This is standard operating procedure for companies. They establish a brand which has certain consistent characteristics. The brand becomes popular because the characteristics are valued. Then they leverage the popularity extending the brand to new products that don't necessarily have the valued characteristics. It's essentially dishonest, but since they never promised that the brand meant any particular thing, they can deflect criticism.
My pet peeve was Robitussin, which literally for decades referred to a cough syrup with a specific ingredient (guaifenisin). Then Robitussin introduced a line of "Robitussin cough drops" which contained no guaifenisin, no dextromethorphan, just the usual menthol-and-hard-candy throat soother stuff. I complained that they were marketing "Robitussin cough drops" that didn't have any Robitussin in them; they basically gave the Humpty-Dumpty defense (words can mean whatever we say they mean), and, after all, they own the trademark.
IBM did the same thing with the PS/2 line of computers, which originally referred to set of computers, one of whose characteristics was that they opened extremely easily (one dime, one captive screw, about a quarter of a turn and voila!). When they brought out a "PS/2" with a standard ISA bus, I recommended that our company get them. Dumb me. Only after they arrived did we find that they didn't have what I thought of as the "PS/2" mechanical construction at all. In fact they were just perfectly generic clones, featuring the standard screwdriver and a dozen screws and a cover that comes off fairly easily but won't go on again for love or money. Of course they charged IBM premium prices for these commodity machines.
Then, there was the flap about--was it Buicks that GM built with Chevrolet engines in them? Very good engines, GM insisted. Nothing wrong with them except that they weren't Buick engines.
In these days when the FBI thinks possession of an almanac makes you suspicious...what happens to you if some half-baked experimental steganography-detection program looks at billions of.jpgs, gets to an image you've included in an eBay auction descriptions, and detects some not-quite-decodable signal just above the noise that it interprets "there's definitely something hidden in that image, even though we can't tell what?"
How do you prove that you're innocent?
How do you prove that your image does NOT contain steganography?
Worse yet, suppose you are using steganography--say, a watermark to prevent people from stealing your image. Will the FBI believe what you tell them is the decoded content?
I mean, a few decades ago some nutcase analyzed Shakespeare's First Folio and decided that it was printed in a mixture of two slightly different fonts that constituted a binary code with a message proving that it had been written by Sir Francis Bacon. (No kidding). That proves that it's easy for someone who's looking for steganography to find it, whether it's there or not.
Oh, my goodness, they didn't even mention the brilliantly satirical piece that appeared in MAD magazine in... the late fifties? By whom? Jack Davis, perhaps? Oh, dear... I can see the style of the drawing in my head so clearly.
It brilliantly lampooned the "dreams of the moon." I think it may have been specifically targeted at those inspired by Wernher von Braun.
One of the running gags was "the press of a button jettisons another section." It is a huge multistage rocket. Every time the press of a button jettisons another section, the jettisoned section is seen to be full of jettisoned spacecrew. As each section is jettisoned the caption says something like "Jettisoned section falls onto house which Mr. and Mrs. Potrezebie of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin have been building for five years." Eventually it comments "Note that this is only article which actually tells you what happens to jettisoned sections."
When the press of a button has jettisoned all but the final section, we are shown an astronaut on a bicycle pedals pedalling madly to get the rocket those last few feet.
Perhaps they say "just kidding" and rewind a bit, because I also remember (this is all from memory folks, don't expect high accuracy) the same article as showing the rocket, with extended tripod legs and landing pads, gently descending onto the exact pointy summit of a lunar mountain. The captions had just explained how the cleverly engineered legs could absorb shock; the next one says something like "Uh-oh, guess we never figured out how to land a point."
"You can remotely access your photos and files from any Internet-connected PC, including Macs. Currently only computers that run Windows 2000 or Windows XP are supported for Mirra Backup and Restore within your home network."
So, my wife's PC running Windows 98 and my PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.3.2 could read files that had been backed up from any other machines on our network... except... there aren't any.
I'm currently in a state of denial, because, having a longish commute, and a car with a ridiculously small trunk, the passenger compartment of my car is chock full of things I might happen to need. (My commute is seriously lacking in convenient places where I could stop the car, get out, and get things out of the trunk).
A couple of months ago, Reader's Digest had a genuinely scary article about the hazards of loose objects in passenger compartments in an accident. It made a lot of sense--I remember reading about how demolition-derby participants make a fetish of having their passenger compartments almost surgically clean. RD had horror stories about kids being killed by loose cell phones.
I realize that I had a bunch of genuinely mental pictures about how an accident could occur occur--my mental notion is that I hit something while travelling forward, and that everything in the back seat will conveniently and safely be stopped by the seatbacks. RD made me realize that wasn't how things happen.
Anyway... apart from the distraction factor... it seems to me that you can make a case that anything as heavy as a laptop probably shouldn't be in the passenger compartment at all.
1) It's already against the rules for beef products to contain nervous system tissue.
2) 2002 Agriculture Department survey found central nervous system tissue in beef products at 74 percent of the plants tested. Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/15401 7_beefsaf ety25.html
There you have it. We already have regulations in place that would be perfectly adequate prevent the transmission of mad cow to disease to humans--and the regulations are not being followed.
What earthly good will it do to accumulate yet more tracking records and database entries? What's needed is a willingness to put public safety above the profits of private interests. If that's absent, all the RFID tags in the world aren't going to help.
I've listened to all sorts of advice and have conducted limited experiments.
I believe the great unstated truth is that rechargeable batteries just plain have a limited life.
In fact, the lifetime on any one particular cell seems to be subject to a great deal of variation. For about ten years I tried to power all my AA, C, and D-cell-powered devices from rechargeable Nicads, and even when usage and recharging patterns were similar, some batteries _bought at the same time in the package_ might died after a year and a half, while others would be going strong after four years. I suspect this variation is one reason why manufacturers are so vague about lifetimes, and also contributes to peoples' superstitions (as they try to correlate the random behavior of individual cells with what they did to them.)
People who try to share rechargeable devices tend to bully each other and try to impose their personal superstitions about it ("I TOLD you not to keep it on the charger, Mabel!"), and companies who do not wish to replace dead batteries certainly are inclined to reinforce this. If I were a support person and someone phoned me with a battery issue, I would certainly suggest that they discharge the battery fully and recharge it. Why not? It would get them off the phone, and it MIGHT work, and when they called back to say it didn't it would be someone else's problem.
As for leaving batteries in the charger, at some point you have to assume that the people who make the batteries and the charger know what they're doing, and that the charger is smart enough not to deliver life-threatening quantities of charge to a fully charged battery. Certainly this should be true in these days where the chargers and batteries have microchips in them.
So I say, don't kick yourself over it. Accept the fact that rechargeable batteries are a) damn expensive, and b) only last a couple of years. Yes, it sucks, but lots of things do.
"Rechargeable" batteries sound as if they should last forever. So did "permanent needles" (ha! anyone else remember THOSE?), permanent waves, and permanent-press clothing.
I mean, I just realized last year that in the basement I had six shoeboxes containing twenty-five years worth of cancelled checks, invoices and receipts.
I tried to go through them, but realized that I didn't really have any quick, easy, reliable way to decide which could be safely thrown out. Sure, 95% of them were easy. Most bills and cancelled checks only need to kept for long enough to resolve any mixups. But the rest were fairly hard.
Tax returns? I think the answer is supposed to be that you don't need to keep them after ten years.
And in the really old ones, I realized that I was fascinated by the changes in the look of bills, receipts, and checks. The oldest ones were printed in ink with chaintrain printers, for example. Then they started to become laser-printed--in monospaced type. Then they acquired proportionally-spaced type. Then they started to get laid out with little boxes and sidebars and things...
Up to about ten years ago I still got--what DO you call those anodized aluminum boxes they always used to have on the counters of small businesses, containing what I think were continuous-form carbon receipts that might have been about 6 by 8 inches in size, onto which bills/receipts/invoices were written by hand? The typefaces popular for letterheads, business cards, and so forth have changed considerably over the years.
But I digress. What algorithms and rules of thumb do people use for deciding what bills can be thrown out? Pardon me, of course I meant shredded.
(And please don't tell me to "just scan them..." then I need to fret about archival media and whether CD labels rot CD-R's and whether Blu-Ray DVD drives will be able to read CD-R's and how to assign them file names and... oh, my aching head)
Who knows what the effect of these chemicals in small doses might be? For all we know, it might be beneficial!
Personally, I think this is nonsense, but over the last five decades this has been used as a debating ploy in regard to DDT, asbestos, dioxin, and (most recently) global warming, so I figure I might as well be the first to post it.
For what it's worth, there is a drug called VERSED (pronounced vur-said, two syllables) that is generally classified as "a sedative," one of whose properties is that it erases your memory of whatever you experienced while under sedation.
According to its maker, Roche Laboratories, "in one study, 73% of the patients who received intramuscularly had no recall of memory cards shown 30 minutes after drug administration."
It is commonly used during colonoscopies, not because colonoscopies are terribly traumatic, but because it provides superior muscular relaxation and enhances the effect of fentanyl (an anesthetic agent).
Nevertheless, the manufacturer describes it as "an agent for sedation/anxiolysis/amnesia;" that is, amnesia is considered to be one of the purposes for which it might be administered.
...despite the fact that every computer I've used since 1984 had a built-in "desk calculator" accessory (and friends who used SideKick have had one even longer), I have a pocket calculator in my desk drawer at home... and at work... and my wife has one on her desk... and so does just about everyone else I know.
I use several different versions of Windows at work (XP, Win2K, NT 4.0, and 98) and I can pull the calculator out of my desk drawer in less time than it takes to figure out where in the start menu they've put the calculator in THIS version of Windows.
In the old Mac OS the calculator was under the Apple menu, but it isn't any more and if I'm away from my own Mac it takes less time to pull out a calculator than to bring up a new Finder window, select Applications, select Utilities, discover that the Calculator isn't a Utility, find it in Applications, drag it to the taskbar--oops, excuse me, Dock so I can find it again...
And the real-world calculator always has the buttons in the right places (regardless of what keyboard I'm using or whether NumLock is on)--and is, as far as I know, free from arithmetic or roundoff bugs.
Oh, and it doesn't take any time to boot. And it runs for YEARS and YEARS on a watch battery (my PDA only gets six months on a set of AA's).
You're probably thinking of journalist Nellie Bly (pseudonym of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane), who left New York on November 14, 1889 and returned on January 25, 1890, beating Phileas Fogg's fictional journey by over a week. Phileas Fogg was a character in Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days," published in 1872.
[now drifting irremediably OT] "Around the World in 80 Days" was a hell of a good movie, based on Verne's novel, which was released in 1956. It was filmed in Todd-AO--one of a handful of movies filmed in that process. It was spectacular and gorgeous and a lot of fun to watch. It had quite a cast, David Niven as Phileas Fogg and Cantinflas as Passepartout. Only bad part was that the theme, which was quite catchy, had become a hit tune and had been played on the radio so often that by the time I saw the film--this was in the days when movies stayed in theatres for more than a couple of weeks, and in the case of Cinerama and Todd-AO spectaculars it could have been months--everybody was thoroughly sick of the theme music.
Earthdial's interesting... but how about this?
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Bill Nye's Marsdial
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· Score: 1
Take a globe of the world, one that's mounted in such a way that the axis can be tilted to any angle. Take it outside. Put it in a sunlit area. Turn the globe's support horizontally until the axis is pointing true north/south. Then adjust the tilt of the axis and the globe's rotation on the axis until your own town's position on the globe is straight up. You've just aligned the globe to match the orientation of the Earth.
Now, when you look at the globe, the part of the globe that is in sunlight shows you the exact part of the world that's in daylight. No software, no calculations, no gnomons, no Equation of Time. In the late afternoon you can see that your home town is near the edge of the lit part of the globe... and that it is lit more dimly than the part of the globe on which the sun is falling directly.
One project I fantasize doing someday during retirement is to find some sort of globe that can tolerate being outside in all sorts of weather... and a location where the sky is unobstructed... that is close to some elementary school... and set one of these things up permanently on a concrete pillar or something.
I realize that's both unfair and unhelpful, but it's still good advice. Actually I formulated notion that years ago... and not in connection with baggage inspections.
It stems from the time when we tried to bring a sewing machine into the United States.
I mean, at that time, Necchi sewing machines happened to be a real bargain in Curacao because Curacao was a junior member of the common market. My wife had been wanting a sewing machine that cost about $500 in the U.S. In a little window of a little fabric store way outside the tourist shopping district it was selling for the equivalent of $200, so we grabbed it. The store people were fascinated because they'd never had anyone from the U.S. buy a sewing machine before. Didn't know people in the U.S. even used sewing machines.
And it took us an hour to get it through customs.
It wasn't that sewing machines were contraband, or forbidden, or suspicious. It's that apparently nobody buys sewing machines on vacations. And it wasn't that it was an expensive or high-duty item; it's that they didn't know what the duty was. They weren't on the list that the inspector had at his station. So they pulled us out of line and took us to the supervisor's office. And he didn't have it in his big reference book. It took them about six phone calls and various people running around and bringing loose-leaf binders into the office before they could determine what category it belonged in. They decided that we owed them about six dollars and twenty-two cents and could proceed on our way.
For the same reason, I've quit taking my Rocket eBook with me. Which is a big shame, as the only real use it had was on trips. I can read novels with comfort and enjoyment on it, and I can carry eight to ten full-length novels in the same weight and volume as a single trade paperback. But it always causes extra delay because the inspectors have never seen one before and don't know what it is (and there's something about it that they don't choose to share with me that shows up in X-rays and bothers them). Plus, of course, the airlines consider it a "personal electronic device" that might interfere with navigation...
So, blend in. Don't carry items that other people don't commonly carry. (In other words, behave like a terr--no, let's not go there).
Anyone succeed in a rebuild from escrowed source?
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Source Code Escrow
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Not a rhetorical question.
My own personal experience--and of course I'm rendering myself vulnerable to remarks about the competence and professionalism of the companies I've worked at--it is that it is very, very, very rare for any source code depository that is not in active daily or near-daily use to be current, or even consistent enough to build. I don't say it can't be done. I just question, in practice, how often it _is_ done.
a) I've worked at a company that made a big deal of sending all their source to "secure offsite storage." What this meant in practice was labelling diskettes (this was a while ago) and sending them to this company. When, finally, an occasion arose to retrieve some of this source, it transpired that the company simply stored them--and had no way of finding or retrieving a particular diskette, even if you knew which diskette you needed and could tell them exactly what it said on the label.
b) Another company was developing a software product under contract to a company I worked at. We were supposed get the source to each and every version they released to us. In practice, most of the time any particular source archive they sent to us would not build or did not match the binaries. (This could, of course, gone undetected if we had simply been filing the archives away instead of actually trying to build from them).
I'm totally baffled. You need to use the stuff in advance of a noise exposure. They don't say how long it takes for it to take effect, but you'd think it would have to be at least half an hour. That means you'd need to know that the noise exposure was coming. They describe a use in which it provided good protection against a 115-db noise exposure.
A cheap pair of earplugs provides 30 db reduction, meaning it would reduce that 115 db to 85 db, which would also provide excellent protection. Earplugs come in a huge variety of designs, some very inexpensive, some very comfortable, some "high-fidelity" (attenuate all frequencies equally), some which attenuate very little when the noise level is low but seal and provide protection against loud noises (such as gunfire), etc. etc.
I mean, this is sort of like using pseudoephedrine instead of Kleenex.
I was disappointed not to see any pictures of these "jellyfish forms."
Indeed, the first thing I thought of when I read that passage was D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form.
I just got out my copy to check and, specifically, I was thinking of Chapter V, pp. 388-398, "On Falling Drops," which is an extended essay on similarities in form between (on the one hand) various kinds of splashes, liquid jets, drops of ink falling in water, etc. and (on the other hand) jellyfish and other medusoids.
...DATACRAFT? Wow, did that bring back memories. However, I suddenly realized that more than coincidence was at work, when I went to the McIDAS website and saw the "Dayton Street, Madison" address.
The University of Wisconsin, circa the late seventies, was a hotbed of Datacraft users. I believe it was Geophysics that pioneered their use with a Datacraft 6024/3. They introduced the cheaper 6024/5 at about the same time Digital came out with, IIRC, the PDP-11/20.
Departments at UW that needed minicomputers in the $50,000 class started buying Datacrafts right and left. Digital lost a lot of sales selling PDP-11's against Datacrafts. But the price/performance comparison, at that time and place, was really compellingly in favor of Datacraft.
