I have absolutely nothing nice to say about VMS (although I still use OSF/1 on Alpha AXP hardware at my job)
I have absolutely nothing even neutral to say about AOS/VS II. Once a hardware vendor has a UNIX OS like DG/UX (which I've actually heard some good things about) continuing to ship arcane proprietary OSes seems backward. Admittedly, I never found the 'xyzzy' command, which I probably would have remembered fondly if I had.
By the time I encountered AOS/VS II, I was of the opinion that OSes were just OSes, CLIs were just CLIs, syntax was just syntax, and languages were just languages. So I learned the CLI, and F77 for programming, in a week or two. Meh.
Let me guess, VMS, MCP, z/OS, i5 OS, z/VSE. Any of these a hit? Just off the top of my head.
VMS, yeah - that's one of the ones people have heard of. The other two were VM/CMS (which is at least ancestrally related to z/OS and z/VSE) and... AOS/VS II. (I didn't use i5 OS's predecessor OS/400, but I was at least aware of it. MCP, though, was a real good one - I had to look up the non-Tron definition of it!)
This. I'm a recovering IT type who's used just about every OS released since the DOS days (tons of UNIX variants, three different non-UNIX server OSes, at least one of which hardly anyone has heard of, lots of Windows and MacOS versions, and a few one-offs). I spent basically all of the 1990s running UNIX machines. I've used Linux since the days of having to download countless floppy images (pre-1.0 Slackware). But when I wanted a new laptop in 2001, and I wanted to be able to watch DVDs without having to cobble together a bunch of different packages and some code of questionable legality, there was an iBook. And lo, it ran a BSDish OS underneath the pretty, and I was happy with it.
Well, I suppose it's a slightly different technique than the one demonstrated last year... maybe this APP thingy will show us dimmer exoplanets or something.
Okay, I like trains, and would probably check out the content the first time I got a letter with such a stamp on it... but the second time? No.
And who thought of the GREAT idea of linking postal stamps to online stuff? "Hey, old chap, let's do something that reminds our customers how little they actually need us!":)
If the Royal Post delivered things in a timely manner, didn't randomly go on strike all the time, and had "tracking" that actually tracked beyond "...and then we gave the letter to another country's post, and we have no idea what happened next," it'd be a lot more useful.
Sorry, but as anyone who's ever diagrammed a sentence knows, the clause "Costing hundreds of thousands of dollars" clearly modifies the noun "IBM" in the summary. The chips and the mainframes, of course, would cost far less than purchasing the entire corporation.
I've been to Scotland numerous times, and have never heard of a "garage forecourt" but can only presume it's a petrol station. I'm curious about the performance of this proposed biofuel, and whether vehicles would achieve the same efficiency as on petrol. How many furlongs to the mutchkin are we talking about here?
There are plenty of reputation-based schemes already in operation for per-protocol black or white listing which work as well (and as badly) as any such scheme can do. There is no need to drag it down to the core, polluting DNS with yet more protocol shenanigans as we do so.
Given that connections via most protocols are preceded by DNS queries (unless you're using hardcoded IP addresses for everything), I think whether this is or isn't a good idea comes down to one question:
Are there are lot of domains out there that deserve a bad reputation for things they do on certain ports or over certain protocols, but are otherwise fine and upstanding members of society?
I think there are plenty of companies out there that are respectable outfits but make some poor choices vis-a-vis email marketing; something like this might provide them the encouragement they need to do the right thing. And most other ways a domain can be evil - protocol-specific though they may be - make spamming look like nothing. Malicious sites, malware, spyware, outright fraud, etc.
Unless there are domains that are only evil on a single protocol and otherwise are angelic, I'd sooner have things vanish at the initial DNS query, and not worry about consulting a bunch of different blacklists, etc. Seems simpler.
Eh, you're being a little quick to dismiss things. A third author typically had, at the very least, some meaningful role in the research that was done, and is a full member of whatever collaboration did it. (And probably has a Ph.D., or is working on one.)
I'm an associate member of a collaboration, and as such I make it onto the authors list for various little announcements they put out, but although I take a lot of the data, I'm not as involved in analyzing what it all means (I'm still shy of a M.Sc) so I usually just wind up in the "thanks to..." part at the end of real papers.:)
Parent nailed it. To fill in a little bit - Pan-STARRS 1 was supposed to be operational for science by mid-late 2008, and the PS1 funders had agreed that if that were the case, they'd fund PS4. Due to some glitches in design of the secondary mirror truss or something, PS1 didn't give good results on time, and had to be reworked a little bit before it finally got rolling back around this February. They're looking for new/additional funders to finish the final system on Mauna Kea.
