The "lack of skills" argument has always been bullshit. If anything, the majority of people are overqualified. Academic inflation is a massive problem. For every full-time Community College position there are literally hundreds, and in many areas thousands or even tens of thousands of applicants waiting in line. A Master's Degree is now about as common as a BA was in the sixties. Meanwhile access to knowledge has exploded even for those who don't pursue degree programs. Just watching 3D simulations on YouTube, you can learn more about biotechnology in a few days than most college students learned from an undergraduate degree a few decades ago. There is skill to go around.
The lack of education argument is nothing but a smoke screen just as it always has been. It's just way of shifting the blame for poor employment prospects away from major corporations and the government policies they've landed in place through the aid of their Republicrat benefactors and onto the middle class.
If you go back and watch Milton Friedman's series called "Free to Choose" you can see some choice examples of where this lie cum mantra originates. In episode three you'll see none other than a young Donald Rumsfeld talking about the new service based economy in which the emerging software industry is going to employ fifty percent of the population and he'll tell you how magically only the US will be able to participate in this market because only Americans can comprehend something so technically advanced as this newfangled software thing. Really an amazing performance. The shocking thing is that such a clearly moronic figure eventually made his way so far up the ladder of power.
But of course the catch to this magical trickle down service economy voodoo was that we're going to need everybody to get re-educated to participate. If you can't do Powerpoint and Visio, how can you expect to reap the rewards of this magic new ago. And hence the argument persists to this day that all the laid off GM workers will get new jobs when they learn how to use Excel and do Word macros etc. Yeah fucking right.
The problem with the economy is not a lack of education, it is a lack of leadership and a lack of responsibility on the part of the electorate that has bought into the greedy lies that will never benefit the majority of population.
Yep, the former darling of Slashdot submissions that disappeared off the map last year. I was a real cheerleader for their business plan so I was disappointed when they gave up. My two cents on what happened was that they decided amorphous silicon AKA thin film was going to put them out of business. Those suspicions are based partly on watching all the action around Swiss company Oerlikon. They're a turn-key provider of thin film production plants and they're making a lot of deals in Taiwan and China in the last few years. Their local sales rep is going around saying they can build you a factory that produces product at 60cents a watt in the next twenty four months.
That in sending radioactive products into the marketplace you could assume consumers would then take responsibility to make sure the products were disposed of properly.
That part was what really disgusted me when I saw that story yesterday. If the serious plastic waste problems in the oceans don't provide ample evidence that you can't control where products end up then there are hundreds of other examples including groundwater contamination in countries across the globe from selenium and other fun stuff that are essential in consumer electronics yet toxic when dispersed into the environment at the end of their useful lives which tend to be numbered in months rather than years with defective by design components like capacitors that have shelf lives like groceries.
I googled it a bit and I read that the half life in these things was like twelve hundred years. Maybe I was missing the dot in there and it was only twelve years but even so that's far longer than the life of a consumer electronics device.
Re:Taiwanese manufacturing in Mainland
on
Replacing a Thinkpad?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, I don't know what a nice guy like me is doing in a thread like this-- slow news day I suppose. Anyhow I'll go ahead and pitch in a few cents.
You won't find anything directly exported from Taiwan intentionally labeled as "Made in China". No way. Not by a long shot. The "Made in Taiwan" label is a big deal here. There are ads on TV all the time showing examples of Europeans and Americans using low quality flimsy products like umbrellas that fall apart and then focusing in on the label that says "Made in Taiwan" with the idea that these commercials are meant to shame local manufacturers into improving their quality standards to raise the brand value of the "Made in Taiwan" label. It works. People get pissed when they buy local stuff that sucks and shopkeepers catch hell over it if it says "Made in Taiwan". Generally stuff made in Taiwan isn't as cheap as mainland stuff. For mainland stuff it's expected to be low quality just as "Made in Japan" is assumed, sometimes dubiously, to mean quality. Sometimes in certain product categories nobody cares as long as it more or less works and the price is right.
There are some product categories where Taiwan is still weak though.Capacitors is one. There are great electronics shops here and you can get Taiwanese caps for a few cents or Japanese ones for about five times as much.Local solder is also like a third the cost of imports even from China. Lots of electronics stuff from Taiwan is just dirt cheap but good luck reading the freakin' manuals. Gotta love a Chinese spec sheet. Even standard units like ohms get translated into characters that mean something totally unrelated but sound like oh mu. Everybody can guess that one right?
Anyway, back to the thread here. You're right that China Airlines is a Taiwanese carrier and both sides have their own China Telecom and China Rail, China post and other similarly named industry players, but that does not extend to labeling Taiwanese goods with a tag that says "Made in China". That would not happen. Thats not to say that there aren't Taiwanese operated and owned factories in mainland, but if a product is made in Taiwan and exported from Taiwan you can be certain the tag will say "Made in Taiwan" and not "Made in China".
I'm just reporting the facts of what I turned up in a quick background search using the terms that were in the article. It looks pretty relevant to me. The Wikipedia article on UHMWPE says very clearly, and I'll quote it for you again one more time.
"(UHMWPE has)much poorer heat resistance than other high-strength fibers."
I was comparing two facts. A) the temperature that was stated for when UHMWPE gets brittle to B) the temperature that is recorded outside the space station when it is dark. They happen to match.
You're the one making assumptions. I'm bringing in some additional facts that weren't in the article.
Wikipedia says this is a synonym for ultra high molecular weight polyethylene
Regarding the weaknesses of UHMWPE, thermal properties are highlighted and consist of the following:
The weak bonding between olefin molecules allows local thermal excitations to disrupt the crystalline order of a given chain piece-by-piece, giving it much poorer heat resistance than other high-strength fibers. Its melting point is around 144 to 152 degrees Celsius, and according to DSM, it is not advisable to use UHMWPE fibers at temperatures exceeding 80 to 100C for long periods of time. It becomes brittle at temperatures below -150C.
Googling for the temperature outside of the space station turns up a Yahoo answers page.
Discode was a project to do an "open source" bio hardware device that sounds very similar to this. The project was going on under the guidance of a UCSD professor and got a lot of write up about three years ago but it seemed to slowly disappear over the years.
Yeah, what's the deal? Slashdot pointing to a ZDNet attempt at a Linux story. WTF?
Anything about Linux or Open Source "versus the competition" or "needs to do X to please company Y or else. . . " is completely irrelevant as far as I can tell. People can do what they want with open source and no open source developer is under any compulsion to do it for them. Where's the story in that? There is none which is why ZDNet implodes when it tries to cover open source.
