Woz is a great guy, and truly a credit to all of geekdom. And the apple 2 was a great machine -- truly the first mass market pre-assembled computer. All should visit woz.org now!
However, if we are going to credit the person who came up with the first personal computer I am afraid the prize should go to the inventor of the altair. Although it was a computer kit and wasn't very useful out of the box according to Bob Cringley (the book Accidental Empires and the PBS special triumph of the nerds) the altair pre-dated everything and truly was the first personal computer. Oh I forgot his name. You know the doctor from New mexico should get the prize!
Why stop there? Let's encrypt everything to the point of all we get on our screen will be a bunch of useless characters. We won't know what is going on, but the important part is neither will THEY! Encode our swap space, maybe that is exactly what they want us to do. Ever think about that?
Yeah, I tried it on SuSE 6.4. There was a segmentation fault when it finished copying stuff. They still managed to copy a binary in my directory. I tried it and it seems to be just ducky. I am not sure what, if anything, it didn't copy but I haven't needed it yet.
It does seem to be much faster than M15! I'd say it is pretty close to 4.73 as far as speed goes. Still missing a few things but I am happy with it.
When people think NASA, they think men in space. It is in many ways a waste of money to put people in space, but that is what congressmen want and therefore that is what we get. For each billion NASA spends on the space shuttle, we get a billion or so to do actuall science.
This robot will be able to fix satellites that humans can't because the space shuttle can't reach a high enough orbit to get to many of them. Plus the robot needs no food o2 etc. And a one space shuttle mission costs many times the amount a simple satellite costs. Even though we really don't need them, there will probably continue to be humans in space for quiet a while to come. Not that I can't blame them -- I would LOVE to go to space for no scientific reason as well:)
This would be nice in a firewall.
on
Linux BIOS
·
· Score: 2
Could you shrink the code such that you don't need a hard drive on your firewall? Just turn the power on and your ready to go -- the thing is up in seconds. Maybe this would be nice in a beowulf cluster (no I am not trolling here!) No need for hard drives, floppies or even moniters. All you need is a bunch of motherboards with on-board ethernet.
At work we have an old 486 that is hooked up to our Fourier transform spectrometer. The code to do the FFT is in the bios. The the code is totally optimized it is quite fast for a 486 -- as you can imagine the device is a couple of years old but it still works. Might be nice to be able to set up a pc to do one thing well like that.
I wonder if the imperfection on your lens change when your eye refocuses. If that were the case then you would really need to carry around this big bulky thing to constantly correct your vision.
I assume they were going to take the data from the instrument in order to come up with a funky shaped glasses lens to correct for imperfections in your eye. Well, look at how expensive normal glasses are. Optically your normal eye glasses are pretty simple. They don't even use parabolic lenses but rather spherical ones since they are easier to produce and polish.
It seems to me that we don't have the technology to produce the odd ball shaped lense to correct for imperfection in your eye. How would you polish and coat such a lense with an antireflective coating? If each lense would need to be custom made for every customer than you can imagine how expensive these would be. Of course no one is going to carry around a computerized adaptive optic all the time.
My guess is that these will only be used for specific purposes. Maybe they could come up with expensive funky telescopes that let you see far away and correct for your eye sight. I believe adaptive lenses are getting cheaper and cheaper these days.
Most of my friends who majored in plasma physics got jobs writing computer programs that have nothing to do with plasma. It is a really cool field w/o much applications. Creating plasma on earth is sometimes a dark science. You build your equipment (sometimes out of old microwave oven tubes) and hope to god it works. One of my friends made the mistake of taking apart his plasma generator -- darn thing never worked again. Maybe in the future if it gives us cold fusion but until then most of the graduate become computer programers:)
Seriously though. Are they going to take all of the propelent with them or will they collect it along the way. This is still going to take massive amounts of energy. Are they going to bring a tiny nuclear power plant with them? I suspect the enviromental people will be up in arms over this. People seem to get upset every time the word nuclear is mentioned. It will be quite a while before this is put into practice (if at all.) Hopefully it will be in our lifetime.
