A gag from Compuserve's ADD Forum - since of the of the symptoms of Tourette's is tics...
As other have pointed out, UNIX was considered to be less secure than Multics, though I suspect that work on things like ACL's and OpenBSD's bug stomping crusades may make a modern Unix more secure than Multics. Multics may be in theory a more secure design, but that may not carry over in practice. OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me if being written in PL/1 is a good part of the inherent security as it is way too easy to write insecure software in C.
Another factoid that I ran across ca 1972 was that OS/360 required 1,200 man-years of work while Multics only required 50 man-years, the difference attributed to Multics being programmed in a high level language while OS/260 was largely done in assembler.
Back in the early 1990's, the Quantum Design MPMS was selling for roughly 100k$, of which the SQUID and associated electronics was responsible for only a fraction of that amount. (The SQUIDs in TFA were built by QD) I would be very surprised if the cost of the SQUID's and associated electronics was more than a quarter of the cost of a superconducting MRI magnet.
Is wire-wrap better for multi-layered circuits, or something?
No, PCBs are superior.
Not always. One of the advantages of wire wrap is that the signal lines can be randomly oriented among each other cutting down crosstalk. More info can be found in Johnson and Graham's book, High Speed Digital Design, a Handbook of Black Magic.
The whole point of the mass evacuations is getting people out way ahead of time so that the fire fighters can concentrate on fighting the fire and not rescuing people. Something like 250,000 people have been evacuated but maybe 1,000 homes have burned from the areas where most of the people have evacuated.
This is one lesson from the 2003 fires that was successfully learned.
For a non-Apple laptop, my first OS choice would be Solaris, which has an even more restricted HCL than Linux. With the proper hardware it would be possible to browse the web at Panera and play DVD's on Solaris as well as Linux. However, neither Solaris or Linux has anything quite like the iLife and iWork stacks (OOo is pretty much an M$-Orifice clone and I'd like to try something different).
Linux is 15 years old. 15. In computer development time that's an eon. Linux has been around for half the lifetime of personal computers in general, and it still hasn't taken off.
While Linux hasn't taken off on the desktop, it certainly has in the embedded world. With hardware prices continuing to edge downwards, MS will be under more pressure to reduce the price for Windows as it has in Asia. Another factor is the continuing improvement in web based applications where the OS is more or less irrelevant.
Also remember that it took Windows 13 years to become reasonably useful (1982 to 1995) and close to 20 years elapsed between the beginnings of Windows and the first reasonably solid home version (Win XP).
If I want to surf the web over the free wireless at Panera and watch a dvd
A couple of reasons that I'm strongly leaning to get a Mac as my first notebook... Have the advantage of a bunch of software that 'just works' and access to a Unix command line (all of my OS-X experience so far has been through logging in via SSH).
One other reason for getting a Mac is to play with Pages, which looks like the first non small niche WP package that doesn't try to copy M$-Weird.
If you question the holocaust, or are even unsure of the numbers killed (was it four million? or six?), then your speech can be banned under hate speech laws.
One number I saw was 11 million and have reasons to believe it may be accurate.
Directivity (ie. phased array) is good, and can improve speed and spectrum utilization, but it's just one more technology that improves communications. It's not a game changer in the slightest.
In an ideal world, phased arrays could be a game changer, the big advantage is steerable nulls. In the real world, multipath messes up nulls. Some of the more detailed analysis of propagation at 2.4GHz sounds a lot like ionospheric propagation in the HF bands (3 - 30MHz).
The real-time processing was done on one of several UNIVAC 490 series machines from the 1960s, and the trajectory computation was done on a CDC 3800 mainframe from the 1960s.
I recall reading that the CDC3800 was finally decommissioned in 1992 (may be wrong on the exact date) - which is quite a useful life for something designed in the first half of the sixties. The CDC 3000 series was a silicon based upgrade to the germanium based CDC 1604 and the 3800 was essentially two 3600 CPU's in a cabinet (SMP goes back a l-o-n-g way). The 1604 and 3000 series used 48 bit words.
I remember seeing a 3200 at CDC's La Jolla facility in 1971 - and thinking it would be neat having that as a personal computer (the blue plastic and white frame looked pretty neat at the time) - and realizing that the 386 machine I bought in '86 was probably ahead of it in processing power - also funny in that the store was about two blocks from where the CDC plant used to be.
The Electric Railway Association Presidents Conference Commission was set up in 1933 to develop a streetcar that would better meet the competition from cars and buses. The resulting design was produced in the US from 1936 to 1952.
For the non-streetcar fans, PCC = Portable C Compiler.
They have the right to refuse service for whatever reason they please.
Comcast is more or less a public utility, given a franchise to provide service. Arbitrarily refusing to provide service could be grounds for revoking the franchise. Otherwise the owners of the various pieces of property could say that they could tear up the Comcast lines anytime they wanted to.