I worked for the Institute for Astronomy from 2004-2009, and when I started there, Pan-STARRS was showing up in PowerPoints as "coming in 2008" on Mauna Kea. Now it's "2013 if we're lucky, 2014 if we're realistic."
Well, Zip+4 identifies buildings, or groups of buildings... not people. Your ZIP+4 might change over the course of your life - maybe even several times.
My Zip+4 corresponds to the 4 houses on my driveway... but the post office sees ##A, ##B, ##C and ##D on my street and decides that these are clearly apartments in an apartment building. So sites that collect and distribute "public information" about me tend to start off by being completely wrong about my living arrangements.
I have "naked DSL" with no dialtone at my house, so of course I get: 1. The telephone company's official phone book (which isn't actually produced by the telephone company, and hasn't been for years, and is so full of errors that the telephone company is forced to send a letter-to-the-editor of the local paper explaining that it's not their fault) 2. The paperback-sized one that's just for my side of the county, also from the telephone company. 3. Some unofficial book from some other publisher 4. Another copy of the same unofficial book stuffed into my tiny post office box.
And the office gets some huge number of all of the above, and an email goes out to everyone saying "new phone books are here! come get one if you want, and please put your old one in the next pile over for recycling."
So... I have been taking my old phone books and the new phone books to work, and putting them in the pile for recycling. Sure, it makes my bike heavier on the uphill commute to work, but hey, burn more calories, get rid of phone books, it's a win-win.:)
Depends what you consider "good." If you're thinking of something in the $199-$15,999 price range, with an aperture of 4-16 inches (which should be plenty for just looking at a nearby supernova, then the 16" Meade or one of the 14" Celestrons where I stargaze should work.
If, on the other hand, you're thinking more in the $3,000,000-$400,000,000 range, then I'd have to schlep all the way up to the general vicinity of work.
But I'm relatively certain that even folks around work would be interested in looking at it. I think it'd be a Type II supernova, but I could ask if the Type Ia collaboration I'm in could look at it too... but unfortunately since it's pretty much up during the day this time of year, and "close to" the Sun in the sky, it'd be a hard target.
On Slashdot, you can say things like "Ever heard of the Jazzmutant Lemur?" and everyone will either claim (honestly or not) to be familiar with it, or scramble to find out about it, since clearly it must be something important to know about, or our fellow Slashdotter wouldn't be mentioning it here.
The same question might not go over as well if asked of a helpful policeman, a greengrocer, a veterinarian, a priest, a schoolteacher, the school counselor the teacher refers you to, or the helpful men who the counselor calls to have you fitted for a new sweater with arms that fasten in the back.
Yeah, Apple Retail Stores used a POS based on Windows Mobile for years, but everything I've ever heard indicated it was a POS in more than one way.
Once they announced that version...3, was it? of the iPhone OS would support more specialized hardware accessories, everyone knew they'd switch to their own hardware.
(And really, using iPhones/iPods to sell iPhones/iPods is a great demo.)
There are companies that sell time on telescopes - Slooh and LightBuckets come to mind. Typically their scopes are well-sited and at least as big/capable as anything you're likely to have as an amateur. The CEO of LightBuckets (who isn't by any means a professional astronomer - he used to work for Norton/Symantec) was a classmate of mine in an astronomy class last year, and just for kicks, he used one of his company's telescopes to do a survey (14 hours of imaging over the course of a week) using a 24-inch R-C, to see whether it would turn up any new asteroids. Found 17 of them.
Let's see... Core 2 Duo at 2.26-2.66 GHz with 3MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, 2GB-4GB of DDR3 RAM, GeForce 9400M video, Mini DisplayPort and MiniDVI video out (2 ports, so you can have 2 monitors) 160-500GB internal disk, 5 USB ports, optical digital audio in/out, 1 FireWire-800 port, and a DVD+-R/DL burner...
Geez, thin clients have an awful lot of features nowadays.
(In other words, the Mac mini is essentially laptop hardware, only with more ports than you get on an Apple laptop, and I have no idea where you got this "thin client" idea from.)
I'll second this. I transitioned from dot-coms (Solaris on the backend, Windows on desks, a *few* Macs and Linux boxen) to astronomy about 6 years ago. At that point in time, a typical person's office had a PC for accessing stuff on Windows servers, a Solaris workstation for "doing real work," and a PowerBook that they took home, to conferences, etc. Nowadays, those same people have a Mac(Book) Pro which does their "real work" (ported to OS X), accesses the Windows servers, runs Windows apps in VMware or Parallels if so desired, and leaves enough room on their desk for some seriously big LCD panels.
The idea of being able to use (in the real world) or teach (in a school) Windows, plus the Mac interface, plus UNIX, in a single machine, is quite nice.
In countries were [sic] people earn a few $1,000 a year or even a few hundred, I don't see how Apple could make a product cheap enough to make $$.
I spent 2 weeks in Uganda at the beginning of this year. (There was a nice annular solar eclipse.) Per-capita GDP is about $1,300. Of course, that's an average - some folks make less, some make more - and includes kids and whatever.
Anyway, anyone who makes enough above that average has an iPod. At least a shuffle or a nano. People who can afford one - say, managers - have an iPhone 3G S. There are ads for the iPhone all over Kampala. There's an Apple authorized reseller downtown.
There's also a lot of counterfeit product from China in the market, which is a lot cheaper and typically breaks after a few months. It's interesting to go to a market that doesn't have the level of IP law and trade regulation in place that the US does.
Slashdot Mirror
VM/CMS had REXX, which was nifty.
I have absolutely nothing nice to say about VMS (although I still use OSF/1 on Alpha AXP hardware at my job)
I have absolutely nothing even neutral to say about AOS/VS II. Once a hardware vendor has a UNIX OS like DG/UX (which I've actually heard some good things about) continuing to ship arcane proprietary OSes seems backward. Admittedly, I never found the 'xyzzy' command, which I probably would have remembered fondly if I had.
By the time I encountered AOS/VS II, I was of the opinion that OSes were just OSes, CLIs were just CLIs, syntax was just syntax, and languages were just languages. So I learned the CLI, and F77 for programming, in a week or two. Meh.
One-off desktop OSes were more interesting.
Let me guess, VMS, MCP, z/OS, i5 OS, z/VSE. Any of these a hit? Just off the top of my head.
VMS, yeah - that's one of the ones people have heard of. The other two were VM/CMS (which is at least ancestrally related to z/OS and z/VSE) and... AOS/VS II. (I didn't use i5 OS's predecessor OS/400, but I was at least aware of it. MCP, though, was a real good one - I had to look up the non-Tron definition of it!)
Don't miss any of them. :)
Lots of people can remember things that were written in fancy script, like parts of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution*.
Come to think of it, this bodes well for my kid's lousy writing - people will at least remember what she wrote, once they decipher it.
*Exception made for Christine O'Donnell
This. I'm a recovering IT type who's used just about every OS released since the DOS days (tons of UNIX variants, three different non-UNIX server OSes, at least one of which hardly anyone has heard of, lots of Windows and MacOS versions, and a few one-offs). I spent basically all of the 1990s running UNIX machines. I've used Linux since the days of having to download countless floppy images (pre-1.0 Slackware). But when I wanted a new laptop in 2001, and I wanted to be able to watch DVDs without having to cobble together a bunch of different packages and some code of questionable legality, there was an iBook. And lo, it ran a BSDish OS underneath the pretty, and I was happy with it.
And then everything else happened.
Well, I suppose it's a slightly different technique than the one demonstrated last year... maybe this APP thingy will show us dimmer exoplanets or something.
mobile accounts for only 2.6% of web views, and the iOS share stands at only 1.1%.
Okay, and... what percent of web views do mobile devices running Flash account for?
How many significant digits do you have to go to before it's zero? :)
If you believe mobile in general is "the future" then you probably also believe Flash is the past. If not, then you don't.
Okay, I like trains, and would probably check out the content the first time I got a letter with such a stamp on it... but the second time? No.
And who thought of the GREAT idea of linking postal stamps to online stuff? "Hey, old chap, let's do something that reminds our customers how little they actually need us!" :)
If the Royal Post delivered things in a timely manner, didn't randomly go on strike all the time, and had "tracking" that actually tracked beyond "...and then we gave the letter to another country's post, and we have no idea what happened next," it'd be a lot more useful.
And a depressed robot to open it.
Sorry, but as anyone who's ever diagrammed a sentence knows, the clause "Costing hundreds of thousands of dollars" clearly modifies the noun "IBM" in the summary. The chips and the mainframes, of course, would cost far less than purchasing the entire corporation.
The only problem with that setup is that it takes pictures of what it wants to. ;)
I'll have to stick with the next best thing, which I at least get to point at things. :)
I've been to Scotland numerous times, and have never heard of a "garage forecourt" but can only presume it's a petrol station. I'm curious about the performance of this proposed biofuel, and whether vehicles would achieve the same efficiency as on petrol. How many furlongs to the mutchkin are we talking about here?
There are plenty of reputation-based schemes already in operation for per-protocol black or white listing which work as well (and as badly) as any such scheme can do. There is no need to drag it down to the core, polluting DNS with yet more protocol shenanigans as we do so.
Given that connections via most protocols are preceded by DNS queries (unless you're using hardcoded IP addresses for everything), I think whether this is or isn't a good idea comes down to one question:
Are there are lot of domains out there that deserve a bad reputation for things they do on certain ports or over certain protocols, but are otherwise fine and upstanding members of society?
