Car phones in those days weren't anything like the cell phones of today. They were clunky things that weren't directly tied-in to the phone system. Well, maybe they were dialing out, using phone patch technology similar to what hams use, but to call somebody's car phone you placed a call to the "mobile operator" and had them make the connection.
Kinda like when making a long distance call outside the country in those days you had to ask for the "overseas operator" and have them place the call.
Anyone truly without a fear gene (or whatever) probably wouldn't survive to adulthood.
I mean, look at how many stupid things we do as kids/adolescents even with fear genes -- it's amazing that as many of us make it as do.
There's a reason that fear gene evolved, after all.
Re:Interesting but hardly new.
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Mobile communications are nothing new either, not even mobile computer-mediated communication. Sure, it's a lot more convenient now than in the early 1980s where one lugged around something like a TI Silent700 terminal with built-in acoustic modem and hooked it up to a pay-phone (been there, done that, got the wierd looks), but it isn't new. There were a lot of us bixen whose weapon of choice when on the road was a Radio Shack Model 100 (with its built-in 4-line screen) with either its acoustic coupler or handy-dandy phone jack 'n alligator clips to hook into the motel's telephone system.
I must say you seem surprisingly defensive about a comment that in no way maligned your book, unless you have such a deep emotional investment in believing that you have come up with some new observation that you feel maligned. I haven't read your book, so perhaps you have -- although it seems to me that human sociological phenomena are based in no small part on the way humans are wired, so while there may be new expressions of sociological phenomena, I don't think there'll be new phenomena without a much more fundamental change in the human experience than "just" better communication and data access.
Interesting but hardly new.
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
The classic work in this field is probably Starr Roxanne Hiltz's book Online Communities, published in 1984. While it tends to focus on the user community of the EIES conferencing system, it mentions some others (although my CoSy system -- aka BIX, CIX, and a few other installations, was too new to get much attention then), and the observations are as valid now about blogs and chat rooms as they were then about the command-line, text based technology of the time.
(The following quotes are from EIES users circa 1983 -- they make just as much sense if you s/EIES/Slashdot/ for example:
"I can't think when the system is down."
"I can live without EIES, but I can't LIVE without EIES."
"I find myself staying up late at night and getting up early in the morning just to use the damn thing.")
And it occurs to me, having read The Victorian Internet, that similar sentiments were probably expressed by telegraph operators back then.
Re:Still can't figure out how it works...
on
Optical Camouflage
·
· Score: 2
Nope, nope, nope. You give a fair description of the chromakey process (aka blue-screen or green-screen), but that won't work with a non-color like silver.
This is a variation on what's known as front-projection, invented back in the 1950s (by SF author William F. Jenkins, better known by his pen-name Murray Leinster) and used in "2001: A Space Odyssey" to film the "Dawn of Man" sequences.
The trick is the retro-reflective material (Scotchlite, originally). You can either use that as a backdrop or, as in this case, you coat an object or cloak with it. It's made up of tiny beads that reflect light back in the direction it came from. (The same stuff is used on the ping-pong balls that attach to your joints in a motion-capture setup -- the video camera doing the mo-cap is co-located with a light source of a particular color so that the balls show up as bright spots in that color).
Anyway, if you project an image using low-intensity light, that image will be washed out by ambient light to most observers. To somebody (or a camera) next to the projector, that image will be quite bright when bounced off the retroreflective material. In "2001", the scenes of the ape-men with the African landscape in the background were all filmed on a sound stage, with the landscape projected onto a front-projection screen behind them.
To do the invisibity trick, you set up a piece of the screen in the foreground -- whatever moves behind it will seem to have gone invisible.
(The half-mirror in the diagram is just there so that the camera and projector don't have to be physically in the same spot.)
I can see where unregenerate C programmers who wouldn't know OOP if it bit them might dislike UML. Heck, even I think some UML diagram types are a bit hokey. But what, specifically, is your beef?
You want DFDs and STDs or just plain old flowcharts?
No, just that time of isn't very specific. For one thing, like many of Shakespeare's plays, things are sometimes anachronistic -- clocks in Julius Caesar, for example. Hamlet is based on a 12th century Danish story, but the play (and movie) are more contemporaneous with Shakespeare's 16th.
Given that range, the movie The Emperor's New Groove set (loosely and anachronistically) in the pre-Columbian Incan empire could be said to be "in the time of Hamlet" -- but it wouldn't be in the play.
Yes, loved it. Steam engines, Newton's laws... all so close.
