Born 1972
1976 : Commodore green LED pocket calculator : quickly understood +-*, but failed to grasp / and especially the % key.
1981 : Casio PB-100 + Cassette deck : solving linear systems of three equations, and computing pi wirh Buffon's needle...an early exposure to numerics thanks to the manual and absence of decent games or anything else to do with it !
1983 : Ti-30 LCD (PB100 considered too precious to carry to school...)
1983 : Commodore 64 + color monitor + cassette deck...Cauldron and Ghostbusters, my own
function drawing program in HiRes
(where I had not noticed that the Y axis is inverted vs the mathematical one, the math teacher
was surprised by the fact that I was the only one in class with all the curves correct in the slightest details, only reversed upside down...)
1988 : Atari 1024 STE + Printer+ monochrome monitor (and color monitor from C64).
Discovering modern typesetting (Signum),
Carrier Command, GFA Basic with my own 3D drawing programs (no hidden lines however).
I rendered a horse stable for my father, saying
it would be ugly. My father said I must be wrong.
Once built, the stable turned out to be ugly.
Also computing all the possible finite groups of
order 6 to solve a stupid exercise, computing intersections of a sphere and a cylinder to save on ink technical drawing time...
1989 : HP-28B, symbolic computing, getting top marks in analysis and matrix algebra !
PC-AT at school : differential equations, linear algebra programs in Pascal
1991 : Sun 0S/Solaris at school : discovering Unix and Usenet (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica already)
I remember trying mosaic and finding it useless since the pages would'nt display if all the images weren't ready, and there always was one missing. Xarchie and Xnetlib were much more convincing to my eyes.
1995 : whitebox Pentium 75 with HP printer : DukeNukem3D, Civilization, Linux 1.2, the WWW
(14.4 modem) with Netscape 1.0 this time.
access to Cray T3E/IBM SP2 : parallel computing !
HP-UX workstations at work : OpenGL !
1999 : Compaq 366 MHz laptop : GTA1&2, Midtown Madness
Self made Beowulf cluster 84 processors
should I stop here ?
In England laws from the middle ages are still in vigour (it is forbidden for instance to kill or wound a fairy). So I wonder if nuclear physicists are liable for having transmuted matter in nuclear reactors, like in the one around Oxford..
this could have triggered a chain reaction
on
A $251 Million Typo
·
· Score: 2, Funny
and ended our civilisation as we know it, provoking a stock echhange collapse like in 1929 and the rise of some democratically challenged leaders. Quite offtopic, makes me think that we haven't had a forties revival yet.
Basically, the process of creating a printed document with a computer had, until the Mac, been one of simply typing ASCII into a very basic editor program (Linux users: think pico or similar; Windows users, think Notepad), then sending it to the printer directly as a stream of characters, which it would output using its single available ugly, low-res typeface and size. No formatting, no fonts, no graphics
you are basically right, but forget that you could also output escape characters (TeX, or nroff like) which would change to italics, boldface, underline, or Courier font. This at last on my Epson FX80 which I still use from time to time ; nice thing at the time was that the printers came with a complete manual, so that, reading it completely, you could achieve nice results whatever the computer you used...no need for device drivers since somehow you wrote it yourself in the streams of characters sent to the printer !
It was not more cumbersome than the embedded HTML commands I use right now for typing this comment.
For centuries, people have compared the human brain with the most advanced technology of the era : clocks in the 17th century, automatons in the 18th, Jacquard weaving machines or steam engines during the 19th, automated telephone exchanges in the 1920's, and digital computers from the 1950's on. Now it's (neural) networks, quantum computers or fuzzy logic, but the idea is the same.
to reply to parent and grandparent, you are both right, in the US people are free but not happy...and indeed, the concept of democracy seems to me as much "in principle only" in both countries. Even in Soviet Russia (no slashjoke here) there were free and open elections in principle, the Com. Party being there only to enforce a political vision but not to control the state. It's the same in Vietnam I think. Besides, at the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the parties gracefully retired without bloodshed, having understood that the people wanted something else ; that proves that there was some democracy.
Recently, in Europe, the governments in place did not seem to understand the message sent by the referenda about the european constitution ; they just stay in place, "business as usual". One wonders were democracy really is.
