I remember you from about ten years ago. Most of the old admins do. I'm glad you're no longer thinking of harming yourself, and if you do want to return to Wikipedia in the future, I'll do my best to help the process.
In the mid-1980s I had a program called PC-Alien which ran on an MS-Dos machine and which could read almost any undamaged CP/M formatted disk. There is a more recent program which appears to have similar capabilites: OmniFlop, but I have no experience of using this. Such a program means a standard IBM PC, still reasonably commonly available, could read the undamaged disks rather than searching for an even older and rarer CP/M machine.
A third approach is to have a robot independent of the vehicle which can drive it, and presumably can switch from one vehicle to another. The best example of this I'm aware of is Yamaha's motobot which is capable of riding a motorcycle on a track. I'm not sure how much of the article is speculation rather than existing capability. http://pcmag.com/robotics-automation-products/39534/news/this-yamaha-robot-can-drive-a-motorcyle
Alas, there is no free PL/I compiler for Windows or Linux; certainly not one with anything approaching a full feature set and currently maintained. I learned PL/I at technical college in the 1980s and it was certainly better than the other languages taught then (COBOL, BASIC and RPG). I would like to be able to write a few programs in it for nostalgic reasons.
I don't think we were taught anything about computers in class, but there was a computer programming club. We used PORTRAN, which is a cut-down version of FORTRAN - I think it stands for Port-a-punch FORTRAN. The cards were sent away to a computer a few hundred km away, and a syntax error listing came back by the following week. It wasn't exactly a productive environment, so we competed to see who could get the most different errors in a single program.
Those of us who grew up in areas where there was no electricity. Even in developed nations, electricity wasn't available in some country areas well into the 1960s. In my case, this was Northern Ireland, only a mile or two out from a small city.
New Scientist is possibly the best popular science magazine available. Scientific American is pretty good too, but doesn't have the same coverage because it's monthly, while NS is weekly.
The original Ghost is still produced as Ghost Solution Suite. See http://www.symantec.com/business/ghost-solution-suite. Symantec also produces Norton Ghost which uses a different code base and incompatible image file formats.
There are regular stories on Wikipedia on Slashdot, and occasional stories on other wikis. Shouldn't there be either a Wikipedia icon or a Wiki icon to distinguish these stories? The Wikipedia "multilingual globe being built" is copyright (one of the very few things in Wikipedia which is) so you can't use that, but the Wikipedia "W" is fairly well known. Looking through Wikimedia Commons, this puzzle piece looked good to me. I don't know if the GFDL licence would be a problem for Slashdot.
The MediaWiki sunflower would only be suitable as an icon for Wikis powered by that piece of software. I don't have an idea for an icon to represent all wikis.
Roguelike games have held my interest since I first got into computers in the mid 1980s. I discovered Moria on an Amiga in 1989 or 1990, then Angband a few years later, and moved from there to Zangband about the time I got into the internet - about 1994. I've kept playing it on and off ever since - never won.
Occasionally I fire up one of the modern graphically impressive games, but I tire of them quickly. The Civilization series would be my favourite "conventional" game, and I've spent long hours on Civ, Civ2, Alpha Centauri (probably my overall favourite of the series), Civ3 and Civ4. I've looked at Age of Empires but find the micromanagement a complete pain.
A couple of years ago, I got hooked on Wikipedia, and that now takes up most of my gaming time. I know Wikipedia isn't a game, but it appeals to the same obsessive-compulsive element in me, and the countless hours I spend there researching and writing articles, copyediting or playing whack-a-mole with vandals produces a long-term result which is good for everyone.
Technically, my first computer was some Burroughs mainframe in a distant city, which as a high school student I could send programs on punched cards to. I'd get a listing back a couple of weeks later explaining the syntax errors in my program.
One of the first computers I got to lay my hands on was a ZX 81. A friend had been given one as a bonus by her work (she was an ICL tech) and invited me over to play with it. I browsed through the first few pages of the manual and proceeded to write and debug a program to print the times tables. The program would probably have been 18-20 lines long. Then I turned to the next page of the manual and discovered for loops.
A couple of years later, one of my neighbours got a 48 k Spectrum. An acquaintance showed me the Colossal Cave game on a CP/M machine, and I stayed up all night writing a version of that game for the Spectrum. I don't remember any details of the programming of it, except that I used computed gotos to handle room movement. The save to tape failed, so the program only lasted for a couple of days before the Spectrum was turned off.
A year or two later again, I threw in my truck driving job and went to tech for a couple of years to become a professional programmer. The first machine I actually owned was a CP/M luggable Kapro clone.
Last year I retired from programming. I'll always have computers as a major part of my life, but I've finally burned out on programming.
I quit my job with a major software company last year, and patents were part of the reason. I was planning to quit within a year or two anyway, but when my objectives for the year included "Get two patents" over my strenous objections, I knew I would never see another annual review.
I'm sufficiently financially secure that such a decision was easier for me than for many. I can call it "early retirement", or "career change". It's been five months since I quit, and I've had no regrets. From the end of this month, I'm a full-time student working towards a BSc as a hobby.
Two RCX bricks can communicate with each other using the IR ports. I don't have a second one, but the books I have all rave about how much more interesting it gets when you have two RCX bricks controlling your robot.
If the NXT can control an RCX, then I can reuse my existing motors and sensors with a bit more complexity. Complexity = fun in this context.
I realise the NXT doesn't use studded lego pieces directly, but there's obviously some way to integrate it with studded pieces, so I don't think there will be structural problems to overcome.
I also have a meccano set with motor, and at some point I want to make some robots which combine the two technologies...
There's nothing wrong with mirrors of Wikipedia content, and laborlawtalk acknowledges Wikipedia as the source of the material so it is compliant with the GFDL, but people here might want to add to the article, and they can only do that at Wikipedia and not at a mirror.
This is just a method of corrupting your partition table so the same disk sectors appear more than once. If you try this, don't ask Symantec for help afterwards.
I researched what was available pretty extensively, and chose an IBM Thinkpad G40.
I wanted something powerful, but this was for home, so price was very much a consideration. I looked hard at a couple of Toshiba's, and at the Dell range, but the IBM came in at a slightly lower price for the features I wanted, and I know from experience that Thinkpads are high quality. I did also look at the iBooks, but the prices were way too high for the feature set.
For what it's worth, I wanted 40 Gb / 512 Mb/ DVD/CR-RW combo / 15" screen / XP Pro / 2 GHz or better processor. Size / Weight / battery life weren't an issue. The G40 I bought has a 2.4 GHz processor. Unlike most Thinkpads, it doesn't have removable drives. I was willing to cut the iBook some slack on processor speed (although the ones I tried in store were very slow; they were short on RAM as displayed).
Relative price probably varies from country to country, and month to month, so if you live in a different country from me (probable), and since my purchase was a month ago, you might find something else works better for you.
I remember the Daedalus study, I subscribed to the Journal of the BIS at the time.
One "problem" with the proposal was that if we sent such a probe, it might report back in 1000 years, but if we waited another century, we could send a probe that would get there in half the time, so we'd get the information in only 600 years.
Of course, in two centuries we'd be able to send a probe that could get there more quickly still, and maybe have the data less than 500 years from now. Of course there is a limit to this converging sequence.
The figures I've given above are just to illustrate the point. I no longer remember what the actual figures were. I seem to recall that Barnard's Star (about 6 light years away) was the nominal target at the time.
Anyway, I saw an Osbourne as late as 1988. I was over at a friend of a friend's house, and his mom did her word processing on one. I was amazed. I impressed her by knowing how to copy files with PIP.;-)
I've never used an Osbourne, but I did have a Kaypro which was basically an Osbourne clone. The Kaypro had a slightly larger screen, and may have weighed less. I bought mine in 1985.
It was a nice little machine, although it had no graphics ability or colour. I ran Wordstar on it, and dBase II, and Turbo Pascal 3 for CP/M. I also played a lot of Zork.
This clas of computers were known as "luggables", because no-one could reasonably describe them as portable. It wasn't unreasonable to take one around to a friend's place. I even took mine on a flight cross-country once (as handheld baggage).
This is what I did about 10 years ago, when I was selling a program on many different versions of Unix.
I bought the most common 386 unix versions (SCO Xenix, SCO Unix, 386/ix), and had one risc machine (an AViiON, since DG was my main customer base). If a user wanted an RS6000 version, I just rang my local branch of IBM, arranged a time to pop in, and compiled my latest code on a machine there. It cost IBM nothing, and may have sold a few machines for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember you from about ten years ago. Most of the old admins do. I'm glad you're no longer thinking of harming yourself, and if you do want to return to Wikipedia in the future, I'll do my best to help the process.