I think there are plenty of companies out there that are respectable outfits but make some poor choices vis-a-vis email marketing; something like this might provide them the encouragement they need to do the right thing. And most other ways a domain can be evil - protocol-specific though they may be - make spamming look like nothing. Malicious sites, malware, spyware, outright fraud, etc.
Unless there are domains that are only evil on a single protocol and otherwise are angelic, I'd sooner have things vanish at the initial DNS query, and not worry about consulting a bunch of different blacklists, etc. Seems simpler.
Eh, you're being a little quick to dismiss things. A third author typically had, at the very least, some meaningful role in the research that was done, and is a full member of whatever collaboration did it. (And probably has a Ph.D., or is working on one.)
I'm an associate member of a collaboration, and as such I make it onto the authors list for various little announcements they put out, but although I take a lot of the data, I'm not as involved in analyzing what it all means (I'm still shy of a M.Sc) so I usually just wind up in the "thanks to..." part at the end of real papers. :)
Parent nailed it. To fill in a little bit - Pan-STARRS 1 was supposed to be operational for science by mid-late 2008, and the PS1 funders had agreed that if that were the case, they'd fund PS4. Due to some glitches in design of the secondary mirror truss or something, PS1 didn't give good results on time, and had to be reworked a little bit before it finally got rolling back around this February. They're looking for new/additional funders to finish the final system on Mauna Kea.
I worked for the Institute for Astronomy from 2004-2009, and when I started there, Pan-STARRS was showing up in PowerPoints as "coming in 2008" on Mauna Kea. Now it's "2013 if we're lucky, 2014 if we're realistic."
Well, Zip+4 identifies buildings, or groups of buildings... not people. Your ZIP+4 might change over the course of your life - maybe even several times.
My Zip+4 corresponds to the 4 houses on my driveway... but the post office sees ##A, ##B, ##C and ##D on my street and decides that these are clearly apartments in an apartment building. So sites that collect and distribute "public information" about me tend to start off by being completely wrong about my living arrangements.
I have "naked DSL" with no dialtone at my house, so of course I get:
1. The telephone company's official phone book (which isn't actually produced by the telephone company, and hasn't been for years, and is so full of errors that the telephone company is forced to send a letter-to-the-editor of the local paper explaining that it's not their fault)
2. The paperback-sized one that's just for my side of the county, also from the telephone company.
3. Some unofficial book from some other publisher
4. Another copy of the same unofficial book stuffed into my tiny post office box.
And the office gets some huge number of all of the above, and an email goes out to everyone saying "new phone books are here! come get one if you want, and please put your old one in the next pile over for recycling."
So... I have been taking my old phone books and the new phone books to work, and putting them in the pile for recycling. Sure, it makes my bike heavier on the uphill commute to work, but hey, burn more calories, get rid of phone books, it's a win-win. :)
Anyone with a good telescope available?!
Depends what you consider "good." If you're thinking of something in the $199-$15,999 price range, with an aperture of 4-16 inches (which should be plenty for just looking at a nearby supernova, then the 16" Meade or one of the 14" Celestrons where I stargaze should work.
If, on the other hand, you're thinking more in the $3,000,000-$400,000,000 range, then I'd have to schlep all the way up to the general vicinity of work.
But I'm relatively certain that even folks around work would be interested in looking at it. I think it'd be a Type II supernova, but I could ask if the Type Ia collaboration I'm in could look at it too... but unfortunately since it's pretty much up during the day this time of year, and "close to" the Sun in the sky, it'd be a hard target.
I would hope for visibility by daylight, since Orion is basically only up during the day this time of year!
Clever, clever kooks - pick a target that's practically un-observable when you make your big "announcement." :)
On Slashdot, you can say things like "Ever heard of the Jazzmutant Lemur?" and everyone will either claim (honestly or not) to be familiar with it, or scramble to find out about it, since clearly it must be something important to know about, or our fellow Slashdotter wouldn't be mentioning it here.
The same question might not go over as well if asked of a helpful policeman, a greengrocer, a veterinarian, a priest, a schoolteacher, the school counselor the teacher refers you to, or the helpful men who the counselor calls to have you fitted for a new sweater with arms that fasten in the back.
Yeah, Apple Retail Stores used a POS based on Windows Mobile for years, but everything I've ever heard indicated it was a POS in more than one way.
Once they announced that version...3, was it? of the iPhone OS would support more specialized hardware accessories, everyone knew they'd switch to their own hardware.
(And really, using iPhones/iPods to sell iPhones/iPods is a great demo.)
There are companies that sell time on telescopes - