Does anyone on the show have an engineering/science degree? I like the show. I ask as I often see many common mistakes in testing methods made on the show. One that comes to mind is the A/C vs open windows.
Even when you use 2 vehicles that are supposed to be identical, there can be small differences that can affect this type of test. To more accuratly check this it seems that the best way would be to fill both vehicles at the same gas pump until the nozzle clicks. Run a 200 to 250 mile test loop and refill both vehicles to find the gas used. then repeat the test with the A/C vs open windows reversed on the vehicles so both vehicles run the loop in both situations.
In the swimming underwater to avoid getting shot I think it would have been useful to do some additional tests. One would be to vary the angle of the gun in relation to the water. Another might be to drop a large mass in the water just before shooting to see if the large mass (person diving) affects the surface tension enough to change the results,
I have 2 games that require media be inserted in the drive. I've managed in my latest move to loose/misplace the media (Civ III one of them). I just won't buy a copy protected program where the copy protection causes me problems.
I do video editing. This usually takes a copule minutes of my time and then several hours of computer time for the final prep and burn. I only have one drive on my system so I can't play a media protected game while the computer is busy doing other things.
I also backup my system to CD/DVD. This takes several hours. Again I only have one CD/DVD-RW drive so I can't play media protectd games while the backup runs for several hours. I've started backing up to temp space on my video work drive (temp files only), FTP the files to my Linux system, burn the DVD backups there. I'm currenlty testing this to make sure the backups work and can be recovered from. Nothing worse then a bad backup;)
Re:Your opinion on game crackers?
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I have to agree with this. I backup my computer to cd/dvd-rw. With the amount of data,e tc it's nice to play a game while the system works, but with civ III requiring the cd to be in the drive I can't run my backup and play teh game at teh same time. I also recently moved and havint found the civ III cd so I've given up on civ III. I've stayed with alpha centauri and the original civilization and other games that do not require the cd be in the cd drive.
I do my best to avoid any game requiring media in the drive as it ties up the drive and/or the media fails or gets misplaced.
Putting data and code in separate segments is nothing new. making data read/write only and code read/execute only isnothing new. This was standard on Multics (http://www.multicians.org). I believe Bouroughs and other vendors also did this as a standard feature back in the 60's as well. I find all this reinvent 60's and 70's technology very amusing. Why does everyone have to keep reinventing solutions?
Multics was a commercial failure as it was not marketed by Honeywell. Multics was available as a product in the very early 70's, however a customer had to ask for Multics by name, threaten to go to IBM/DEC/CDC/etc before they could even get a proposal with pricing. The first Multics system was booted in 1969 and the last one was shudown IIRC in late 2000. Due to internal politics in Honeywell, Multics was never activly sold by Honeywell. GCOS was activily sold. Multics only ever entered a contract proposal when wither the customer insisted on Multics or GCOS could not meet the benchmark, but Multics cold (GCOS and Multics ran on the same basic hardware. Multics had VM, GCOS did not among many other differences).
Security never got in the way of development or use. Users managed their own security with very intelligent defaults. Security on files and directories is controlled by access control lists. An access control list item specified the.. that a particular permission applied to. any component could be a * for all so a public project file might have a acl entry *.gcc.* for all users on the gcc project. Note that one of the defualt entries was for the backup system so you could block the backkup daemon from backing up one or more files.
I'm not sure if it was intentional, but when I was working on Multics a system crash occured while I was doing a long listing on a hard copy terminal. When the system came back up an hour later, my listing resumed without dripping a single character.
That figure of 4492 is 4,492,000 lbs of fuel. IIRC form The Promise of Space by Arthur C Clarke, first stage fuel consumption was 15 tons of fule per second, 3 tons/engine.
I've had very good luck with the local computer shop. One of the advantages of 'cheap' off the shelf pc hardware is you can stock spare parts. I used to run a small ISP (1994 - 1999). The very first spare parts I stocked were power supplies and cpu fans. We had 2 primary suppliers, a good SCSI disk vendor (www.harddisk.com) and the local PC vendor (www.aitcomputers.com).
Having spare parts saved both us and some of our cohost customers.
Scheduled maintenance was done once or twice a year on weekends/holidays. Machines would be opened and any fan (cpu, case, power supply) that showed any signs of wear were replaced. between these times externally visible fans were cleaned with compressed air weekly to monthly.
As older machines were replaced with newer/faster/bigger/etc they were gutted for spare parts or left complete and functional as backups.
We ran our own news server and managed to place very well on the top 1000 usenet sites in the mid to late 90's. see http://www.freenix.fr/reseau/top1000/ and search for wizvax.net in the mid to late 90's. The last incarnation of news server was powered by an AMD K6-2/450.
Asynchronous CPU's have been around since at least the mid 60's. The GE-600/Honeywell-6000 series had several separate parts to the CPU that ran indenpendently. IIRC up to 5 instructions could be executed at the same time in different parts of the CPU.
I remember seeing a language/system on the GE/Honeywell mainframe at Griffass AFB/RADC called exper designed and used for instruction around 1970-1972 timeframe.
I worked for a company in 1999-2001 that specialized in multimedia instruction/training software.
I also seem to remember an instructional system called PLATO (?) supported/done by CDC sometime in the 60's through 70's timeframe. I've only heard/read about it, never used it so maybe this might trigger someone else's memory.
Not being a lawyer, I'm not sure which, if any of them might count as prior art.
well IIRC the KCML version of WANG BASIC2C allows something like ADDR(a)ADDR(b) so you can compare two items to see if they occupy the same memory location or are the same instance of a variable. KCML has been around since at least the mid/late 80's. KCML is done by an English company. The place I worked used the Niakwa version of WANG 2200 Basic2C. It's been many years so I don't remember the details on KCML and I recently moved and my KCML stuff is still packed away somewhere.
DARPA is the newer name. Back when I worked on the net in 1977 it was known as arpanet and IPV4 was so new that very few OS's had deployed it. RADC/Griffiss AFB where I worked was using the Honeywell IMP. At that time a fast arpanet connection was 56K with many sites on 9600 bps lines.
People in glass houses should not throw rocks. If you check your computer history you will find that Unix was developed by (and acknowledged in older documentation) the Multics groups at Bell labs after Bell labs dropped out of the Multics project.
Multics was originally concieved of by MIT. GE Information Systems and Bell labs became part of the project.
I'm not sure of the exact details but GE sold their computer business to Honeywell. At one point I think Honeywell and french computer company Bull merged/joined and later separated and I believe that Bull ended up with the rights to Multics.
For more details about Multics you can look at the usenet for the group alt.os.multics or http://www.multicians.org/
I have a registered copyright (TXu 189-482 ganted March 11, 1985) for secure communications between computers. I wonder if my copyright is older then theirs. If so, I wonder if they are violating my copyright? Work was completed in 1984.
I could understand one or two of them, but several hundred? The ISP only had around 1000 customers at peak. The system gets hundreds, if not thousands of undeliverable emails that sit in the mail queue until they time out as the senders do not provide valid bounce addresses. The mail system's load is higher now then when the ISP was live and had hundreds of customers sending and receiving email.
I used to run an ISP that went poof a couple years ago. I'm still running the mail server for myself and a few people who wanted to keep the address. The following is in the mail queue of bounced email on an account that hasn't existed for at least a couple years:
=== You are receiving this e-mail because you have opted-in to receive special offers from Hi-Speed Media or one of it's marketing partners. If you feel you have received this e-mail in error or do not wish to receive additional special offers, please scroll down to unsubscribe. ===
I'd really like to know how an account that has not existed for at least 2 years could opt in to a marketing list. Isn't this false advertising? I should problaby complain to the NYS attorney general or maybe the FBI.
Well there are at last 2 excellent Indian restaurants, one in downtown Troy. There are several nice Japanese restaurants with hibachi (sp) tables. There is a nice indonesian restaurant. There are many others in the area, I'm only mentioning the ones I personaly have sampled.
Both SUNY Albany and RPI have several foreign student organizations. I know the RPI ones usually do a presentation on their country including food samples once or twice a year. I ran one of the student film programs. I got an emergancy call one saturday to show a film as they normal projectionist hadn't shown up. This was for the India club. I spent some of the time talking with one of the club officers asking about the film and the players in it as the film was in one of the languages from India.
We havebn't had much snow the last 10 years. I think I've only had to shovel the sidewalk a couple times all winter.
The Watervliet Arsenal in Watervliet, across the river from Troy. As best I remember, the Watervliet arsenal is the only currently operating arsenals making all the gun barrels for Cannon and Artilery. It was also the only armory in the country that can handle 16" Battleship Cannon. This is where the gun barrels on the Battleships were handeled when the iowa class BB's were brought out of mothballs. There are alot of RPI projects around WWII concerning fabrication of long cylinders;)
Knolls Atomic in Niskayuna just down the street from GE Corporate R&D plus there are R&D groups in the downtown GE Complex. I believe there is a small R&D reactor at Knolls Atomic. I don't know the current situation, but at one time back in the early 80's RPI ran the reactor. Source: Student government meeting where the head of security admitted that he did have a pistol as it was required by federal law for refueling operations where he had to be there as part of the armed security.
Ballston Spa. I don't know the official name of the place, but one of the Navy's nuclear sub training centers is there. Two of my RPI friends trained there before serving on Subs. Both had Rikover interviews as did several other of my friends in Navy ROTC.
RPI has a Nuclear Engineering program which includes a linear accelerator. (I worked there one year doing programming). There is (or was) a very small nuclear pile on campus used for training the nuclear engineers. As I understand it, just hot enough to keep them on their toes.
There is a company in the area that makes some critical jet engine part. They are the only company that makes them in the US. I believe its some type of gasket, but I don't remember the details of the conversation.
I'm an RPI alumnus (class of '76) and still live in troy about a block from RPI. Unfortunatly I'm currently an unemployed *nix/network sysadmin/troubleshooter/etc. I still participate with a couple of student clubs (RPI-ACM www.acm.rpi.edu, and RPI Players).
Back around 1980, IBM gave RPI an electron beam lithography machine. One of my friends worked on helping set it up.
There was a grad course back when I was a Sophmore at RPI where you could design and build a small scale integrated circuit. The equipment was in the Materials Research Center, IIRC.
Something I did not see mentioned is SPAC (Saratoga Performaing Arts Center) summer home of the NYC ballet and Philidelphia Philharmonic. They also have rock concerts. For those who like Coffee house style music there is Cafe Lena in Saratoga as well as the RPI student Union sponsered Mother's in the student union. Saratoga also has the Saratoga flat track as well as a Harness track. I'd put some pictures up, but I con't want to get slashdotted;) I only have a 128K DSL line.
If you read the article closely, all the charges against him while he was working in Canada were dismissed. The only charges that he was found guilty of were those done while he was working/living within the US.
I'm not sure I agree with the charges to begin with mind you, but you should try to make sure you have the facts straight or at least the alleged facts from the article.
The fire temperature could have been as high as 1200 deg. F. Please see the
AISC ASD steel manual, page 6-3, on "Effect of Heat on Structural Steel.
"As examples of the decreased ratio levels obtained at elevated temperature,
the yield strength ratios for carbon and high-strenth low-alloy steel are
approximately 0.77 at 800 deg F, 0.63 at 1000 deg F, and 0.37 at 1200 deg
F."
I found FORTRAN very easy to learn and use. I've found C/C++ very difficult. Actually, of all the languages I have used, C and C++ have been the two hardest to learn.
I've worked in 10 different flavors of FORTRAN, several versions of PL/1, several versions of Basic, several assemblers including machines no one here has probably heard of (ITT ADX-9303, interrupt driven I/O only), SNOBOL, APL, LISP, PERL, and others I don't readily remember. I haven't looked at JAVA. C/C++/JAVA seem to be languages that need huge support libraries to overcome the lack of builtin features and capabilities.
My use of C/C++ has always been frustrated by the lack of language features and abilities that make things easy.
I've got several computers running either windows or linux. Since I rarely need access to them, I put them and the noisy A/C to keep them cool in another room and use a Belkin 2x8 KVM switch (2 kybd/monnitors/mice). One kvm setup is with the equipment for when I need ready access to the hardware, the other is at my desk. I also went to a real office funiture store and bought a very good high end chair. Its the first chair I've had that has lasted more then a year or so. I've had it for over 5 years and its comfortable sitting even on those long 16+ hour days. I've even slept in it a couple times, though not intentionally;)
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Does anyone on the show have an engineering/science degree? I like the show. I ask as I often see many common mistakes in testing methods made on the show. One that comes to mind is the A/C vs open windows.
Even when you use 2 vehicles that are supposed to be identical, there can be small differences that can affect this type of test. To more accuratly check this it seems that the best way would be to fill both vehicles at the same gas pump until the nozzle clicks. Run a 200 to 250 mile test loop and refill both vehicles to find the gas used. then repeat the test with the A/C vs open windows reversed on the vehicles so both vehicles run the loop in both situations.
In the swimming underwater to avoid getting shot I think it would have been useful to do some additional tests. One would be to vary the angle of the gun in relation to the water. Another might be to drop a large mass in the water just before shooting to see if the large mass (person diving) affects the surface tension enough to change the results,
I have 2 games that require media be inserted in the drive. I've managed in my latest move to loose/misplace the media (Civ III one of them). I just won't buy a copy protected program where the copy protection causes me problems.
;)
I do video editing. This usually takes a copule minutes of my time and then several hours of computer time for the final prep and burn. I only have one drive on my system so I can't play a media protected game while the computer is busy doing other things.
I also backup my system to CD/DVD. This takes several hours. Again I only have one CD/DVD-RW drive so I can't play media protectd games while the backup runs for several hours. I've started backing up to temp space on my video work drive (temp files only), FTP the files to my Linux system, burn the DVD backups there. I'm currenlty testing this to make sure the backups work and can be recovered from. Nothing worse then a bad backup
I have to agree with this. I backup my computer to cd/dvd-rw. With the amount of data,e tc it's nice to play a game while the system works, but with civ III requiring the cd to be in the drive I can't run my backup and play teh game at teh same time. I also recently moved and havint found the civ III cd so I've given up on civ III. I've stayed with alpha centauri and the original civilization and other games that do not require the cd be in the cd drive.
I do my best to avoid any game requiring media in the drive as it ties up the drive and/or the media fails or gets misplaced.
Putting data and code in separate segments is nothing new. making data read/write only and code read/execute only isnothing new. This was standard on Multics (http://www.multicians.org). I believe Bouroughs and other vendors also did this as a standard feature back in the 60's as well. I find all this reinvent 60's and 70's technology very amusing. Why does everyone have to keep reinventing solutions?
Multics was a commercial failure as it was not marketed by Honeywell. Multics was available as a product in the very early 70's, however a customer had to ask for Multics by name, threaten to go to IBM/DEC/CDC/etc before they could even get a proposal with pricing. The first Multics system was booted in 1969 and the last one was shudown IIRC in late 2000. Due to internal politics in Honeywell, Multics was never activly sold by Honeywell. GCOS was activily sold. Multics only ever entered a contract proposal when wither the customer insisted on Multics or GCOS could not meet the benchmark, but Multics cold (GCOS and Multics ran on the same basic hardware. Multics had VM, GCOS did not among many other differences).
Security never got in the way of development or use. Users managed their own security with very intelligent defaults. Security on files and directories is controlled by access control lists. An access control list item specified the .. that a particular permission applied to. any component could be a * for all so a public project file might have a acl entry *.gcc.* for all users on the gcc project. Note that one of the defualt entries was for the backup system so you could block the backkup daemon from backing up one or more files.
I'm not sure if it was intentional, but when I was working on Multics a system crash occured while I was doing a long listing on a hard copy terminal. When the system came back up an hour later, my listing resumed without dripping a single character.
That figure of 4492 is 4,492,000 lbs of fuel. IIRC form The Promise of Space by Arthur C Clarke, first stage fuel consumption was 15 tons of fule per second, 3 tons/engine.
I've had very good luck with the local computer shop. One of the advantages of 'cheap' off the shelf pc hardware is you can stock spare parts. I used to run a small ISP (1994 - 1999). The very first spare parts I stocked were power supplies and cpu fans. We had 2 primary suppliers, a good SCSI disk vendor (www.harddisk.com) and the local PC vendor (www.aitcomputers.com).
Having spare parts saved both us and some of our cohost customers.
Scheduled maintenance was done once or twice a year on weekends/holidays. Machines would be opened and any fan (cpu, case, power supply) that showed any signs of wear were replaced. between these times externally visible fans were cleaned with compressed air weekly to monthly.
As older machines were replaced with newer/faster/bigger/etc they were gutted for spare parts or left complete and functional as backups.
We ran our own news server and managed to place very well on the top 1000 usenet sites in the mid to late 90's. see http://www.freenix.fr/reseau/top1000/ and search for wizvax.net in the mid to late 90's. The last incarnation of news server was powered by an AMD K6-2/450.
Asynchronous CPU's have been around since at least the mid 60's. The GE-600/Honeywell-6000 series had several separate parts to the CPU that ran indenpendently. IIRC up to 5 instructions could be executed at the same time in different parts of the CPU.
I remember seeing a language/system on the GE/Honeywell mainframe at Griffass AFB/RADC called exper designed and used for instruction around 1970-1972 timeframe.
I worked for a company in 1999-2001 that specialized in multimedia instruction/training software.
I also seem to remember an instructional system called PLATO (?) supported/done by CDC sometime in the 60's through 70's timeframe. I've only heard/read about it, never used it so maybe this might trigger someone else's memory.
Not being a lawyer, I'm not sure which, if any of them might count as prior art.
well IIRC the KCML version of WANG BASIC2C allows something like ADDR(a)ADDR(b) so you can compare two items to see if they occupy the same memory location or are the same instance of a variable. KCML has been around since at least the mid/late 80's. KCML is done by an English company. The place I worked used the Niakwa version of WANG 2200 Basic2C. It's been many years so I don't remember the details on KCML and I recently moved and my KCML stuff is still packed away somewhere.
DARPA is the newer name. Back when I worked on the net in 1977 it was known as arpanet and IPV4 was so new that very few OS's had deployed it. RADC/Griffiss AFB where I worked was using the Honeywell IMP. At that time a fast arpanet connection was 56K with many sites on 9600 bps lines.
Multics was originally concieved of by MIT. GE Information Systems and Bell labs became part of the project.
I'm not sure of the exact details but GE sold their computer business to Honeywell. At one point I think Honeywell and french computer company Bull merged/joined and later separated and I believe that Bull ended up with the rights to Multics.
For more details about Multics you can look at the usenet for the group alt.os.multics or http://www.multicians.org/
I have a registered copyright (TXu 189-482 ganted March 11, 1985) for secure communications between computers. I wonder if my copyright is older then theirs. If so, I wonder if they are violating my copyright? Work was completed in 1984.
I could understand one or two of them, but several hundred? The ISP only had around 1000 customers at peak. The system gets hundreds, if not thousands of undeliverable emails that sit in the mail queue until they time out as the senders do not provide valid bounce addresses. The mail system's load is higher now then when the ISP was live and had hundreds of customers sending and receiving email.
I used to run an ISP that went poof a couple years ago. I'm still running the mail server for myself and a few people who wanted to keep the address. The following is in the mail queue of bounced email on an account that hasn't existed for at least a couple years:
===
You are receiving this e-mail because you have opted-in to receive special offers from
Hi-Speed Media or one of it's marketing partners. If you feel you have received this e-mail in error or do not wish to receive additional special offers, please scroll down to unsubscribe.
===
I'd really like to know how an account that has not existed for at least 2 years could opt in to a marketing list. Isn't this false advertising? I should problaby complain to the NYS attorney general or maybe the FBI.
Both SUNY Albany and RPI have several foreign student organizations. I know the RPI ones usually do a presentation on their country including food samples once or twice a year. I ran one of the student film programs. I got an emergancy call one saturday to show a film as they normal projectionist hadn't shown up. This was for the India club. I spent some of the time talking with one of the club officers asking about the film and the players in it as the film was in one of the languages from India.
We havebn't had much snow the last 10 years. I think I've only had to shovel the sidewalk a couple times all winter.
The Watervliet Arsenal in Watervliet, across the river from Troy. As best I remember, the Watervliet arsenal is the only currently operating arsenals making all the gun barrels for Cannon and Artilery. It was also the only armory in the country that can handle 16" Battleship Cannon. This is where the gun barrels on the Battleships were handeled when the iowa class BB's were brought out of mothballs. There are alot of RPI projects around WWII concerning fabrication of long cylinders ;)
Knolls Atomic in Niskayuna just down the street from GE Corporate R&D plus there are R&D groups in the downtown GE Complex. I believe there is a small R&D reactor at Knolls Atomic. I don't know the current situation, but at one time back in the early 80's RPI ran the reactor. Source: Student government meeting where the head of security admitted that he did have a pistol as it was required by federal law for refueling operations where he had to be there as part of the armed security.
Ballston Spa. I don't know the official name of the place, but one of the Navy's nuclear sub training centers is there. Two of my RPI friends trained there before serving on Subs. Both had Rikover interviews as did several other of my friends in Navy ROTC.
RPI has a Nuclear Engineering program which includes a linear accelerator. (I worked there one year doing programming). There is (or was) a very small nuclear pile on campus used for training the nuclear engineers. As I understand it, just hot enough to keep them on their toes.
There is a company in the area that makes some critical jet engine part. They are the only company that makes them in the US. I believe its some type of gasket, but I don't remember the details of the conversation.
I'm an RPI alumnus (class of '76) and still live in troy about a block from RPI. Unfortunatly I'm currently an unemployed *nix/network sysadmin/troubleshooter/etc. I still participate with a couple of student clubs (RPI-ACM www.acm.rpi.edu, and RPI Players).
Back around 1980, IBM gave RPI an electron beam lithography machine. One of my friends worked on helping set it up.
There was a grad course back when I was a Sophmore at RPI where you could design and build a small scale integrated circuit. The equipment was in the Materials Research Center, IIRC.
Something I did not see mentioned is SPAC (Saratoga Performaing Arts Center) summer home of the NYC ballet and Philidelphia Philharmonic. They also have rock concerts. For those who like Coffee house style music there is Cafe Lena in Saratoga as well as the RPI student Union sponsered Mother's in the student union. Saratoga also has the Saratoga flat track as well as a Harness track. I'd put some pictures up, but I con't want to get slashdotted ;) I only have a 128K DSL line.
If you read the article closely, all the charges against him while he was working in Canada were dismissed. The only charges that he was found guilty of were those done while he was working/living within the US.
I'm not sure I agree with the charges to begin with mind you, but you should try to make sure you have the facts straight or at least the alleged facts from the article.
WOW! doesn't that describe many versions of the Bible? Are they trying to outlaw religeon?
The fire temperature could have been as high as 1200 deg. F. Please see the AISC ASD steel manual, page 6-3, on "Effect of Heat on Structural Steel. "As examples of the decreased ratio levels obtained at elevated temperature, the yield strength ratios for carbon and high-strenth low-alloy steel are approximately 0.77 at 800 deg F, 0.63 at 1000 deg F, and 0.37 at 1200 deg F."
I know several people who use LISP. I can't tell you much more as I don't know much more as the use is for classified government projects.
I've worked in 10 different flavors of FORTRAN, several versions of PL/1, several versions of Basic, several assemblers including machines no one here has probably heard of (ITT ADX-9303, interrupt driven I/O only), SNOBOL, APL, LISP, PERL, and others I don't readily remember. I haven't looked at JAVA. C/C++/JAVA seem to be languages that need huge support libraries to overcome the lack of builtin features and capabilities.
My use of C/C++ has always been frustrated by the lack of language features and abilities that make things easy.
I've got several computers running either windows or linux. Since I rarely need access to them, I put them and the noisy A/C to keep them cool in another room and use a Belkin 2x8 KVM switch (2 kybd/monnitors/mice). One kvm setup is with the equipment for when I need ready access to the hardware, the other is at my desk. I also went to a real office funiture store and bought a very good high end chair. Its the first chair I've had that has lasted more then a year or so. I've had it for over 5 years and its comfortable sitting even on those long 16+ hour days. I've even slept in it a couple times, though not intentionally ;)