I just spent two weeks in Vietnam, and people look quite happy to me...and human rights do not seem to be violated anymore, especially not in shops selling bootleg MP3 and software CDs at 1$ apiece ! There even was very expensive engineering software like Patran.
The good thing when you buy a Windows CD there (or DVD for 3$ ) is that when you install it, Office magically appears already configured in several languages with all extensions, as well as Photoshop or Acrobat, Norton and so on. So Microsoft is actually able to put on the market distributions competitive with Linux, usable out-of the box !
Very interesting also in Saigon-HMC : the museum of american war crimes in Vietnam (called now the Museum against war or something like that for political correctness). The very disturbing pictures of agent-orange children or torched villages help to relativize the alleged human rights violations...
the motto in the porn industry always has been
on
Porn in Your Pocket
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· Score: 2, Insightful
if memory serves, aluminium was isolated in the 1850's only and not a thousand year ago. You are right however to point out that it was expensive at the time, since it was extracted by chemical means and not electrical as later on, from 1880. Napoleon III had aluminium "silverware" for instance.
What if the systems have to be retrocompatible ? The re must be a flag to detect if the processor is a 945, and if not, software decoding happens. By making the system believe the processor is pre-945, there must be a way to circumvent the protection (does not work of course if a 945 is required, but this will need another three to five years).
I experience this with almost any article written by a professional journalist about facts I have first hand knowledge of.
They must be teaching sloppy reporting in media studies, along with the annoying habit of starting with a shock thesis and carefully pruning out all the facts which do not fit the thesis : almost the opposite of the true scientific method (which, admittedly, does not guarantee a paper published even in the best scientific journals)
It's called the Langevin twin paradox of special relativity, and needs acceleration (with general relativity computations) to work (clocks orbiting around Earth, for instance). In the experiment you describe when you're back you have aged exactly the same than the people on Earth.
I am not sure it's in the movie, but definitely in the novel : the Russians use Bulgar gangsters for all the menial tasks in Istanbul, like following Bond and Bey on scooters, etc. When Bond and Bey assist to a gipsy banquet, there is a catfight staged to settle a matter between two girls, interrupted by a Bulgar attack which ends in a very bloody mess, despite the miserable firepower of Bond's Beretta.25 (changed to a PPK later in the books, in the first scene of Dr.No : the books were not adapted in order).
good point, but for what I remember of the movie the scene where Bond finds Tatiana naked in his bed is the movie, as well as the lovemaking in the train. I am not sure for the catfight.
At the time Bond movies were intended for an adult audience (remember the bikini scene in Dr.No) : the fight with Red at the end is one of the more realistic and violent I have ever seen in a movie. Remember that in the sixties people were still used to go to the movies often, and not everyone had a TV, especially in Europe ; besides, cinemas were omnipresent and extremely cheap (no 5.1, wooden chairs...)
Things started to go down with Moonraker, when the success of Star Wars made the producers target the teens and even the kids with Jaws. The average cinema audience is much younger now than in the early sixties since parents prefer to stay home to watch TV, which is much cheaper than movies, popcorn, babysitter, etc.
you don't want swap whenyou perform hours-long scientific computations : if the program ever swaps, the perfomance goes down, and since the computer is unattended, the hard disks burns downs in a few hours (happened to me). Many Beowulf clusters are diskless and headless for cost and maintenance reasons anyways.
and I wonder if they will go for an X or R rated videogame by including the three days of continuous lovemaking in the train...or the bed scene where Bond first meets Tatiana (with only her stockings on). "Good evening, Mr.Bond..". Not speaking of course of the catfight where the two Gypsies end up naked, and where Bond shoots his way out through 8 Bulgars : even worse than GTA !
you can find a lot of free midi files on the web, and transfer them for free on your cell phone with a cable, bluetooth or IR interface. It is also very easy nowadays to make Hi-Fi ringtones from a WAV.
like in the space probes and spy satellites. Coupled to a thermoelectric couple, you can get 500 W of power on a quite long time with no moving parts. Voyager and Pioneer have been using this in deep space for more than 20 years, it should work if the half life of the material is well chosen (Pu, U-235 or C-60). Not easy to find however of you don't have Libyan terrorists among your friends like in Back to the Future...
Slashdot Mirror
Born 1972 1976 : Commodore green LED pocket calculator : quickly understood +-*, but failed to grasp / and especially the % key. 1981 : Casio PB-100 + Cassette deck : solving linear systems of three equations, and computing pi wirh Buffon's needle...an early exposure to numerics thanks to the manual and absence of decent games or anything else to do with it ! 1983 : Ti-30 LCD (PB100 considered too precious to carry to school...) 1983 : Commodore 64 + color monitor + cassette deck...Cauldron and Ghostbusters, my own function drawing program in HiRes (where I had not noticed that the Y axis is inverted vs the mathematical one, the math teacher was surprised by the fact that I was the only one in class with all the curves correct in the slightest details, only reversed upside down...) 1988 : Atari 1024 STE + Printer+ monochrome monitor (and color monitor from C64). Discovering modern typesetting (Signum), Carrier Command, GFA Basic with my own 3D drawing programs (no hidden lines however). I rendered a horse stable for my father, saying it would be ugly. My father said I must be wrong. Once built, the stable turned out to be ugly. Also computing all the possible finite groups of order 6 to solve a stupid exercise, computing intersections of a sphere and a cylinder to save on ink technical drawing time... 1989 : HP-28B, symbolic computing, getting top marks in analysis and matrix algebra ! PC-AT at school : differential equations, linear algebra programs in Pascal 1991 : Sun 0S/Solaris at school : discovering Unix and Usenet (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica already) I remember trying mosaic and finding it useless since the pages would'nt display if all the images weren't ready, and there always was one missing. Xarchie and Xnetlib were much more convincing to my eyes. 1995 : whitebox Pentium 75 with HP printer : DukeNukem3D, Civilization, Linux 1.2, the WWW (14.4 modem) with Netscape 1.0 this time. access to Cray T3E/IBM SP2 : parallel computing ! HP-UX workstations at work : OpenGL ! 1999 : Compaq 366 MHz laptop : GTA1&2, Midtown Madness Self made Beowulf cluster 84 processors should I stop here ?
In England laws from the middle ages are still in vigour (it is forbidden for instance to kill or wound a fairy). So I wonder if nuclear physicists are liable for having transmuted matter in nuclear reactors, like in the one around Oxford..
and ended our civilisation as we know it, provoking a stock echhange collapse like in 1929 and the rise of some democratically challenged leaders. Quite offtopic, makes me think that we haven't had a forties revival yet.
Basically, the process of creating a printed document with a computer had, until the Mac, been one of simply typing ASCII into a very basic editor program (Linux users: think pico or similar; Windows users, think Notepad), then sending it to the printer directly as a stream of characters, which it would output using its single available ugly, low-res typeface and size. No formatting, no fonts, no graphics you are basically right, but forget that you could also output escape characters (TeX, or nroff like) which would change to italics, boldface, underline, or Courier font. This at last on my Epson FX80 which I still use from time to time ; nice thing at the time was that the printers came with a complete manual, so that, reading it completely, you could achieve nice results whatever the computer you used...no need for device drivers since somehow you wrote it yourself in the streams of characters sent to the printer ! It was not more cumbersome than the embedded HTML commands I use right now for typing this comment.
For centuries, people have compared the human brain with the most advanced technology of the era : clocks in the 17th century, automatons in the 18th, Jacquard weaving machines or steam engines during the 19th, automated telephone exchanges in the 1920's, and digital computers from the 1950's on. Now it's (neural) networks, quantum computers or fuzzy logic, but the idea is the same.
to reply to parent and grandparent, you are both right, in the US people are free but not happy...and indeed, the concept of democracy seems to me as much "in principle only" in both countries. Even in Soviet Russia (no slashjoke here) there were free and open elections in principle, the Com. Party being there only to enforce a political vision but not to control the state. It's the same in Vietnam I think. Besides, at the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the parties gracefully retired without bloodshed, having understood that the people wanted something else ; that proves that there was some democracy. Recently, in Europe, the governments in place did not seem to understand the message sent by the referenda about the european constitution ; they just stay in place, "business as usual". One wonders were democracy really is.
I just spent two weeks in Vietnam, and people look quite happy to me...and human rights do not seem to be violated anymore, especially not in shops selling bootleg MP3 and software CDs at 1$ apiece ! There even was very expensive engineering software like Patran. The good thing when you buy a Windows CD there (or DVD for 3$ ) is that when you install it, Office magically appears already configured in several languages with all extensions, as well as Photoshop or Acrobat, Norton and so on. So Microsoft is actually able to put on the market distributions competitive with Linux, usable out-of the box ! Very interesting also in Saigon-HMC : the museum of american war crimes in Vietnam (called now the Museum against war or something like that for political correctness). The very disturbing pictures of agent-orange children or torched villages help to relativize the alleged human rights violations...
"new media, same old shit"
if memory serves, aluminium was isolated in the 1850's only and not a thousand year ago. You are right however to point out that it was expensive at the time, since it was extracted by chemical means and not electrical as later on, from 1880. Napoleon III had aluminium "silverware" for instance.
What if the systems have to be retrocompatible ? The re must be a flag to detect if the processor is a 945, and if not, software decoding happens. By making the system believe the processor is pre-945, there must be a way to circumvent the protection (does not work of course if a 945 is required, but this will need another three to five years).
I experience this with almost any article written by a professional journalist about facts I have first hand knowledge of. They must be teaching sloppy reporting in media studies, along with the annoying habit of starting with a shock thesis and carefully pruning out all the facts which do not fit the thesis : almost the opposite of the true scientific method (which, admittedly, does not guarantee a paper published even in the best scientific journals)
It's called the Langevin twin paradox of special relativity, and needs acceleration (with general relativity computations) to work (clocks orbiting around Earth, for instance). In the experiment you describe when you're back you have aged exactly the same than the people on Earth.
for me, Google passes the Turing test. See my journal.
I am not sure it's in the movie, but definitely in the novel : the Russians use Bulgar gangsters for all the menial tasks in Istanbul, like following Bond and Bey on scooters, etc. When Bond and Bey assist to a gipsy banquet, there is a catfight staged to settle a matter between two girls, interrupted by a Bulgar attack which ends in a very bloody mess, despite the miserable firepower of Bond's Beretta .25 (changed to a PPK later in the books, in the first scene of Dr.No : the books were not adapted in order).
good point, but for what I remember of the movie the scene where Bond finds Tatiana naked in his bed is the movie, as well as the lovemaking in the train. I am not sure for the catfight. At the time Bond movies were intended for an adult audience (remember the bikini scene in Dr.No) : the fight with Red at the end is one of the more realistic and violent I have ever seen in a movie. Remember that in the sixties people were still used to go to the movies often, and not everyone had a TV, especially in Europe ; besides, cinemas were omnipresent and extremely cheap (no 5.1, wooden chairs...) Things started to go down with Moonraker, when the success of Star Wars made the producers target the teens and even the kids with Jaws. The average cinema audience is much younger now than in the early sixties since parents prefer to stay home to watch TV, which is much cheaper than movies, popcorn, babysitter, etc.
search for "Warewulf" clusters (turning into a Beowulf at night)...it's quite old news ahref=http://warewulf.lbl.gov/http://warewulf.lbl. gov/>
you don't want swap whenyou perform hours-long scientific computations : if the program ever swaps, the perfomance goes down, and since the computer is unattended, the hard disks burns downs in a few hours (happened to me). Many Beowulf clusters are diskless and headless for cost and maintenance reasons anyways.
most of the story is set in Turkey and in the Orient Express, in particular for 007.
and I wonder if they will go for an X or R rated videogame by including the three days of continuous lovemaking in the train...or the bed scene where Bond first meets Tatiana (with only her stockings on). "Good evening, Mr.Bond..". Not speaking of course of the catfight where the two Gypsies end up naked, and where Bond shoots his way out through 8 Bulgars : even worse than GTA !
or the Bogdanov brothers http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanoff/
a Beowulf cluster of these !
you can find a lot of free midi files on the web, and transfer them for free on your cell phone with a cable, bluetooth or IR interface. It is also very easy nowadays to make Hi-Fi ringtones from a WAV.
like in the space probes and spy satellites. Coupled to a thermoelectric couple, you can get 500 W of power on a quite long time with no moving parts. Voyager and Pioneer have been using this in deep space for more than 20 years, it should work if the half life of the material is well chosen (Pu, U-235 or C-60). Not easy to find however of you don't have Libyan terrorists among your friends like in Back to the Future...
I can say the same thing for FORTRAN as well...
indeed. sorry. must be Alzheimer's.