It's an editorial problem for them. They have some fairly qualified writing staff but the whole editorial bent doesn't really gibe with open source. They're always trying to frame their stories as a cliff hanger of intense quarter to quarter cut-throat competition --don't touch that dial! But that TV commercial writing style doesn't translate to open source projects particularly well.
Depends on your application.
In space constrained situations I suppose you can be concerned about maximum efficiency and not care about cost. But for the majority of the market cost is the foremost concern. This is why the dollar-per-watt is such a big deal.
Congratuations to all those who produce higher efficiency products, but that's not what's going to win over the majority of the market. To win over people who don't give a rats ass about the environment you need to focus on costs rather than efficiency.
Let's put it this way, a typical 200sq ft suburban home has enough roof area that even at 7% efficiency you would have more than enough space to fullfill that households electricity needs and perhaps enough left over for the marjority of their transportation as well. The space isn't a problem. The problem is the cost. If the cost could be reduced significantly below that of grid electricity over the product lifetime then it would most definitely happen.
Moreover, if it was cheap enough, you could also put panels on the fencing around the yard. In many American homes that would double the surface area. Also you can use curved tiles on the roof again significantly enlarging the surface area. Surface area is so low cost for most applications so what's the significance of efficiency?
But this is all academic because the key point is that the original target market isn't the residential market anyway. The first target market is membrane roofed industrial buildings. This is already going on big time in Germany and Spain.
Here in Taiwan, we just had the annual solar trade show which is becoming a really big deal on the silicon island. Solar has become a huge because it dovetails right in with other semi industry players that get put together in industrial parks.
So this year there was a big dollar-per-watt announcement from Oerlikon. If you don't know who they are, they're a Swiss provider of turn-key thin film or amorphous silicon solar panel factories. They've got several partners in Taiwan already including, most recently, some of the large-scale optical media manufacturers who already use similar techniques and equipment and have some cash to invest.
The local Oerlikon rep was saying that producers will be at sixty cents per watt within forty eight months and that this will mean actual product at the dollar a watt level. Hey, I'm just passing along what the sales rep said. Obviously he's got a reason to overstate his case, but that's what he claimed was coming down the piple.
I think it's also worth noting that a former Slashdot sweetheart that went by the name of Spheral Solar has basically dropped off the map because they realized that amorphous silicon was going to take over.
Oerlikon bought up Excimer laser of the UK last year. One of the repeated steps in doing thin film solar is laser etching.
I'm not too sure about the tech being referred to in this piece, but dollar-a-watt PV, which is what the UN and other agencies have said is the tilting point where solar is cheaper than coal or natural gas, is already being spoken of at industry trade shows and shouldn't be seen as a wildly implausible announcement.
It's interesting how we have to be held captive to the whims of big capital players when such proven and ideal technologies are already in existence. You notice that SEGS was one of the links here. Doesn't the SEGS story seem a little strange? Doesn't it seem like part of the story is being left out?
If it worked so well and is still producing to this day with a parabolic revenue curve then why did they stop at 350MW peak? The answer is plain as day. The oil crisis ended. Back in the seventies when the first oil crisis hit, private investors decided to hop on the solar thermal gravy train. When the oil crisis turned out to be a big global confidence trick and the price collapsed, that was the end of the money for SEGS. Sure, you can argue that solar thermal competes with coal and natural gas rather than oil, but the truth is that energy markets aren't rational like that. Not then and not now either. The collapse of the oil in the eighties price killed off expansion funding for SEGS.
It's not that the technology failed or proved unworkable, the funding dried up because of the deflation of the seventies energy bubble.
This is a good example of how so-called free markets and energy policies don't match. Our market structures are predicated on the interests of corporate shareholders which is fine for some things, but that's no way to set a coherent long-term policy on vital core utilities. Corporations plan quarter by quarter not decade by decade. It's a simple fact of corporate accounting that the focus is three months at a time. Well that may be fine for Mattell and Pepsi, but energy policy is about a fundamental resource that every single citizen of the country is guaranteed to need for the rest of their lives and not just the latest marketing trend.
Think about the things that we do agree to pay for with taxes and compare them. Let's take education for instance. Does every member of the community benefit from the public school system? How about adults who have no kids? Why should they have to pay for public education? And yet those same people sure as hell do need electricity, don't they.
How about public funding for highways? Does it really make sense that we publicly fund the highway systems with tax dollars which clearly benefits both the auto and petroleum industries but we find it impossible to create a clean energy system using tax financing? Why is that?
Let's not even mention direct tax dollar funding for oil companies.
If we don't direct public money towards this direction, I can predict the future. The oil thing blows away. All the paranoid bullshit about peak oil turns out to be just that, just as it was in the seventies. Oil drops and all the other energy markets do the same for no logical reason and th funding for solar thermal dries up and blows away for twenty years before we get back on this fucked up cycle. Let's put an end to this ridiculous game by funding energy policy with public monies to build out a nationwide solar thermal energy supply.
If we just got over this paranoid obsession with the metaphor of the marketplace. Cpitalism is an inherently paranoid system because your starting premise is that everybody is competing and there is no altruism. Or, as Heinlen put it --no free lunch.
But this is truly paranoid. To demonstrate that, we can look to the scientific study of the global food supply. I don't mean just the human food supply but the entire planet's food supply. Where goes the nutrition of the world come from on a global ecological scale? Is it big fish eats little fish? No, that's a tiny little piece of the global food chain. The truth is it almost all comes from plants. Plants are the source of the vast majority of life sustaining nutrition. Do the little Bambi deer and the little rabbits have to pay to eat the grass? No.
But how can it be? How can the plants give of themselves freely? Are the plants stupid Communists? Don't they know they're playing the sucker by giving it all away? Or is it that they're being subsidized by some big government operation like, oh say the Sun perhaps. That fuckin' Sun is the biggest Commie of them all. Good Capitalists get up every morning and spit right at it, yeah?
See, there is such a thing as a free lunch and it's all around us. Not just people but even animal and plant communities can thrive without competition. In fact, the reason we aren't thriving just might be BECAUSE of the stupid wasteful competition.
I won't belabor the point with too many examples, but let's stick to a topic closer to home for Slashdot that Heinlein could dig --robots. Where are the robots? What's holding back robotics technology in the United States? The answer is there's no need for it. Why use robots when you could just lower the workers wages by either hiring illegals, immigrants on shady visa programs or simply outsourcing. That's what you get from capitalism. Rather than a utopian future where the robots do all the work you get a society split into masses of poor and a tiny elite going --hey fuck all you poor people.
