I wonder why they didn't go with removable harddrives. Or external drives. No reason to mail all the other crap that goes with the computer.
(That's the solution we came up with for sending updated DV files to a site in Australia: a handful of 80 GB drives in caddies that we kept swapping by FedEx.)
Certainly 1980s, probably circa 1983 or 1984 at the latest. I came up with the phrase (which may well have been independently coined before me, at the time I was unaware of it) when we were setting up NETNORTH, the Canadian counterpart to BITNET (networks of typically college campus mainframes, not directly part of ARPANET). There was discussion about setting up the HQ at University of Guelph (where I worked at the time - west of Toronto) or Waterloo University.
The highway in question (as in station wagon travelling on) was the Highway (7? it's been a long time) between Waterloo and Guelph (at least part of which I drove every day, since I lived in Waterloo). I don't recall the numbers now, but my calculation of the bandwidth of Hwy 7 was based on a couple of boxes of 2400' reels of 6250 BPI tape (standard IBM mainframe tape size) in a car (or station wagon) travelling at the posted 90 km/h speed limit.
Back in those days, aside from dedicated leased-line networks like BITNET or commercial X.25 packet networks like Tymnet, a 2400 baud dialup modem was considered blazingly fast. (And long distance charges were not cheap, hence the popularity of multi-hop dialup networks using UUCP or like Fidonet.)
MRAM is set to debut, and this could in theory hold the users' data state, but you still have to boot the computer up through the normal BIOS process,
You could have a flag or register or some such that indicates whether to do the fast power up or the full BIOS scan. Wire it to the 'case opened' switch to ensure a BIOS scan if the box was opened.
I've yet to see anyone duplicate (on PC-class hardware) a feature that one of the 68K-based UNIX boxen of the mid 1980s had (I think it was an NCR box, but we were evaluating a bunch at the time so I may be mistaken). On a power interrupt that would do a complete state save, and on power up it could restore right to the middle of a running user process. (My simple-minded test of this was to write a program that incremented a number and displayed it on screen, then I pulled out the power cord. When I plugged it back in five minutes later, it picked up at the number it had left off at.) The "suspend" function (usually on laptops) is close, but not quite.)
The last time I programmed in Fortran it was still Fortran IV. (Oh, wait, I did write a version of "Asteroids" for a VAX with a graphics unit and AD/DA hardware in DEC's Fortran 77 -- but that wasn't serious programming.)
When I wanted structures and records and fields (oh my!) I went with PL/I or Pascal or C or C++ or Java (in roughly that chronological order). Let it go. If you want to do Fortranish things, use (standard) Fortran. If you want to do Pascalish or Cish or Adaish (etc) things, use that language.
There's probably a corollary of Henry Spencer's law about ignorant OS designers reinventing Unix (poorly) that applies to programming languages, although I haven't quite figured what the "target" language (the way Unix is the target OS) is. (Probably Algol68;-)
Reference Counting Smart Pointer (RCSP for short): this type of smart pointer will keep of how many RCSPs are pointing to the same object. It'll delete the object when the last RCSP is destroyed.
So, if you have two RCSPs pointing at each other (or a whole daisy chain of them), and nothing else pointing to any of them, when do they get deleted?
(They don't. That's the weakness of reference counting. You're fine so long as you never create any circular lists. (That's one reason you cannot create hard links to directories on 'nix.) It's something that mark and sweep can catch, though. But reference counting is usually faster than mark'n'sweep.)
Filing a motion to dismiss is pretty much a reflex action in any lawsuit or trial. Sometimes the reasons can be pretty ridiculous, but a lawyer wouldn't be doing his duty if he didn't at least try. (On the "it never hurts to ask" principle.)
And yes, this ranks as one of the more ridiculous.
This is what destructors are for, so you can explicitly (in the destructor) free resources that haven't yet been freed. Simplifies dealing with exceptions, especially where an exception may take control out of the scope of the object.
Sure, explicitly free your descriptors and whatnot -- that makes the code clearer -- but also do it in the destructor (wrapped in a suitable check so you don't do it twice, of course) as a back up.
Well, yeah, and I almost wrote that to make it hard to miss that X was a candidate -- except that X doesn't support display-side scripting like a browser does.
If you have destructors, do they ever get called? Destructors aren't just for freeing memory, they're also used for freeing other system resources (depending on the object). File descriptors, database connections, that kind of stuff. (Granted, you can have explicit methods to take care of that cleanup, but then you can have explicit methods to free memory too. Seems to me you want all that as automatic as possible.)
The trend to produce major applications based on "the Web" (a term I find hard to use when referring to, say, intranets, but will accept) is one that benefits almost everyone.
Nah, they're crap. They're using a stupid connectionless protocol (HTTP) and a crippled display server (the browser), and the server end has to go through all sorts of contortions to get around that (half the stuff in a J2EE app has to do with just saving state between connections).
While at one level that beats custom developing GUIs for every app and sure as hell beats the old text mode 3270 green screens, we'd all be better off if there was a "universal client" that was a step up from the browser and used a more sensible protocol, at least on intranets.
(In other words, I generally agree with your sentiment about web apps, but disagree with the particular implementation.)
it means they don't know how to deal with a salesman as well as they would like.
Well, I suppose greeting them with a loaded shotgun and offering five seconds to get off your property might not be "as well as you would like", if you'd really like not to give them the five seconds...
Not as well as I used to, not that even that was very good. Enough to get by on a visit to Russia about 10 years ago, and (then) to read articles with a tranlation dictionary open.
Rest assured, though, that there were plenty of people reading the Soviet journals at the time, if not republishing the material in the popular press.
The blurb says "as first described by Arthur C. Clarke in 1979". Much as I respect Clarke's accomplishments, this isn't one of them.
The concept may have first been documented by Tsiolkovsky, certainly it had an early mention by Artsutanov ("V Kosmos na electrovoze", Komsomolskaya Pravda, 31 July 1960), and was described in western literature at least four years before Fountains of Paradise by Pearson (Pearson, J., "The Orbital Tower; A Spacecraft Launcher Using the Earth's Rotational Energy", Acta Astronautica, V2, 1975, pp. 785-799).
I researched the concept a fair bit for my papers on using the idea on Mars as an easy way to export Martian volatiles (eg water) to other bases or settlements in the inner solar system. (I don't really want my server slashdotted so I'm not going to post a link. A google will find it.)
I'm listening to it right now [cough}kazaa{/cough]. To me it sounds like all their other stuff.
Must have been a really bad rip or you're trying to listen to it through cheap $2 computer speakers. Or both.
My preferences run towards classical compositions by dead guys.
That covers a pretty broad gamut. In that area my tastes tend toward Bach, Pachelbel or Handel rather than Beethoven or Berlioz. Maybe because I can actually hear the treble frequencies as well as the bass.
Irrelevant - it's a contract suit, not trademark
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The thing is, when Apple Corps first sued Apple Computer over the Apple trademark, Apple Corps was by far the better known and Apple Computer was this wierd little company producing expensive little 8-bit computers that most people couldn't figure a use for,
As part of the settlement of that lawsuit, Apple Computer agreed not to sell music. It's that settlement agreement -- a contract -- that Apple Corps is charging Apple Computer with violating.
Sure, today Apple Corps probably wouldn't stand much chance in a trademark suit against Apple Computer, even if they did have the trademark first. But that's not what this lawsuit is about.
Go get a copy of Pet Sounds. Listen to it. Better yet, listen to it, particulary to the music rather than the lyrics. Especially track 8 -- God Only Knows. (Unless, of course, your hearing is already totally shot from listening to head banging heavy metal acid rock at 130 dB.)
BTW, Brian Wilson was inspired to create Pet Sounds when he heard the Beatles' Rubber Soul. In turn, Pet Sounds inspired the Beatles to do Sergeant Pepper's, which in turn prompted the Rolling Stones to create On Their Satanic Majesties Request. Rubber Soul, BTW, was partly a result of Bob Dylan's influence on the Beatles.
There's a big difference between refusing to throw your morals and principles out the window, slavishly devoting yourself to your kids whims, and letting them starve.
Besides, nobody starves in this country unless they want to. You might have to take a drastic cut in lifestyle, sell your house, go on food stamps, etc, but the "letting your kids starve" is a red herring -- except for a few whackos who really are neglectful, the sort unlikely to have ever held a software development position.
I want my children to respect me because they will understand that I valued their future far more than I valued my beliefs and morals.
Boy, do you have a lot to learn about earning a child's respect. I hope you don't have any kids yet, both for their sake and society's. The behaviour you describe just reinforces a child's natural inclination to believe that they are the center of the universe, and all should revolve around them. That's a great way to raise spoiled brats, if not outright sociopaths.
The "re-usable" vehicle has turned out to be a LOT more expensive then the disposable one.
That particular design of "reusable" (it isn't very) has turned out to be more expensive. Change the design criteria (drop the nominal 60,000 lb payload and the 1000 mile crossrange capability, for example) and design the thing with beefier margins (yes, trading off payload capacity), and the design might work out cheaper. The thing is to design it so that it doesn't need to be completely overhauled after each flight.
The VTOVL demonstrator DC-X (admittedly suborbital) achieved a 24 hour turnaround during its test series, flying two flights less than 24 hours apart. It also managed an intact landing after aborting an ascent when it was realized that an external explosion of fuel fumes on the ground hand severely damaged the rocket's skin.
Heck, the X-15 was a reusable rocket, and it did fly into space (earned a couple of pilots their astronaut wings for flying higher than 50 nautical miles). Total of something like 199 missions for three vehicles. And that was what, 1950s materials and avionics technology?
So long as they don't fill with water when the door opens.
In fact, they recovered most, if not all, capsules form the old-skool space program.
Well yeah, but in the case of Grissom's Mercury capsule Libery Bell 7, it was recovered 30+ years later from several thousand feet down in the Atlantic. (Latest theory is that the hatch blew because of a static discharge from the helicopter winch cable, which I guess didn't ground itself on the ocean surface first.)
Well, reusable as compared to the ablative heat shields used on Mercury through Apollo.
As for inspection and reports between flights -- how much of that is really necessary vs "make work"? Strikes me that a lot of it could be automated, if one were really concerned about rapid and low cost turnaround.
Re:Gemini 2 was reused and flew twice.
on
The Return of Apollo?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Gemini 2 was unmanned. No big deal if it didn't survive launch or reentry. Also note "Gemini 2 capsule, which was modified to become a Gemini B capsule."
Basically the Air Force just needed something vaguely Gemini-shaped to fit atop the dummy MOL module for the Titan III launch, Gemini 2 was available, and since it was an unmanned test article it didn't have the same "museum quality" that the manned vehicles had. If the MOL program had continued, then probably yes, Gemini (B) capsules would have been reused, and probably also the parawing land recovery method would have been used.
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I wonder why they didn't go with removable harddrives. Or external drives. No reason to mail all the other crap that goes with the computer.
(That's the solution we came up with for sending updated DV files to a site in Australia: a handful of 80 GB drives in caddies that we kept swapping by FedEx.)
Certainly 1980s, probably circa 1983 or 1984 at the latest. I came up with the phrase (which may well have been independently coined before me, at the time I was unaware of it) when we were setting up NETNORTH, the Canadian counterpart to BITNET (networks of typically college campus mainframes, not directly part of ARPANET). There was discussion about setting up the HQ at University of Guelph (where I worked at the time - west of Toronto) or Waterloo University.
The highway in question (as in station wagon travelling on) was the Highway (7? it's been a long time) between Waterloo and Guelph (at least part of which I drove every day, since I lived in Waterloo). I don't recall the numbers now, but my calculation of the bandwidth of Hwy 7 was based on a couple of boxes of 2400' reels of 6250 BPI tape (standard IBM mainframe tape size) in a car (or station wagon) travelling at the posted 90 km/h speed limit.
Back in those days, aside from dedicated leased-line networks like BITNET or commercial X.25 packet networks like Tymnet, a 2400 baud dialup modem was considered blazingly fast. (And long distance charges were not cheap, hence the popularity of multi-hop dialup networks using UUCP or like Fidonet.)
MRAM is set to debut, and this could in theory hold the users' data state, but you still have to boot the computer up through the normal BIOS process,
You could have a flag or register or some such that indicates whether to do the fast power up or the full BIOS scan. Wire it to the 'case opened' switch to ensure a BIOS scan if the box was opened.
I've yet to see anyone duplicate (on PC-class hardware) a feature that one of the 68K-based UNIX boxen of the mid 1980s had (I think it was an NCR box, but we were evaluating a bunch at the time so I may be mistaken). On a power interrupt that would do a complete state save, and on power up it could restore right to the middle of a running user process. (My simple-minded test of this was to write a program that incremented a number and displayed it on screen, then I pulled out the power cord. When I plugged it back in five minutes later, it picked up at the number it had left off at.) The "suspend" function (usually on laptops) is close, but not quite.)
The last time I programmed in Fortran it was still Fortran IV. (Oh, wait, I did write a version of "Asteroids" for a VAX with a graphics unit and AD/DA hardware in DEC's Fortran 77 -- but that wasn't serious programming.)
;-)
When I wanted structures and records and fields (oh my!) I went with PL/I or Pascal or C or C++ or Java (in roughly that chronological order). Let it go. If you want to do Fortranish things, use (standard) Fortran. If you want to do Pascalish or Cish or Adaish (etc) things, use that language.
There's probably a corollary of Henry Spencer's law about ignorant OS designers reinventing Unix (poorly) that applies to programming languages, although I haven't quite figured what the "target" language (the way Unix is the target OS) is. (Probably Algol68
Reference Counting Smart Pointer (RCSP for short): this type of smart pointer will keep of how many RCSPs are pointing to the same object. It'll delete the object when the last RCSP is destroyed.
So, if you have two RCSPs pointing at each other (or a whole daisy chain of them), and nothing else pointing to any of them, when do they get deleted?
(They don't. That's the weakness of reference counting. You're fine so long as you never create any circular lists. (That's one reason you cannot create hard links to directories on 'nix.) It's something that mark and sweep can catch, though. But reference counting is usually faster than mark'n'sweep.)
Filing a motion to dismiss is pretty much a reflex action in any lawsuit or trial. Sometimes the reasons can be pretty ridiculous, but a lawyer wouldn't be doing his duty if he didn't at least try. (On the "it never hurts to ask" principle.)
And yes, this ranks as one of the more ridiculous.
Shrug. Memory is a system resource.
This is what destructors are for, so you can explicitly (in the destructor) free resources that haven't yet been freed. Simplifies dealing with exceptions, especially where an exception may take control out of the scope of the object.
Sure, explicitly free your descriptors and whatnot -- that makes the code clearer -- but also do it in the destructor (wrapped in a suitable check so you don't do it twice, of course) as a back up.
Well, yeah, and I almost wrote that to make it hard to miss that X was a candidate -- except that X doesn't support display-side scripting like a browser does.
This is not necessarily bad, though.
leave our deletes and our destructors out,
If you have destructors, do they ever get called? Destructors aren't just for freeing memory, they're also used for freeing other system resources (depending on the object). File descriptors, database connections, that kind of stuff. (Granted, you can have explicit methods to take care of that cleanup, but then you can have explicit methods to free memory too. Seems to me you want all that as automatic as possible.)
The trend to produce major applications based on "the Web" (a term I find hard to use when referring to, say, intranets, but will accept) is one that benefits almost everyone.
Nah, they're crap. They're using a stupid connectionless protocol (HTTP) and a crippled display server (the browser), and the server end has to go through all sorts of contortions to get around that (half the stuff in a J2EE app has to do with just saving state between connections).
While at one level that beats custom developing GUIs for every app and sure as hell beats the old text mode 3270 green screens, we'd all be better off if there was a "universal client" that was a step up from the browser and used a more sensible protocol, at least on intranets.
(In other words, I generally agree with your sentiment about web apps, but disagree with the particular implementation.)
it means they don't know how to deal with a salesman as well as they would like.
Well, I suppose greeting them with a loaded shotgun and offering five seconds to get off your property might not be "as well as you would like", if you'd really like not to give them the five seconds...
because she can not find anything else
... and then launch into your Amway pitch.
There's always something else.
Just ask them: "Do you ever look at other ways of making money?"
Do you read Russian?
Not as well as I used to, not that even that was very good. Enough to get by on a visit to Russia about 10 years ago, and (then) to read articles with a tranlation dictionary open.
Rest assured, though, that there were plenty of people reading the Soviet journals at the time, if not republishing the material in the popular press.
The blurb says "as first described by Arthur C. Clarke in 1979". Much as I respect Clarke's accomplishments, this isn't one of them.
The concept may have first been documented by Tsiolkovsky, certainly it had an early mention by Artsutanov ("V Kosmos na electrovoze", Komsomolskaya Pravda, 31 July 1960), and was described in western literature at least four years before Fountains of Paradise by Pearson (Pearson, J., "The Orbital Tower; A Spacecraft Launcher Using the Earth's Rotational Energy", Acta Astronautica, V2, 1975, pp. 785-799).
I researched the concept a fair bit for my papers on using the idea on Mars as an easy way to export Martian volatiles (eg water) to other bases or settlements in the inner solar system. (I don't really want my server slashdotted so I'm not going to post a link. A google will find it.)
I'm listening to it right now [cough}kazaa{/cough]. To me it sounds like all their other stuff.
Must have been a really bad rip or you're trying to listen to it through cheap $2 computer speakers. Or both.
My preferences run towards classical compositions by dead guys.
That covers a pretty broad gamut. In that area my tastes tend toward Bach, Pachelbel or Handel rather than Beethoven or Berlioz. Maybe because I can actually hear the treble frequencies as well as the bass.
I rest my case.
The thing is, when Apple Corps first sued Apple Computer over the Apple trademark, Apple Corps was by far the better known and Apple Computer was this wierd little company producing expensive little 8-bit computers that most people couldn't figure a use for,
As part of the settlement of that lawsuit, Apple Computer agreed not to sell music. It's that settlement agreement -- a contract -- that Apple Corps is charging Apple Computer with violating.
Sure, today Apple Corps probably wouldn't stand much chance in a trademark suit against Apple Computer, even if they did have the trademark first. But that's not what this lawsuit is about.
Do yourself a favor.
Go get a copy of Pet Sounds. Listen to it. Better yet, listen to it, particulary to the music rather than the lyrics. Especially track 8 -- God Only Knows. (Unless, of course, your hearing is already totally shot from listening to head banging heavy metal acid rock at 130 dB.)
BTW, Brian Wilson was inspired to create Pet Sounds when he heard the Beatles' Rubber Soul. In turn, Pet Sounds inspired the Beatles to do Sergeant Pepper's, which in turn prompted the Rolling Stones to create On Their Satanic Majesties Request. Rubber Soul, BTW, was partly a result of Bob Dylan's influence on the Beatles.
Now when the next sobig.f or whatever hits, we'll lose the phone service as well as the electicity.
There's a big difference between refusing to throw your morals and principles out the window, slavishly devoting yourself to your kids whims, and letting them starve.
Besides, nobody starves in this country unless they want to. You might have to take a drastic cut in lifestyle, sell your house, go on food stamps, etc, but the "letting your kids starve" is a red herring -- except for a few whackos who really are neglectful, the sort unlikely to have ever held a software development position.
I want my children to respect me because they will understand that I valued their future far more than I valued my beliefs and morals.
Boy, do you have a lot to learn about earning a child's respect. I hope you don't have any kids yet, both for their sake and society's. The behaviour you describe just reinforces a child's natural inclination to believe that they are the center of the universe, and all should revolve around them. That's a great way to raise spoiled brats, if not outright sociopaths.
The "re-usable" vehicle has turned out to be a LOT more expensive then the disposable one.
That particular design of "reusable" (it isn't very) has turned out to be more expensive. Change the design criteria (drop the nominal 60,000 lb payload and the 1000 mile crossrange capability, for example) and design the thing with beefier margins (yes, trading off payload capacity), and the design might work out cheaper. The thing is to design it so that it doesn't need to be completely overhauled after each flight.
The VTOVL demonstrator DC-X (admittedly suborbital) achieved a 24 hour turnaround during its test series, flying two flights less than 24 hours apart. It also managed an intact landing after aborting an ascent when it was realized that an external explosion of fuel fumes on the ground hand severely damaged the rocket's skin.
Heck, the X-15 was a reusable rocket, and it did fly into space (earned a couple of pilots their astronaut wings for flying higher than 50 nautical miles). Total of something like 199 missions for three vehicles. And that was what, 1950s materials and avionics technology?
Capsules float.
So long as they don't fill with water when the door opens.
In fact, they recovered most, if not all, capsules form the old-skool space program.
Well yeah, but in the case of Grissom's Mercury capsule Libery Bell 7, it was recovered 30+ years later from several thousand feet down in the Atlantic. (Latest theory is that the hatch blew because of a static discharge from the helicopter winch cable, which I guess didn't ground itself on the ocean surface first.)
Well, reusable as compared to the ablative heat shields used on Mercury through Apollo.
As for inspection and reports between flights -- how much of that is really necessary vs "make work"? Strikes me that a lot of it could be automated, if one were really concerned about rapid and low cost turnaround.
Gemini 2 was unmanned. No big deal if it didn't survive launch or reentry. Also note "Gemini 2 capsule, which was modified to become a Gemini B capsule."
Basically the Air Force just needed something vaguely Gemini-shaped to fit atop the dummy MOL module for the Titan III launch, Gemini 2 was available, and since it was an unmanned test article it didn't have the same "museum quality" that the manned vehicles had. If the MOL program had continued, then probably yes, Gemini (B) capsules would have been reused, and probably also the parawing land recovery method would have been used.