I only got them to stay on the line for about 15 minutes. When he told me to press the Windows key ("The what?" "The key with a flag picture on it") I said "My key has a picture of a penguin on it, does that make a difference?"
Back in my (pre PC) college days, COBOL was big in business but wasn't taught or used by anyone in the Computer Science department. If you wanted to learn COBOL, those courses were offered through the school of Business.
And APL was taught by the department of Mathematics, to the extent that APL packages were used in the statistics classes.
Computer science classes weren't about teaching programming languages (we probably went through a dozen or more, from Algol and assembler to Lisp and Simula and Snobol -- we were expected to learn them ourselves depending on the assignment), but about how to think about programming (and operating systems and so on).
Yet another reason to find a way around the speed of light.
Actually I've always said (jokingly) that if anyone does find a way to go FTL, it'll be the computer chip manufacturers. In fact Brad Torgersen and I had a story to that effect in Analog magazine a couple of years ago, "Strobe Effect".
I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design.
Except that they're not. Those solid boosters? They're "based on" Shuttle SRBs, not identical to them. Several segments longer, meaning higher internal pressures, different burn characteristics, etc. If you don't think that's going to take extra years of testing, there are several bridges I'd be happy to sell you.
Ditto for any other technologies that they're basing stuff on rather than reusing identically.
The SLS isn't also known as the "Senate Launch System" for nothing. NASA's role should be to try radical new designs, not serve as a conduit for senators to shovel pork to their constituents.
A launch from Florida (in an easterly direction) doesn't look like it might be an attack on Cuba; a launch from south Texas does (or could). The political and technical situations are a bit different today.
Also, spreading the pork around to multiple states/congressional districts. Texas got the facility in Houston.
Oh, and what open water is to the west of Brownsville?;-)
As the saying goes, no (battle) plan survives contact with the enemy. That doesn't mean such a plan has no use whatsoever.
An 'Integrated America Plan' or an 'Integrated Computing Plan' would of course be ludicrous in hindsight. (Just as is the original Integrated Space Plan). But such plans have the power to inspire people. To make people think "hey, I see a better option over here". To encourage people to make it so. To dream things that never were and say "why not?"
Sure, if we had cheap access to space there'd be a lot more people making their own plans and going out and doing it. Maybe this plan will help inspire the next generation's Gary Hudson, Elon Musk or a non-fictional Delos D. Harriman.
(Disclaimer: I've probably still got a small stack of the original ISP poster in my basement. My ex used to sell them through her (long defunct) Space Pioneers business.)
Who says memory retrieval is non-lossy? It's an organic process, of course it's lossy. Our brains just make shit up to fill in the gaps.
The stuff we retrieve frequently is slightly less lossy because it gets refreshed (somewhat) when we remember it (sort of remembering that we remembered it).
And our brains are very good at making shit up to fill in the gaps, almost too good.
If there are things you don't like about systemd, you should write up coherent bug reports or feature requests,
That doesn't work if it's the whole design philosophy you don't like. Whatever happened to the Unix philosophy that tools should do one thing, and do it well, and be easy to integrate with (not assimilate, borg-like) other components?
Me, I'll keep SysV init. How often do you need to reboot a unix or linux box anyway?
+1 nostalgia if I had the mod points. Heck, there was a time (about 3 decades back) when I was being paid to teach APL (or APL, as properly rendered).
Mind, the bit-arrays used in ElasticSearch filtering strike me as a very APL-like idiom. You never know when something you learned back when will prove useful again.
PCs were surprisingly common in 1983. Consider the Apple II and various CP/M machines had been around for quite a few years at that point.
Sure, they were still struggling to gain entrance to big businesses which were bastions of the mainframe (although more like with 3270 type terminals than card decks by that point), but small businesses loved them. Businesses were buying Apple II's as "Visicalc machines" in huge numbers, let alone the number of Wordstar boxes out there. Sure, it would be another few years before everyone and his dog had one, but by 1983 there were plenty around.
what happens when you have a very long incline for miles, such as found on I-84, I-76, I-80, I-70, etc. and your batteries run down? Granted most of it isn't steep, but very long distances.
Even the long stretches on say I-70 going up to the Eisenhower Tunnel or Vail Pass aren't more than a couple of miles... and you get an equivalent downhill to recharge those batteries on the other side.
(As for speed, I once had the turbo control cable snap on my (relatively new at the time) Daytona Turbo-Z while climbing from Silverthorne up to the tunnel. 2.2 L just doesn't do a heck of a lot without a turbo assist, especially at altitude. Fortunately traffic was light. BTW, max speed limit in the mountains is usually 65mph.)
[...] As he spoke, Carson noticed a slim green ribbon ripple out of the jungle canopy ahead. It glided toward them and settled on Gupta's shoulder. A jade ribbon snake. Carson reached over and flicked it to the ground, then stomped on its head, hard. Gupta flinched, then looked down. "A flying snake is only mildly toxic to humans, there was no need to do that." "Flying snakes on Earth, perhaps," said Carson. "This is a jade, its venom compares to that of a krait or a taipan." Gupta paled. "That deadly?" "Only if you let them bite you. Come on." Gupta looked up at the branches above them, then down at the body of the snake. He brought his heel down hard on its already flattened head. Carson looked at him, an eyebrow raised. "Just making sure," Gupta said.
Let's face it, humans aren't cut out for ocean voyages either.
We certainly can't swim for any great distance, so we need boats or ships. Sea water is toxic to us, so there's nothing to drink. Days, weeks or months at sea means constant exposure to sunlight, with all the radiation damage that brings. Humans are prone to seasickness -- the illness is named for the sea for Pete's sake! Similar long times without access to fresh food can lead to deficiency diseases like scurvy. I could go on...
No, clearly humans are not cut out for sea travel. The idea is folly.
I'll agree with you where management of said private corporations is less than usually psychopathic or where regulatory inspections are frequent and/or the cost of doing it right is not dramatically more than taking shortcuts.
Where there's more money to be made by taking those shortcuts, and management doesn't care about public consequences or thinks the risk of getting caught is low, then government can (not necessarily will, depending) do a better job because there's no profit bottom line to worry about. Indeed, doing a proper job may well mean a bigger staff and budget which is a plus to bureaucrats.
If you want to limit it to PCs (which the original quote did not), then you might as well rule out Apple too.
They build (or rather, subcontract offshore companies to build) phones and tablets, neither of which by any stretch could be considered general purpose computers the way PCs could, and an increasingly shrinking line of computing appliances, ditto. Of course that's pretty much true all the way back to the original Mac, except for a brief period when Jobs wasn't around.
Indeed, arguably Apple isn't around either. They got assimilated by Jobs's NeXT which then changed their name, same way Southern Bell is now AT&T. The original AT&T isn't around. (Of course, the Jobs Reality Distortion Field was such that Apple paid him to be assimilated.)
On the flip side, if you want to talk about companies that are still around which made PCs back in the day, then add Radio Shack and Texas Instruments. Arguably, TI still does make PCs, given what some of their hand-held calculators are capable of.
By the way, if you're more interested in the social effects of e.g. telegraphy technology rather than the science behind it, I heartily recommend Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I only got them to stay on the line for about 15 minutes. When he told me to press the Windows key ("The what?" "The key with a flag picture on it") I said "My key has a picture of a penguin on it, does that make a difference?"
He hung up.
Back in my (pre PC) college days, COBOL was big in business but wasn't taught or used by anyone in the Computer Science department. If you wanted to learn COBOL, those courses were offered through the school of Business.
And APL was taught by the department of Mathematics, to the extent that APL packages were used in the statistics classes.
Computer science classes weren't about teaching programming languages (we probably went through a dozen or more, from Algol and assembler to Lisp and Simula and Snobol -- we were expected to learn them ourselves depending on the assignment), but about how to think about programming (and operating systems and so on).
Yet another reason to find a way around the speed of light.
Actually I've always said (jokingly) that if anyone does find a way to go FTL, it'll be the computer chip manufacturers. In fact Brad Torgersen and I had a story to that effect in Analog magazine a couple of years ago, "Strobe Effect".
Or worse, they're running SQLServer on Sun boxes...
I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design.
Except that they're not. Those solid boosters? They're "based on" Shuttle SRBs, not identical to them. Several segments longer, meaning higher internal pressures, different burn characteristics, etc. If you don't think that's going to take extra years of testing, there are several bridges I'd be happy to sell you.
Ditto for any other technologies that they're basing stuff on rather than reusing identically.
The SLS isn't also known as the "Senate Launch System" for nothing. NASA's role should be to try radical new designs, not serve as a conduit for senators to shovel pork to their constituents.
Yep. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen .. all metals. To an astrophysicist, we're not made of meat, we're made of metal.
(Okay, there's a fair bit of hydrogen in our mix, too.)
And I still don't trust it.
A hobbit. They can be trusted. Don't you know nothin'?
No. Then it'd have to be a whole key ring.
Cuba.
A launch from Florida (in an easterly direction) doesn't look like it might be an attack on Cuba; a launch from south Texas does (or could). The political and technical situations are a bit different today.
Also, spreading the pork around to multiple states/congressional districts. Texas got the facility in Houston.
Oh, and what open water is to the west of Brownsville? ;-)
As the saying goes, no (battle) plan survives contact with the enemy. That doesn't mean such a plan has no use whatsoever.
An 'Integrated America Plan' or an 'Integrated Computing Plan' would of course be ludicrous in hindsight. (Just as is the original Integrated Space Plan). But such plans have the power to inspire people. To make people think "hey, I see a better option over here". To encourage people to make it so. To dream things that never were and say "why not?"