Utopia is doable, it's all around us. We're in Utopia already, the sun, the tides, the earth, the plants the animals --it's all beautiful and free. We just need to get it together enough to realize that our societies can reflect this instead of the paranoid dystopia that is capitalism.
This is what I've hear anyway. I hear that the cheapest and easiest way to get massive amounts of electromagenetic noise is a cheap dimmer switch on an AC circuit such as a lamp. I'm not quite sure why that is, but I've read that this is the kind of thing that really causes headaches for people trying to do remote monitoring as opposed to some fancy James Bond signal jammer doohickie. I'm not sure if the same thing applies to cheap carbon potentiometers on a DC circuit. I'm sure somebody here knows and perhaps even has some math to back it up.
Mmkay Smithers. Yes, we all appreciate the enormous contributions of the wonderful Mr. Burns. Sheesh.
But I can go back old school as far as you can. I happen to have done extensive research on the economic implications of punch card based lace machines in the eighteenth century. You wanna get old-school bitch?
The point is, although modern computational techniques clearly can trace their lineage to the eighteenth century, the eighteenth century is not when computers took over the world and neither is the nineteen fifties or the sixties or the seventies or even the early eighties. All those eras had elements of computing but none of them was defined by computing. It's in the nineties that computers took over the world and that is the time of the post coin-op 8-bit computer games slowly turning into home consoles and PCs that coincides with Gen-X, not the boomers.
And you can love Big Bear Bill all you want, the dude is a bankah gangstah. Maybe he's ya big poppa, but that's doesn't mean he's contributed shit to computing.
Amen to that. To me it has always been simple. It's about games.
If you grew up loving video games, you're part of the computer generation. If you grew up before the rise of coin operated video arcade games, like my boomer parents, then you're sort of perpetually outside of it.
This is an clear way to see how computing works in society because it's not age based. As it happens, historically this aligns pretty well with the population segment referred to as Gen-X. But it's not exclusive of those boomers who might have been on the forefront. Of course from their peers perspectives, these people would have been seen as nerdish freaks. And this is why they call Gen-X people nerds even though it's actually mainstream to be a computer junky in that age segment.
And there's a really good reason why this divide exists. If you grew up thinking computers meant games and fun and even a hint of danger and taboo then you're naturally attracted to them just like toys. This didn't really happen for most boomers. That's not to say there isn't a significant minority, but not a huge percentage of the population. My parents think it's sick to spend all day on the PC and yet for people in my own generation and younger this is the place to be.
And using Bill Gates as an example of anything in tech is lame. The guy is a shake down artist. Who cares what inspired him to do anything. Why pay attention to such a money grubbing loser.
Yeah, I wrote to them on that because there was that PDF mentioned in that thread which said they were going to open up their spec.
I wrote to the address and asked for more info on the project and explained how I had built various power supplies for DIY projects and lived in Taiwan so I had great access to a wide range of cheap retail electronics parts. I also mentioned that I had plenty of spare hardware sitting around and would like to try putting together some of their designs and wasn't worried about any kind of quality assurance. I sent the message twice and never got any reply.
I was disappointed obviously.I can see how they might be wary of liability issues if they were dealing with people in the States, although that seems like a cop-out since there are thousands of DIY circuit sites on the web already, but I explained that I'm not even in the US. Liability and environmental laws are almost completely unenforcable in Taiwan which is no doubt the same reason electronics parts are so cheap.
Anyway, in the unlikely even that anybody in the Google power supply section reads this thread --hook us up with your plans. It sounded like a really good idea. PSU designs tend to be way conservative. I'd especially like a recipe that could be modded into something like a single PSU that could do like four SLot1 PIII boards at a time.It's not so much the price, since I can get working used PSUs for three bucks a pop at plenty of places around here, but more about the overall aesthetics of a big stack and how to fit them in DIY racks.
I've made this comment before so I'll just summarize the key points.
When you get right down to it, the real drug war is, as William Burroughs pointed out, between those who seek euphoria through drugs and those who seek euphoria by controlling other people's access to drugs. It gets painted as a health issue, but really this is not what drives the intensity of the battle.
The health issuses are almost exclusively about dosage control and dosage methods and don't even get into the issue of whether a person has a right to control their own perception of euphoria. Once you take those dosage issues out of the black market drug game, you radically refocus the argument onto the real issues of control and euphoria.
You can confirm this mentally by asking yourself what are the symptoms that the drug wars are said to be working to prevent? Fatal IV overdose is the classic example. Disease transmission such as AIDS is another one that isn't really about the drug, be it heroin, cocaine or meth, but the delivery method. Then there are the problems caused by excessive doasage. In many cases the psychotic episodes some drug users experience in which people go temporarily insane and harm themselves or others in a drunk-like rage are due to non-fatal overdoses that would be prevented by a controlled dosage device. These classic icons of the drug wars are all, in fact, dosage issues.
Once you exclude dosage issues, the only problems you can associate with drugs are related to the fact that they are illegal. Indeed, these two issues are intimately related but the people who get their best high off of controlling other people enjoy separating these two issues.
If you had reliable dosage control and you reduced costs through decriminalization the real issue would emerge which is that there is simply a large segment of the population that craves control over other people's lives in much the same way a junkie craves heroin. Our society is infected with control addicts.
Wow, you guys must be right. Since I'm paranoid and rabid, I must be delirious as well and therefore my desires to actually be able to use the hardware I pay for is invalid. It's all clear now. Thanks for your help.
The security doesn't bug me at all compared to the issue of open drivers. If all the drivers for 802.11n products were as open as wired ethernet then it would be an almost maybe possibility but as we've seen with regular Wifi, there's no way in hell. Personally, I think pushing yet more closed and fucked up drivers is almost certainly one of the goals of the 802.11n standard.
It's a well known fact that UWB and other existing techniques can push wireless bandwitdth far past what 802.11n offers, but they're not "ready" for the consumer market. The game is to incrementally push the consumer market into a series of screwed up proprietary drivers to push out open standards and ensure that only "enthusiasts" use open source.
Thanks for your kind words. I'm hesitant to assume you were even addresing my comments, but it seems to be the case from the gist of your message.
I don't particularly object to your characterization of my argument, but I'd like to re-emphasize a few items to be sure I make the message as clear as possible.
The message I would like to convey is that our great debt for the technology we enjoy as geeks is not to market forces or even military funded rearch but to the Enlightenment thinkers who developed the mathematical foundations of modern science and that these guys would probably have spit on the floor if you described libertarianism to them.
Now, here's the problem. It's easy to get everybody to do a bobble head on this kind of grand rhetoric about all those great dead white guys, but what I think people fail to appreciate is that this is not just empty rhetoric; this is real here and now shit! I'm saying your DSL connection, your Cable modem, your WiFi connection to this web forum, the fiber connection to the backbone of the net from your ISP and the backbone itself is currently at this very moment in 2007 utterly and wholely dependent upon the mathematical concept of the Fourier transform that was developed by a guy who was what we would now call a socialist who hated any form of mythology be it monarchy or church desiged to enslave the masses and who did his research in hopes of freeing his fellow man through knowledge that would be shared freely. We owe this man a huge debt and yet he would not have wanted to be a billionaire or even a CEO.
So let's look more closely at just what a fourier transform actually is so we can see why it's so important and how it relates to your comment. To put it simply and in paractical terms as it is applied to orthagonal frequncy division multiplexing in telecommunictions, a fourier tranform is a way of taking a waveform that would look clean on a scope and scrambling it all up with all sorts of little wavelets that enable many channels of information to ride the same signal which is precisely why it is so essential to telecommunications. Okay, so this is going straight to your point. What was Fourier's work all about? It was about complexity. Scientists are fascinated by complexity, libertarians are obsessed by simplicity.
You phrase the question as --what is wrong with seeking first principles? But that's not quite what I'm saying my libertarian techie friends are guilty of. There's nothing wrong with seeking first principles and certainly this was a huge motivation for Enlightenment scientists like Fourier. What I find offensive is when someone concludes their search by saying --oh, here it is. I've found THE first principle and it is black and white and simple as hell: let the markets decide.
That is not seeking first principles. That is the opposite of seeking first principles. If you are satisfied with a simplistic answer then you are clearly not willing to be a part of the scientific heritage of people like Fourier who sought and harnessed the patterns of complexity they discovered in their brve search for first principles. That tedious work in details is the reality of seeking first principles and its rewards are vast and profound as the internet connections we are using so clearly demonstrate.
Seeking first principles is in no way a synonym for accepting simplistic fairy tale versions of how the world works. These tasks can both be characterize as seeking first principles but nonethless, they are nearly opposites.
Well, if you were reading the post carefully you would have noticed the phrase "French mathematician" and you would have seen a reference to the entire name spelled out as Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier and so you would have not asked this question.
But I welcome this clarification because it allows me an opportunity to elaborate on why I specifically chose the example of Joseph Fourier. From the modem, to the fiber optic line, every modern communication system relies upon the mathematical concept of the Fourier transform in order to pull off a trick called orthagonal frequency division multiplexing. What this mathematical trick does is to allow a single signal to carry far more information than would otherwise be possible. If there is a real father of modern telecommunication, it is not DARPA or even Al Gore: the man who laid the mathematical foundations for the telecommunications hardware that we use to this day is Joseph Fourier.
Now, I have seen several efforts in this thread to try to suggest that my connection of Fourier to communist or socialist ideology is inappropriate. Those efforts have involved the associations between himself and Napolean in his later life after he had already become a distinguished member of the academy. According to Fourier's own writings, these later associations were distasteful to him and done out of the expedience of an aging man not wanting to martry himself.
But that changes nothing about his early motivations for studying mathematics where, as I have quoted above already, he specifically stated that his goal in studying the natural laws through mathematics were to knock down the oppressive social systems that empowered the church and monarchy. As a youth he made a great deal of specifically declining a choice opportunity to join the priesthood which at that time was essentially the equivalent of today's corporate gig.
This is the thinking of the minds that created the technology geeks claim to love. This is the mind that is seeking for equality and putting the interests of mankind above petty interests in fucking everybody else over to make a buck. That's where the technology comes from. This is a historical fact and people who espouse simplistic libertarian ideologies are entirely divorced from this great history. Libertarians may be nerds, but they sure as hell are not scientists or even historians for that matter.
Okay, I see where we're differing here. I'd say we're both right. It's like this. The Eniac was still binary at the hardware level in the sense that it relied on switches. This is my point. A mechanical switch has an on and off state and thus binary is the language of machines. You're saying that the logic of the machine worked on a decimal level. This is also true. What makes it confusing is that the binary relays and the digital ring counters were both technically hardware. However, this was what I would call a conversion from binary that was implemented at the hardware layer. The fundamental function of the machine was still based on switches that could only be on or off and that is binary.
Sounds like you're grasping a bit here. I mean come on, one Burroughs machine and several IBM machines? I'll look into your references on Univac and Eniac because that does surprise me. Are you sure there wasn't a conversion going on there. It's easy to convert from binary to decimal but you're saying the machine code was decimal? I'll take a look on my own and I'd be happy to check out any links you have but I will be surprised to find they were using a decimal machine code.
Anyway, I'm going back quite a bit further than that for my reference.
I was thinking of the lace machines that were the cornerstone of various European economies in the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century card based voting tabulation machines.
A quick trip to "binary" at Wikipedia pulls up the following tidbit that seems to weigh in favor of my argument.
"In 1937, Claude Shannon produced his master's thesis at MIT that implemented Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic using electronic relays and switches for the first time in history. Entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, Shannon's thesis essentially founded practical digital circuit design.
In November of 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, completed a relay-based computer he dubbed the "Model K" (for "Kitchen", where he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Bell Labs thus authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Computer, completed January 8, 1940, was able to calculate complex numbers. In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on September 11, 1940, Stibitz was able to send the Complex Number Calculator remote commands over telephone lines by a teletype. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line. Some participants of the conference who witnessed the demonstration were John Von Neumann, John Mauchly, and Norbert Wiener, who wrote about it in his memoirs."
I'd further point out that the prominence of octal and hexidecimal notation in computing is due to the ease of conversion from binary.
Again, I'm happy to learn more about Eniac and Univac. I do glassblowing as a hobby and so anything that involves tubes is interesting to me.
These are the words of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier in 1793 as he joined his local Revolutionary Committee:
"As the natural ideas of equality developed it was possible to conceive the sublime hope of establishing among us a free government exempt from kings and priests, and to free from this double yoke the long-usurped soil of Europe. I readily became enamoured of this cause, in my opinion the greatest and most beautiful which any nation has ever undertaken."
Slashdot Mirror
Which part is the disguise?
The "lack of skills" argument has always been bullshit. If anything, the majority of people are overqualified. Academic inflation is a massive problem. For every full-time Community College position there are literally hundreds, and in many areas thousands or even tens of thousands of applicants waiting in line. A Master's Degree is now about as common as a BA was in the sixties. Meanwhile access to knowledge has exploded even for those who don't pursue degree programs. Just watching 3D simulations on YouTube, you can learn more about biotechnology in a few days than most college students learned from an undergraduate degree a few decades ago. There is skill to go around.
The lack of education argument is nothing but a smoke screen just as it always has been. It's just way of shifting the blame for poor employment prospects away from major corporations and the government policies they've landed in place through the aid of their Republicrat benefactors and onto the middle class.
If you go back and watch Milton Friedman's series called "Free to Choose" you can see some choice examples of where this lie cum mantra originates. In episode three you'll see none other than a young Donald Rumsfeld talking about the new service based economy in which the emerging software industry is going to employ fifty percent of the population and he'll tell you how magically only the US will be able to participate in this market because only Americans can comprehend something so technically advanced as this newfangled software thing. Really an amazing performance. The shocking thing is that such a clearly moronic figure eventually made his way so far up the ladder of power.
But of course the catch to this magical trickle down service economy voodoo was that we're going to need everybody to get re-educated to participate. If you can't do Powerpoint and Visio, how can you expect to reap the rewards of this magic new ago. And hence the argument persists to this day that all the laid off GM workers will get new jobs when they learn how to use Excel and do Word macros etc. Yeah fucking right.
The problem with the economy is not a lack of education, it is a lack of leadership and a lack of responsibility on the part of the electorate that has bought into the greedy lies that will never benefit the majority of population.
Yep, the former darling of Slashdot submissions that disappeared off the map last year. I was a real cheerleader for their business plan so I was disappointed when they gave up. My two cents on what happened was that they decided amorphous silicon AKA thin film was going to put them out of business. Those suspicions are based partly on watching all the action around Swiss company Oerlikon. They're a turn-key provider of thin film production plants and they're making a lot of deals in Taiwan and China in the last few years. Their local sales rep is going around saying they can build you a factory that produces product at 60cents a watt in the next twenty four months.
That in sending radioactive products into the marketplace you could assume consumers would then take responsibility to make sure the products were disposed of properly.
That part was what really disgusted me when I saw that story yesterday. If the serious plastic waste problems in the oceans don't provide ample evidence that you can't control where products end up then there are hundreds of other examples including groundwater contamination in countries across the globe from selenium and other fun stuff that are essential in consumer electronics yet toxic when dispersed into the environment at the end of their useful lives which tend to be numbered in months rather than years with defective by design components like capacitors that have shelf lives like groceries.
I googled it a bit and I read that the half life in these things was like twelve hundred years. Maybe I was missing the dot in there and it was only twelve years but even so that's far longer than the life of a consumer electronics device.
Well, I don't know what a nice guy like me is doing in a thread like this-- slow news day I suppose. Anyhow I'll go ahead and pitch in a few cents.
You won't find anything directly exported from Taiwan intentionally labeled as "Made in China". No way. Not by a long shot. The "Made in Taiwan" label is a big deal here. There are ads on TV all the time showing examples of Europeans and Americans using low quality flimsy products like umbrellas that fall apart and then focusing in on the label that says "Made in Taiwan" with the idea that these commercials are meant to shame local manufacturers into improving their quality standards to raise the brand value of the "Made in Taiwan" label. It works. People get pissed when they buy local stuff that sucks and shopkeepers catch hell over it if it says "Made in Taiwan". Generally stuff made in Taiwan isn't as cheap as mainland stuff. For mainland stuff it's expected to be low quality just as "Made in Japan" is assumed, sometimes dubiously, to mean quality. Sometimes in certain product categories nobody cares as long as it more or less works and the price is right.
There are some product categories where Taiwan is still weak though.Capacitors is one. There are great electronics shops here and you can get Taiwanese caps for a few cents or Japanese ones for about five times as much.Local solder is also like a third the cost of imports even from China. Lots of electronics stuff from Taiwan is just dirt cheap but good luck reading the freakin' manuals. Gotta love a Chinese spec sheet. Even standard units like ohms get translated into characters that mean something totally unrelated but sound like oh mu. Everybody can guess that one right?
Anyway, back to the thread here. You're right that China Airlines is a Taiwanese carrier and both sides have their own China Telecom and China Rail, China post and other similarly named industry players, but that does not extend to labeling Taiwanese goods with a tag that says "Made in China". That would not happen. Thats not to say that there aren't Taiwanese operated and owned factories in mainland, but if a product is made in Taiwan and exported from Taiwan you can be certain the tag will say "Made in Taiwan" and not "Made in China".
I'm just reporting the facts of what I turned up in a quick background search using the terms that were in the article. It looks pretty relevant to me. The Wikipedia article on UHMWPE says very clearly, and I'll quote it for you again one more time.
"(UHMWPE has)much poorer heat resistance than other high-strength fibers."
I was comparing two facts. A) the temperature that was stated for when UHMWPE gets brittle to B) the temperature that is recorded outside the space station when it is dark. They happen to match.
You're the one making assumptions. I'm bringing in some additional facts that weren't in the article.
I get the following:
The tether was made of Dyneema.
Wikipedia says this is a synonym for ultra high molecular weight polyethylene
Regarding the weaknesses of UHMWPE, thermal properties are highlighted and consist of the following:
The weak bonding between olefin molecules allows local thermal excitations to disrupt the crystalline order of a given chain piece-by-piece, giving it much poorer heat resistance than other high-strength fibers. Its melting point is around 144 to 152 degrees Celsius, and according to DSM, it is not advisable to use UHMWPE fibers at temperatures exceeding 80 to 100C for long periods of time. It becomes brittle at temperatures below -150C.
Googling for the temperature outside of the space station turns up a Yahoo answers page.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061215121108AASpIMx&show=7
Which says the answer is -250 F. Convert to Celsius and we get -156.7C
Maybe this helps to explain what might have happened.
Discode was a project to do an "open source" bio hardware device that sounds very similar to this. The project was going on under the guidance of a UCSD professor and got a lot of write up about three years ago but it seemed to slowly disappear over the years.
Yeah, what's the deal? Slashdot pointing to a ZDNet attempt at a Linux story. WTF?
Anything about Linux or Open Source "versus the competition" or "needs to do X to please company Y or else. . . " is completely irrelevant as far as I can tell. People can do what they want with open source and no open source developer is under any compulsion to do it for them. Where's the story in that? There is none which is why ZDNet implodes when it tries to cover open source.
It's an editorial problem for them. They have some fairly qualified writing staff but the whole editorial bent doesn't really gibe with open source. They're always trying to frame their stories as a cliff hanger of intense quarter to quarter cut-throat competition --don't touch that dial! But that TV commercial writing style doesn't translate to open source projects particularly well.
Depends on your application.
In space constrained situations I suppose you can be concerned about maximum efficiency and not care about cost. But for the majority of the market cost is the foremost concern. This is why the dollar-per-watt is such a big deal.
Congratuations to all those who produce higher efficiency products, but that's not what's going to win over the majority of the market. To win over people who don't give a rats ass about the environment you need to focus on costs rather than efficiency.
Let's put it this way, a typical 200sq ft suburban home has enough roof area that even at 7% efficiency you would have more than enough space to fullfill that households electricity needs and perhaps enough left over for the marjority of their transportation as well. The space isn't a problem. The problem is the cost. If the cost could be reduced significantly below that of grid electricity over the product lifetime then it would most definitely happen.
Moreover, if it was cheap enough, you could also put panels on the fencing around the yard. In many American homes that would double the surface area. Also you can use curved tiles on the roof again significantly enlarging the surface area. Surface area is so low cost for most applications so what's the significance of efficiency?
But this is all academic because the key point is that the original target market isn't the residential market anyway. The first target market is membrane roofed industrial buildings. This is already going on big time in Germany and Spain.
Here in Taiwan, we just had the annual solar trade show which is becoming a really big deal on the silicon island. Solar has become a huge because it dovetails right in with other semi industry players that get put together in industrial parks.
So this year there was a big dollar-per-watt announcement from Oerlikon. If you don't know who they are, they're a Swiss provider of turn-key thin film or amorphous silicon solar panel factories. They've got several partners in Taiwan already including, most recently, some of the large-scale optical media manufacturers who already use similar techniques and equipment and have some cash to invest.
The local Oerlikon rep was saying that producers will be at sixty cents per watt within forty eight months and that this will mean actual product at the dollar a watt level. Hey, I'm just passing along what the sales rep said. Obviously he's got a reason to overstate his case, but that's what he claimed was coming down the piple.
I think it's also worth noting that a former Slashdot sweetheart that went by the name of Spheral Solar has basically dropped off the map because they realized that amorphous silicon was going to take over.
Oerlikon bought up Excimer laser of the UK last year. One of the repeated steps in doing thin film solar is laser etching.
I'm not too sure about the tech being referred to in this piece, but dollar-a-watt PV, which is what the UN and other agencies have said is the tilting point where solar is cheaper than coal or natural gas, is already being spoken of at industry trade shows and shouldn't be seen as a wildly implausible announcement.
It's interesting how we have to be held captive to the whims of big capital players when such proven and ideal technologies are already in existence. You notice that SEGS was one of the links here. Doesn't the SEGS story seem a little strange? Doesn't it seem like part of the story is being left out?
If it worked so well and is still producing to this day with a parabolic revenue curve then why did they stop at 350MW peak? The answer is plain as day. The oil crisis ended. Back in the seventies when the first oil crisis hit, private investors decided to hop on the solar thermal gravy train. When the oil crisis turned out to be a big global confidence trick and the price collapsed, that was the end of the money for SEGS. Sure, you can argue that solar thermal competes with coal and natural gas rather than oil, but the truth is that energy markets aren't rational like that. Not then and not now either. The collapse of the oil in the eighties price killed off expansion funding for SEGS.
It's not that the technology failed or proved unworkable, the funding dried up because of the deflation of the seventies energy bubble.
This is a good example of how so-called free markets and energy policies don't match. Our market structures are predicated on the interests of corporate shareholders which is fine for some things, but that's no way to set a coherent long-term policy on vital core utilities. Corporations plan quarter by quarter not decade by decade. It's a simple fact of corporate accounting that the focus is three months at a time. Well that may be fine for Mattell and Pepsi, but energy policy is about a fundamental resource that every single citizen of the country is guaranteed to need for the rest of their lives and not just the latest marketing trend.
Think about the things that we do agree to pay for with taxes and compare them. Let's take education for instance. Does every member of the community benefit from the public school system? How about adults who have no kids? Why should they have to pay for public education? And yet those same people sure as hell do need electricity, don't they.
How about public funding for highways? Does it really make sense that we publicly fund the highway systems with tax dollars which clearly benefits both the auto and petroleum industries but we find it impossible to create a clean energy system using tax financing? Why is that?
Let's not even mention direct tax dollar funding for oil companies.
If we don't direct public money towards this direction, I can predict the future. The oil thing blows away. All the paranoid bullshit about peak oil turns out to be just that, just as it was in the seventies. Oil drops and all the other energy markets do the same for no logical reason and th funding for solar thermal dries up and blows away for twenty years before we get back on this fucked up cycle. Let's put an end to this ridiculous game by funding energy policy with public monies to build out a nationwide solar thermal energy supply.
If we just got over this paranoid obsession with the metaphor of the marketplace. Cpitalism is an inherently paranoid system because your starting premise is that everybody is competing and there is no altruism. Or, as Heinlen put it --no free lunch.
But this is truly paranoid. To demonstrate that, we can look to the scientific study of the global food supply. I don't mean just the human food supply but the entire planet's food supply. Where goes the nutrition of the world come from on a global ecological scale? Is it big fish eats little fish? No, that's a tiny little piece of the global food chain. The truth is it almost all comes from plants. Plants are the source of the vast majority of life sustaining nutrition. Do the little Bambi deer and the little rabbits have to pay to eat the grass? No.
But how can it be? How can the plants give of themselves freely? Are the plants stupid Communists? Don't they know they're playing the sucker by giving it all away? Or is it that they're being subsidized by some big government operation like, oh say the Sun perhaps. That fuckin' Sun is the biggest Commie of them all. Good Capitalists get up every morning and spit right at it, yeah?
See, there is such a thing as a free lunch and it's all around us. Not just people but even animal and plant communities can thrive without competition. In fact, the reason we aren't thriving just might be BECAUSE of the stupid wasteful competition.
I won't belabor the point with too many examples, but let's stick to a topic closer to home for Slashdot that Heinlein could dig --robots. Where are the robots? What's holding back robotics technology in the United States? The answer is there's no need for it. Why use robots when you could just lower the workers wages by either hiring illegals, immigrants on shady visa programs or simply outsourcing. That's what you get from capitalism. Rather than a utopian future where the robots do all the work you get a society split into masses of poor and a tiny elite going --hey fuck all you poor people.
Utopia is doable, it's all around us. We're in Utopia already, the sun, the tides, the earth, the plants the animals --it's all beautiful and free. We just need to get it together enough to realize that our societies can reflect this instead of the paranoid dystopia that is capitalism.
This is what I've hear anyway. I hear that the cheapest and easiest way to get massive amounts of electromagenetic noise is a cheap dimmer switch on an AC circuit such as a lamp. I'm not quite sure why that is, but I've read that this is the kind of thing that really causes headaches for people trying to do remote monitoring as opposed to some fancy James Bond signal jammer doohickie. I'm not sure if the same thing applies to cheap carbon potentiometers on a DC circuit. I'm sure somebody here knows and perhaps even has some math to back it up.
Mmkay Smithers. Yes, we all appreciate the enormous contributions of the wonderful Mr. Burns. Sheesh.
But I can go back old school as far as you can. I happen to have done extensive research on the economic implications of punch card based lace machines in the eighteenth century. You wanna get old-school bitch?
The point is, although modern computational techniques clearly can trace their lineage to the eighteenth century, the eighteenth century is not when computers took over the world and neither is the nineteen fifties or the sixties or the seventies or even the early eighties. All those eras had elements of computing but none of them was defined by computing. It's in the nineties that computers took over the world and that is the time of the post coin-op 8-bit computer games slowly turning into home consoles and PCs that coincides with Gen-X, not the boomers.
And you can love Big Bear Bill all you want, the dude is a bankah gangstah. Maybe he's ya big poppa, but that's doesn't mean he's contributed shit to computing.
Amen to that. To me it has always been simple. It's about games.
If you grew up loving video games, you're part of the computer generation. If you grew up before the rise of coin operated video arcade games, like my boomer parents, then you're sort of perpetually outside of it.
This is an clear way to see how computing works in society because it's not age based. As it happens, historically this aligns pretty well with the population segment referred to as Gen-X. But it's not exclusive of those boomers who might have been on the forefront. Of course from their peers perspectives, these people would have been seen as nerdish freaks. And this is why they call Gen-X people nerds even though it's actually mainstream to be a computer junky in that age segment.
And there's a really good reason why this divide exists. If you grew up thinking computers meant games and fun and even a hint of danger and taboo then you're naturally attracted to them just like toys. This didn't really happen for most boomers. That's not to say there isn't a significant minority, but not a huge percentage of the population. My parents think it's sick to spend all day on the PC and yet for people in my own generation and younger this is the place to be.
And using Bill Gates as an example of anything in tech is lame. The guy is a shake down artist. Who cares what inspired him to do anything. Why pay attention to such a money grubbing loser.
Yeah, I wrote to them on that because there was that PDF mentioned in that thread which said they were going to open up their spec.
I wrote to the address and asked for more info on the project and explained how I had built various power supplies for DIY projects and lived in Taiwan so I had great access to a wide range of cheap retail electronics parts. I also mentioned that I had plenty of spare hardware sitting around and would like to try putting together some of their designs and wasn't worried about any kind of quality assurance. I sent the message twice and never got any reply.
I was disappointed obviously.I can see how they might be wary of liability issues if they were dealing with people in the States, although that seems like a cop-out since there are thousands of DIY circuit sites on the web already, but I explained that I'm not even in the US. Liability and environmental laws are almost completely unenforcable in Taiwan which is no doubt the same reason electronics parts are so cheap.
Anyway, in the unlikely even that anybody in the Google power supply section reads this thread --hook us up with your plans. It sounded like a really good idea. PSU designs tend to be way conservative. I'd especially like a recipe that could be modded into something like a single PSU that could do like four SLot1 PIII boards at a time.It's not so much the price, since I can get working used PSUs for three bucks a pop at plenty of places around here, but more about the overall aesthetics of a big stack and how to fit them in DIY racks.
I've made this comment before so I'll just summarize the key points.
When you get right down to it, the real drug war is, as William Burroughs pointed out, between those who seek euphoria through drugs and those who seek euphoria by controlling other people's access to drugs. It gets painted as a health issue, but really this is not what drives the intensity of the battle.
The health issuses are almost exclusively about dosage control and dosage methods and don't even get into the issue of whether a person has a right to control their own perception of euphoria. Once you take those dosage issues out of the black market drug game, you radically refocus the argument onto the real issues of control and euphoria.
You can confirm this mentally by asking yourself what are the symptoms that the drug wars are said to be working to prevent? Fatal IV overdose is the classic example. Disease transmission such as AIDS is another one that isn't really about the drug, be it heroin, cocaine or meth, but the delivery method. Then there are the problems caused by excessive doasage. In many cases the psychotic episodes some drug users experience in which people go temporarily insane and harm themselves or others in a drunk-like rage are due to non-fatal overdoses that would be prevented by a controlled dosage device. These classic icons of the drug wars are all, in fact, dosage issues.
Once you exclude dosage issues, the only problems you can associate with drugs are related to the fact that they are illegal. Indeed, these two issues are intimately related but the people who get their best high off of controlling other people enjoy separating these two issues.
If you had reliable dosage control and you reduced costs through decriminalization the real issue would emerge which is that there is simply a large segment of the population that craves control over other people's lives in much the same way a junkie craves heroin. Our society is infected with control addicts.
Wow, you guys must be right. Since I'm paranoid and rabid, I must be delirious as well and therefore my desires to actually be able to use the hardware I pay for is invalid. It's all clear now. Thanks for your help.
The security doesn't bug me at all compared to the issue of open drivers. If all the drivers for 802.11n products were as open as wired ethernet then it would be an almost maybe possibility but as we've seen with regular Wifi, there's no way in hell. Personally, I think pushing yet more closed and fucked up drivers is almost certainly one of the goals of the 802.11n standard.
It's a well known fact that UWB and other existing techniques can push wireless bandwitdth far past what 802.11n offers, but they're not "ready" for the consumer market. The game is to incrementally push the consumer market into a series of screwed up proprietary drivers to push out open standards and ensure that only "enthusiasts" use open source.
Thanks for your kind words. I'm hesitant to assume you were even addresing my comments, but it seems to be the case from the gist of your message.
I don't particularly object to your characterization of my argument, but I'd like to re-emphasize a few items to be sure I make the message as clear as possible.
The message I would like to convey is that our great debt for the technology we enjoy as geeks is not to market forces or even military funded rearch but to the Enlightenment thinkers who developed the mathematical foundations of modern science and that these guys would probably have spit on the floor if you described libertarianism to them.
Now, here's the problem. It's easy to get everybody to do a bobble head on this kind of grand rhetoric about all those great dead white guys, but what I think people fail to appreciate is that this is not just empty rhetoric; this is real here and now shit! I'm saying your DSL connection, your Cable modem, your WiFi connection to this web forum, the fiber connection to the backbone of the net from your ISP and the backbone itself is currently at this very moment in 2007 utterly and wholely dependent upon the mathematical concept of the Fourier transform that was developed by a guy who was what we would now call a socialist who hated any form of mythology be it monarchy or church desiged to enslave the masses and who did his research in hopes of freeing his fellow man through knowledge that would be shared freely. We owe this man a huge debt and yet he would not have wanted to be a billionaire or even a CEO.
So let's look more closely at just what a fourier transform actually is so we can see why it's so important and how it relates to your comment. To put it simply and in paractical terms as it is applied to orthagonal frequncy division multiplexing in telecommunictions, a fourier tranform is a way of taking a waveform that would look clean on a scope and scrambling it all up with all sorts of little wavelets that enable many channels of information to ride the same signal which is precisely why it is so essential to telecommunications. Okay, so this is going straight to your point. What was Fourier's work all about? It was about complexity. Scientists are fascinated by complexity, libertarians are obsessed by simplicity.
You phrase the question as --what is wrong with seeking first principles? But that's not quite what I'm saying my libertarian techie friends are guilty of. There's nothing wrong with seeking first principles and certainly this was a huge motivation for Enlightenment scientists like Fourier. What I find offensive is when someone concludes their search by saying --oh, here it is. I've found THE first principle and it is black and white and simple as hell: let the markets decide.
That is not seeking first principles. That is the opposite of seeking first principles. If you are satisfied with a simplistic answer then you are clearly not willing to be a part of the scientific heritage of people like Fourier who sought and harnessed the patterns of complexity they discovered in their brve search for first principles. That tedious work in details is the reality of seeking first principles and its rewards are vast and profound as the internet connections we are using so clearly demonstrate.
Seeking first principles is in no way a synonym for accepting simplistic fairy tale versions of how the world works. These tasks can both be characterize as seeking first principles but nonethless, they are nearly opposites.
Well, if you were reading the post carefully you would have noticed the phrase "French mathematician" and you would have seen a reference to the entire name spelled out as Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier and so you would have not asked this question.
But I welcome this clarification because it allows me an opportunity to elaborate on why I specifically chose the example of Joseph Fourier. From the modem, to the fiber optic line, every modern communication system relies upon the mathematical concept of the Fourier transform in order to pull off a trick called orthagonal frequency division multiplexing. What this mathematical trick does is to allow a single signal to carry far more information than would otherwise be possible. If there is a real father of modern telecommunication, it is not DARPA or even Al Gore: the man who laid the mathematical foundations for the telecommunications hardware that we use to this day is Joseph Fourier.
Now, I have seen several efforts in this thread to try to suggest that my connection of Fourier to communist or socialist ideology is inappropriate. Those efforts have involved the associations between himself and Napolean in his later life after he had already become a distinguished member of the academy. According to Fourier's own writings, these later associations were distasteful to him and done out of the expedience of an aging man not wanting to martry himself.
But that changes nothing about his early motivations for studying mathematics where, as I have quoted above already, he specifically stated that his goal in studying the natural laws through mathematics were to knock down the oppressive social systems that empowered the church and monarchy. As a youth he made a great deal of specifically declining a choice opportunity to join the priesthood which at that time was essentially the equivalent of today's corporate gig.
This is the thinking of the minds that created the technology geeks claim to love. This is the mind that is seeking for equality and putting the interests of mankind above petty interests in fucking everybody else over to make a buck. That's where the technology comes from. This is a historical fact and people who espouse simplistic libertarian ideologies are entirely divorced from this great history. Libertarians may be nerds, but they sure as hell are not scientists or even historians for that matter.
Okay, I see where we're differing here. I'd say we're both right. It's like this. The Eniac was still binary at the hardware level in the sense that it relied on switches. This is my point. A mechanical switch has an on and off state and thus binary is the language of machines. You're saying that the logic of the machine worked on a decimal level. This is also true. What makes it confusing is that the binary relays and the digital ring counters were both technically hardware. However, this was what I would call a conversion from binary that was implemented at the hardware layer. The fundamental function of the machine was still based on switches that could only be on or off and that is binary.
Agreed?
Sounds like you're grasping a bit here. I mean come on, one Burroughs machine and several IBM machines? I'll look into your references on Univac and Eniac because that does surprise me. Are you sure there wasn't a conversion going on there. It's easy to convert from binary to decimal but you're saying the machine code was decimal? I'll take a look on my own and I'd be happy to check out any links you have but I will be surprised to find they were using a decimal machine code.
Anyway, I'm going back quite a bit further than that for my reference.
I was thinking of the lace machines that were the cornerstone of various European economies in the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century card based voting tabulation machines.
A quick trip to "binary" at Wikipedia pulls up the following tidbit that seems to weigh in favor of my argument.
"In 1937, Claude Shannon produced his master's thesis at MIT that implemented Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic using electronic relays and switches for the first time in history. Entitled A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, Shannon's thesis essentially founded practical digital circuit design.
In November of 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, completed a relay-based computer he dubbed the "Model K" (for "Kitchen", where he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Bell Labs thus authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Computer, completed January 8, 1940, was able to calculate complex numbers. In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on September 11, 1940, Stibitz was able to send the Complex Number Calculator remote commands over telephone lines by a teletype. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line. Some participants of the conference who witnessed the demonstration were John Von Neumann, John Mauchly, and Norbert Wiener, who wrote about it in his memoirs."
I'd further point out that the prominence of octal and hexidecimal notation in computing is due to the ease of conversion from binary.
Again, I'm happy to learn more about Eniac and Univac. I do glassblowing as a hobby and so anything that involves tubes is interesting to me.
These are the words of Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier in 1793 as he joined his local Revolutionary Committee:
e s/Fourier.html
"As the natural ideas of equality developed it was possible to conceive the sublime hope of establishing among us a free government exempt from kings and priests, and to free from this double yoke the long-usurped soil of Europe. I readily became enamoured of this cause, in my opinion the greatest and most beautiful which any nation has ever undertaken."
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographi