...Funny, I thought it BEGAN under "direct government control." Specifically, the U. S. military. Specifically, DARPA.
I even had the impression that most of the key technical and governance decisions resulting in the success of the Internet evolved under those conditions.
Or am I remembering incorrectly, and the Internet is a actually a direct descendant of CompuServe and The Source? (If you're old enough to remember CompuServe and The Source, you're old enough for your memory to be flaky!)
It's easy to say "don't open obvious spam at all" and "never open an attachment" and "never click on a URL in an email."
Personally, my middle-aged brain only functions at about a four-nines reliability level, meaning that if I deal with thirty pieces of email a day, about once a year I'll accidentally do something STUPID.
Like pressing "reply" before I've finished composing my mail. Or replying to all when I only meant to reply to one. Or replying to a list when I only meant to reply to one person on a list. Or thinking that PayPal might really have sent me an email. Or opening a foreign attachment. Typically I realize that I've goofed approximately five hundred milliseconds after performing the mouse click that commits me to the imprudent action.
(It doesn't help that I actually have real human friends who do send me email message with subject lines that are blank, or consist of the single word "Hi!" or "Meeting.")
I am sure that you never ever do anything STUPID, and I fully agree with you that someone as STUPID as I deserves to have my computer infected with viruses.
It's just like a bad TV commercial...
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"I don't use [product] any more."
"What? but, Agnes you've always used [product].
"Nope, now I've switched--to *NEW*, *IMPROVED* [product]. It's even tastier, more absorbent, and 22.6% faster-acting!"
"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator."
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Composing "poetry" is no challenge, because so much poetry is obscure, bad, avant-garde, etc. that it takes centuries to judge whether the stuff is any good--and there's not much of a commercial market, so that can't serve as a test. So nobody can tell whether the latest Markov-generated nonsense (Racter, anyone?) is poetry or not.
Song lyrics, that's the test. When a computer program can produce commercial-quality song lyrics. When a program has produced, say, a body of a dozen song lyrics which are good enough to be recorded by an artist and accepted by audiences that do not know they were produced by a computer, that will be a certifiable achievement.
I'm not talking Cole Porter here, either. But a set of lyrics that has some kind of erotic or emotional resonance to it, even if it sounds stale or derivative. (It doesn't have to be any better than, say, Andrew Lloyd-Webber).
I don't get it. It took years to convince the industry that it was important to have a detachable keyboard and an adjustable tilt/swivel CRT. The laptop returned to the single-piece design and I've been wondering for some time when we're going to start to hear complaints from people that use them for more than a few hours a day.
But now, we're going to have a device that requires you to hold your head in one specific position in order to view the 3D effect?
This will be a nice business-builder for chiropractors.
A single glass of seawater isn't dangerous. (Usual disclaimer: assuming you're an adult, in reasonable good health, the seawater is unpolluted, etc.)
It may not be a great idea because it tastes lousy, it will indeed dehydrate you and make you thirsty, and the magnesium ions in it, in addition to giving it that bitter taste, have the same effect as milk of magnesia.
Certain kinds of health faddists have been drinking seawater for years.
Obviously, dirty seawater from a harbor or near a sewage outflow will put you at bacteriological risk.
If you're lost at sea in a liferaft with no fresh water and dying of thirst, drinking seawater will eventually kill you. But one glass as a (disgusting) morning libation won't do you any harm.
Look, rebates are a scam. I spend more time and effort than they're worth because of the principle of the thing (following instructions to the letter, keeping photocopies of everything, writing down expected dates when I'm supposed to get them, following up when I don't, etc).
But Best Buy is no worse than anyone else. Within the past year I've bought a Mitsubisih monitor, an Epson printer, and a spindle of CD-R's from Best Buy, all with rebates, and had no trouble with any of them. The rebate forms were actually printed on the cash register tape, along with a second copy of the receipt. In one case, (the CD-R's), it was actually possible to file for the rebate online without mailing anything in.
I don't think your comment is fair. At least, it doesn't jibe with my own experience at a particular Best Buy (in Dedham, MA).
And just in case anyone is wondering whether any marine organisms are actually sensitive to caffeine...
"Responses of regular urchins to mechanical and chemical stimulation have been described by... von Uexkull (1896a, 1896b, 1900a). According to von Uexkull, caffein is a particularly effective chemical agent and evokes pointing away of the spines in all concentrations." (L. H. Hyman, The Invertebrates: Echinodermata, 1955, pp. 552-3).
Just a data point, but I think it's particularly interesting that even these invertebrates, whose physiology is very different from humans, are sensitive to caffeine.
...it's replete with observations that don't just cover the usual ground (those stale old extremes: "copying is theft" versus "information wants to be free").
Your mileage may vary, but I, for one, had never seen the observation that the chief function of DRM is to "protect the release window" (the short time when content is new and makes most of its money).
Why, that article reads just like the sort of technology-worshipping PR stuff that used to be churned out by big industrial corporations in the U. S. (and, of course, by the Soviet Union).
Only back then it used to be dams and steel mills and such.
This mighty dam holds mumble godzillion acre-cubits of water from the Colorado-Dnieper river. Its sixty-nine turbines turn at over 3000 therbligs, generating twenty-two thousand, six jillion and seventeen point six five myriads of power, coursing through twenty thousand leagues of wire--enough to serve the needs of sixteen-and-a-quarter cities the size of East Buffington. These complex control panels, with a combined mendacity of six hundred and fifty-eight knobs, buttons, and levers, are constantly monitored by eighty-six point three five highly trained technicians. Yes, when in full operation, this project will harness the vast forces of nature and offer the promise of a better life for the six million, two hundred and seventy-six-thousand, seven hundred and eighty-four people served by the North-by-Northwest Winnemac Regional Development Authority!
The article is not about archiving "everything in the world." It's specifically about references in scholarly papers, which, for the past three or four centuries, have been part of the essential fabric of scientific research. In a research paper, everything you say is either supposed to be the result of your own direct observation, or backed by a traceable, verifiable, and critiquable authority.
You don't just say "Frotz and Rumble observed that the freeble-tropic factor was 6.32," you say "Frotz and Rumble (1991) observed that the freeble-tropic factor was 6.32." Then, at the end, traditionally, you would put "Frotz, Q. X and Rumble, M (1991): Dilatory freeble-tropism in the edible polka-dotted starfish, Asterias gigantiferus (L) (Echinodermata, Asteroidea), when treated with radioactive magnesium pemoline. J. f. Krankschaft und Gierschift, 221(6):340-347."
Then if someone else wondered about that statement, they'd go to the library and pull down volume 221 of the journal, and see that Frotz and Rumble had only measured that factor on six specimens, using the questionable Rumkohrf assay. If they had more questions, they'd write to Frotz at the address given in the article, asking them whether they remembered to control for the presence of foithbernder residue.
This sort of thing is absolutely essential to the scientific process and makes science self-correcting.
The article says that these days, the papers are published online, the references are URLs, and that an awful lot of them are stale. If so, this cuts to the very heart of the process of scientific scholarship.
I don't know how you rate "most popular." Since computer use has been exploding exponentially, if you do it by user head count, no computer that's more that a couple of years old would count.
So, if you rate computers by their influence or by the affection they inspired, these really ought to be on the list:
The PDP-1. I mean, the MIT hacker community used it to play video games (Spacewar! and Flight Simulator), do word processing (Expensive Typewriter, TECO, and TJ-2), play music (Pete Samson's harmony compiler), etc.
The LINC. The Computer Museum designated this as "the first personal computer." It was a tabletop unit, not floorstanding, and pioneered the first diskette-like storage (the LINCtape stored about 700 half-kilobyte blocks with random access and rewrite-in-place; effectively, a linear diskette with fractional-minute seek time). It was a 12-bit computer, probably the shortest word length ever used before microprocessors.
The Xerox Alto. First WYSIWYG word processor. First compound-document (mixed words and graphics word processor). First "object-oriented" drawing program. First bitmap-editing painting program. Ethernet and local area networking. One user, one computer. I mean, every significant concept in modern-day personal computing was there.
The Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system. If we ARE talking user head counts--adjusted for exponential growth--the Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system has to be way up there. How many people used it? How many peole first got the idea that computers should be a working tool for ordinary people by using it? Where did people get the idea that they wanted their own computer, and why they wanted it--so that they could run their own BASIC programs. Hey, how would Bill Gates have known what to write in 1974 if Dartmouth BASIC hadn't been there first?