I don't have a security clearence, but I work for a lab that does a lot of governemt work. A few doors down there is a classified room that had been locked for so long that the lock was rusting. I always wonered what was in it (old alien autopsy footage?) One day they had the room open to inventory the lab's property or something. I sneaked my head in and found racks and racks of old reel to reel 8-track computer tapes. The funny thing is that the lab no longer has any equipment to read those tapes. It seems once something is classified it has to be held even if the information is useless. They could have the tapes destroyed but my guess is that this would involve a lot of red tape and it might be easier just to store the things. It really reminded me of the ending scene to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arch! I am sure the US has room like the one in the movie. Maybe we do already have the arch.
I hear the security is much tighter at government contracters than it is in the government itself. I work for a lab that does a lot fo governemt work. Sometimes I feel like I can't fart without getting some type of clearence. You want to take home that old 486 to make it part of your beawulf cluster? I don't think so! Governemt contracters are serious about security because they can loose their securty clearence. You can't fire a group that is part fo the governmemt as well.
Bablefish or any other online translator could handle legal mumbo jumbo. You could feed it an entire court proceeding and all bablefish would have to say is: "That guy is screwed!"
Did I read that right? An upstart operating system? The thing is what, 9 years old? I wouldn't call that upstart, would you? They amke it sound like linux was written yesturday.
Anyway, it will be nice to buy a laptop w/o paying an MS tax or worrying about getting X to work with the touchpad and video screen. You can't change those like oyu can on a desktop.
I wish someone would give me a defintion of a troll. I thought it was someone who hung out under bridges and posted useless comments. Those annoying "first post" things are good example of trolls.
However on/. a troll seems to be anyone who does not agree with the opinion of most/.ers.
Could someone explain how Justin is a troll? What he said something that wasn't 100% rosey about linux? Everyone has a right to their own opinion. Someone could come right out and say linux and sucks -- if they have a reason for this then they aren't a troll.
BTW I personally think linux rocks! But that doesn't mean I don't respect other's opinions.
Re:Well my favorite pinball company is still aroun
on
Is Pinball Dying?
·
· Score: 1
Huh?
I guess you are talking about Saturn/32x thing.
The 32x was a flop, I'll give you that. I would consider the Saturn only half a flop because it sold well in Japan -- the most important market in the world, and if you actually bought one you would know it totally kicked butt! The thing flopped because of marketing not becuase it didn't have great games.
The 32x was an add-on and not a console. So I would only call that half a flop as well.
So the Sega is coming off of 0.5+0.5=1 flop. So what companies make mistakes sometimes. Don't forget about Sony and that whole beta max thing, or nintendo and that whole snes cd thing (better known as the playstation.) Sega still owns the coin-op arcade market (although that is shrinking too.)
Well my favorite pinball company is still around
on
Is Pinball Dying?
·
· Score: 1
Well, my favorite importer and maker is still around. They aren't making many pinball machines these days, but Sega is still kicking around.
I am surprised that more old school pinball companies didn't switch to making electronic games. I love it when sega remembers the past by putting pinball stages in their games -- like the casino stage in Sonic Adventure.
Anyway, I bet pinball machines will always be around. The companies that make them might go into hard times, but they will probably be like player pianos. Player pianos were largely replaced by the phonograph but even in the days of CD's and napster you can still see a few player pianos now and then.
I hope that comment about noone needing more than 8 megs of memory isn't one of the comments that survives.
Seriously though, you stay up all night writing and OS you gotta let it out. I am sure most people would have been at least a bit sarcastic in the comments as well.
You can't trust benchmarks because it is so easy to skew their results. I think you should buy the AMD chip because it is cheaper and the performance is as good or better.
There is also another important thing to consider: acording to http://www.netcraft.com/whats/, www.amd.com is running on apache under linux. Likewise www.cyrix.com is runing apache under bsd. However, www.intel.com is running some sort of micros~1 crap.
