Addressing the growth in hardware capabilities, the report says The review... sought to address the realities of the computer market, including... the advancements in interconnection capabilities that allow end-users to network large clusters of computers.
So that's government-speak for "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
To read ANYTHING without the benefit of our previous experiences in life...
That's not what Michael said: He said to read it without preconceived ideas of whether you'll find it "good" or "bad." That doesn't imply ignoring your own experiences.
"Here, drink this hemlock tea without any preconceived notions..."
That's a silly analogy. How can reading something without any preconceived notions possibly harm you?
I believe the fancy pen maker, Cross, made some sort of electronic pad-like device. I think I saw it listed in my PC Warehouse catalog a few times. It was made to look like a standard yellow legal pad, but it also had some buttons and what appeared to be a small LCD at the bottom. I think the idea was that it would store your scratchings and then you could transmit them to your PC for further work.
I bought a 1958 Scientific American recently and was fascinated by the ads as much as the articles. Many were for missle-related technology - the space program hadn't really gotten off the ground yet (he-he) - but there were a few computer ads as well.
Perkin-Elmer was one such company advertising back then. We had a laugh at work because until recently, they still used those beasts there. Because they never rewrite code when we change platforms, only port it, there's a routine called PEKLUDGE() which must be called. Nobody ever claims to understand what it does anymore.
I remember some detail of one ad - it was comparing one company's product to the competition and described how it had some 512 bytes of memory and could perform something on the order of a few hundred operations per second. And I think they boasted that it could use the new punch-card technology to input programs...
I gave the issue to a friend who was born that month, but I think I'm going to borrow it and put up a page with some of the ads on it. Email me if you're interested in the URL when it's available.
On first glance at the article, I thought it said "they are a fart away from an emergency evacuation." I was imagining a bunch of grimacing astronauts squeezing their cheeks together to keep from lettin go.
Imagine the shame of being the first to let one rip. "This is Commander Smith. He was first in his class at the Air Force Academy and was Top Gun, but he cleared the International Space Station with one SBD..."
I'm not so sure the hardware realm is as pure as it seems. I'm far from a hardware designer, but I've perused some of the Linux kernel source and have seen many comments about broken hardware designs. Of course, the obvious examples are probably the various Pentium bugs (FDIV, FOOF, etc.) but I was initially thinking of my (t)rusty Intel etherexpress board.
Maybe it doesn't matter to anyone other than driver writers, since performance is improving.
In other words, bad design or implementation impacts users of the interface that an object provides. So a crappy piece of hardware gives headaches to driver writers, but a buggy word processor gives headaches to end users (and their IT support staff...)
Yeah, that would be nice. As a goof, I ran emacs this way over PalmTelnet. Luckily this program has a way to enter Control keys, or I'd have been screwed.
Isnt one point of having a PDA that you dont NEED a keyboard?
Well, sure, but the point of a separate keyboard for a PDA is that for a long enough note, typing is faster than tapping, accounting for the setup time. Sure, a quick note on the bus isn't the place for one of these.
There's a company that makes a replacement Palm III cover that has a digital voice recorder in it. I think the combination of that, the normal grafitti, and the keyboard gives one a wide range of input modes. If you're driving, for example, tapping out grafitti is probably more than you want to get involved with, but recording a voice note that you might transcribe later isn't.
I find that my Palm and keyboard makes a fine substitute for a laptop for tasks such as composing email or keeping notes. Even ignoring the mistakes I make with grafitti, the keyboard is faster.
In fact, it's better than a laptop for those tasks, since it doesn't use much power, has no appreciable startup time, and is a lot smaller. Also, I can separate the two. If I just want to read stuff on the train, I just need the Palm, but not the keyboard.
That's an interesting and totally sensible explanation. For all I know he gave a similar explanation. I wish I could remember how he explained it, because that was the biggest gap in his story (other than why an airline pilot would be in grad school for sociology). How he handled it plays a big part in deciding whether he was legit or not, as mentioned in the review.
It's harder to remember nonsense than coherent ideas, so the fact that I don't remember his explanation suggests to me that it didn't make so much sense and was probably BS.
Reading about his exploits as a fake pilot reminds me of a guy I met at a bar. I was having a drink with a friend when the guy sitting next to us interjected into our conversation. Eventually he claimed to be a pilot who was a sociology grad student part time. That struck my friend and me as odd, but the guy seemed harmless, so we kept talking to him.
Something else struck me as odd, though, which later led us to speculate that he was some sort of pathological liar. He'd said that flights of over eight hours require three pilots, while shorter ones are allowed only two, but several minutes later, he said something about being one of two pilots on a ten-hour flight. I asked him about the contradiction, and he smoothly got out of it, but I don't remember how.
Another time I was approached on the street by someone who I was immediately suspicious of, but I didn't feel physically threatened, so out of curiosity I played along for a while. It turned out to be a pretty straight-forward scam - this guy was pretending to be newly arrived in this country - he had, or affected, what seemed like an African accent. He claimed to have lots of cash but for some contrived reasons couldn't deposit it at a bank himself. Then he asked a "stranger" (an obvious accomplice) to confirm his fears of using the bank. His accomplice was a woman talking on a pay phone nearby - but it was pretty clear to me that she wasn't talking to anyone at all. Eventually, the meat of the scam came out - he wanted me to deposit his "money" into my bank account using my ATM card. At this point I ducked out because I didn't see any point in going further with their scam.
It sounds pretty obvious, but people fall for scams like this all the time. In retrospect, I wonder if, by stringing them along and giving them nothing, I prevented someone else from getting scammed... That's a pretty obscure way to justify what I did out of morbid curiosity/boredom; I suppose if I'd seen a cop, I would have gotten his attention. I'm sure that would have scared this pair off.
It's both a play on "Alpha-Bits" cereal and on the notion of the infinite - sorry, unbounded - tape. I think that makes about as much sense as the delightful "frog and mouse" allegory that you linked.
I thought Aleph-Nought is the cardinality of the natural numbers. What do you think it is?
Yeah, DSL speeds things up considerably - a CD's worth of data would be down to 3 to 4 hours. Or just get two while you're off at work.
Another thing - some computer magazines include CDs with distributions attached. I got a copy of debian-based Storm Linux this way from some British magazine. Would the Canadian/Polish gov't charge that much tax on a magazine?
True enough. I was going to try to figure out the per-minute fee break-even point, but I got distracted with work. Still, the post I replied to was from a Canadian. I'm just an ignorant 'merican, but I thought Canada has flat-rate 'net access like we do down here.
Your post got me wondering how long it would take to download the CD image. A CD holds about 650 MB, and with a 56K dial-up getting 5KB/s download speed, that works out to about 36 hours per CD. It seems to me a CD burner would "pay for itself" pretty quickly...
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"Your mind makes it real." - Morpheus.
So that's government-speak for "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
The first song I'd play on one of these would have to be Kraftwerk's Pocket Calculator.
That's not what Michael said: He said to read it without preconceived ideas of whether you'll find it "good" or "bad." That doesn't imply ignoring your own experiences.
"Here, drink this hemlock tea without any preconceived notions..."
That's a silly analogy. How can reading something without any preconceived notions possibly harm you?
I think that's a good suggestion for anything you read.
I believe the fancy pen maker, Cross, made some sort of electronic pad-like device. I think I saw it listed in my PC Warehouse catalog a few times. It was made to look like a standard yellow legal pad, but it also had some buttons and what appeared to be a small LCD at the bottom. I think the idea was that it would store your scratchings and then you could transmit them to your PC for further work.
Perkin-Elmer was one such company advertising back then. We had a laugh at work because until recently, they still used those beasts there. Because they never rewrite code when we change platforms, only port it, there's a routine called PEKLUDGE() which must be called. Nobody ever claims to understand what it does anymore.
I remember some detail of one ad - it was comparing one company's product to the competition and described how it had some 512 bytes of memory and could perform something on the order of a few hundred operations per second. And I think they boasted that it could use the new punch-card technology to input programs...
I gave the issue to a friend who was born that month, but I think I'm going to borrow it and put up a page with some of the ads on it. Email me if you're interested in the URL when it's available.
Must ... resist ... making ... joke ... asking ... why ... not ... visit ... Uranus ... and ... hyperlinking ... goatse.cx ... (Whew. I made it.)
Ah, the "three pings and you're out" approach.
I walked onto a plane a few years ago and noticed that the in-flight movie equipment was Betamax.
Imagine the shame of being the first to let one rip. "This is Commander Smith. He was first in his class at the Air Force Academy and was Top Gun, but he cleared the International Space Station with one SBD..."
If BT were suing goatse.cx's ISP, we'd be cheering BT for ridding us of that menace to our delicate constitutions.
"You are not allowed to move your lips when you read this document."
I'm not so sure the hardware realm is as pure as it seems. I'm far from a hardware designer, but I've perused some of the Linux kernel source and have seen many comments about broken hardware designs. Of course, the obvious examples are probably the various Pentium bugs (FDIV, FOOF, etc.) but I was initially thinking of my (t)rusty Intel etherexpress board.
Maybe it doesn't matter to anyone other than driver writers, since performance is improving.
In other words, bad design or implementation impacts users of the interface that an object provides. So a crappy piece of hardware gives headaches to driver writers, but a buggy word processor gives headaches to end users (and their IT support staff...)
Yeah, that would be nice. As a goof, I ran emacs this way over PalmTelnet. Luckily this program has a way to enter Control keys, or I'd have been screwed.
Well, sure, but the point of a separate keyboard for a PDA is that for a long enough note, typing is faster than tapping, accounting for the setup time. Sure, a quick note on the bus isn't the place for one of these.
There's a company that makes a replacement Palm III cover that has a digital voice recorder in it. I think the combination of that, the normal grafitti, and the keyboard gives one a wide range of input modes. If you're driving, for example, tapping out grafitti is probably more than you want to get involved with, but recording a voice note that you might transcribe later isn't.
I find that my Palm and keyboard makes a fine substitute for a laptop for tasks such as composing email or keeping notes. Even ignoring the mistakes I make with grafitti, the keyboard is faster.
In fact, it's better than a laptop for those tasks, since it doesn't use much power, has no appreciable startup time, and is a lot smaller. Also, I can separate the two. If I just want to read stuff on the train, I just need the Palm, but not the keyboard.
It used to be this way I think, but New York City now has a new area code, 646. I think other places have codes that break that rule.
It's harder to remember nonsense than coherent ideas, so the fact that I don't remember his explanation suggests to me that it didn't make so much sense and was probably BS.
Something else struck me as odd, though, which later led us to speculate that he was some sort of pathological liar. He'd said that flights of over eight hours require three pilots, while shorter ones are allowed only two, but several minutes later, he said something about being one of two pilots on a ten-hour flight. I asked him about the contradiction, and he smoothly got out of it, but I don't remember how.
Another time I was approached on the street by someone who I was immediately suspicious of, but I didn't feel physically threatened, so out of curiosity I played along for a while. It turned out to be a pretty straight-forward scam - this guy was pretending to be newly arrived in this country - he had, or affected, what seemed like an African accent. He claimed to have lots of cash but for some contrived reasons couldn't deposit it at a bank himself. Then he asked a "stranger" (an obvious accomplice) to confirm his fears of using the bank. His accomplice was a woman talking on a pay phone nearby - but it was pretty clear to me that she wasn't talking to anyone at all. Eventually, the meat of the scam came out - he wanted me to deposit his "money" into my bank account using my ATM card. At this point I ducked out because I didn't see any point in going further with their scam.
It sounds pretty obvious, but people fall for scams like this all the time. In retrospect, I wonder if, by stringing them along and giving them nothing, I prevented someone else from getting scammed... That's a pretty obscure way to justify what I did out of morbid curiosity/boredom; I suppose if I'd seen a cop, I would have gotten his attention. I'm sure that would have scared this pair off.
It's both a play on "Alpha-Bits" cereal and on the notion of the infinite - sorry, unbounded - tape. I think that makes about as much sense as the delightful "frog and mouse" allegory that you linked.
I thought Aleph-Nought is the cardinality of the natural numbers. What do you think it is?
To implement the Turing machine's infinite tape in a cereal, of course, you wouldn't use Life cereal, you'd use Aleph-Nought-Bits...
(If you don't know what Aleph-Nought is, please don't even think about moderating this post...)
Another thing - some computer magazines include CDs with distributions attached. I got a copy of debian-based Storm Linux this way from some British magazine. Would the Canadian/Polish gov't charge that much tax on a magazine?
True enough. I was going to try to figure out the per-minute fee break-even point, but I got distracted with work. Still, the post I replied to was from a Canadian. I'm just an ignorant 'merican, but I thought Canada has flat-rate 'net access like we do down here.
Your post got me wondering how long it would take to download the CD image. A CD holds about 650 MB, and with a 56K dial-up getting 5KB/s download speed, that works out to about 36 hours per CD. It seems to me a CD burner would "pay for itself" pretty quickly...
This sounds like just the material I need to keep my Buckyballs safe and warm!