Minor nitpick -- the movie isn't merely set in the time of Hamlet, it's set in the play Hamlet; Rozencrantz and Gildenstern are minor characters in that play, but this movie focuses on them (with a lot of action beyond what Shakespeare wrote) rather than on the Prince of Denmark. Which is also amusing.
didn't take any rocket science, doesn't produce green house gasses, doesn't make any noise, doesn't cost much to run,...doesn't work worth a darn anywhere useful.
Assuming that 4deg is Celsius (Only a few places on Earth - mostly covered with ice - where that might be Fahrenheit), you're still talking about pretty high latitudes. 4C == 40F, but most temperate latitudes the constant ground temperature is more like 50F - 55F, getting warmer as you approach the tropics. Not cold enough for a fridge (typically 4C/40F), and you'd have to dig more than just "a few feet" anyway.
It doesn't break down into smaller pieces of plastic (well, it does, but that's a first step). The polystyrene chain is broken into smaller units as the bacteria attack the linked sugars. Those smaller units can then be broken down directly by the bacteria.
Most plastics are poly-hydrocarbons (although stuff like PVC and teflon throw chlorine or fluorine atoms into the mix). Depolymerize them and you get hydrocarbons, which all sorts of bacteria find yummy (depending on the specific hydrocarbon -- but styrene and ethylene both occur in nature (styrene in strawberries, coffee, etc, and ethylene is a chemical trigger produced by and recognized by fruits to hasten the ripening process.)
Machu Picchu is indeed spectacular. We got there one misty morning before the tourist bus (we'd overnighted in Agua Caliente) and that added to the experience. If you're in Peru, it's also worth taking a flight over the Nazca lines -- although all the steep turns over them to get a good look got everyone in the six-seater airsick except for the pilot and me (also a pilot).
Dunno about the Egyptian pyramids -- the one time I went through Cairo airport my layover was about a half-hour too short to do the "bus to the pyramids, get out, look at them, back in the bus, back to the airport" quickie tour (which was about two hours, as I recall).
Really. A lot of this stuff is just where you find it -- a lot of big companies do factory tours, mine tours etc. and the local tourist info places or AAA handbooks will tell you.
I've done tours of uranium mining and milling operations, a day-long tour of Abitibi's forest products facility (from tree farm to pulp and paper mill) in northern Ontario, an iron mine in Minnesota, a (decommissioned) nuclear facility in Idaho, the Jack Daniels' distillery in Lynchburg, etc, etc -- all as side trips on touring around the country. Various conferences often have such side trips for the early arrivers before the first day of the official conference (I did a tour of the Boeing 747 assembly facility that way.)
I suppose in this post 9/11 era some of this stuff might be scaled back, and even before that some of the more interesting stuff required an organized group and advanced notice for clearance (e.g. the NORAD facility in Cheyenne Mountain, which I've toured). Best bet if there's something you're interested in is to ask their Public Relations office.
Only if by "obscurity" you mean "unusualness". There's nothing obscure ("hidden") about the software running on the boxes or the architecture of the boxes.
For an analogy, there's nothing obscure about how standard door locks work. A skilled locksmith can pick the lock whether it's a Yale or a Schlage. A "script kiddie" with an automatic pick that only works on Yale locks (unlikely, but give me this for the sake of analogy), however, will be stopped by a Schlage.
Somebody capable of creating a rootkit for x86 could probably create one for Sparc or PPC or MIPS, although he might first have to study the architecture and acquire the hardware to test with. Given the ubiquity of x86 systems, however, he's more likely to spend that time finding some other x86 exploit.
The specs in the article don't make any reference to having on-board Ethernet, but in the pictures it looks like there's an RJ-45 connector on the board. Anyone know for sure? That'd be very useful. I seem to recall the POP spec including Ethernet, so it probably does.
What exactly are they doing when they say 'sharing'?
Hard to tell for sure from the picture, but they probably mean physical sharing of the space. I.e., if you've got an AGP card installed, there's just no room for a card in the first PCI slot, and vice versa. Just like some old PCI + ISA mobos, where there was one card position that could be either ISA or PCI (two connectors, one mounting bracket position).
skr1pt k1dd1ez will have a whole lotta trouble trying to crack it with cut-and-paste x86 rootkits.
Exactly! That's why I like using "oddball" cpu/OS combos for stuff exposed to the net. (Aside from the geek coolness factor;-) An old Sun box running SuSE Linux, for example. An old Mac running MkLinux. Still need to get a MIPS machine, but Indigos are pretty cheap on eBay...