Here in Australia, we have had download quotas since the early days of broadband. This is necessary due to the extremely high costs associated with international data links here (there is a duopoly on submarine telecommunication cables linking Australia to the rest of the world, so prices are high).
Do they make any distinction between domestic and international bandwidth? Seems to me that the purely domestic traffic would have significantly lower cost of service than international.
On a similar note, I can see some rationale for an ISP to say that bandwidth on the local network is unlimited, but caps will be put on traffic to/from outside the network.
I remember one of my fellow dormies getting into Pascal ca 1974 or so - running on a CDC-6400 (BTW, the same computer that SPICE was developed on)- and he was quite fond of it. He was later exposed to "An abomination in the eyes of the Lord" from some outfit in New Jersay, making comments that if Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor, the phone company would still be using vacuum tubes.
One of my engineering materials books lists the Liberty Ship failures as caused by a lack of understanding in stress distribution which the all welded design exasperated.
Problem with blaming the outgassing on Radon is that the half life is only a couple of days. OTOH, all the helium emitted as alpha particles as part of the decay chain doesn't decay and may make up a good portion of the gas.
The problem with the Silver Bridge was not so much underdesign, but the lack of redundancy in the eyebars used in the suspension members. Most suspension bridges use bundles of steel wires, if one wire breaks there are enough redundant wires to take up the load. In the case of the Silver Bridge, when one of the pins holding two of the eyebars broke, there was no redundant member to take up the load. What made things worse was that the towers holding the suspension members were on rockers, so they fell down when the eyebars failed.
Something similar may have happened with the I-35W bridge, a lack of redundancy led to the bridge to collapse as a result of a single piece failing.
By the way, most aircraft are required to maintain structural integrity after the failure of a single structural element such as a wing spar.
IIRC, the I-35 bridge was built in 1967, so the designers/builders weren't as painfully aware of the importance of redundancy as after the collapse of the Silver Bridge.
A similar thing happened in California wrt the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. Several bridges of the newly completed I-5 came down, the cause was found to be lack of hoop strength in the re-bar inside the column. Columns built after that used helically wound rebar to keep the column intact under seismic loading. The need for retrofitting was driven home during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and was further sped up after the 1994 Northridge quake when the reinforced bridges survived and the ones waiting for reinforcement collapsed.
Out of curiosity, did IDE have a standard interface when it started, or did everyone adopt the most popular one?
The original 'IDE' drives were made for Compaq by Control Data (whose disk drive division is now part of Seagate), so that could be thought of as the original standard. The intent was to have something that acted a bit like a standard MFM drive + controller to allow for a simple interface to the ISA bus. The original IDE port was on Compaq's multifunction I/O card that had the FD controller, parallel port, serial port and IDE port on one card. The original drives were 'dumb' with no information on drive geometry.
The P-ATA interface uses the same physical connector as the IDE interface, but incorporated much of the SCSI command set instead of the low level disk controller command set used on the original IDE drives.
There's not a heck of a lot of GNU in OpenSolaris - most of the stuff needed to bring up the OS (e.g. compilers) was developed by Sun or other System V contributors - unlike Linux that needed the GNU userland.
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As other have pointed out, UNIX was considered to be less secure than Multics, though I suspect that work on things like ACL's and OpenBSD's bug stomping crusades may make a modern Unix more secure than Multics. Multics may be in theory a more secure design, but that may not carry over in practice. OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me if being written in PL/1 is a good part of the inherent security as it is way too easy to write insecure software in C.
Another factoid that I ran across ca 1972 was that OS/360 required 1,200 man-years of work while Multics only required 50 man-years, the difference attributed to Multics being programmed in a high level language while OS/260 was largely done in assembler.
QD's SQUIDs were also used in Gravity Probe B.
No, PCBs are superior.Not always. One of the advantages of wire wrap is that the signal lines can be randomly oriented among each other cutting down crosstalk. More info can be found in Johnson and Graham's book, High Speed Digital Design, a Handbook of Black Magic.
This is one lesson from the 2003 fires that was successfully learned.
For a non-Apple laptop, my first OS choice would be Solaris, which has an even more restricted HCL than Linux. With the proper hardware it would be possible to browse the web at Panera and play DVD's on Solaris as well as Linux. However, neither Solaris or Linux has anything quite like the iLife and iWork stacks (OOo is pretty much an M$-Orifice clone and I'd like to try something different).
While Linux hasn't taken off on the desktop, it certainly has in the embedded world. With hardware prices continuing to edge downwards, MS will be under more pressure to reduce the price for Windows as it has in Asia. Another factor is the continuing improvement in web based applications where the OS is more or less irrelevant.Also remember that it took Windows 13 years to become reasonably useful (1982 to 1995) and close to 20 years elapsed between the beginnings of Windows and the first reasonably solid home version (Win XP).
A couple of reasons that I'm strongly leaning to get a Mac as my first notebook... Have the advantage of a bunch of software that 'just works' and access to a Unix command line (all of my OS-X experience so far has been through logging in via SSH).One other reason for getting a Mac is to play with Pages, which looks like the first non small niche WP package that doesn't try to copy M$-Weird.
Anyone remember the Caldera vs MS lawsuit where MS claimed to have lost the source to have lost the source to MS-DOS? (ca 1997)Or how about MS needing to use the Samba teams documentation to figure out what was going on with the SMB protocol?
One number I saw was 11 million and have reasons to believe it may be accurate.The Stairsteps National Monument in SE Utah would be a good start - though there is still a bit of light pollution (some of it from Las Vegas).
In an ideal world, phased arrays could be a game changer, the big advantage is steerable nulls. In the real world, multipath messes up nulls. Some of the more detailed analysis of propagation at 2.4GHz sounds a lot like ionospheric propagation in the HF bands (3 - 30MHz).
I recall reading that the CDC3800 was finally decommissioned in 1992 (may be wrong on the exact date) - which is quite a useful life for something designed in the first half of the sixties. The CDC 3000 series was a silicon based upgrade to the germanium based CDC 1604 and the 3800 was essentially two 3600 CPU's in a cabinet (SMP goes back a l-o-n-g way). The 1604 and 3000 series used 48 bit words.I remember seeing a 3200 at CDC's La Jolla facility in 1971 - and thinking it would be neat having that as a personal computer (the blue plastic and white frame looked pretty neat at the time) - and realizing that the 386 machine I bought in '86 was probably ahead of it in processing power - also funny in that the store was about two blocks from where the CDC plant used to be.
The Electric Railway Association Presidents Conference Commission was set up in 1933 to develop a streetcar that would better meet the competition from cars and buses. The resulting design was produced in the US from 1936 to 1952.For the non-streetcar fans, PCC = Portable C Compiler.
Comcast is more or less a public utility, given a franchise to provide service. Arbitrarily refusing to provide service could be grounds for revoking the franchise. Otherwise the owners of the various pieces of property could say that they could tear up the Comcast lines anytime they wanted to.
Do they make any distinction between domestic and international bandwidth? Seems to me that the purely domestic traffic would have significantly lower cost of service than international.On a similar note, I can see some rationale for an ISP to say that bandwidth on the local network is unlimited, but caps will be put on traffic to/from outside the network.
I remember one of my fellow dormies getting into Pascal ca 1974 or so - running on a CDC-6400 (BTW, the same computer that SPICE was developed on)- and he was quite fond of it. He was later exposed to "An abomination in the eyes of the Lord" from some outfit in New Jersay, making comments that if Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor, the phone company would still be using vacuum tubes.
Don't forget the Thomas viaduct built in 1831 and the Starrucca viaduct built in the 1850's. Both are still in use as railroad bridges.
Good point, but IMBO, the lack of structural redundancy was even more of a problem.
Perhaps you meant exacerbated?Problem with blaming the outgassing on Radon is that the half life is only a couple of days. OTOH, all the helium emitted as alpha particles as part of the decay chain doesn't decay and may make up a good portion of the gas.
Something similar may have happened with the I-35W bridge, a lack of redundancy led to the bridge to collapse as a result of a single piece failing.
By the way, most aircraft are required to maintain structural integrity after the failure of a single structural element such as a wing spar.
A similar thing happened in California wrt the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. Several bridges of the newly completed I-5 came down, the cause was found to be lack of hoop strength in the re-bar inside the column. Columns built after that used helically wound rebar to keep the column intact under seismic loading. The need for retrofitting was driven home during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and was further sped up after the 1994 Northridge quake when the reinforced bridges survived and the ones waiting for reinforcement collapsed.
USB to 5 1/4" FD interface???
The original 'IDE' drives were made for Compaq by Control Data (whose disk drive division is now part of Seagate), so that could be thought of as the original standard. The intent was to have something that acted a bit like a standard MFM drive + controller to allow for a simple interface to the ISA bus. The original IDE port was on Compaq's multifunction I/O card that had the FD controller, parallel port, serial port and IDE port on one card. The original drives were 'dumb' with no information on drive geometry.The P-ATA interface uses the same physical connector as the IDE interface, but incorporated much of the SCSI command set instead of the low level disk controller command set used on the original IDE drives.
There's not a heck of a lot of GNU in OpenSolaris - most of the stuff needed to bring up the OS (e.g. compilers) was developed by Sun or other System V contributors - unlike Linux that needed the GNU userland.