There can be different architectures for computers, but, nowadays, for many of us, I'd say there is one particular model of an architecture that is likely to be the only one we're really familiar with, and that automatically comes to mind when one speaks of a computer architecture. It's a rather compartmentalized architecture in which the CPU is the place where opcodes are executed and memory is just a big flat address space for data, including instructions. This "transfer triggered" architecture strikes me as being not so much a 1 instruction computer as one where instructions are implemented in a less compartmentalized fashion, spread out among special units activated by addresses, as opposed to the more plain architecture where bit patterns on the address bus simply activate individual generic memory cells along with a read/write signal. More than that may happen, cache memory comes into play with all it's complications for instance, but the 'model' for the programmer is that simple one.
I grew up in the 50s. The proprietor of a general store near home let me read comics off the rack, which was very nice of him, even though I did buy a lot after reading them. The best were the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics. The ones I found out years and years later were written and drawn by Carl Barks. That's where I learned about the 7 Cities of Cibola, Atlantis, King Solomon's Mines, The Philosopher's Stone, The Abominable Snowman. As I got older I came to appreciate the complexity of the characters, with their flaws that constantly got them in trouble. I've always felt they were more sophisticated than the superhero comics. I came to figure out that the superheroes were always being misunderstood and that this was to target teenagers who presumably were always feeling like they were misunderstood.
Oh, in the 60s Mad Magazine was pretty damn good too. I wish I still had the issue that talked about Macomber Bombey. Bombey was a photographer who went out with all the intrepid explorers and photographed them. But he never got any recognition himself. Whenever I see something like "Globetrekker" on TV, with somebody like Ian Wright running along the beach in Morocco to the sea, that it's Macomber Bombey out there running along behind him wielding a camera.
First, I'm not even a user of Microsoft stuff (see my sig), and I'm not posting because I think I know what Microsoft should do. This is not a rhetorical question on my part, but just a plain question. As I understand it, when a machine is infected it makes trouble for everybody (becomes part of an army of botnets or whatever). So, helping pirates who, except for pirating Microsoft Software are pretty much minding their own business, to keep their machines virus free would help everybody wouldn't it?
They try to give junkies clean needles not to help them be junkies, but to try to prevent the spread of disease. Have I got that right? If I do, then, isn't it a similar situation with Microsoft?
First of all, if you have a binary image of a program in some read only place, you could just compare to the running/working image to see if it were compromised and reload the original if it were. Admittedly, that can be a lot of work and ClearView might be more efficient. But, if it's just checking the behavior of the program, what's to keep hackers from getting their own copies of ClearView and figuring out how to game it, just like any other detection software. That is, making hacked programs perform so that they seem to be well behaved. Of course, if the idea is to turn the compromised software into a bot that is continuously spewing stuff out through the ethernet port, that might be hard to hide. But would you need ClearView to check that?
I thought electromagnetic radiation of different frequencies traveled at different speeds through a medium (as opposed to a vacuum). In this case, the medium would be intergalactic gas, very thin, but there's 7 billion light years of it. How come that didn't spread things out? Is it because the frequencies involved are so high?
Actually, I thought that "The Next Generation" did make some plausible speculations on the effects of the holodeck, what they called holodiction. They also did raise the occasional philosophical point about what Data was. Generally, while the science and tech may have been ad hoc, they did try to explore ideas from time to time, as in the "Rashomon" like episode "Matter of Perspective".
However, there's no way anyone can predict the effects technology will have even 100 years from now. Presumably there will be a 'singularity', when machines become smarter than humans. The famous science fiction writer and editor of 'the Golden Age' of science fiction, John W. Campbell, challenged his writers to write stories involving aliens who were smarter than humans. As I recall, about all they could do was either have the aliens be juveniles, or have them do a bunch of seemingly random things that somehow made things work out for them.
Actually, he talked about two things. First, there's eating more meat, that's homo habilis, and he even mentions some people do not put that species in the homo genus. Second, there's cooking it, which he speculates is what happened with homo erectus.
Granted, there had to be many other changes going on at the same time. He speculates that homo habilis pounded the meat with round stones that have been found in abundance. That could have affected the shape of our hands for instance. To try to be totally holistic about all the changes that would happen in concert would be pretty daunting for a phone interview.
I was going to suggest Univac's exec 8, which I used in college, or maybe Modcomp's Max IV, from my first job, but it looks like they or their descendant OSes are still around.
Just last week I was summoned for jury duty. This is maybe the 5th time I've been called up. Each time I was part of a pool of potential jurors. Roll would be taken, then names, presumably at random, would be called to fill the jury box plus extras. These would be examined and various people rejected and new ones called up till they had a jury plus alternates. So far, I've never even been called up to be examined. But this last time, unusually, it took 3 days for a jury to be selected, and the judge kept admonishing us not to twitter or google him or the lawyers or try to find out anything about the case even when we were being selected. On the 2nd or 3rd day he even said it had come to his attention that some of us were texting during the selection process and he said if we were caught doing that the cell phone or whatever would be taken away from us.
Once I remember I was in a conversation with 4 or 5 other people, one of whom happened to be a lawyer, and the subject of some fairly famous case came up, though I don't remember which one now, but apparently people were surprised at the verdict rendered by the jury. The lawyer said that when that happened he'd be inclined to go with the jury because they would be presented with all the evidence, while everyone else would see slanted opinions and speculation in the papers. This was back in the 1980s by the way. Maybe things have changed since then. I understand there was a lawyer who became famous for perfecting the science of jury selection. I found out about her when I happened to read her obituary in the paper (she had died of cancer I believe). I don't remember her name.
In some of the past cases where I was in the jury pool I could tell people were deliberately saying things to get themselves rejected but generally I thought potential jurors were thoughtful and honest during the selection process. Maybe just showing up was enough to indicate you were ready to do your civic duty.
Supposedly, David O. Selznick, who produced "Gone With The Wind", really wanted to top or at least repeat his act, and his most egregious failure to do so was the movie "Duel In The Sun", sometimes referred to as "Lust In The Dust".
There's various places in fluid dynamics where 'obstacles' are put to improve flow aren't there? Those cone shaped things in jet engines for instance (and falcon's have similar cone shaped things in their nostrils.) Maybe this is like that.
I don't know what you mean by compiled assembly. Do you mean having things like having macros? To me, assembly is code where the programmer gets to express exactly what the machine's opcodes will end up being, and doing it symbolically so the opcodes don't have to be memorized. Also, doing other convenient bookkeeping like figuring out addresses. Macros don't diminish the ability to get that precision, at least they shouldn't.
The difference between an interpreter and a compiler, as I understand it, is the interpreter has to convert the higher level code into machine code at the time you run the program, and do it every time you run the program, barring some sort of just in time caching of the just created machine code perhaps. So the interpreter is invoked and run every time the program is run, while the compiler is invoked only once to generate the machine code, and after that, only the machine code is invoked to run the program. To me that's a big, fundamental difference. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. An interpreter knows more about the environment at the time of execution for example, and can adapt to it. The compiler, on the other hand, can take longer optimizing since the code isn't going to be run right away.
An image for this would be two people on Earth, starting on slightly different places on the equator, and going North. Despite the fact that their ways start out parallel, and neither makes a turn to the left or the right, they'll come closer together until they meet at the north pole, where they meet at a non-zero angle
I've seen this description before, but, in the analogy, if the two people don't start out, they don't move closer to each other. Suppose you just took the earth and moon and set them down 250K miles apart but did not impart any motion to them. What would get them moving? Where would the energy come from? I hope my cluelessness about this doesn't confound you too much.
For contrast you'd need to be able to make something really dark wouldn't you? The only way I can think of offhand to do that would be to have pixel units that were actually shaped like pits that light photons from external sources would enter and be absorbed by.
I saw a science documentary on TV one time, hosted by Philip Morrison (How many people here are old enough to get the humor his parents showed giving him that name?) Morrison was talking about black body radiation, and the show had a kiln of the kind used for firing ceramics but with a hole in the side. At first the hole was just dark. As the kiln heated up, it glowed and one could see the objects inside, but when it got really hot and bright, all distinction blurred. A hole in a box, which lets light in but hardly lets any light out is the closest thing to a 'black body' that I think we can create here on earth.
... competition forces companies to eventually lower their costs. with robots and computers being able to do more and more human jobs, it seems like a good idea to fire workers and have them replaced.
on the surface it seems like a good idea - but high unemployment, which eventually follows, has never been good for any economy.
it won't bring on a new era of prosperity, as less people will be able to buy their products. this forces companies to lower prices even more (ie firing workers, using technology instead), which again hurts purchasing power. A lovely vicious circle ending in the very rich getting richer and society's bottom 50% starving....
This kind of argument has been used since the 1700s industrial revolution. Ever hear of Luddites? Or Featherbedding? There is a dislocation. Older workers have a hard time adapting and being retrained for new technology and adapting to a new environment, and yes there is a lot of suffering, and I don't want to be dismissive of that. But the end result has not been 'the very rich getting richer and society's bottom 50% starving."
I will also allow that if the singularity happens, if machine intelligence genuinely surpasses human, then everybody may be out of a job. It would be a singularity or at least an inflection point. But what should be done about it? Should we always hold machines back so we can claim our top dog position.
One thing that seems to be true of human nature is that people generally would prefer to be the big frog in a small pond, rather than a comparatively less big frog in a bigger pond even if they're bigger in absolute terms. Some economists and policy makers talk about how 'a rising tide floats all boats', but for a lot of people, if their particular boat isn't floated high enough vis a vis others, they'd prefer the status quo.
Another example of an improvement arriving to a technology just as it was obsoleted is the gas mantle, which improved the efficiency of gas lamps just about the time the electric light bulb came along.
in riso veritas? (OK, I'm trying to paraphrase the Latin saying "in vino veritas" which means "in wine there is truth", by making it "In humor there is truth". but I don't know if the damn ablative is the same for 'risus' (laughter) as it is for 'vinum' (wine), or is it a dative?
Dividing and conquering by having several threads processing images or anti-aliasing fonts, is that a 'difficult' problem for parallelization? I don't have experience in this kind of thing, so maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to divide up a bunch of data and hand out the individual pieces to different threads, which are mostly programmed in the old-fashioned serial way.
I read a book about animation once. Don't remember the name of it, but it was by the guy who did "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Anyway, he was learning his craft at the feet of various masters and he asked one of them one time what kind of music he listened to, and the guy said he didn't listened to music when he worked because he could only do one thing at a time. The writer went on to say that he came to agree with the master, and mentioned assistants who were doing grunt work like 'in-betweeners' making stupid mistakes when they were listening to music through their headphones.
I used to listen to music sometimes while coding, and eventually I realized it was more distraction than help.
Re:...only if the BIOS chip is replaceable.
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 1
Isn't it a security risk for a program to able to reflash the BIOS?
I worked for a time in what are now called 'embedded systems'. Our prototype equipment had eprom (eraseable programmable read only memory). The burner was roughly square, covered with sockets for different kinds of eproms. You had to find the socket that matched your eprom. You erased the roms by putting them in a box with a strong ultraviolet light. You could tell the eraseables because they had a little window to let in the UV.
Do people still use those old fashioned hardware debuggers with the adapter that had pins for the socket on the board where the CPU would go, so it could capture the signals on all the pins?
I was a programmer working mostly in Unix and embedded systems. I'd actually quit for 3 years trying to write science fiction but my money ran out and I had to go back to work as a programmer at the end of 1993. My home computer was an Atari 520ST purchased in the late 1980s which I still have, tucked away in a closet. I'd used CP/M back in the 1970s and early 80s, but had very little experience with MS-DOS or any other Microsoft product. I remember not buying that original IBM PC or Apple II because they seemed so overpriced for their underpowered CPU chips.
Anyway, once I had a programming job again, and started to catch up on the changes in the world of computers while I'd been away, the point came where I purchased a laptop with Windows 3.1 installed. Coming from the Unix world I found it very awkward and strange. A colleague at work showed me an ad for linux, which was supposed to be unix-like. I called the place up and ordered it. When it arrived I reserved a Saturday morning to install it on my precious laptop with its 250MB hard drive. The distro was slackware 2.0. It came on 50 diskettes which I still have.
It was a pretty scary experience. At one point the windows system was gone, and linux hadn't been installed properly and I wondered if I'd just trashed my whole laptop. But I went back and booted the install diskette from the linux distro and went through the process all over and finally it was working, and I was happy to have my familiar programs like vi up and running on the laptop.
The wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_lamps) makes them seem interesting/promising, but it's a bit dry, does anybody here have significant experience/knowledge of them?
Think about it. Not everybody drinks alcohol, but nearly everyone alive, even the elders of Patagonia, and the babies in Vanuatu, breathes, and that releases C02 into the atmosphere too.
Slashdot Mirror
There can be different architectures for computers, but, nowadays, for many of us, I'd say there is one particular model of an architecture that is likely to be the only one we're really familiar with, and that automatically comes to mind when one speaks of a computer architecture. It's a rather compartmentalized architecture in which the CPU is the place where opcodes are executed and memory is just a big flat address space for data, including instructions. This "transfer triggered" architecture strikes me as being not so much a 1 instruction computer as one where instructions are implemented in a less compartmentalized fashion, spread out among special units activated by addresses, as opposed to the more plain architecture where bit patterns on the address bus simply activate individual generic memory cells along with a read/write signal. More than that may happen, cache memory comes into play with all it's complications for instance, but the 'model' for the programmer is that simple one.
I grew up in the 50s. The proprietor of a general store near home let me read comics off the rack, which was very nice of him, even though I did buy a lot after reading them. The best were the Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics. The ones I found out years and years later were written and drawn by Carl Barks. That's where I learned about the 7 Cities of Cibola, Atlantis, King Solomon's Mines, The Philosopher's Stone, The Abominable Snowman. As I got older I came to appreciate the complexity of the characters, with their flaws that constantly got them in trouble. I've always felt they were more sophisticated than the superhero comics. I came to figure out that the superheroes were always being misunderstood and that this was to target teenagers who presumably were always feeling like they were misunderstood. Oh, in the 60s Mad Magazine was pretty damn good too. I wish I still had the issue that talked about Macomber Bombey. Bombey was a photographer who went out with all the intrepid explorers and photographed them. But he never got any recognition himself. Whenever I see something like "Globetrekker" on TV, with somebody like Ian Wright running along the beach in Morocco to the sea, that it's Macomber Bombey out there running along behind him wielding a camera.
First, I'm not even a user of Microsoft stuff (see my sig), and I'm not posting because I think I know what Microsoft should do. This is not a rhetorical question on my part, but just a plain question. As I understand it, when a machine is infected it makes trouble for everybody (becomes part of an army of botnets or whatever). So, helping pirates who, except for pirating Microsoft Software are pretty much minding their own business, to keep their machines virus free would help everybody wouldn't it? They try to give junkies clean needles not to help them be junkies, but to try to prevent the spread of disease. Have I got that right? If I do, then, isn't it a similar situation with Microsoft?
First of all, if you have a binary image of a program in some read only place, you could just compare to the running/working image to see if it were compromised and reload the original if it were. Admittedly, that can be a lot of work and ClearView might be more efficient. But, if it's just checking the behavior of the program, what's to keep hackers from getting their own copies of ClearView and figuring out how to game it, just like any other detection software. That is, making hacked programs perform so that they seem to be well behaved. Of course, if the idea is to turn the compromised software into a bot that is continuously spewing stuff out through the ethernet port, that might be hard to hide. But would you need ClearView to check that?
I thought electromagnetic radiation of different frequencies traveled at different speeds through a medium (as opposed to a vacuum). In this case, the medium would be intergalactic gas, very thin, but there's 7 billion light years of it. How come that didn't spread things out? Is it because the frequencies involved are so high?
Actually, I thought that "The Next Generation" did make some plausible speculations on the effects of the holodeck, what they called holodiction. They also did raise the occasional philosophical point about what Data was. Generally, while the science and tech may have been ad hoc, they did try to explore ideas from time to time, as in the "Rashomon" like episode "Matter of Perspective". However, there's no way anyone can predict the effects technology will have even 100 years from now. Presumably there will be a 'singularity', when machines become smarter than humans. The famous science fiction writer and editor of 'the Golden Age' of science fiction, John W. Campbell, challenged his writers to write stories involving aliens who were smarter than humans. As I recall, about all they could do was either have the aliens be juveniles, or have them do a bunch of seemingly random things that somehow made things work out for them.
That's oxytocin, not oxygen. And it's not like love, it is love. (duck)
Actually, he talked about two things. First, there's eating more meat, that's homo habilis, and he even mentions some people do not put that species in the homo genus. Second, there's cooking it, which he speculates is what happened with homo erectus.
Granted, there had to be many other changes going on at the same time. He speculates that homo habilis pounded the meat with round stones that have been found in abundance. That could have affected the shape of our hands for instance. To try to be totally holistic about all the changes that would happen in concert would be pretty daunting for a phone interview.
I was going to suggest Univac's exec 8, which I used in college, or maybe Modcomp's Max IV, from my first job, but it looks like they or their descendant OSes are still around.
Just last week I was summoned for jury duty. This is maybe the 5th time I've been called up. Each time I was part of a pool of potential jurors. Roll would be taken, then names, presumably at random, would be called to fill the jury box plus extras. These would be examined and various people rejected and new ones called up till they had a jury plus alternates. So far, I've never even been called up to be examined. But this last time, unusually, it took 3 days for a jury to be selected, and the judge kept admonishing us not to twitter or google him or the lawyers or try to find out anything about the case even when we were being selected. On the 2nd or 3rd day he even said it had come to his attention that some of us were texting during the selection process and he said if we were caught doing that the cell phone or whatever would be taken away from us.
Once I remember I was in a conversation with 4 or 5 other people, one of whom happened to be a lawyer, and the subject of some fairly famous case came up, though I don't remember which one now, but apparently people were surprised at the verdict rendered by the jury. The lawyer said that when that happened he'd be inclined to go with the jury because they would be presented with all the evidence, while everyone else would see slanted opinions and speculation in the papers. This was back in the 1980s by the way. Maybe things have changed since then. I understand there was a lawyer who became famous for perfecting the science of jury selection. I found out about her when I happened to read her obituary in the paper (she had died of cancer I believe). I don't remember her name.
In some of the past cases where I was in the jury pool I could tell people were deliberately saying things to get themselves rejected but generally I thought potential jurors were thoughtful and honest during the selection process. Maybe just showing up was enough to indicate you were ready to do your civic duty.
Supposedly, David O. Selznick, who produced "Gone With The Wind", really wanted to top or at least repeat his act, and his most egregious failure to do so was the movie "Duel In The Sun", sometimes referred to as "Lust In The Dust".
There's various places in fluid dynamics where 'obstacles' are put to improve flow aren't there? Those cone shaped things in jet engines for instance (and falcon's have similar cone shaped things in their nostrils.) Maybe this is like that.
I don't know what you mean by compiled assembly. Do you mean having things like having macros? To me, assembly is code where the programmer gets to express exactly what the machine's opcodes will end up being, and doing it symbolically so the opcodes don't have to be memorized. Also, doing other convenient bookkeeping like figuring out addresses. Macros don't diminish the ability to get that precision, at least they shouldn't.
The difference between an interpreter and a compiler, as I understand it, is the interpreter has to convert the higher level code into machine code at the time you run the program, and do it every time you run the program, barring some sort of just in time caching of the just created machine code perhaps. So the interpreter is invoked and run every time the program is run, while the compiler is invoked only once to generate the machine code, and after that, only the machine code is invoked to run the program. To me that's a big, fundamental difference. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. An interpreter knows more about the environment at the time of execution for example, and can adapt to it. The compiler, on the other hand, can take longer optimizing since the code isn't going to be run right away.
An image for this would be two people on Earth, starting on slightly different places on the equator, and going North. Despite the fact that their ways start out parallel, and neither makes a turn to the left or the right, they'll come closer together until they meet at the north pole, where they meet at a non-zero angle
I've seen this description before, but, in the analogy, if the two people don't start out, they don't move closer to each other. Suppose you just took the earth and moon and set them down 250K miles apart but did not impart any motion to them. What would get them moving? Where would the energy come from? I hope my cluelessness about this doesn't confound you too much.
Contrast is perhaps in worst shape.
For contrast you'd need to be able to make something really dark wouldn't you? The only way I can think of offhand to do that would be to have pixel units that were actually shaped like pits that light photons from external sources would enter and be absorbed by.
I saw a science documentary on TV one time, hosted by Philip Morrison (How many people here are old enough to get the humor his parents showed giving him that name?) Morrison was talking about black body radiation, and the show had a kiln of the kind used for firing ceramics but with a hole in the side. At first the hole was just dark. As the kiln heated up, it glowed and one could see the objects inside, but when it got really hot and bright, all distinction blurred. A hole in a box, which lets light in but hardly lets any light out is the closest thing to a 'black body' that I think we can create here on earth.
So how do they create really really dark screens?
...
competition forces companies to eventually lower their costs. with robots and computers being able to do more and more human jobs, it seems like a good idea to fire workers and have them replaced.
on the surface it seems like a good idea - but high unemployment, which eventually follows, has never been good for any economy.
it won't bring on a new era of prosperity, as less people will be able to buy their products. this forces companies to lower prices even more (ie firing workers, using technology instead), which again hurts purchasing power. A lovely vicious circle ending in the very rich getting richer and society's bottom 50% starving. ...
This kind of argument has been used since the 1700s industrial revolution. Ever hear of Luddites? Or Featherbedding? There is a dislocation. Older workers have a hard time adapting and being retrained for new technology and adapting to a new environment, and yes there is a lot of suffering, and I don't want to be dismissive of that. But the end result has not been 'the very rich getting richer and society's bottom 50% starving."
I will also allow that if the singularity happens, if machine intelligence genuinely surpasses human, then everybody may be out of a job. It would be a singularity or at least an inflection point. But what should be done about it? Should we always hold machines back so we can claim our top dog position.
One thing that seems to be true of human nature is that people generally would prefer to be the big frog in a small pond, rather than a comparatively less big frog in a bigger pond even if they're bigger in absolute terms. Some economists and policy makers talk about how 'a rising tide floats all boats', but for a lot of people, if their particular boat isn't floated high enough vis a vis others, they'd prefer the status quo.
50K years from now, do we want humans to still be smarter than the machines? One alternative might be 'trans humans', enhancing our own intelligence through artificial means, or combining with machines into cyborgs. I would say that runs into the "ship of theseus' paradox:
http://www.scientificblogging.com/geeks039_guide_world_domination/cool_thought_experiments_ii_ship_theseus
also the obligatory wikipedia URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus,
Another example of an improvement arriving to a technology just as it was obsoleted is the gas mantle, which improved the efficiency of gas lamps just about the time the electric light bulb came along.
in riso veritas? (OK, I'm trying to paraphrase the Latin saying "in vino veritas" which means "in wine there is truth", by making it "In humor there is truth". but I don't know if the damn ablative is the same for 'risus' (laughter) as it is for 'vinum' (wine), or is it a dative?
Dividing and conquering by having several threads processing images or anti-aliasing fonts, is that a 'difficult' problem for parallelization? I don't have experience in this kind of thing, so maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to divide up a bunch of data and hand out the individual pieces to different threads, which are mostly programmed in the old-fashioned serial way.
I read a book about animation once. Don't remember the name of it, but it was by the guy who did "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Anyway, he was learning his craft at the feet of various masters and he asked one of them one time what kind of music he listened to, and the guy said he didn't listened to music when he worked because he could only do one thing at a time. The writer went on to say that he came to agree with the master, and mentioned assistants who were doing grunt work like 'in-betweeners' making stupid mistakes when they were listening to music through their headphones.
I used to listen to music sometimes while coding, and eventually I realized it was more distraction than help.
Isn't it a security risk for a program to able to reflash the BIOS?
I worked for a time in what are now called 'embedded systems'. Our prototype equipment had eprom (eraseable programmable read only memory). The burner was roughly square, covered with sockets for different kinds of eproms. You had to find the socket that matched your eprom. You erased the roms by putting them in a box with a strong ultraviolet light. You could tell the eraseables because they had a little window to let in the UV.
Do people still use those old fashioned hardware debuggers with the adapter that had pins for the socket on the board where the CPU would go, so it could capture the signals on all the pins?
I was a programmer working mostly in Unix and embedded systems. I'd actually quit for 3 years trying to write science fiction but my money ran out and I had to go back to work as a programmer at the end of 1993. My home computer was an Atari 520ST purchased in the late 1980s which I still have, tucked away in a closet. I'd used CP/M back in the 1970s and early 80s, but had very little experience with MS-DOS or any other Microsoft product. I remember not buying that original IBM PC or Apple II because they seemed so overpriced for their underpowered CPU chips.
Anyway, once I had a programming job again, and started to catch up on the changes in the world of computers while I'd been away, the point came where I purchased a laptop with Windows 3.1 installed. Coming from the Unix world I found it very awkward and strange. A colleague at work showed me an ad for linux, which was supposed to be unix-like. I called the place up and ordered it. When it arrived I reserved a Saturday morning to install it on my precious laptop with its 250MB hard drive. The distro was slackware 2.0. It came on 50 diskettes which I still have.
It was a pretty scary experience. At one point the windows system was gone, and linux hadn't been installed properly and I wondered if I'd just trashed my whole laptop. But I went back and booted the install diskette from the linux distro and went through the process all over and finally it was working, and I was happy to have my familiar programs like vi up and running on the laptop.
The wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_lamps) makes them seem interesting/promising, but it's a bit dry, does anybody here have significant experience/knowledge of them?
Think about it. Not everybody drinks alcohol, but nearly everyone alive, even the elders of Patagonia, and the babies in Vanuatu, breathes, and that releases C02 into the atmosphere too.