Sure, the truly determined and knowledgeable hacker might find a way through, but it'll stop the script kiddies -- at least until such setups are so widespread that rootkits for them start to show up.
Do you think that maybe one of the reasons he got the 3000 was more due to the market flood?
That's part of it. And that number is probably low for this area (Denver -- lots of former telecom high tech workers on the streets, and most of the new jobs (Lockheed, Raytheon) require security clearances).
Another part is that typically the unemployment insurance system tends to encourage it -- if you're required to make N job contacts per week, if there's only one or two that really match your skills you'll send out resumes to places you know you don't have a hope in hell of getting hired at just to meet your quota. (Of course, just responding to ads is one of the worst job-search strategies, but it's the one most people default to.)
I have a 486DX-66 (33.18 bogomips, 24MB RAM) that I'm still using as a mail server. I used to also run 3 web sites and DNS on it, but since moved those to a different machine. (More a disk space issue than anything else.)
I'm also running a SparcStation IPC (24.88 bogomips, 32MB RAM) as an internal web server and CD image server. (Running SuSE SPARC 7.3).
Up until a few months ago my development machine at work was a P-166. (My main home machine is a dual CPU P3-550 with a half gig of RAM, and yes, I noticed the difference!)
Which shows how lousy C is at recursive functions. (And how bad recursive calls can be in general).
Rewriting fib(int n) along the lines of
int fastfib(int n) { int i; int f = 0; int fm1 = 1; int fm2 = 1;
if (n < 2) return 1;
for (i = 2; i <= n; i++) {
f = fm1 + fm2;
fm2 = fm1;
fm1 = f;
}
return f; }
(and similar in Java), I get times of 0.004 seconds for C and 0.567 seconds for Java -- most of which is the time to load the JVM (ie the difference between 'time java fastfib 40' and 'time java fastfib 0' is lost in the noise).
Proving that choice of algorithm can make far more difference than choice of programming language.
Don't believe me? Download the Markov examples from Kernighan & Pike's "The Practise of Programming" and time the C++ and Java examples. On a P3-550 I get 3.63 seconds for the C++ and 2.90 seconds for the Java version.
Slashdot Mirror
Car phones in those days weren't anything like the cell phones of today. They were clunky things that weren't directly tied-in to the phone system. Well, maybe they were dialing out, using phone patch technology similar to what hams use, but to call somebody's car phone you placed a call to the "mobile operator" and had them make the connection.
Kinda like when making a long distance call outside the country in those days you had to ask for the "overseas operator" and have them place the call.
Anyone truly without a fear gene (or whatever) probably wouldn't survive to adulthood.
I mean, look at how many stupid things we do as kids/adolescents even with fear genes -- it's amazing that as many of us make it as do.
There's a reason that fear gene evolved, after all.
Mobile communications are nothing new either, not even mobile computer-mediated communication. Sure, it's a lot more convenient now than in the early 1980s where one lugged around something like a TI Silent700 terminal with built-in acoustic modem and hooked it up to a pay-phone (been there, done that, got the wierd looks), but it isn't new. There were a lot of us bixen whose weapon of choice when on the road was a Radio Shack Model 100 (with its built-in 4-line screen) with either its acoustic coupler or handy-dandy phone jack 'n alligator clips to hook into the motel's telephone system.
I must say you seem surprisingly defensive about a comment that in no way maligned your book, unless you have such a deep emotional investment in believing that you have come up with some new observation that you feel maligned. I haven't read your book, so perhaps you have -- although it seems to me that human sociological phenomena are based in no small part on the way humans are wired, so while there may be new expressions of sociological phenomena, I don't think there'll be new phenomena without a much more fundamental change in the human experience than "just" better communication and data access.
The classic work in this field is probably Starr Roxanne Hiltz's book Online Communities, published in 1984. While it tends to focus on the user community of the EIES conferencing system, it mentions some others (although my CoSy system -- aka BIX, CIX, and a few other installations, was too new to get much attention then), and the observations are as valid now about blogs and chat rooms as they were then about the command-line, text based technology of the time.
(The following quotes are from EIES users circa 1983 -- they make just as much sense if you s/EIES/Slashdot/ for example:
"I can't think when the system is down."
"I can live without EIES, but I can't LIVE without EIES."
"I find myself staying up late at night and getting up early in the morning just to use the damn thing.")
And it occurs to me, having read The Victorian Internet, that similar sentiments were probably expressed by telegraph operators back then.
Nope, nope, nope. You give a fair description of the chromakey process (aka blue-screen or green-screen), but that won't work with a non-color like silver.