...to questions like "What is SAA?" "what is digital_nervous_system?" "What is (Wang's) Office 2000?" "What is Microsoft Back Office?" "What is.NET?" etc. etc. is always the name of some particular almost-upper-level manager who just got put in charge of some substantial chunk of the organization. In addition to being able to brag about how many thousand people he/she now has "working for him," he/she gets to pick some spiffy name for the grab-bag of projects that he/she now "owns."
What the grab-bag has in common is not any well-defined set of technical characteristics, but the fact that a single person is managing them.
Therefore, the grab-bag of projects is said to be directed at whatever set of goals that person thinks are now relevant or will sell well.
What the reporter should have asked is: what's the name of the person that is in charge of "Adaptive Enterprise?"
If the grab-bag of stuff does well, the person in charge will stay in charge and terminology will remain stable. If it doesn't do all that well, the person will change, the name will change, and the color scheme and typography of the brochures describing it will change.
Is there a good fairly-technical introduction to how this stuff works? ("This stuff" being current surround-sound, ambience, 3D sound, 5.1 sound, etc...)
I'm not even clear on how things like 5.1 encoding works--I don't think there are five independent full-bandwidth channels in there. Obviously none of these systems are accurately reproducing the three-dimensional movement of air in the volume surrounding one's head...
I already own the 1983 edition (as well as copies of "Envisioning Information" and "Visual Explanations.")
So what I really need to know is just what has been added in the new edition and whether it's really worth shelling out $40 for.
"Some additional graphics, extra colour, and corrections" doesn't really tell me a whole lot. It does suggest that it's not much of an update and probably not a must-have if you have the older edition. Is that correct? Of course, if the "additional graphics" include any gems like the multidimensional map of Napoleon's army in Russia, it might easily be worth the $40 for those alone.
That's exactly what FORTRAN does. You don't do any programming yourself, you simply describe the problem you want solved in a natural, easy-to-learn language, and the FORTRAN compiler writes a bug-free program that implements the solution.
If you're not using FORTRAN, you're wasting time and effort. Why, when you write a single line of FORTRAN the FORTRAN compiler writes an average of ten lines of code for you, so you become ten times as productive and can get projects shipping and earning revenue times as fast. And is it ever good code! Why, it's 99 and 44/100% as efficient as the very best hacker-tweaked assembly language. FORTRAN even puts the instructions on the drum for you in the best locations for optimum access speed.
(If you personally happen to dislike FORTRAN, then substitute The Last One, or DELPHI, or Visual Basic, or LabView--that programming language where you drag icons around and "wire" them together... it doesn't matter, the claims are always the same, including tenfold productivity boosts)
Symantec should talk to Intuit, which included a flaky PITA "activation" system in TurboTax last year. They got bad reviews from the likes of Walter Mossberg. They lost a significant chunk of business to H&R Block's TaxCut. They are dropping product activation from next year's product, and went to the expense of running full page ads in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in which product manager Tom Allanson "personally apologized" for the debacle.
I hope Symantec will find out that no company that actually has competition can get away with treating their customers poorly.
...which included a flaky PITA "activation" system in TurboTax last year. They got bad reviews from the likes of Walter Mossberg, lost a significant chunk of business to H&R Block's TaxCut, pulled it from the product, and went to the expense of running full page ads in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in which product manager Tom Allanson "personally apologized" for doing it.
I hope Symantec will find out that company that actually has competition can get away with treating their customers poorly.
I don't know how effective it is, because I'm glad to say it hasn't been tested yet in practice, but for about five years I have been organizing the directory structure of my hard drive entirely by recovery strategy. That is, in simplified form... anything for which the recovery strategy is "reinstall from manufacturer's CD" goes in one top-level directory. Everything for which the strategy is "copy directory from backup CD" goes there... and so forth. Another category is "external documents," which are, in effect, hierarchical storage: the "real" documents life on the web, or on CD-ROM's, and are, in effect, being cached for quick reference on my hard drive.