Datacraft was headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, and I believe a lot of its engineering staff consisted of Cuban emigres. The Datacraft machines were 24 bits versus Digital's 16. I forget how many bits were in the mantissa and exponent, but there was a very usable 24-bit floating-point format. The instruction set was well designed for doing floating point without a dedicated processor (though a dedicated FPU was available). One of the things that sold us on the Datacraft was that without an FPU, the Datacraft's times for floating point add, subtract, multiply, and divide were all less than forty microseconds; the comparable times for Digital was about a millisecond.
The Datacraft had a hardware square root function.
The instruction set was the most godawful asymmetrical mess I've ever seen. If you were used to the elegant orthogonality of, say, a PDP-8, a Datacraft was a bit of a shock. (It made even a 6502 look pretty). Most instructions took a 15-bit address, and the natural address space was limited to 32K (of 24-bit words). However, in order to win some bid that required 65K, they had shoehorned in a few instructions that accepted a 16-bit address. This meant that when working in an address space of more than 32K, the linker (and compiler) had to keep track of an incredible number of linkage flavors, and probably about half the bugs reported had to do with things that happened when you crossed the 32K boundary.
There were three sort-of-index registers, named I, J, and K (if you used the variables I, J, and K in a FORTRAN program they were automatically assigned to the index registers). They were all slightly specialized, though. I don't remember what each of them did, but there were some instructions in which the I register, and only the I register had some special role, and ditto for J and K.
There was a 3-bit index register field, and most of the instructions that moved data into or out of index registers used the field to specify the register. That meant, of course, that those instructions could NOT themselves perform indexed addressing.
A very cool feature was an instruction that swapped the contents of a register and memory in a single cycle. The same architectural feature that enabled this also enabled another cool feature: there were functions that simultaneously set a word to all zeros or all ones and set the condition register to reflect the previous contents of the word. That is, a single instruction could you whether a word was zero or nonzero at the same time as it set it to zero.
Generally speaking--if there was anything general about the architecture, which I doubt--you could, at the binary level, specify more than one index register, which resulted in storage into all of the specified registers if it was a store instruction or loading the OR of the contents of the specified register if it was a load instruction. This resulted in a lot of possible instructions for which there were no assembler mnemonics defined. (And the assembler syntax was IBM-style card-oriented, with a single mnemonic going in a specified set of columns--you couldn't just OR the mnemonics themselves). Some of these instructions were actually useful, and there was always controversy, never quite resolved by Datacraft, as t
I know it's just a joke, but very unfair to the Wright Brothers and shows a significant misunderstanding of what the "bicycle" was then. It was relatively new and a relatively advanced piece of technology. It was like being a personal computer hobbyist in, say 1975. The mechanical features of bicycles were nontrivial and a bicycle shop owner had to do a lot of significant hands-on mechanical work.
Furthermore, it was their experience with the bicycle that gave the Wright brothers insight into some of the issues of stability and controllability. When the Wright brothers' plane was first demonstrated before big audiences, people were surprised and shocked that the thing banked, thought something had gone wrong, and expected it to crash. Probably the other aerodynamic pioneers knew better, but there was certainly a mindset that heavier-than-aircraft would maneuver like boats--being turned with a rudder and staying level along the "roll" axis.
The cycling experience was undoubtedly relevant to their achievements.
So, Richard Pearce may have flown a heavier-than-air craft a year earlier than the Wrights, but it was little publicized and did not have much of a follow-on.
Now, the other side of the coin.
I'm very surprised by the posters that say the Wright's flight was better publicized, because in fact the Wrights played their cards so close to the chest that, at the time, relatively few people heard of their flight.
Santos-Dumont's flight in October 23rd, 1906 in the "14-bis" took place very much in public, with the press and representatives of the French Aero Club in attendance, and was very widely attended. It was far more publicized than the Wright's flight and most people at the time thought it was the first heavier-than-air flight. To this day, there are still those (particularly, for some reason, French and Brazilians) who believe his flight is the one that should "count."
Really, what the Wright Brothers truly deserve credit for was the brilliant engineering, their aerodynamic studies, their wind tunnel work, their conceptualization of the problem as one of controllability rather than stability, and their conscious understanding of the importance of what would now be called a good "user interface." Their flight wasn't a stunt. Most important, unlike Santos-Dumont's flight, it did not depend on having a pilot of extraordinary skill.
Now, about Friese-Greene's invention of motion pictures...
...at least he certainly gives that impression. His description of the "Kazaa experience" is the most intelligent thing I've heard a big executive say about Kazaa lately. It almost sounds as if he's tried it himself--or, at the very least, isn't six layers removed from someone who has.
It's worth pointing out that the GPL is an example of a way for companies to cooperate for mutual benefit without running afoul of antitrust.
There is nothing in the Constitution or common sense or antitrust laws that requires companies to engage solely in cutthroat competition for profit, or that says that companies can't cooperate for their mutual benefit. Care, however, is needed to make sure that cooperation doesn't run afoul of antitrust.
The GPL provides one of a number of available mechanisms for companies to cooperate for mutual benefit in a way that does not create antitrust problems.
Another way is the creation of voluntary industry standards--such as C, Unicode, the use of 120 VAC 60 cycles for home wiring in the U.S., etc. Presumably SCO opposes this, too.
SCO may win the FUD war if we aren't careful. We should make the point that SCO is fundamentally opposed to the whole notion of cooperation.