This is a variation on what's known as front-projection, invented back in the 1950s (by SF author William F. Jenkins, better known by his pen-name Murray Leinster) and used in "2001: A Space Odyssey" to film the "Dawn of Man" sequences.
The trick is the retro-reflective material (Scotchlite, originally). You can either use that as a backdrop or, as in this case, you coat an object or cloak with it. It's made up of tiny beads that reflect light back in the direction it came from. (The same stuff is used on the ping-pong balls that attach to your joints in a motion-capture setup -- the video camera doing the mo-cap is co-located with a light source of a particular color so that the balls show up as bright spots in that color).
Anyway, if you project an image using low-intensity light, that image will be washed out by ambient light to most observers. To somebody (or a camera) next to the projector, that image will be quite bright when bounced off the retroreflective material. In "2001", the scenes of the ape-men with the African landscape in the background were all filmed on a sound stage, with the landscape projected onto a front-projection screen behind them.
To do the invisibity trick, you set up a piece of the screen in the foreground -- whatever moves behind it will seem to have gone invisible.
(The half-mirror in the diagram is just there so that the camera and projector don't have to be physically in the same spot.)
UML is a disease on the face of the planet
I can see where unregenerate C programmers who wouldn't know OOP if it bit them might dislike UML. Heck, even I think some UML diagram types are a bit hokey. But what, specifically, is your beef?
You want DFDs and STDs or just plain old flowcharts?
the free software world is severely lacking in UML diagramming tools
What, ArgoUML's BSD license isn't free enough for you?
No, just that time of isn't very specific. For one thing, like many of Shakespeare's plays, things are sometimes anachronistic -- clocks in Julius Caesar, for example. Hamlet is based on a 12th century Danish story, but the play (and movie) are more contemporaneous with Shakespeare's 16th.
Given that range, the movie The Emperor's New Groove set (loosely and anachronistically) in the pre-Columbian Incan empire could be said to be "in the time of Hamlet" -- but it wouldn't be in the play.
Yes, loved it. Steam engines, Newton's laws ... all so close.
Minor nitpick -- the movie isn't merely set in the time of Hamlet, it's set in the play Hamlet; Rozencrantz and Gildenstern are minor characters in that play, but this movie focuses on them (with a lot of action beyond what Shakespeare wrote) rather than on the Prince of Denmark. Which is also amusing.
I've read their books about C++ and Java in parallel
;)
You read Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java at the same time, and your head didn't explode? Amazing!
didn't take any rocket science, doesn't produce green house gasses, doesn't make any noise, doesn't cost much to run, ...doesn't work worth a darn anywhere useful.
Assuming that 4deg is Celsius (Only a few places on Earth - mostly covered with ice - where that might be Fahrenheit), you're still talking about pretty high latitudes. 4C == 40F, but most temperate latitudes the constant ground temperature is more like 50F - 55F, getting warmer as you approach the tropics. Not cold enough for a fridge (typically 4C/40F), and you'd have to dig more than just "a few feet" anyway.
Unless you live in Greenland.
Have I missed something?
Apparently.
It doesn't break down into smaller pieces of plastic (well, it does, but that's a first step). The polystyrene chain is broken into smaller units as the bacteria attack the linked sugars. Those smaller units can then be broken down directly by the bacteria.
Most plastics are poly-hydrocarbons (although stuff like PVC and teflon throw chlorine or fluorine atoms into the mix). Depolymerize them and you get hydrocarbons, which all sorts of bacteria find yummy (depending on the specific hydrocarbon -- but styrene and ethylene both occur in nature (styrene in strawberries, coffee, etc, and ethylene is a chemical trigger produced by and recognized by fruits to hasten the ripening process.)
No, no, read the word again.
It is as spelled: diodegradation -- the process of grading a collection of diodes, e.g. sorting them according to quality.
Although I'm not sure what that has to do with rottable plastic...
Machu Picchu is indeed spectacular. We got there one misty morning before the tourist bus (we'd overnighted in Agua Caliente) and that added to the experience. If you're in Peru, it's also worth taking a flight over the Nazca lines -- although all the steep turns over them to get a good look got everyone in the six-seater airsick except for the pilot and me (also a pilot).
Dunno about the Egyptian pyramids -- the one time I went through Cairo airport my layover was about a half-hour too short to do the "bus to the pyramids, get out, look at them, back in the bus, back to the airport" quickie tour (which was about two hours, as I recall).