In the mid-1980s I had a program called PC-Alien which ran on an MS-Dos machine and which could read almost any undamaged CP/M formatted disk. There is a more recent program which appears to have similar capabilites: OmniFlop, but I have no experience of using this. Such a program means a standard IBM PC, still reasonably commonly available, could read the undamaged disks rather than searching for an even older and rarer CP/M machine.
A third approach is to have a robot independent of the vehicle which can drive it, and presumably can switch from one vehicle to another. The best example of this I'm aware of is Yamaha's motobot which is capable of riding a motorcycle on a track. I'm not sure how much of the article is speculation rather than existing capability. http://pcmag.com/robotics-automation-products/39534/news/this-yamaha-robot-can-drive-a-motorcyle
Alas, there is no free PL/I compiler for Windows or Linux; certainly not one with anything approaching a full feature set and currently maintained. I learned PL/I at technical college in the 1980s and it was certainly better than the other languages taught then (COBOL, BASIC and RPG). I would like to be able to write a few programs in it for nostalgic reasons.
A 6.4 metre wingspan is pretty impressive, but some of the pterosaurs were considerably larger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan of 10-11 metres and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatzegopteryx was about the same size.
For anyone wanting to see the original discussion of this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bohemian_Rhapsody/Archive_2#Analysis_by_Two_Music_Scholars
If you want to play with a free compiler, try OpenCOBOL at http://www.opencobol.org/.
There is a list of other free COBOL compilers at http://mainframewizard.com/content/free-cobol-compilers but some of them look pretty old.
I don't think we were taught anything about computers in class, but there was a computer programming club. We used PORTRAN, which is a cut-down version of FORTRAN - I think it stands for Port-a-punch FORTRAN. The cards were sent away to a computer a few hundred km away, and a syntax error listing came back by the following week. It wasn't exactly a productive environment, so we competed to see who could get the most different errors in a single program.
Far more countries than that involved. Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Kenya, Zambia, Mauritius and Madagascar will all have dishes too.
Those of us who grew up in areas where there was no electricity. Even in developed nations, electricity wasn't available in some country areas well into the 1960s. In my case, this was Northern Ireland, only a mile or two out from a small city.
New Scientist is possibly the best popular science magazine available. Scientific American is pretty good too, but doesn't have the same coverage because it's monthly, while NS is weekly.
The original Ghost is still produced as Ghost Solution Suite. See http://www.symantec.com/business/ghost-solution-suite. Symantec also produces Norton Ghost which uses a different code base and incompatible image file formats.
There are regular stories on Wikipedia on Slashdot, and occasional stories on other wikis. Shouldn't there be either a Wikipedia icon or a Wiki icon to distinguish these stories? The Wikipedia "multilingual globe being built" is copyright (one of the very few things in Wikipedia which is) so you can't use that, but the Wikipedia "W" is fairly well known. Looking through Wikimedia Commons, this puzzle piece looked good to me. I don't know if the GFDL licence would be a problem for Slashdot.
The MediaWiki sunflower would only be suitable as an icon for Wikis powered by that piece of software. I don't have an idea for an icon to represent all wikis.
Roguelike games have held my interest since I first got into computers in the mid 1980s. I discovered Moria on an Amiga in 1989 or 1990, then Angband a few years later, and moved from there to Zangband about the time I got into the internet - about 1994. I've kept playing it on and off ever since - never won.
Occasionally I fire up one of the modern graphically impressive games, but I tire of them quickly. The Civilization series would be my favourite "conventional" game, and I've spent long hours on Civ, Civ2, Alpha Centauri (probably my overall favourite of the series), Civ3 and Civ4. I've looked at Age of Empires but find the micromanagement a complete pain.
A couple of years ago, I got hooked on Wikipedia, and that now takes up most of my gaming time. I know Wikipedia isn't a game, but it appeals to the same obsessive-compulsive element in me, and the countless hours I spend there researching and writing articles, copyediting or playing whack-a-mole with vandals produces a long-term result which is good for everyone.
One of the first computers I got to lay my hands on was a ZX 81. A friend had been given one as a bonus by her work (she was an ICL tech) and invited me over to play with it. I browsed through the first few pages of the manual and proceeded to write and debug a program to print the times tables. The program would probably have been 18-20 lines long. Then I turned to the next page of the manual and discovered for loops.