I am not sure it that is good enough to sway your chip buying practices, but it is food for thought.
You can sue a company for selling a crappy product. Couldn't read the actual site cause it's been/.ed -- but that is the gist of it from what I understand.
Oh My God -- the law suits against micros~1 should begin any second now!!!
Your right, it is their site and they can do what ever the hell they want. If they wanted to they could make slasdot give you the middle finger when you click on there page. However I think/. is a little above a middle schooler with his first first web page.
In their wisdom, they set up a site where anybody could come in a voice their opinions about a news story. It was even ok to talk about/. itself and what is wrong with it. I guess I do have a warped idea of what/. was, I thought it was ok to voice my opinion no matter what it is.
Maybe you are a better person than I am, but I think just about everyone thinks it is cool when their first/. story is posted. So what. I am not so high and mighty that I am not above a little ego boasting as long as we all admit as what it is. Likewise, I thought this was a forum where anything news worthy was posted no matter what the source was.
I think a valid criticism of/. is that it is sometimes slow to post stories, and sometimes I question the stories that do get posted. IMO maybe if they post more user submitted stories in a timely fashion and less stories submitted by one person things might get better. I realize they have to wade through thousands of user submissions and that this can be a pain. But I still think more user stories would be better. However, I still think/. is worth the time it takes to read it. Am I allowed to have this opinion?
Anyone who has submited a story and then had it posted w/o giving you credit -- or someone else posts something that you feel is much less important than your story will know exactly what you mean. People like CmdrTaco have an inside track and it seems like they can post whatever they want while sometimes it seems like it takes an act of congress for anyone else's story to get posted. Also I hate how the moderation and karma system brings out a nerdier than thow atituted amoung some/.ers. Yes slashdot is not without it's problems -- for one it seems to be a victim of it's own success. But it is only one internet site -- there are more important things in life to get upset over.
CO2 is not the most important green house gas. Water vapor is much more important. The amount of it in the atmosphere varies alot more than the amount of CO2 and water vapor has many more absorption lines in the infrared than CO2 does. We have records stored in the polar ice cap that shows that an increase in global temperature comes with an increase amount of CO2. However, we aren't sure if this is the cause of global warming or an effect of it. You can't take out polar ice in order to check for water vapor though:( Most of the infrared radiance emitted by the earth is in the 8-12 and 3-5 micron range. Neither CO2 or H2O absorp at those wavelengths. If we were to put large amounts of gasses that do absorp there than that would be REALLY nasty! We would end up with Earth turning into Venus (that would be really bad!) The Earth is a very compicated planet. We can't predict the weather past 5 days, we have no idea what putting all this CO2 and H2O into the atmosphere will do in the long run.
If you were to try to make mars capable of supporting life from planet earth I think you will need to do more than just release a lot of o2. Mars is a much smaller planet than Earth so I don't think it actually has the gravitational pull to keep the same amount of atmosphere as the earth does. You would have to greatly increase the amount of gases in the atmosphere and then most of those gases would evenutally fly off. Next you would need to set up some sort of green house effect. Not only does Mars not have enough o2, but the pressure of the atmosphere is to small. Next the planet is too cold and the temperature fluxtuated too much. It is amazing how the Earth is perfect for supporting life, and I don't think man understands all of the mechanisms that made that possible. I don't think we have the knowledge or the technology to terra form mars and I don't think we will for a while. Heck, we may be de-terra forming Earth and we do not have the will or the technology to stop it (without giving up the industrial revolution which I don't think anyone is ready to do.)
Slashdot Mirror
Woz is a great guy, and truly a credit to all of geekdom. And the apple 2 was a great machine -- truly the first mass market pre-assembled computer. All should visit woz.org now!
However, if we are going to credit the person who came up with the first personal computer I am afraid the prize should go to the inventor of the altair. Although it was a computer kit and wasn't very useful out of the box according to Bob Cringley (the book Accidental Empires and the PBS special triumph of the nerds) the altair pre-dated everything and truly was the first personal computer. Oh I forgot his name. You know the doctor from New mexico should get the prize!
Why stop there? Let's encrypt everything to the point of all we get on our screen will be a bunch of useless characters. We won't know what is going on, but the important part is neither will THEY! Encode our swap space, maybe that is exactly what they want us to do. Ever think about that?
Yeah, I tried it on SuSE 6.4. There was a segmentation fault when it finished copying stuff. They still managed to copy a binary in my directory. I tried it and it seems to be just ducky. I am not sure what, if anything, it didn't copy but I haven't needed it yet.
It does seem to be much faster than M15! I'd say it is pretty close to 4.73 as far as speed goes. Still missing a few things but I am happy with it.
When people think NASA, they think men in space. It is in many ways a waste of money to put people in space, but that is what congressmen want and therefore that is what we get. For each billion NASA spends on the space shuttle, we get a billion or so to do actuall science.
:)
This robot will be able to fix satellites that humans can't because the space shuttle can't reach a high enough orbit to get to many of them. Plus the robot needs no food o2 etc. And a one space shuttle mission costs many times the amount a simple satellite costs. Even though we really don't need them, there will probably continue to be humans in space for quiet a while to come. Not that I can't blame them -- I would LOVE to go to space for no scientific reason as well
Could you shrink the code such that you don't need a hard drive on your firewall? Just turn the power on and your ready to go -- the thing is up in seconds. Maybe this would be nice in a beowulf cluster (no I am not trolling here!) No need for hard drives, floppies or even moniters. All you need is a bunch of motherboards with on-board ethernet.
At work we have an old 486 that is hooked up to our Fourier transform spectrometer. The code to do the FFT is in the bios. The the code is totally optimized it is quite fast for a 486 -- as you can imagine the device is a couple of years old but it still works. Might be nice to be able to set up a pc to do one thing well like that.
I wonder if the imperfection on your lens change when your eye refocuses. If that were the case then you would really need to carry around this big bulky thing to constantly correct your vision.
I assume they were going to take the data from the instrument in order to come up with a funky shaped glasses lens to correct for imperfections in your eye. Well, look at how expensive normal glasses are. Optically your normal eye glasses are pretty simple. They don't even use parabolic lenses but rather spherical ones since they are easier to produce and polish.
It seems to me that we don't have the technology to produce the odd ball shaped lense to correct for imperfection in your eye. How would you polish and coat such a lense with an antireflective coating? If each lense would need to be custom made for every customer than you can imagine how expensive these would be. Of course no one is going to carry around a computerized adaptive optic all the time.
My guess is that these will only be used for specific purposes. Maybe they could come up with expensive funky telescopes that let you see far away and correct for your eye sight. I believe adaptive lenses are getting cheaper and cheaper these days.
Most of my friends who majored in plasma physics got jobs writing computer programs that have nothing to do with plasma. It is a really cool field w/o much applications. Creating plasma on earth is sometimes a dark science. You build your equipment (sometimes out of old microwave oven tubes) and hope to god it works. One of my friends made the mistake of taking apart his plasma generator -- darn thing never worked again. Maybe in the future if it gives us cold fusion but until then most of the graduate become computer programers :)
Seriously though. Are they going to take all of the propelent with them or will they collect it along the way. This is still going to take massive amounts of energy. Are they going to bring a tiny nuclear power plant with them? I suspect the enviromental people will be up in arms over this. People seem to get upset every time the word nuclear is mentioned. It will be quite a while before this is put into practice (if at all.) Hopefully it will be in our lifetime.
I don't have a security clearence, but I work for a lab that does a lot of governemt work. A few doors down there is a classified room that had been locked for so long that the lock was rusting. I always wonered what was in it (old alien autopsy footage?) One day they had the room open to inventory the lab's property or something. I sneaked my head in and found racks and racks of old reel to reel 8-track computer tapes. The funny thing is that the lab no longer has any equipment to read those tapes. It seems once something is classified it has to be held even if the information is useless. They could have the tapes destroyed but my guess is that this would involve a lot of red tape and it might be easier just to store the things. It really reminded me of the ending scene to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arch! I am sure the US has room like the one in the movie. Maybe we do already have the arch.
I hear the security is much tighter at government contracters than it is in the government itself. I work for a lab that does a lot fo governemt work. Sometimes I feel like I can't fart without getting some type of clearence. You want to take home that old 486 to make it part of your beawulf cluster? I don't think so! Governemt contracters are serious about security because they can loose their securty clearence. You can't fire a group that is part fo the governmemt as well.
Bablefish or any other online translator could handle legal mumbo jumbo. You could feed it an entire court proceeding and all bablefish would have to say is: "That guy is screwed!"
Just a thought.
Did I read that right? An upstart operating system? The thing is what, 9 years old? I wouldn't call that upstart, would you? They amke it sound like linux was written yesturday.
Anyway, it will be nice to buy a laptop w/o paying an MS tax or worrying about getting X to work with the touchpad and video screen. You can't change those like oyu can on a desktop.
I wish someone would give me a defintion of a troll. I thought it was someone who hung out under bridges and posted useless comments. Those annoying "first post" things are good example of trolls.
/. a troll seems to be anyone who does not agree with the opinion of most /.ers.
However on
Could someone explain how Justin is a troll? What he said something that wasn't 100% rosey about linux? Everyone has a right to their own opinion. Someone could come right out and say linux and sucks -- if they have a reason for this then they aren't a troll.
BTW I personally think linux rocks! But that doesn't mean I don't respect other's opinions.
Huh?
I guess you are talking about Saturn/32x thing.
The 32x was a flop, I'll give you that. I would consider the Saturn only half a flop because it sold well in Japan -- the most important market in the world, and if you actually bought one you would know it totally kicked butt! The thing flopped because of marketing not becuase it didn't have great games.
The 32x was an add-on and not a console. So I would only call that half a flop as well.
So the Sega is coming off of 0.5+0.5=1 flop. So what companies make mistakes sometimes. Don't forget about Sony and that whole beta max thing, or nintendo and that whole snes cd thing (better known as the playstation.) Sega still owns the coin-op arcade market (although that is shrinking too.)
Well, my favorite importer and maker is still around. They aren't making many pinball machines these days, but Sega is still kicking around.
I am surprised that more old school pinball companies didn't switch to making electronic games. I love it when sega remembers the past by putting pinball stages in their games -- like the casino stage in Sonic Adventure.
Anyway, I bet pinball machines will always be around. The companies that make them might go into hard times, but they will probably be like player pianos. Player pianos were largely replaced by the phonograph but even in the days of CD's and napster you can still see a few player pianos now and then.
I hope that comment about noone needing more than
8 megs of memory isn't one of the comments that
survives.
Seriously though, you stay up all night writing
and OS you gotta let it out. I am sure most people
would have been at least a bit sarcastic in the
comments as well.
I have a feeling that you don't like this film. Don't hold back, tell us what you really think :^)
Or did the expected beowulf comment stop being funny many moons ago?
It is time for something new people!
You have to look at this with a bit of skepticism.
:)
First: If this is so great why aren't we reading this in a serious science magazine or site?
Second AMD et al have already spent millions on conventional fabs. They will need a lot of convincing before they drop everything.
Chips keep getting better, they are trying to hit a moving target.
What would happen if a human would get infected by a microchip virus? Talk about a nasty cold
You can't trust benchmarks because it is so easy to skew their results. I think you should buy the AMD chip because it is cheaper and the performance is as good or better.
There is also another important thing to consider: acording to http://www.netcraft.com/whats/, www.amd.com is running on apache under linux. Likewise www.cyrix.com is runing apache under bsd. However, www.intel.com is running some sort of micros~1 crap.