Really. A lot of this stuff is just where you find it -- a lot of big companies do factory tours, mine tours etc. and the local tourist info places or AAA handbooks will tell you.
I've done tours of uranium mining and milling operations, a day-long tour of Abitibi's forest products facility (from tree farm to pulp and paper mill) in northern Ontario, an iron mine in Minnesota, a (decommissioned) nuclear facility in Idaho, the Jack Daniels' distillery in Lynchburg, etc, etc -- all as side trips on touring around the country. Various conferences often have such side trips for the early arrivers before the first day of the official conference (I did a tour of the Boeing 747 assembly facility that way.)
I suppose in this post 9/11 era some of this stuff might be scaled back, and even before that some of the more interesting stuff required an organized group and advanced notice for clearance (e.g. the NORAD facility in Cheyenne Mountain, which I've toured). Best bet if there's something you're interested in is to ask their Public Relations office.
Only if by "obscurity" you mean "unusualness". There's nothing obscure ("hidden") about the software running on the boxes or the architecture of the boxes.
For an analogy, there's nothing obscure about how standard door locks work. A skilled locksmith can pick the lock whether it's a Yale or a Schlage. A "script kiddie" with an automatic pick that only works on Yale locks (unlikely, but give me this for the sake of analogy), however, will be stopped by a Schlage.
Somebody capable of creating a rootkit for x86 could probably create one for Sparc or PPC or MIPS, although he might first have to study the architecture and acquire the hardware to test with. Given the ubiquity of x86 systems, however, he's more likely to spend that time finding some other x86 exploit.
Man, what a tease.
The specs in the article don't make any reference to having on-board Ethernet, but in the pictures it looks like there's an RJ-45 connector on the board. Anyone know for sure? That'd be very useful. I seem to recall the POP spec including Ethernet, so it probably does.
What exactly are they doing when they say 'sharing'?
Hard to tell for sure from the picture, but they probably mean physical sharing of the space. I.e., if you've got an AGP card installed, there's just no room for a card in the first PCI slot, and vice versa. Just like some old PCI + ISA mobos, where there was one card position that could be either ISA or PCI (two connectors, one mounting bracket position).
skr1pt k1dd1ez will have a whole lotta trouble trying to crack it with cut-and-paste x86 rootkits.
;-) An old Sun box running SuSE Linux, for example. An old Mac running MkLinux. Still need to get a MIPS machine, but Indigos are pretty cheap on eBay...
Exactly! That's why I like using "oddball" cpu/OS combos for stuff exposed to the net. (Aside from the geek coolness factor
Sure, the truly determined and knowledgeable hacker might find a way through, but it'll stop the script kiddies -- at least until such setups are so widespread that rootkits for them start to show up.
Do you think that maybe one of the reasons he got the 3000 was more due to the market flood?
That's part of it. And that number is probably low for this area (Denver -- lots of former telecom high tech workers on the streets, and most of the new jobs (Lockheed, Raytheon) require security clearances).
Another part is that typically the unemployment insurance system tends to encourage it -- if you're required to make N job contacts per week, if there's only one or two that really match your skills you'll send out resumes to places you know you don't have a hope in hell of getting hired at just to meet your quota. (Of course, just responding to ads is one of the worst job-search strategies, but it's the one most people default to.)
I have a 486DX-66 (33.18 bogomips, 24MB RAM) that I'm still using as a mail server. I used to also run 3 web sites and DNS on it, but since moved those to a different machine. (More a disk space issue than anything else.)
I'm also running a SparcStation IPC (24.88 bogomips, 32MB RAM) as an internal web server and CD image server. (Running SuSE SPARC 7.3).
Up until a few months ago my development machine at work was a P-166. (My main home machine is a dual CPU P3-550 with a half gig of RAM, and yes, I noticed the difference!)
(and similar in Java), I get times of 0.004 seconds for C and 0.567 seconds for Java -- most of which is the time to load the JVM (ie the difference between 'time java fastfib 40' and 'time java fastfib 0' is lost in the noise).Rewriting fib(int n) along the lines of
Proving that choice of algorithm can make far more difference than choice of programming language.
On a P3-550 (dual CPU, but that has no effect here) I get 10.82 sec for the C version (GCC 2.95) and 9.74 for the Java version (JDK 1.3).
It's big and slow.
In some cases, it's faster than C++.
Don't believe me? Download the Markov examples from Kernighan & Pike's "The Practise of Programming" and time the C++ and Java examples. On a P3-550 I get 3.63 seconds for the C++ and 2.90 seconds for the Java version.