The directory labelled "Created" contains every file that I have personally created as the result of performing keystrokes and mouse clicks. Believe it or not, after more than five years it all still fits easily on a single CD. DOing this sometimes requires fighting the applications and OS that sometimes have their own idea of where things should go, but I fight the fight.
One directory labelled "Keys" gathers together all of the various codes, CD labels, activation codes, registration codes, shareware-nag-disabling codes etc. that are needed when reinstalling software. To my surprise, I currently have well over fifty of them.
Backup is complicated, and the data on my hard drive falls into different categories for which different kinds of backup are needed. It's lovely when the technology stars happens to align for a while in such a way that there's a cheap, external, removable-media device that happens to be about the same capacity as your hard drive and supports fast reads and write, but that only happens for brief, shining moments.
Most difficult and annoying problem: there is NO POINT in doing a backup unless you have a way to verify that backup and unless you DO verify the backup. My biggest complaint against tape backup systems is that in my own limited personal experience, whenever I have run a verify on a tape backup I have gotten an error-free verify less than 50% of the time. (And, no, verifying by using the tape drive's "read-after-write" feature is NOT the same as verifying the tape in a separate run; not even close).
I'd add that if the backup software you're using has any kind of tricky system with wildcards and pattern-matching, for specifying what directories to include or exclude during the backup, you need to spend some serious time verifying THAT. Setting these things up is like doing a global search-and-replace with regular expressions. It seems simple but it is extremely easy to make a mistake resulting in the omission of things that you thought were being backed up.l
Farts contain a significant amount of hydrogen sulfide... it's only a matter of time for the price to come down low enough that novelty shops will be able to sell $29.95 items that genuinely detect actual farts and sound off with "Major Fart Alert!"
Technology is so wonderful... maybe we won't have manned space travel to Mars, but at least we'll have fart detectors!
Am I infringing copyright if I say "Leopold Stokowski and Mickey Mouse shake hands in Walt Disney's Fantasia?"
Am I committing an indecency if I say "Grove Press created a sensation when they published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer?"
Am I committing a terrorist act if I say "Nuclear weapons information which the government, in the eighties, claimed was classified, appears in the Encyclopedia Americana?"
...don't worry, we'll soon have energy too cheap to meter. We'll unleash the limitless, endless, bountiful power of the peaceful atom to provide an inexhaustible supply of energy for all mankind.
A single aspirin-sized pellet of uranium will provide Mr. and Mrs. America with enough power to run their car for a lifetime. And soon, the peaceful atom will provide a propulsion source that will make family helicars practical and affordable.
Scientists expect this to happen in a few short decades--perhaps before the end of the sixties.
At least, that's what the science teacher said when I was in junior high school.
The tablet PC is partly driven by the same misguided notion that has driven many failed PC hardware and software developments: the belief, on the part of an older generation of CEO's, that there is something demeaning about using a keyboard.
Up to the 1980's, keyboards were associated with secretarial and clerical staff, who were paid less and ranked lower socially than executives. Executives had no skill in keyboarding and were proud of it. The mantra was "I have people to do that for me." The result, unfortunately, was that the decision-makers never got any gut experience in the feeling of keyboard interaction or the power and suitability of the keyboard as a human-interface device.
So, you have all those stupid fantasies of machines that you "will just talk to in English," and the continuing search for handwriting recognition.
Ever since all the bright young MBA's started using Excel and Powerpoint you'd think people would know better. Sure, the upper-mid-level people play the game of "my-laptop-is-shinier-than-yours", but I have still seen upper management eyes gleam at the idea of not needing to use a keyboard. They give lip service to the legitimacy of the keyboard, but in their hearts they feel that a high-ranking person should not be using one.
It's silly. A tablet PC is like a PC with a mouse but no keyboard (yes, I know there is a keyboard buried inside). It's an impoverished communications channel, and no matter how cleverly you design it, it will never be as comfortable, efficient, or powerful as a channel that includes a keyboard or a keyboard-like modality.
It would be far better to research improved, more convenient, more portable keyboard subtitutes (type in the air and let lasers track your fingers, or whatever) than to continue down the silly path of trying to express a human-computer dialog solely with a continous two-dimensional line.
Slashdot Mirror
...Funny, I thought it BEGAN under "direct government control." Specifically, the U. S. military. Specifically, DARPA.