I am not sure it that is good enough to sway your chip buying practices, but it is food for thought.
And in other news:
Nasa is trying to use "Pig Power" in order to fly the space shuttle.
Elvis admits that yes indeed he has been living a trailer park in Texas since he faked his death.
Aliens meet with president. Claim that now they are going to disney world.
This seems more real than anything in the past. So I hope they do have something here, but who else has seen one to many Amiga sigthings?
You can sue a company for selling a crappy product. Couldn't read the actual site cause it's been /.ed -- but that is the gist of it from what I understand.
Oh My God -- the law suits against micros~1 should begin any second now!!!
Your right, it is their site and they can do what ever the hell they want. If they wanted to they could make slasdot give you the middle finger when you click on there page. However I think /. is a little above a middle schooler with his first first web page.
/. itself and what is wrong with it. I guess I do have a warped idea of what /. was, I thought it was ok to voice my opinion no matter what it is.
/. story is posted. So what. I am not so high and mighty that I am not above a little ego boasting as long as we all admit as what it is. Likewise, I thought this was a forum where anything news worthy was posted no matter what the source was.
/. is that it is sometimes slow to post stories, and sometimes I question the stories that do get posted. IMO maybe if they post more user submitted stories in a timely fashion and less stories submitted by one person things might get better. I realize they have to wade through thousands of user submissions and that this can be a pain. But I still think more user stories would be better. However, I still think /. is worth the time it takes to read it. Am I allowed to have this opinion?
In their wisdom, they set up a site where anybody could come in a voice their opinions about a news story. It was even ok to talk about
Maybe you are a better person than I am, but I think just about everyone thinks it is cool when their first
I think a valid criticism of
Anyone who has submited a story and then had it posted w/o giving you credit -- or someone else posts something that you feel is much less important than your story will know exactly what you mean. People like CmdrTaco have an inside track and it seems like they can post whatever they want while sometimes it seems like it takes an act of congress for anyone else's story to get posted. Also I hate how the moderation and karma system brings out a nerdier than thow atituted amoung some /.ers. Yes slashdot is not without it's problems -- for one it seems to be a victim of it's own success. But it is only one internet site -- there are more important things in life to get upset over.
CO2 is not the most important green house gas. Water vapor is much more important. The amount of it in the atmosphere varies alot more than the amount of CO2 and water vapor has many more absorption lines in the infrared than CO2 does. We have records stored in the polar ice cap that shows that an increase in global temperature comes with an increase amount of CO2. However, we aren't sure if this is the cause of global warming or an effect of it. You can't take out polar ice in order to check for water vapor though :( Most of the infrared radiance emitted by the earth is in the 8-12 and 3-5 micron range. Neither CO2 or H2O absorp at those wavelengths. If we were to put large amounts of gasses that do absorp there than that would be REALLY nasty! We would end up with Earth turning into Venus (that would be really bad!) The Earth is a very compicated planet. We can't predict the weather past 5 days, we have no idea what putting all this CO2 and H2O into the atmosphere will do in the long run.
If you were to try to make mars capable of supporting life from planet earth I think you will need to do more than just release a lot of o2. Mars is a much smaller planet than Earth so I don't think it actually has the gravitational pull to keep the same amount of atmosphere as the earth does. You would have to greatly increase the amount of gases in the atmosphere and then most of those gases would evenutally fly off. Next you would need to set up some sort of green house effect. Not only does Mars not have enough o2, but the pressure of the atmosphere is to small. Next the planet is too cold and the temperature fluxtuated too much. It is amazing how the Earth is perfect for supporting life, and I don't think man understands all of the mechanisms that made that possible. I don't think we have the knowledge or the technology to terra form mars and I don't think we will for a while. Heck, we may be de-terra forming Earth and we do not have the will or the technology to stop it (without giving up the industrial revolution which I don't think anyone is ready to do.)