A couple of years later, one of my neighbours got a 48 k Spectrum. An acquaintance showed me the Colossal Cave game on a CP/M machine, and I stayed up all night writing a version of that game for the Spectrum. I don't remember any details of the programming of it, except that I used computed gotos to handle room movement. The save to tape failed, so the program only lasted for a couple of days before the Spectrum was turned off.
A year or two later again, I threw in my truck driving job and went to tech for a couple of years to become a professional programmer. The first machine I actually owned was a CP/M luggable Kapro clone.
Last year I retired from programming. I'll always have computers as a major part of my life, but I've finally burned out on programming.
I quit my job with a major software company last year, and patents were part of the reason. I was planning to quit within a year or two anyway, but when my objectives for the year included "Get two patents" over my strenous objections, I knew I would never see another annual review.
I'm sufficiently financially secure that such a decision was easier for me than for many. I can call it "early retirement", or "career change". It's been five months since I quit, and I've had no regrets. From the end of this month, I'm a full-time student working towards a BSc as a hobby.
Two RCX bricks can communicate with each other using the IR ports. I don't have a second one, but the books I have all rave about how much more interesting it gets when you have two RCX bricks controlling your robot.
If the NXT can control an RCX, then I can reuse my existing motors and sensors with a bit more complexity. Complexity = fun in this context.
I realise the NXT doesn't use studded lego pieces directly, but there's obviously some way to integrate it with studded pieces, so I don't think there will be structural problems to overcome.
I also have a meccano set with motor, and at some point I want to make some robots which combine the two technologies...
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction_on_te levision.
There's nothing wrong with mirrors of Wikipedia content, and laborlawtalk acknowledges Wikipedia as the source of the material so it is compliant with the GFDL, but people here might want to add to the article, and they can only do that at Wikipedia and not at a mirror.
Yes, Ghost development is still done in New Zealand.
I'm a Ghost developer.
This is just a method of corrupting your partition table so the same disk sectors appear more than once. If you try this, don't ask Symantec for help afterwards.
I researched what was available pretty extensively, and chose an IBM Thinkpad G40.
I wanted something powerful, but this was for home, so price was very much a consideration. I looked hard at a couple of Toshiba's, and at the Dell range, but the IBM came in at a slightly lower price for the features I wanted, and I know from experience that Thinkpads are high quality. I did also look at the iBooks, but the prices were way too high for the feature set.
For what it's worth, I wanted 40 Gb / 512 Mb/ DVD/CR-RW combo / 15" screen / XP Pro / 2 GHz or better processor. Size / Weight / battery life weren't an issue. The G40 I bought has a 2.4 GHz processor. Unlike most Thinkpads, it doesn't have removable drives. I was willing to cut the iBook some slack on processor speed (although the ones I tried in store were very slow; they were short on RAM as displayed).
Relative price probably varies from country to country, and month to month, so if you live in a different country from me (probable), and since my purchase was a month ago, you might find something else works better for you.
I remember the Daedalus study, I subscribed to the Journal of the BIS at the time.
One "problem" with the proposal was that if we sent such a probe, it might report back in 1000 years, but if we waited another century, we could send a probe that would get there in half the time, so we'd get the information in only 600 years.
Of course, in two centuries we'd be able to send a probe that could get there more quickly still, and maybe have the data less than 500 years from now. Of course there is a limit to this converging sequence.
The figures I've given above are just to illustrate the point. I no longer remember what the actual figures were. I seem to recall that Barnard's Star (about 6 light years away) was the nominal target at the time.
I've never used an Osbourne, but I did have a Kaypro which was basically an Osbourne clone. The Kaypro had a slightly larger screen, and may have weighed less. I bought mine in 1985.
It was a nice little machine, although it had no graphics ability or colour. I ran Wordstar on it, and dBase II, and Turbo Pascal 3 for CP/M. I also played a lot of Zork.
This clas of computers were known as "luggables", because no-one could reasonably describe them as portable. It wasn't unreasonable to take one around to a friend's place. I even took mine on a flight cross-country once (as handheld baggage).
This is what I did about 10 years ago, when I was selling a program on many different versions of Unix.
I bought the most common 386 unix versions (SCO Xenix, SCO Unix, 386/ix), and had one risc machine (an AViiON, since DG was my main customer base). If a user wanted an RS6000 version, I just rang my local branch of IBM, arranged a time to pop in, and compiled my latest code on a machine there. It cost IBM nothing, and may have sold a few machines for them.
That might have been true, for computers with the price/performance ratio of 1943.