I even had the impression that most of the key technical and governance decisions resulting in the success of the Internet evolved under those conditions.
Or am I remembering incorrectly, and the Internet is a actually a direct descendant of CompuServe and The Source? (If you're old enough to remember CompuServe and The Source, you're old enough for your memory to be flaky!)
It's easy to say "don't open obvious spam at all" and "never open an attachment" and "never click on a URL in an email."
Personally, my middle-aged brain only functions at about a four-nines reliability level, meaning that if I deal with thirty pieces of email a day, about once a year I'll accidentally do something STUPID.
Like pressing "reply" before I've finished composing my mail. Or replying to all when I only meant to reply to one. Or replying to a list when I only meant to reply to one person on a list. Or thinking that PayPal might really have sent me an email. Or opening a foreign attachment. Typically I realize that I've goofed approximately five hundred milliseconds after performing the mouse click that commits me to the imprudent action.
(It doesn't help that I actually have real human friends who do send me email message with subject lines that are blank, or consist of the single word "Hi!" or "Meeting.")
I am sure that you never ever do anything STUPID, and I fully agree with you that someone as STUPID as I deserves to have my computer infected with viruses.
"I don't use [product] any more."
"What? but, Agnes you've always used [product].
"Nope, now I've switched--to *NEW*, *IMPROVED* [product]. It's even tastier, more absorbent, and 22.6% faster-acting!"
"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator."
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Composing "poetry" is no challenge, because so much poetry is obscure, bad, avant-garde, etc. that it takes centuries to judge whether the stuff is any good--and there's not much of a commercial market, so that can't serve as a test. So nobody can tell whether the latest Markov-generated nonsense (Racter, anyone?) is poetry or not.
Song lyrics, that's the test. When a computer program can produce commercial-quality song lyrics. When a program has produced, say, a body of a dozen song lyrics which are good enough to be recorded by an artist and accepted by audiences that do not know they were produced by a computer, that will be a certifiable achievement.
I'm not talking Cole Porter here, either. But a set of lyrics that has some kind of erotic or emotional resonance to it, even if it sounds stale or derivative. (It doesn't have to be any better than, say, Andrew Lloyd-Webber).
I don't get it. It took years to convince the industry that it was important to have a detachable keyboard and an adjustable tilt/swivel CRT. The laptop returned to the single-piece design and I've been wondering for some time when we're going to start to hear complaints from people that use them for more than a few hours a day.
But now, we're going to have a device that requires you to hold your head in one specific position in order to view the 3D effect?
This will be a nice business-builder for chiropractors.
A single glass of seawater isn't dangerous. (Usual disclaimer: assuming you're an adult, in reasonable good health, the seawater is unpolluted, etc.)
It may not be a great idea because it tastes lousy, it will indeed dehydrate you and make you thirsty, and the magnesium ions in it, in addition to giving it that bitter taste, have the same effect as milk of magnesia.
Certain kinds of health faddists have been drinking seawater for years.
Obviously, dirty seawater from a harbor or near a sewage outflow will put you at bacteriological risk.
If you're lost at sea in a liferaft with no fresh water and dying of thirst, drinking seawater will eventually kill you. But one glass as a (disgusting) morning libation won't do you any harm.
Look, rebates are a scam. I spend more time and effort than they're worth because of the principle of the thing (following instructions to the letter, keeping photocopies of everything, writing down expected dates when I'm supposed to get them, following up when I don't, etc).
But Best Buy is no worse than anyone else. Within the past year I've bought a Mitsubisih monitor, an Epson printer, and a spindle of CD-R's from Best Buy, all with rebates, and had no trouble with any of them. The rebate forms were actually printed on the cash register tape, along with a second copy of the receipt. In one case, (the CD-R's), it was actually possible to file for the rebate online without mailing anything in.
I don't think your comment is fair. At least, it doesn't jibe with my own experience at a particular Best Buy (in Dedham, MA).
And just in case anyone is wondering whether any marine organisms are actually sensitive to caffeine...
"Responses of regular urchins to mechanical and chemical stimulation have been described by... von Uexkull (1896a, 1896b, 1900a). According to von Uexkull, caffein is a particularly effective chemical agent and evokes pointing away of the spines in all concentrations." (L. H. Hyman, The Invertebrates: Echinodermata, 1955, pp. 552-3).
Just a data point, but I think it's particularly interesting that even these invertebrates, whose physiology is very different from humans, are sensitive to caffeine.
...it's replete with observations that don't just cover the usual ground (those stale old extremes: "copying is theft" versus "information wants to be free").
Your mileage may vary, but I, for one, had never seen the observation that the chief function of DRM is to "protect the release window" (the short time when content is new and makes most of its money).
Why, that article reads just like the sort of technology-worshipping PR stuff that used to be churned out by big industrial corporations in the U. S. (and, of course, by the Soviet Union).
Only back then it used to be dams and steel mills and such.
This mighty dam holds mumble godzillion acre-cubits of water from the Colorado-Dnieper river. Its sixty-nine turbines turn at over 3000 therbligs, generating twenty-two thousand, six jillion and seventeen point six five myriads of power, coursing through twenty thousand leagues of wire--enough to serve the needs of sixteen-and-a-quarter cities the size of East Buffington. These complex control panels, with a combined mendacity of six hundred and fifty-eight knobs, buttons, and levers, are constantly monitored by eighty-six point three five highly trained technicians. Yes, when in full operation, this project will harness the vast forces of nature and offer the promise of a better life for the six million, two hundred and seventy-six-thousand, seven hundred and eighty-four people served by the North-by-Northwest Winnemac Regional Development Authority!
The article is not about archiving "everything in the world." It's specifically about references in scholarly papers, which, for the past three or four centuries, have been part of the essential fabric of scientific research. In a research paper, everything you say is either supposed to be the result of your own direct observation, or backed by a traceable, verifiable, and critiquable authority.
You don't just say "Frotz and Rumble observed that the freeble-tropic factor was 6.32," you say "Frotz and Rumble (1991) observed that the freeble-tropic factor was 6.32." Then, at the end, traditionally, you would put "Frotz, Q. X and Rumble, M (1991): Dilatory freeble-tropism in the edible polka-dotted starfish, Asterias gigantiferus (L) (Echinodermata, Asteroidea), when treated with radioactive magnesium pemoline. J. f. Krankschaft und Gierschift, 221(6):340-347."
Then if someone else wondered about that statement, they'd go to the library and pull down volume 221 of the journal, and see that Frotz and Rumble had only measured that factor on six specimens, using the questionable Rumkohrf assay. If they had more questions, they'd write to Frotz at the address given in the article, asking them whether they remembered to control for the presence of foithbernder residue.
This sort of thing is absolutely essential to the scientific process and makes science self-correcting.
The article says that these days, the papers are published online, the references are URLs, and that an awful lot of them are stale. If so, this cuts to the very heart of the process of scientific scholarship.
I don't know how you rate "most popular." Since computer use has been exploding exponentially, if you do it by user head count, no computer that's more that a couple of years old would count.
So, if you rate computers by their influence or by the affection they inspired, these really ought to be on the list:
The PDP-1. I mean, the MIT hacker community used it to play video games (Spacewar! and Flight Simulator), do word processing (Expensive Typewriter, TECO, and TJ-2), play music (Pete Samson's harmony compiler), etc.
The LINC. The Computer Museum designated this as "the first personal computer." It was a tabletop unit, not floorstanding, and pioneered the first diskette-like storage (the LINCtape stored about 700 half-kilobyte blocks with random access and rewrite-in-place; effectively, a linear diskette with fractional-minute seek time). It was a 12-bit computer, probably the shortest word length ever used before microprocessors.
The Xerox Alto. First WYSIWYG word processor. First compound-document (mixed words and graphics word processor). First "object-oriented" drawing program. First bitmap-editing painting program. Ethernet and local area networking. One user, one computer. I mean, every significant concept in modern-day personal computing was there.
The Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system. If we ARE talking user head counts--adjusted for exponential growth--the Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system has to be way up there. How many people used it? How many peole first got the idea that computers should be a working tool for ordinary people by using it? Where did people get the idea that they wanted their own computer, and why they wanted it--so that they could run their own BASIC programs. Hey, how would Bill Gates have known what to write in 1974 if Dartmouth BASIC hadn't been there first?
...to questions like "What is SAA?" "what is digital_nervous_system?" "What is (Wang's) Office 2000?" "What is Microsoft Back Office?" "What is .NET?" etc. etc. is always the name of some particular almost-upper-level manager who just got put in charge of some substantial chunk of the organization. In addition to being able to brag about how many thousand people he/she now has "working for him," he/she gets to pick some spiffy name for the grab-bag of projects that he/she now "owns."
What the grab-bag has in common is not any well-defined set of technical characteristics, but the fact that a single person is managing them.
Therefore, the grab-bag of projects is said to be directed at whatever set of goals that person thinks are now relevant or will sell well.
What the reporter should have asked is: what's the name of the person that is in charge of "Adaptive Enterprise?"
If the grab-bag of stuff does well, the person in charge will stay in charge and terminology will remain stable. If it doesn't do all that well, the person will change, the name will change, and the color scheme and typography of the brochures describing it will change.
Is there a good fairly-technical introduction to how this stuff works? ("This stuff" being current surround-sound, ambience, 3D sound, 5.1 sound, etc...)
I'm not even clear on how things like 5.1 encoding works--I don't think there are five independent full-bandwidth channels in there. Obviously none of these systems are accurately reproducing the three-dimensional movement of air in the volume surrounding one's head...
"...the RISKS are obvious."
I already own the 1983 edition (as well as copies of "Envisioning Information" and "Visual Explanations.")
So what I really need to know is just what has been added in the new edition and whether it's really worth shelling out $40 for.
"Some additional graphics, extra colour, and corrections" doesn't really tell me a whole lot. It does suggest that it's not much of an update and probably not a must-have if you have the older edition. Is that correct? Of course, if the "additional graphics" include any gems like the multidimensional map of Napoleon's army in Russia, it might easily be worth the $40 for those alone.
That's exactly what FORTRAN does. You don't do any programming yourself, you simply describe the problem you want solved in a natural, easy-to-learn language, and the FORTRAN compiler writes a bug-free program that implements the solution.
If you're not using FORTRAN, you're wasting time and effort. Why, when you write a single line of FORTRAN the FORTRAN compiler writes an average of ten lines of code for you, so you become ten times as productive and can get projects shipping and earning revenue times as fast. And is it ever good code! Why, it's 99 and 44/100% as efficient as the very best hacker-tweaked assembly language. FORTRAN even puts the instructions on the drum for you in the best locations for optimum access speed.
(If you personally happen to dislike FORTRAN, then substitute The Last One, or DELPHI, or Visual Basic, or LabView--that programming language where you drag icons around and "wire" them together... it doesn't matter, the claims are always the same, including tenfold productivity boosts)
Let's try that again...
Symantec should talk to Intuit, which included a flaky PITA "activation" system in TurboTax last year. They got bad reviews from the likes of Walter Mossberg. They lost a significant chunk of business to H&R Block's TaxCut. They are dropping product activation from next year's product, and went to the expense of running full page ads in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in which product manager Tom Allanson "personally apologized" for the debacle.
I hope Symantec will find out that no company that actually has competition can get away with treating their customers poorly.
...which included a flaky PITA "activation" system in TurboTax last year. They got bad reviews from the likes of Walter Mossberg, lost a significant chunk of business to H&R Block's TaxCut, pulled it from the product, and went to the expense of running full page ads in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in which product manager Tom Allanson "personally apologized" for doing it.
I hope Symantec will find out that company that actually has competition can get away with treating their customers poorly.
Indeed.
I don't know how effective it is, because I'm glad to say it hasn't been tested yet in practice, but for about five years I have been organizing the directory structure of my hard drive entirely by recovery strategy. That is, in simplified form... anything for which the recovery strategy is "reinstall from manufacturer's CD" goes in one top-level directory. Everything for which the strategy is "copy directory from backup CD" goes there... and so forth. Another category is "external documents," which are, in effect, hierarchical storage: the "real" documents life on the web, or on CD-ROM's, and are, in effect, being cached for quick reference on my hard drive.
The directory labelled "Created" contains every file that I have personally created as the result of performing keystrokes and mouse clicks. Believe it or not, after more than five years it all still fits easily on a single CD. DOing this sometimes requires fighting the applications and OS that sometimes have their own idea of where things should go, but I fight the fight.
One directory labelled "Keys" gathers together all of the various codes, CD labels, activation codes, registration codes, shareware-nag-disabling codes etc. that are needed when reinstalling software. To my surprise, I currently have well over fifty of them.
Backup is complicated, and the data on my hard drive falls into different categories for which different kinds of backup are needed. It's lovely when the technology stars happens to align for a while in such a way that there's a cheap, external, removable-media device that happens to be about the same capacity as your hard drive and supports fast reads and write, but that only happens for brief, shining moments.
Most difficult and annoying problem: there is NO POINT in doing a backup unless you have a way to verify that backup and unless you DO verify the backup. My biggest complaint against tape backup systems is that in my own limited personal experience, whenever I have run a verify on a tape backup I have gotten an error-free verify less than 50% of the time. (And, no, verifying by using the tape drive's "read-after-write" feature is NOT the same as verifying the tape in a separate run; not even close).
I'd add that if the backup software you're using has any kind of tricky system with wildcards and pattern-matching, for specifying what directories to include or exclude during the backup, you need to spend some serious time verifying THAT. Setting these things up is like doing a global search-and-replace with regular expressions. It seems simple but it is extremely easy to make a mistake resulting in the omission of things that you thought were being backed up.l
Farts contain a significant amount of hydrogen sulfide... it's only a matter of time for the price to come down low enough that novelty shops will be able to sell $29.95 items that genuinely detect actual farts and sound off with "Major Fart Alert!"
Technology is so wonderful... maybe we won't have manned space travel to Mars, but at least we'll have fart detectors!
I don't get it.
Am I infringing copyright if I say "Leopold Stokowski and Mickey Mouse shake hands in Walt Disney's Fantasia?"
Am I committing an indecency if I say "Grove Press created a sensation when they published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer?"
Am I committing a terrorist act if I say "Nuclear weapons information which the government, in the eighties, claimed was classified, appears in the Encyclopedia Americana?"
I don't think so.
...don't worry, we'll soon have energy too cheap to meter. We'll unleash the limitless, endless, bountiful power of the peaceful atom to provide an inexhaustible supply of energy for all mankind.
A single aspirin-sized pellet of uranium will provide Mr. and Mrs. America with enough power to run their car for a lifetime. And soon, the peaceful atom will provide a propulsion source that will make family helicars practical and affordable.
Scientists expect this to happen in a few short decades--perhaps before the end of the sixties.
At least, that's what the science teacher said when I was in junior high school.
My spiffy new silver-and-black 10.3 upgrade CD's just arrived yesterday, and I installed them... ...it is indeed build 7B85.
But what's with the "B?"
Isn't the "B" designation usually used for a beta release?
The tablet PC is partly driven by the same misguided notion that has driven many failed PC hardware and software developments: the belief, on the part of an older generation of CEO's, that there is something demeaning about using a keyboard.
Up to the 1980's, keyboards were associated with secretarial and clerical staff, who were paid less and ranked lower socially than executives. Executives had no skill in keyboarding and were proud of it. The mantra was "I have people to do that for me." The result, unfortunately, was that the decision-makers never got any gut experience in the feeling of keyboard interaction or the power and suitability of the keyboard as a human-interface device.
So, you have all those stupid fantasies of machines that you "will just talk to in English," and the continuing search for handwriting recognition.
Ever since all the bright young MBA's started using Excel and Powerpoint you'd think people would know better. Sure, the upper-mid-level people play the game of "my-laptop-is-shinier-than-yours", but I have still seen upper management eyes gleam at the idea of not needing to use a keyboard. They give lip service to the legitimacy of the keyboard, but in their hearts they feel that a high-ranking person should not be using one.
It's silly. A tablet PC is like a PC with a mouse but no keyboard (yes, I know there is a keyboard buried inside). It's an impoverished communications channel, and no matter how cleverly you design it, it will never be as comfortable, efficient, or powerful as a channel that includes a keyboard or a keyboard-like modality.
It would be far better to research improved, more convenient, more portable keyboard subtitutes (type in the air and let lasers track your fingers, or whatever) than to continue down the silly path of trying to express a human-computer dialog solely with a continous two-dimensional line.