Slashdot Mirror
This is standard operating procedure for companies. They establish a brand which has certain consistent characteristics. The brand becomes popular because the characteristics are valued. Then they leverage the popularity extending the brand to new products that don't necessarily have the valued characteristics. It's essentially dishonest, but since they never promised that the brand meant any particular thing, they can deflect criticism.
My pet peeve was Robitussin, which literally for decades referred to a cough syrup with a specific ingredient (guaifenisin). Then Robitussin introduced a line of "Robitussin cough drops" which contained no guaifenisin, no dextromethorphan, just the usual menthol-and-hard-candy throat soother stuff. I complained that they were marketing "Robitussin cough drops" that didn't have any Robitussin in them; they basically gave the Humpty-Dumpty defense (words can mean whatever we say they mean), and, after all, they own the trademark.
IBM did the same thing with the PS/2 line of computers, which originally referred to set of computers, one of whose characteristics was that they opened extremely easily (one dime, one captive screw, about a quarter of a turn and voila!). When they brought out a "PS/2" with a standard ISA bus, I recommended that our company get them. Dumb me. Only after they arrived did we find that they didn't have what I thought of as the "PS/2" mechanical construction at all. In fact they were just perfectly generic clones, featuring the standard screwdriver and a dozen screws and a cover that comes off fairly easily but won't go on again for love or money. Of course they charged IBM premium prices for these commodity machines.
Then, there was the flap about--was it Buicks that GM built with Chevrolet engines in them? Very good engines, GM insisted. Nothing wrong with them except that they weren't Buick engines.
In these days when the FBI thinks possession of an almanac makes you suspicious...what happens to you if some half-baked experimental steganography-detection program looks at billions of .jpgs, gets to an image you've included in an eBay auction descriptions, and detects some not-quite-decodable signal just above the noise that it interprets "there's definitely something hidden in that image, even though we can't tell what?"
How do you prove that you're innocent?
How do you prove that your image does NOT contain steganography?
Worse yet, suppose you are using steganography--say, a watermark to prevent people from stealing your image. Will the FBI believe what you tell them is the decoded content?
I mean, a few decades ago some nutcase analyzed Shakespeare's First Folio and decided that it was printed in a mixture of two slightly different fonts that constituted a binary code with a message proving that it had been written by Sir Francis Bacon. (No kidding). That proves that it's easy for someone who's looking for steganography to find it, whether it's there or not.
Oh, my goodness, they didn't even mention the brilliantly satirical piece that appeared in MAD magazine in... the late fifties? By whom? Jack Davis, perhaps? Oh, dear... I can see the style of the drawing in my head so clearly.
It brilliantly lampooned the "dreams of the moon." I think it may have been specifically targeted at those inspired by Wernher von Braun.
One of the running gags was "the press of a button jettisons another section." It is a huge multistage rocket. Every time the press of a button jettisons another section, the jettisoned section is seen to be full of jettisoned spacecrew. As each section is jettisoned the caption says something like "Jettisoned section falls onto house which Mr. and Mrs. Potrezebie of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin have been building for five years." Eventually it comments "Note that this is only article which actually tells you what happens to jettisoned sections."
When the press of a button has jettisoned all but the final section, we are shown an astronaut on a bicycle pedals pedalling madly to get the rocket those last few feet.
Perhaps they say "just kidding" and rewind a bit, because I also remember (this is all from memory folks, don't expect high accuracy) the same article as showing the rocket, with extended tripod legs and landing pads, gently descending onto the exact pointy summit of a lunar mountain. The captions had just explained how the cleverly engineered legs could absorb shock; the next one says something like "Uh-oh, guess we never figured out how to land a point."
Phooey. It says right here that
"You can remotely access your photos and files from any Internet-connected PC, including Macs. Currently only computers that run Windows 2000 or Windows XP are supported for Mirra Backup and Restore within your home network."
So, my wife's PC running Windows 98 and my PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.3.2 could read files that had been backed up from any other machines on our network... except... there aren't any.
I'm currently in a state of denial, because, having a longish commute, and a car with a ridiculously small trunk, the passenger compartment of my car is chock full of things I might happen to need. (My commute is seriously lacking in convenient places where I could stop the car, get out, and get things out of the trunk).
A couple of months ago, Reader's Digest had a genuinely scary article about the hazards of loose objects in passenger compartments in an accident. It made a lot of sense--I remember reading about how demolition-derby participants make a fetish of having their passenger compartments almost surgically clean. RD had horror stories about kids being killed by loose cell phones.
I realize that I had a bunch of genuinely mental pictures about how an accident could occur occur--my mental notion is that I hit something while travelling forward, and that everything in the back seat will conveniently and safely be stopped by the seatbacks. RD made me realize that wasn't how things happen.
Anyway... apart from the distraction factor... it seems to me that you can make a case that anything as heavy as a laptop probably shouldn't be in the passenger compartment at all.
1) It's already against the rules for beef products to contain nervous system tissue.
1 7_beefsaf ety25.html
2) 2002 Agriculture Department survey found central nervous system tissue in beef products at 74 percent of the plants tested. Source:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/1540
There you have it. We already have regulations in place that would be perfectly adequate prevent the transmission of mad cow to disease to humans--and the regulations are not being followed.
What earthly good will it do to accumulate yet more tracking records and database entries? What's needed is a willingness to put public safety above the profits of private interests. If that's absent, all the RFID tags in the world aren't going to help.
I've listened to all sorts of advice and have conducted limited experiments.
I believe the great unstated truth is that rechargeable batteries just plain have a limited life.
In fact, the lifetime on any one particular cell seems to be subject to a great deal of variation. For about ten years I tried to power all my AA, C, and D-cell-powered devices from rechargeable Nicads, and even when usage and recharging patterns were similar, some batteries _bought at the same time in the package_ might died after a year and a half, while others would be going strong after four years. I suspect this variation is one reason why manufacturers are so vague about lifetimes, and also contributes to peoples' superstitions (as they try to correlate the random behavior of individual cells with what they did to them.)
People who try to share rechargeable devices tend to bully each other and try to impose their personal superstitions about it ("I TOLD you not to keep it on the charger, Mabel!"), and companies who do not wish to replace dead batteries certainly are inclined to reinforce this. If I were a support person and someone phoned me with a battery issue, I would certainly suggest that they discharge the battery fully and recharge it. Why not? It would get them off the phone, and it MIGHT work, and when they called back to say it didn't it would be someone else's problem.
As for leaving batteries in the charger, at some point you have to assume that the people who make the batteries and the charger know what they're doing, and that the charger is smart enough not to deliver life-threatening quantities of charge to a fully charged battery. Certainly this should be true in these days where the chargers and batteries have microchips in them.
So I say, don't kick yourself over it. Accept the fact that rechargeable batteries are a) damn expensive, and b) only last a couple of years. Yes, it sucks, but lots of things do.
"Rechargeable" batteries sound as if they should last forever. So did "permanent needles" (ha! anyone else remember THOSE?), permanent waves, and permanent-press clothing.
I mean, I just realized last year that in the basement I had six shoeboxes containing twenty-five years worth of cancelled checks, invoices and receipts.
I tried to go through them, but realized that I didn't really have any quick, easy, reliable way to decide which could be safely thrown out. Sure, 95% of them were easy. Most bills and cancelled checks only need to kept for long enough to resolve any mixups. But the rest were fairly hard.
Tax returns? I think the answer is supposed to be that you don't need to keep them after ten years.
And in the really old ones, I realized that I was fascinated by the changes in the look of bills, receipts, and checks. The oldest ones were printed in ink with chaintrain printers, for example. Then they started to become laser-printed--in monospaced type. Then they acquired proportionally-spaced type. Then they started to get laid out with little boxes and sidebars and things...
Up to about ten years ago I still got--what DO you call those anodized aluminum boxes they always used to have on the counters of small businesses, containing what I think were continuous-form carbon receipts that might have been about 6 by 8 inches in size, onto which bills/receipts/invoices were written by hand? The typefaces popular for letterheads, business cards, and so forth have changed considerably over the years.
But I digress. What algorithms and rules of thumb do people use for deciding what bills can be thrown out? Pardon me, of course I meant shredded.
(And please don't tell me to "just scan them..." then I need to fret about archival media and whether CD labels rot CD-R's and whether Blu-Ray DVD drives will be able to read CD-R's and how to assign them file names and... oh, my aching head)
Who knows what the effect of these chemicals in small doses might be? For all we know, it might be beneficial!
Personally, I think this is nonsense, but over the last five decades this has been used as a debating ploy in regard to DDT, asbestos, dioxin, and (most recently) global warming, so I figure I might as well be the first to post it.
...send them a donation or don't send them a donation, but don't whine about it.
They're a great resource and I don't want to see them go.
Your mileage may vary.
Just my $0.02. (And, yes, my donation was more than $0.02).
For what it's worth, there is a drug called VERSED (pronounced vur-said, two syllables) that is generally classified as "a sedative," one of whose properties is that it erases your memory of whatever you experienced while under sedation.
According to its maker, Roche Laboratories, "in one study, 73% of the patients who received intramuscularly had no recall of memory cards shown 30 minutes after drug administration."
It is commonly used during colonoscopies, not because colonoscopies are terribly traumatic, but because it provides superior muscular relaxation and enhances the effect of fentanyl (an anesthetic agent).
Nevertheless, the manufacturer describes it as "an agent for sedation/anxiolysis/amnesia;" that is, amnesia is considered to be one of the purposes for which it might be administered.
...despite the fact that every computer I've used since 1984 had a built-in "desk calculator" accessory (and friends who used SideKick have had one even longer), I have a pocket calculator in my desk drawer at home... and at work... and my wife has one on her desk... and so does just about everyone else I know.
I use several different versions of Windows at work (XP, Win2K, NT 4.0, and 98) and I can pull the calculator out of my desk drawer in less time than it takes to figure out where in the start menu they've put the calculator in THIS version of Windows.
In the old Mac OS the calculator was under the Apple menu, but it isn't any more and if I'm away from my own Mac it takes less time to pull out a calculator than to bring up a new Finder window, select Applications, select Utilities, discover that the Calculator isn't a Utility, find it in Applications, drag it to the taskbar--oops, excuse me, Dock so I can find it again...
And the real-world calculator always has the buttons in the right places (regardless of what keyboard I'm using or whether NumLock is on)--and is, as far as I know, free from arithmetic or roundoff bugs.
Oh, and it doesn't take any time to boot. And it runs for YEARS and YEARS on a watch battery (my PDA only gets six months on a set of AA's).
You're probably thinking of journalist Nellie Bly (pseudonym of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane), who left New York on November 14, 1889 and returned on January 25, 1890, beating Phileas Fogg's fictional journey by over a week. Phileas Fogg was a character in Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days," published in 1872.
[now drifting irremediably OT] "Around the World in 80 Days" was a hell of a good movie, based on Verne's novel, which was released in 1956. It was filmed in Todd-AO--one of a handful of movies filmed in that process. It was spectacular and gorgeous and a lot of fun to watch. It had quite a cast, David Niven as Phileas Fogg and Cantinflas as Passepartout. Only bad part was that the theme, which was quite catchy, had become a hit tune and had been played on the radio so often that by the time I saw the film--this was in the days when movies stayed in theatres for more than a couple of weeks, and in the case of Cinerama and Todd-AO spectaculars it could have been months--everybody was thoroughly sick of the theme music.
Take a globe of the world, one that's mounted in such a way that the axis can be tilted to any angle. Take it outside. Put it in a sunlit area. Turn the globe's support horizontally until the axis is pointing true north/south. Then adjust the tilt of the axis and the globe's rotation on the axis until your own town's position on the globe is straight up. You've just aligned the globe to match the orientation of the Earth.
Now, when you look at the globe, the part of the globe that is in sunlight shows you the exact part of the world that's in daylight. No software, no calculations, no gnomons, no Equation of Time. In the late afternoon you can see that your home town is near the edge of the lit part of the globe... and that it is lit more dimly than the part of the globe on which the sun is falling directly.
One project I fantasize doing someday during retirement is to find some sort of globe that can tolerate being outside in all sorts of weather... and a location where the sky is unobstructed... that is close to some elementary school... and set one of these things up permanently on a concrete pillar or something.
I realize that's both unfair and unhelpful, but it's still good advice. Actually I formulated notion that years ago... and not in connection with baggage inspections.
It stems from the time when we tried to bring a sewing machine into the United States.
I mean, at that time, Necchi sewing machines happened to be a real bargain in Curacao because Curacao was a junior member of the common market. My wife had been wanting a sewing machine that cost about $500 in the U.S. In a little window of a little fabric store way outside the tourist shopping district it was selling for the equivalent of $200, so we grabbed it. The store people were fascinated because they'd never had anyone from the U.S. buy a sewing machine before. Didn't know people in the U.S. even used sewing machines.
And it took us an hour to get it through customs.
It wasn't that sewing machines were contraband, or forbidden, or suspicious. It's that apparently nobody buys sewing machines on vacations. And it wasn't that it was an expensive or high-duty item; it's that they didn't know what the duty was. They weren't on the list that the inspector had at his station. So they pulled us out of line and took us to the supervisor's office. And he didn't have it in his big reference book. It took them about six phone calls and various people running around and bringing loose-leaf binders into the office before they could determine what category it belonged in. They decided that we owed them about six dollars and twenty-two cents and could proceed on our way.
For the same reason, I've quit taking my Rocket eBook with me. Which is a big shame, as the only real use it had was on trips. I can read novels with comfort and enjoyment on it, and I can carry eight to ten full-length novels in the same weight and volume as a single trade paperback. But it always causes extra delay because the inspectors have never seen one before and don't know what it is (and there's something about it that they don't choose to share with me that shows up in X-rays and bothers them). Plus, of course, the airlines consider it a "personal electronic device" that might interfere with navigation...
So, blend in. Don't carry items that other people don't commonly carry. (In other words, behave like a terr--no, let's not go there).
Not a rhetorical question.
My own personal experience--and of course I'm rendering myself vulnerable to remarks about the competence and professionalism of the companies I've worked at--it is that it is very, very, very rare for any source code depository that is not in active daily or near-daily use to be current, or even consistent enough to build. I don't say it can't be done. I just question, in practice, how often it _is_ done.
a) I've worked at a company that made a big deal of sending all their source to "secure offsite storage." What this meant in practice was labelling diskettes (this was a while ago) and sending them to this company. When, finally, an occasion arose to retrieve some of this source, it transpired that the company simply stored them--and had no way of finding or retrieving a particular diskette, even if you knew which diskette you needed and could tell them exactly what it said on the label.
b) Another company was developing a software product under contract to a company I worked at. We were supposed get the source to each and every version they released to us. In practice, most of the time any particular source archive they sent to us would not build or did not match the binaries. (This could, of course, gone undetected if we had simply been filing the archives away instead of actually trying to build from them).
I'm totally baffled. You need to use the stuff in advance of a noise exposure. They don't say how long it takes for it to take effect, but you'd think it would have to be at least half an hour. That means you'd need to know that the noise exposure was coming. They describe a use in which it provided good protection against a 115-db noise exposure.
A cheap pair of earplugs provides 30 db reduction, meaning it would reduce that 115 db to 85 db, which would also provide excellent protection. Earplugs come in a huge variety of designs, some very inexpensive, some very comfortable, some "high-fidelity" (attenuate all frequencies equally), some which attenuate very little when the noise level is low but seal and provide protection against loud noises (such as gunfire), etc. etc.
I mean, this is sort of like using pseudoephedrine instead of Kleenex.
I was disappointed not to see any pictures of these "jellyfish forms."
Indeed, the first thing I thought of when I read that passage was D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form.
I just got out my copy to check and, specifically, I was thinking of Chapter V, pp. 388-398, "On Falling Drops," which is an extended essay on similarities in form between (on the one hand) various kinds of splashes, liquid jets, drops of ink falling in water, etc. and (on the other hand) jellyfish and other medusoids.
...DATACRAFT? Wow, did that bring back memories. However, I suddenly realized that more than coincidence was at work, when I went to the McIDAS website and saw the "Dayton Street, Madison" address.
The University of Wisconsin, circa the late seventies, was a hotbed of Datacraft users. I believe it was Geophysics that pioneered their use with a Datacraft 6024/3. They introduced the cheaper 6024/5 at about the same time Digital came out with, IIRC, the PDP-11/20.
Departments at UW that needed minicomputers in the $50,000 class started buying Datacrafts right and left. Digital lost a lot of sales selling PDP-11's against Datacrafts. But the price/performance comparison, at that time and place, was really compellingly in favor of Datacraft.