Sure, if we had cheap access to space there'd be a lot more people making their own plans and going out and doing it. Maybe this plan will help inspire the next generation's Gary Hudson, Elon Musk or a non-fictional Delos D. Harriman.
(Disclaimer: I've probably still got a small stack of the original ISP poster in my basement. My ex used to sell them through her (long defunct) Space Pioneers business.)
>40 hz of current?
Sure, at a frequency of 30 mA for about 0.5 volt-hours.
Who says memory retrieval is non-lossy? It's an organic process, of course it's lossy. Our brains just make shit up to fill in the gaps.
The stuff we retrieve frequently is slightly less lossy because it gets refreshed (somewhat) when we remember it (sort of remembering that we remembered it).
And our brains are very good at making shit up to fill in the gaps, almost too good.
As the legendary Henry Spencer said, "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
Clearly the folks behind systemd do not understand Unix.
If there are things you don't like about systemd, you should write up coherent bug reports or feature requests,
That doesn't work if it's the whole design philosophy you don't like. Whatever happened to the Unix philosophy that tools should do one thing, and do it well, and be easy to integrate with (not assimilate, borg-like) other components?
Me, I'll keep SysV init. How often do you need to reboot a unix or linux box anyway?
+1 nostalgia if I had the mod points. Heck, there was a time (about 3 decades back) when I was being paid to teach APL (or APL, as properly rendered).
Mind, the bit-arrays used in ElasticSearch filtering strike me as a very APL-like idiom. You never know when something you learned back when will prove useful again.
PCs were surprisingly common in 1983. Consider the Apple II and various CP/M machines had been around for quite a few years at that point.
Sure, they were still struggling to gain entrance to big businesses which were bastions of the mainframe (although more like with 3270 type terminals than card decks by that point), but small businesses loved them. Businesses were buying Apple II's as "Visicalc machines" in huge numbers, let alone the number of Wordstar boxes out there. Sure, it would be another few years before everyone and his dog had one, but by 1983 there were plenty around.
what happens when you have a very long incline for miles, such as found on I-84, I-76, I-80, I-70, etc. and your batteries run down? Granted most of it isn't steep, but very long distances.
Even the long stretches on say I-70 going up to the Eisenhower Tunnel or Vail Pass aren't more than a couple of miles ... and you get an equivalent downhill to recharge those batteries on the other side.
(As for speed, I once had the turbo control cable snap on my (relatively new at the time) Daytona Turbo-Z while climbing from Silverthorne up to the tunnel. 2.2 L just doesn't do a heck of a lot without a turbo assist, especially at altitude. Fortunately traffic was light. BTW, max speed limit in the mountains is usually 65mph.)
People can (and some do) brew their own beer too, or buy from local microbreweries.
But I don't see Coors or Anheuser-Busch going out of business anytime soon.
Come now, Ian Fleming wrote a documentary on it, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Well done, sir. I just posted something similar, being too offended at TFS to have read all the posts first. You did it first and better.
Let's face it, humans aren't cut out for ocean voyages either.
We certainly can't swim for any great distance, so we need boats or ships. Sea water is toxic to us, so there's nothing to drink. Days, weeks or months at sea means constant exposure to sunlight, with all the radiation damage that brings. Humans are prone to seasickness -- the illness is named for the sea for Pete's sake! Similar long times without access to fresh food can lead to deficiency diseases like scurvy. I could go on...
No, clearly humans are not cut out for sea travel. The idea is folly.
It depends.
I'll agree with you where management of said private corporations is less than usually psychopathic or where regulatory inspections are frequent and/or the cost of doing it right is not dramatically more than taking shortcuts.
Where there's more money to be made by taking those shortcuts, and management doesn't care about public consequences or thinks the risk of getting caught is low, then government can (not necessarily will, depending) do a better job because there's no profit bottom line to worry about. Indeed, doing a proper job may well mean a bigger staff and budget which is a plus to bureaucrats.
If you want to limit it to PCs (which the original quote did not), then you might as well rule out Apple too.
They build (or rather, subcontract offshore companies to build) phones and tablets, neither of which by any stretch could be considered general purpose computers the way PCs could, and an increasingly shrinking line of computing appliances, ditto. Of course that's pretty much true all the way back to the original Mac, except for a brief period when Jobs wasn't around.
Indeed, arguably Apple isn't around either. They got assimilated by Jobs's NeXT which then changed their name, same way Southern Bell is now AT&T. The original AT&T isn't around. (Of course, the Jobs Reality Distortion Field was such that Apple paid him to be assimilated.)
On the flip side, if you want to talk about companies that are still around which made PCs back in the day, then add Radio Shack and Texas Instruments. Arguably, TI still does make PCs, given what some of their hand-held calculators are capable of.
By the way, if you're more interested in the social effects of e.g. telegraphy technology rather than the science behind it, I heartily recommend Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet.