All the significant scientific research in space has been done by unmanned probes for a long time.
About the only really significant thing the manned space program has done in aid of science was to repair the Hubble.
We're putting humans into space so that they can build the ISS so that we can put humans into space. Into low earth orbit. The same place John Glenn went in 1962. It was thrlling then. Well, OK, the "Space Station 3D" movie is thrilling to watch now... but the scientific aspects of the ISS seem to me to be about 98% grandstanding and PR.
What's the point? Is it a welfare project on the part of the U. S. to keep Russian scientists from looking for work from nations we would just as soon not have Russian scientists working for?
(That was supposed to be "Digital and MS-DOS use CR-LF, UNIX uses LF, and Apple, bless it's heart, uses CR." I shouldn't have angle brackets around them....)
Oh, I almost forgot: the Sony 3.5" drive (swift move)... but with diskette formatting that was completely different from PCs (bonehead move).
Unfortunately, Apple has had, sadly, a track record of adopting "standards" that other PC vendors didn't adopt.
It's all very well that NuBus was a "standard," but the only major companies that adopted it were Apple, TI, NeXT... and they all adopted slight different implementations and very different form factors. The TI boards were about 9x9 inches if I recall correctly, and certainly weren't interoperable with Apple's.
Even little details: Digital and MS-DOS use as the line break, UNIX uses , and Apple, bless its heart, uses .
FireWire hasn't been a total dud, but it certainly wasn't the mainstream peripheral bus Apple hoped for. Outside of the Apple world it's a video interconnect standard, not much more. One small reason why Apple hardware costs a little bit more is that, effectively, Apple is forced to implement both FireWire and USB 2.0...
SCSI was a smart move on Apple's part, but some of the value was compromised by the fact that up until, oh, 1993 or thereabouts, you couldn't just plug any old SCSI drive into a Mac; it needed a model-specific driver, and those drivers involved a lot of black magic and more or less undocumented information. The SCSI standard says nothing about the physical connector, but Apple managed to pick a different one from Adaptec, the dominant PC vendor, and that didn't help either. Worse yet, they picked one that didn't allow one ground wire per signal wire... and was, in fact, the same connector as the standard 25-pin RS-232 connector.
About the only good thing you can say is that whether by chance or design, plugging a printer into the Mac SCSI port didn't fry either of them. I know that because I was doing support for a research institute and when the MacPlus first came out, just about all of the first half-dozen people to buy one tried to plug a printer into the SCSI port.
If a product is ready for the world, it absolutely should be ready for a live demo. It shouldn't be just barely ready to work, under perfect conditions, minutes after careful testing by technicians.
In fact, they should have called up a volunteer from the audience... preferably a member of the press so you'd know it wasn't a confederate... to do the talking.
We realize things can go wrong under the best of circumstances. But it is still a completely valid test of the company's confidence in their product. In the real world, conditions will be far worse, there will be no technicians around, the software will be running in an environment that's had three security patches and two other major products installed on top of it, and so forth.
In the days of live TV there was a program, it might have been Ed Sullivan, in which they regularly ran commercials for Timex watches, which, they said, "takes a licking and keeps on ticking," in which they put a Timex through various torture tests. It didn't always survive: the one I remember was the one where they buckled the watch onto the blade of an outboard motor's propellor and ran the motor in a tank of water, onstage, live. When they finished, at first they couldn't find the watch: the strap had broken. The propellor had flung the watch into a corner of the tank. And it wasn't ticking. But mostly, the Timex demos worked.
On the Steve Allen show, they would regularly demonstrate Polaroid cameras. This was in the days before the cameras were motorized and the processing operation was tricky: you had to pull a long strip of paper-film sandwich firmly against fairly stiff resistance, wait ninety seconds, open the camera back, get a fingernail into a slit, and peel the perforated picture base away from the backing. Occasionally they had problems. As with the Timex demos, you got a completely convincing picture of the product's reliability and usability, and the company's confidence in their products.
In Jack London's "The Sea-Wolf," a character asks "Do you know Dr. Jordan's final test of truth?" and answers: "Can we make it work? Can we trust our lives to it? is the test."
I don't say Microsoft should wait to ship until they are ready to trust their lives to Vista voice recognition, but they should darn well be prepared to demonstrate it, live, in public.
They talk about some specific thing they personally want to do.
BIll Gates didn't say "I want to make innovative software," he said he wanted a computer on every desk and Microsoft software in that computer.
Edwin Land didn't say "I want to develop innovative imaging-related products for the consumer and technical markets," he said "Marketing is what you do when your product is no good" and "The bottom line is in heaven."
The pictures are genuinely interesting, but I seriously wonder whether the spam input plays any important role in their appearance. I'll bet he could just as easily have used Wall Street Journal editorials, or transcriptions of chess games, or digitized music waveforms, or, quite possibly, random numbers.
It's rather like the phony "participative" art... like the staircase they have, or used to have, at the Boston Museum of Science, where descending the steps interrupts light beams and creates wind-chime-like music. You sense a connection between your actions and the music, and for about fifteen seconds it's cool, but then you gradually realize that you aren't really controlling the music or pouring anything meaningful of your own into the artwork.
For that matter, it's like a wind chime. The aural experience is shaped far more by the designer of the chime than by the wind.
Or... for one more analogy... is this really different from the Andy O'Meara's G-Force visualization plugin for MP3 players... or the 1930's "color organs?"
The annoying part is that the most novel aspect is the claimed connection with spam. Because of the novelty of using spam as the semi-random seeding function, I believe he's probably managed to get much more notice of his art than if he had used something less novel.
Virtually every time... say, three times out of the last four... I'll get thrown into a loop in which I scan an item, it says "Please place item in bag," I place it in the bag, it says "Unexpected item in bagging area! Please remove item," I remove it, it says "Please place item in bag," lather, rinse, repeat.
I have never been able to figure out how to deal with this or what I'm supposed to do... other than call for help. If anyone knows the cause and cure, please let me know. Try not to insult me any more than absolutely necessary in the process.
(The fourth time didn't work either. I was checking out half-a-dozen nutrition bars of different flavors. One of them wouldn't scan. It didn't offer me any sensible options, like keying in the UPC by hand. Eventually... after my wife, initially convinced I was being clumsy or stupid or both, satisfied herself that it wouldn't scan for her either... we settled for purchasing the five, and dropping the unscannable bar onto a random nearby surface).
Now, let me see... when was the last Singularity? Was it Y2K? Or was it perhaps the Jupiter Effect (when all the planets lined up and the gravitational effect tipped the earth out of its axis?) Or am I confusing both of them with the beginning of the Aquarian Age? Or maybe I'm thinking of the Harmonic Convergence of August 17, 1987?
I'm way too young to remember the Millerites and the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844, when Jesus failed to reappear, but I've been blessed to live through a veritable multiplicity of singularities.
Oooh, singularity! I like that word. So much kewler than, say, "Armageddon." It sounds so technical, so scientific, so free from ranting religiosity....
Shannon's analog Hex-playing computer
on
The Birth of PC Gaming
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I vote for Claude Shannon and E. F. Moore's 1953 analog Hex-playing computer.
Unlike tic-tac-toe, which is so trivial that a tic-tac-toe-playing computer is only entertaining because it is a computer doing it, the Shannon and Moore machine put up a genuine challenge to a human player, on a game that was not fully analyzed at the time, and that was interesting enough to human players to have been released as a commercial board game.
Of course, I have also wondered whether Link trainers, full-sized flight simulators of the 1930s, were ever "flown" simply for entertainment. Knowing human nature, I bet they were. In fact, speaking of bets, I'll bet pilots placed bets on the outcome of competitive Link-trainer contests. (That's entirely speculation on my part). The Link trainers probably qualify as analog computers, even though the computations were, I believe, performed by pneumatic bellows and other non-electronic devices.
This article says "A March 31, 2005 report in Malaysia's New Straits Times describes how a luxury car owner, Mr. Kumaran, was attacked by a gang of car thieves. His ordeal was apparently made worse because his S-Class Mercedes Benz was equipped with a biometric lock that prevented the car from being started without authentication by his finger or thumb print. At first the thieves had Mr. Kumaran start the car using his fingerprint. Then they took him, along with the car, to a chop-shop where they had hoped that the security system could be bypassed. When they decided that they couldn't override the security and that the fingerprint was required, they took Mr. Kumaran's left fingertip and dropped him off along the roadside where he was eventually able to find medical help."
I guess I'd prefer to have the bad guys to use a reasonable facsimile of my finger, retina, etc. than to have them use the real thing.
Can you imagine Tom Cruise on an impossible mission, faced with trying to enter a secure facility, shrugging his shoulders, and just "pull[ing] every card with a magnetic stripe from [his] wallet"--and discovering that one of them works?
Who would believe it?
True, in a 1998 movie called "Wrongfully Accused," Leslie Nielsen, faced with a computer screen asking for "User" and "Password" gets in by typing in "User" into the user field and "Password" into the password field... but you're supposed to think it's a joke.
If the chip is literally inside the tool, it seems to me that it would be hard to sense the chip.
If it's just glued very strongly onto the surface of the tool, then it could come off inside the patient.
And as for things like sponges... which proverbially (I'm saying "proverbially" because I have no idea whether it's true) are among the commonest things to leave inside, well, they're basically soft, aren't they, so you'd think it might not be that hard for the chip to come loose from the sponge.
I don't think I'd like to need to get cut open again just because nobody could tell for sure whether there was a tool or a just a chip. Of course they could X-ray, but if they could see everything clearly with the X-ray they wouldn't need the chip in the first place.
And unless there's an absolute guarantee that every instrument is chipped, well, the nurses need to know which instruments are chipped and which aren't, and keep an accurate count of the unchipped instruments...
Whole PC world: It doesn't work and nobody cares
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
His rant can be extended to the whole PC world in general. The infancy of the personal computer industry began in an atmosphere of "selling the dream" and never worrying that it couldn't be delivered... and has never grown up.
Computers with sixteen-slot S-100 busses that couldn't possibly drive sixteen cards.
The Apple ][ which had no fan. The first time I saw one, I said, "Wow! they must have brilliant thermal engineers." Then the owner explained that the reason why the cover was off was that if he put the cover on it would overheat and shut down. They didn't have brilliant thermal engineers: they didn't know that they needed thermal engineers.
I remember a guy who kept talking about how wonderful his North Star Advantage was. I asked him if it was reliable. He said, absolutely, he had had no problems with it whatsoever. So the next time I was in his office, I asked for a demo. "Oh, I can't," he said. "The power supply burned out last month." "But," I said, "I thought you said you hadn't had any problems with it." "I haven't had any problems with the computer," he said. "Just the power supply."
And that, in a nutshell, is the way the PC industry has been since its inception. CSS is just one of many examples. People tried to achieve consistent appearance with HTML, and couldn't because it wasn't designed for that and different browsers rendered it differently. So, they invented CSS, whose whole reason for existence is to allow Web pages to be written to a standard that will be rendered consistently by all browsers. And it doesn't really work, and nobody cares.
How about all those USB devices whose instructions tell you never to plug them into a hub?
How about all the CDs that burn and verify without error... and can then be read in about 95% of all CD readers?
How about all the Bluetooth thingies that won't interoperate properly with other Bluetooth thingies?
How about all the Windows releases, each of which is going to solve the security and usability problems of the previous releases?
It goes on and on... but it doesn't matter because nobody expects the stuff to work any more...
TFA says "For maintenance purposes and to improve performance and stability, the company is building much of Vista's networking technology from the ground up."
IS building? Not "HAS built?" Months before ship they are not just mopping up, they are still in the process of designing the network stack?
I realize this is reading a lot into the verb tense chosen by a reporter... and maybe it's reporter so clueless that he doesn't understand what's meant by "performing a build..." but that is still astonishing language to me.
Whoa! This article seems to be making up history out of whole cloth. I'm not even sure where to begin. It's just totally out to lunch.
C was not a reaction to LISP. I can't even imagine why anyone would say this. LISP's if/then/else was an influence on ALGOL and later languages.
C might have been a reaction to Pascal, which in turn was a reaction to ALGOL.
LISP was not "the archetypal high-level language." The very names CAR and CDR mean "contents of address register" and "contents of decrement register," direct references to hardware registers on the IBM 704. When the names of fundamental languages constructs are those of specific registers in a specific processor, that is not a "high-level language" at all. Later efforts to build machines with machine architectures optimized for implementation of LISP further show that LISP was not considered "a high-level language."
C was not specifically patterned on the PDP-11. Rather, both of them were based on common practice and understanding of what was in the air at the time. C was a direct successor to, and reasonably similar to BCPL, on Honeywell 635 and 645, the IBM 360, the TX-2, the CDC 6400, the Univac 1108, the PDP-9, the KDF 9 and the Atlas 2.
C makes an interesting comparison with Pascal; you can see that C is, in many ways, a computer language rather than a mathematical language. For example, the inclusion of specific constructs for increment and decrement (as opposed to just writing A:= A + 1) puts it closer, not to PDP-11 architecture, but to contemporary machine architecture in general.
Are they planning to strip-search the participants for hidden transmitters and receivers?
To test and debug the system, have they hired a couple of good magicians skilled at "mentalist" acts, with a promise to pay them well for their time if they can successfully cheat?
Or, like most scientists, are they just protecting against unconscious cheating by honest, good-faith participants?
I find it disappointing that TFA doesn't really discuss the possibility of conscious, clever cheating... or implies that it's impossible because, well, gee, the system is so high-tech.
People have smuggled transmitters and receivers into casinos, where the management is probably far more savvy, cynical, and experienced at detecting cheating... and financially motivated to do so... than these scientists.
I predict that this will have the same outcome as all other parapsychology experiments: a very slightly better-than-chance statistical outcome, and endless ambiguity and debate about whether the statistics were done in a valid way.
Mind you, I happen to have had an echocardiogram just last week, my first, and it's a freakin' miracle to see all the little valves doing their stuff, and a technician watching my heart in real time for many minutes and making literally dozens of quantitative measurements without poking sharp things into me or injecting dubious "dyes" into me or (I trust!) toasting me with radiation.
But I have to wonder. If high-tech medicine is actually effective--not just awe-inspiring, exciting, and, well, entertaining--why is it that with so much of the stuff, the United States ranks about #40 in infant mortality (worse than New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia)? Why is our life expectancy only 78 years when forty-seven other countries, including Aruba, Spain, and Iceland, do better?
Is it possible that we need less of these robotic surgeons and computer imaging centers and a few more humble, prosaic things... like visiting nurses, or immunization programs (How is it possible that people in the United States are still getting mumps)?
Slashdot Mirror
...(was it something about the article logo?)
Matt Damon will be much better than MacCauley Culkin.
Scientist thinks commercial fusion energy may be possible in future...
Scientist thinks arresting the aging process may be possible in future...
Scientist thinks space colonies may be possible in future...
Scientist thinks flying cars may be possible in future...
etc. etc. etc.
All the significant scientific research in space has been done by unmanned probes for a long time.
About the only really significant thing the manned space program has done in aid of science was to repair the Hubble.
We're putting humans into space so that they can build the ISS so that we can put humans into space. Into low earth orbit. The same place John Glenn went in 1962. It was thrlling then. Well, OK, the "Space Station 3D" movie is thrilling to watch now... but the scientific aspects of the ISS seem to me to be about 98% grandstanding and PR.
What's the point? Is it a welfare project on the part of the U. S. to keep Russian scientists from looking for work from nations we would just as soon not have Russian scientists working for?
(That was supposed to be "Digital and MS-DOS use CR-LF, UNIX uses LF, and Apple, bless it's heart, uses CR." I shouldn't have angle brackets around them....)
Oh, I almost forgot: the Sony 3.5" drive (swift move)... but with diskette formatting that was completely different from PCs (bonehead move).
Unfortunately, Apple has had, sadly, a track record of adopting "standards" that other PC vendors didn't adopt.
It's all very well that NuBus was a "standard," but the only major companies that adopted it were Apple, TI, NeXT... and they all adopted slight different implementations and very different form factors. The TI boards were about 9x9 inches if I recall correctly, and certainly weren't interoperable with Apple's.
Even little details: Digital and MS-DOS use as the line break, UNIX uses , and Apple, bless its heart, uses .
FireWire hasn't been a total dud, but it certainly wasn't the mainstream peripheral bus Apple hoped for. Outside of the Apple world it's a video interconnect standard, not much more. One small reason why Apple hardware costs a little bit more is that, effectively, Apple is forced to implement both FireWire and USB 2.0...
SCSI was a smart move on Apple's part, but some of the value was compromised by the fact that up until, oh, 1993 or thereabouts, you couldn't just plug any old SCSI drive into a Mac; it needed a model-specific driver, and those drivers involved a lot of black magic and more or less undocumented information. The SCSI standard says nothing about the physical connector, but Apple managed to pick a different one from Adaptec, the dominant PC vendor, and that didn't help either. Worse yet, they picked one that didn't allow one ground wire per signal wire... and was, in fact, the same connector as the standard 25-pin RS-232 connector.
About the only good thing you can say is that whether by chance or design, plugging a printer into the Mac SCSI port didn't fry either of them. I know that because I was doing support for a research institute and when the MacPlus first came out, just about all of the first half-dozen people to buy one tried to plug a printer into the SCSI port.
...my Amazon account.
If a product is ready for the world, it absolutely should be ready for a live demo. It shouldn't be just barely ready to work, under perfect conditions, minutes after careful testing by technicians.
In fact, they should have called up a volunteer from the audience... preferably a member of the press so you'd know it wasn't a confederate... to do the talking.
We realize things can go wrong under the best of circumstances. But it is still a completely valid test of the company's confidence in their product. In the real world, conditions will be far worse, there will be no technicians around, the software will be running in an environment that's had three security patches and two other major products installed on top of it, and so forth.
In the days of live TV there was a program, it might have been Ed Sullivan, in which they regularly ran commercials for Timex watches, which, they said, "takes a licking and keeps on ticking," in which they put a Timex through various torture tests. It didn't always survive: the one I remember was the one where they buckled the watch onto the blade of an outboard motor's propellor and ran the motor in a tank of water, onstage, live. When they finished, at first they couldn't find the watch: the strap had broken. The propellor had flung the watch into a corner of the tank. And it wasn't ticking. But mostly, the Timex demos worked.
On the Steve Allen show, they would regularly demonstrate Polaroid cameras. This was in the days before the cameras were motorized and the processing operation was tricky: you had to pull a long strip of paper-film sandwich firmly against fairly stiff resistance, wait ninety seconds, open the camera back, get a fingernail into a slit, and peel the perforated picture base away from the backing. Occasionally they had problems. As with the Timex demos, you got a completely convincing picture of the product's reliability and usability, and the company's confidence in their products.
In Jack London's "The Sea-Wolf," a character asks "Do you know Dr. Jordan's final test of truth?" and answers: "Can we make it work? Can we trust our lives to it? is the test."
I don't say Microsoft should wait to ship until they are ready to trust their lives to Vista voice recognition, but they should darn well be prepared to demonstrate it, live, in public.
When this is an option, the question I like to use is:
"What is your password?"
They talk about some specific thing they personally want to do.
BIll Gates didn't say "I want to make innovative software," he said he wanted a computer on every desk and Microsoft software in that computer.
Edwin Land didn't say "I want to develop innovative imaging-related products for the consumer and technical markets," he said "Marketing is what you do when your product is no good" and "The bottom line is in heaven."
And for their next project... Robert Wilder.
The pictures are genuinely interesting, but I seriously wonder whether the spam input plays any important role in their appearance. I'll bet he could just as easily have used Wall Street Journal editorials, or transcriptions of chess games, or digitized music waveforms, or, quite possibly, random numbers.
It's rather like the phony "participative" art... like the staircase they have, or used to have, at the Boston Museum of Science, where descending the steps interrupts light beams and creates wind-chime-like music. You sense a connection between your actions and the music, and for about fifteen seconds it's cool, but then you gradually realize that you aren't really controlling the music or pouring anything meaningful of your own into the artwork.
For that matter, it's like a wind chime. The aural experience is shaped far more by the designer of the chime than by the wind.
Or... for one more analogy... is this really different from the Andy O'Meara's G-Force visualization plugin for MP3 players... or the 1930's "color organs?"
The annoying part is that the most novel aspect is the claimed connection with spam. Because of the novelty of using spam as the semi-random seeding function, I believe he's probably managed to get much more notice of his art than if he had used something less novel.
have been discovered to be eighty units long and oriented face down, nine edge first.
Virtually every time... say, three times out of the last four... I'll get thrown into a loop in which I scan an item, it says "Please place item in bag," I place it in the bag, it says "Unexpected item in bagging area! Please remove item," I remove it, it says "Please place item in bag," lather, rinse, repeat.
I have never been able to figure out how to deal with this or what I'm supposed to do... other than call for help. If anyone knows the cause and cure, please let me know. Try not to insult me any more than absolutely necessary in the process.
(The fourth time didn't work either. I was checking out half-a-dozen nutrition bars of different flavors. One of them wouldn't scan. It didn't offer me any sensible options, like keying in the UPC by hand. Eventually... after my wife, initially convinced I was being clumsy or stupid or both, satisfied herself that it wouldn't scan for her either... we settled for purchasing the five, and dropping the unscannable bar onto a random nearby surface).
Now, let me see... when was the last Singularity? Was it Y2K? Or was it perhaps the Jupiter Effect (when all the planets lined up and the gravitational effect tipped the earth out of its axis?) Or am I confusing both of them with the beginning of the Aquarian Age? Or maybe I'm thinking of the Harmonic Convergence of August 17, 1987?
I'm way too young to remember the Millerites and the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844, when Jesus failed to reappear, but I've been blessed to live through a veritable multiplicity of singularities.
Oooh, singularity! I like that word. So much kewler than, say, "Armageddon." It sounds so technical, so scientific, so free from ranting religiosity....
I vote for Claude Shannon and E. F. Moore's 1953 analog Hex-playing computer.
Unlike tic-tac-toe, which is so trivial that a tic-tac-toe-playing computer is only entertaining because it is a computer doing it, the Shannon and Moore machine put up a genuine challenge to a human player, on a game that was not fully analyzed at the time, and that was interesting enough to human players to have been released as a commercial board game.
Of course, I have also wondered whether Link trainers, full-sized flight simulators of the 1930s, were ever "flown" simply for entertainment. Knowing human nature, I bet they were. In fact, speaking of bets, I'll bet pilots placed bets on the outcome of competitive Link-trainer contests. (That's entirely speculation on my part). The Link trainers probably qualify as analog computers, even though the computations were, I believe, performed by pneumatic bellows and other non-electronic devices.
This article says "A March 31, 2005 report in Malaysia's New Straits Times describes how a luxury car owner, Mr. Kumaran, was attacked by a gang of car thieves. His ordeal was apparently made worse because his S-Class Mercedes Benz was equipped with a biometric lock that prevented the car from being started without authentication by his finger or thumb print. At first the thieves had Mr. Kumaran start the car using his fingerprint. Then they took him, along with the car, to a chop-shop where they had hoped that the security system could be bypassed. When they decided that they couldn't override the security and that the fingerprint was required, they took Mr. Kumaran's left fingertip and dropped him off along the roadside where he was eventually able to find medical help."
I guess I'd prefer to have the bad guys to use a reasonable facsimile of my finger, retina, etc. than to have them use the real thing.
Can you imagine Tom Cruise on an impossible mission, faced with trying to enter a secure facility, shrugging his shoulders, and just "pull[ing] every card with a magnetic stripe from [his] wallet"--and discovering that one of them works?
Who would believe it?
True, in a 1998 movie called "Wrongfully Accused," Leslie Nielsen, faced with a computer screen asking for "User" and "Password" gets in by typing in "User" into the user field and "Password" into the password field... but you're supposed to think it's a joke.
Ah. Well, the good news is that TFA says I'm right about sponges being common things to leave in the patient.
And the bad news is I've made it crystal clear that I didn't read TFA before I wrote my comment.
But the good news is I think my comment is reasonable, anyway.
If the chip is literally inside the tool, it seems to me that it would be hard to sense the chip.
If it's just glued very strongly onto the surface of the tool, then it could come off inside the patient.
And as for things like sponges... which proverbially (I'm saying "proverbially" because I have no idea whether it's true) are among the commonest things to leave inside, well, they're basically soft, aren't they, so you'd think it might not be that hard for the chip to come loose from the sponge.
I don't think I'd like to need to get cut open again just because nobody could tell for sure whether there was a tool or a just a chip. Of course they could X-ray, but if they could see everything clearly with the X-ray they wouldn't need the chip in the first place.
And unless there's an absolute guarantee that every instrument is chipped, well, the nurses need to know which instruments are chipped and which aren't, and keep an accurate count of the unchipped instruments...
His rant can be extended to the whole PC world in general. The infancy of the personal computer industry began in an atmosphere of "selling the dream" and never worrying that it couldn't be delivered... and has never grown up.
Computers with sixteen-slot S-100 busses that couldn't possibly drive sixteen cards.
The Apple ][ which had no fan. The first time I saw one, I said, "Wow! they must have brilliant thermal engineers." Then the owner explained that the reason why the cover was off was that if he put the cover on it would overheat and shut down. They didn't have brilliant thermal engineers: they didn't know that they needed thermal engineers.
I remember a guy who kept talking about how wonderful his North Star Advantage was. I asked him if it was reliable. He said, absolutely, he had had no problems with it whatsoever. So the next time I was in his office, I asked for a demo. "Oh, I can't," he said. "The power supply burned out last month." "But," I said, "I thought you said you hadn't had any problems with it." "I haven't had any problems with the computer," he said. "Just the power supply."
And that, in a nutshell, is the way the PC industry has been since its inception. CSS is just one of many examples. People tried to achieve consistent appearance with HTML, and couldn't because it wasn't designed for that and different browsers rendered it differently. So, they invented CSS, whose whole reason for existence is to allow Web pages to be written to a standard that will be rendered consistently by all browsers. And it doesn't really work, and nobody cares.
How about all those USB devices whose instructions tell you never to plug them into a hub?
How about all the CDs that burn and verify without error... and can then be read in about 95% of all CD readers?
How about all the Bluetooth thingies that won't interoperate properly with other Bluetooth thingies?
How about all the Windows releases, each of which is going to solve the security and usability problems of the previous releases?
It goes on and on... but it doesn't matter because nobody expects the stuff to work any more...
TFA says "For maintenance purposes and to improve performance and stability, the company is building much of Vista's networking technology from the ground up."
IS building? Not "HAS built?" Months before ship they are not just mopping up, they are still in the process of designing the network stack?
I realize this is reading a lot into the verb tense chosen by a reporter... and maybe it's reporter so clueless that he doesn't understand what's meant by "performing a build..." but that is still astonishing language to me.
What's this got that DIVX ain't got? DIVX, backed by the might and power of Circuit City?
Or FlexPlay (EZ-D) "self-destructing" DVDs, launched into the stratosphere by the hit 2004 Christmas movie, Noel?
Or RCA's single-play cassettes that would mechanically lock at the end of one play and could only be unlocked by the rental store with a special tool?
You do remember all of these, don't you?
You don't? That's funny. I wonder why not.
Whoa! This article seems to be making up history out of whole cloth. I'm not even sure where to begin. It's just totally out to lunch.
:= A + 1) puts it closer, not to PDP-11 architecture, but to contemporary machine architecture in general.
C was not a reaction to LISP. I can't even imagine why anyone would say this. LISP's if/then/else was an influence on ALGOL and later languages.
C might have been a reaction to Pascal, which in turn was a reaction to ALGOL.
LISP was not "the archetypal high-level language." The very names CAR and CDR mean "contents of address register" and "contents of decrement register," direct references to hardware registers on the IBM 704. When the names of fundamental languages constructs are those of specific registers in a specific processor, that is not a "high-level language" at all. Later efforts to build machines with machine architectures optimized for implementation of LISP further show that LISP was not considered "a high-level language."
C was not specifically patterned on the PDP-11. Rather, both of them were based on common practice and understanding of what was in the air at the time. C was a direct successor to, and reasonably similar to BCPL, on Honeywell 635 and 645, the IBM 360, the TX-2, the CDC 6400, the Univac 1108, the PDP-9, the KDF 9 and the Atlas 2.
C makes an interesting comparison with Pascal; you can see that C is, in many ways, a computer language rather than a mathematical language. For example, the inclusion of specific constructs for increment and decrement (as opposed to just writing A
Are they planning to strip-search the participants for hidden transmitters and receivers?
To test and debug the system, have they hired a couple of good magicians skilled at "mentalist" acts, with a promise to pay them well for their time if they can successfully cheat?
Or, like most scientists, are they just protecting against unconscious cheating by honest, good-faith participants?
I find it disappointing that TFA doesn't really discuss the possibility of conscious, clever cheating... or implies that it's impossible because, well, gee, the system is so high-tech.
People have smuggled transmitters and receivers into casinos, where the management is probably far more savvy, cynical, and experienced at detecting cheating... and financially motivated to do so... than these scientists.
I predict that this will have the same outcome as all other parapsychology experiments: a very slightly better-than-chance statistical outcome, and endless ambiguity and debate about whether the statistics were done in a valid way.
Mind you, I happen to have had an echocardiogram just last week, my first, and it's a freakin' miracle to see all the little valves doing their stuff, and a technician watching my heart in real time for many minutes and making literally dozens of quantitative measurements without poking sharp things into me or injecting dubious "dyes" into me or (I trust!) toasting me with radiation.
But I have to wonder. If high-tech medicine is actually effective--not just awe-inspiring, exciting, and, well, entertaining--why is it that with so much of the stuff, the United States ranks about #40 in infant mortality (worse than New Zealand, Portugal, Slovenia)? Why is our life expectancy only 78 years when forty-seven other countries, including Aruba, Spain, and Iceland, do better?
Is it possible that we need less of these robotic surgeons and computer imaging centers and a few more humble, prosaic things... like visiting nurses, or immunization programs (How is it possible that people in the United States are still getting mumps)?