Datacraft was headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, and I believe a lot of its engineering staff consisted of Cuban emigres. The Datacraft machines were 24 bits versus Digital's 16. I forget how many bits were in the mantissa and exponent, but there was a very usable 24-bit floating-point format. The instruction set was well designed for doing floating point without a dedicated processor (though a dedicated FPU was available). One of the things that sold us on the Datacraft was that without an FPU, the Datacraft's times for floating point add, subtract, multiply, and divide were all less than forty microseconds; the comparable times for Digital was about a millisecond.
The Datacraft had a hardware square root function.
The instruction set was the most godawful asymmetrical mess I've ever seen. If you were used to the elegant orthogonality of, say, a PDP-8, a Datacraft was a bit of a shock. (It made even a 6502 look pretty). Most instructions took a 15-bit address, and the natural address space was limited to 32K (of 24-bit words). However, in order to win some bid that required 65K, they had shoehorned in a few instructions that accepted a 16-bit address. This meant that when working in an address space of more than 32K, the linker (and compiler) had to keep track of an incredible number of linkage flavors, and probably about half the bugs reported had to do with things that happened when you crossed the 32K boundary.
There were three sort-of-index registers, named I, J, and K (if you used the variables I, J, and K in a FORTRAN program they were automatically assigned to the index registers). They were all slightly specialized, though. I don't remember what each of them did, but there were some instructions in which the I register, and only the I register had some special role, and ditto for J and K.
There was a 3-bit index register field, and most of the instructions that moved data into or out of index registers used the field to specify the register. That meant, of course, that those instructions could NOT themselves perform indexed addressing.
A very cool feature was an instruction that swapped the contents of a register and memory in a single cycle. The same architectural feature that enabled this also enabled another cool feature: there were functions that simultaneously set a word to all zeros or all ones and set the condition register to reflect the previous contents of the word. That is, a single instruction could you whether a word was zero or nonzero at the same time as it set it to zero.
Generally speaking--if there was anything general about the architecture, which I doubt--you could, at the binary level, specify more than one index register, which resulted in storage into all of the specified registers if it was a store instruction or loading the OR of the contents of the specified register if it was a load instruction. This resulted in a lot of possible instructions for which there were no assembler mnemonics defined. (And the assembler syntax was IBM-style card-oriented, with a single mnemonic going in a specified set of columns--you couldn't just OR the mnemonics themselves). Some of these instructions were actually useful, and there was always controversy, never quite resolved by Datacraft, as t
...Glenn Curtis?
I know it's just a joke, but very unfair to the Wright Brothers and shows a significant misunderstanding of what the "bicycle" was then. It was relatively new and a relatively advanced piece of technology. It was like being a personal computer hobbyist in, say 1975. The mechanical features of bicycles were nontrivial and a bicycle shop owner had to do a lot of significant hands-on mechanical work.
Furthermore, it was their experience with the bicycle that gave the Wright brothers insight into some of the issues of stability and controllability. When the Wright brothers' plane was first demonstrated before big audiences, people were surprised and shocked that the thing banked, thought something had gone wrong, and expected it to crash. Probably the other aerodynamic pioneers knew better, but there was certainly a mindset that heavier-than-aircraft would maneuver like boats--being turned with a rudder and staying level along the "roll" axis.
The cycling experience was undoubtedly relevant to their achievements.
So, Richard Pearce may have flown a heavier-than-air craft a year earlier than the Wrights, but it was little publicized and did not have much of a follow-on.
Now, the other side of the coin.
I'm very surprised by the posters that say the Wright's flight was better publicized, because in fact the Wrights played their cards so close to the chest that, at the time, relatively few people heard of their flight.
Santos-Dumont's flight in October 23rd, 1906 in the "14-bis" took place very much in public, with the press and representatives of the French Aero Club in attendance, and was very widely attended. It was far more publicized than the Wright's flight and most people at the time thought it was the first heavier-than-air flight. To this day, there are still those (particularly, for some reason, French and Brazilians) who believe his flight is the one that should "count."
Really, what the Wright Brothers truly deserve credit for was the brilliant engineering, their aerodynamic studies, their wind tunnel work, their conceptualization of the problem as one of controllability rather than stability, and their conscious understanding of the importance of what would now be called a good "user interface." Their flight wasn't a stunt. Most important, unlike Santos-Dumont's flight, it did not depend on having a pilot of extraordinary skill.
Now, about Friese-Greene's invention of motion pictures...
...at least he certainly gives that impression. His description of the "Kazaa experience" is the most intelligent thing I've heard a big executive say about Kazaa lately. It almost sounds as if he's tried it himself--or, at the very least, isn't six layers removed from someone who has.
It's worth pointing out that the GPL is an example of a way for companies to cooperate for mutual benefit without running afoul of antitrust.
There is nothing in the Constitution or common sense or antitrust laws that requires companies to engage solely in cutthroat competition for profit, or that says that companies can't cooperate for their mutual benefit. Care, however, is needed to make sure that cooperation doesn't run afoul of antitrust.
The GPL provides one of a number of available mechanisms for companies to cooperate for mutual benefit in a way that does not create antitrust problems.
Another way is the creation of voluntary industry standards--such as C, Unicode, the use of 120 VAC 60 cycles for home wiring in the U.S., etc. Presumably SCO opposes this, too.
SCO may win the FUD war if we aren't careful. We should make the point that SCO is fundamentally opposed to the whole notion of cooperation.
"The laser system is equipped with radar that will shut down the system in the event that an object is about to enter the laser beam."
How does it work? Does it work? I don't know, but those are the precautions they say they've taken.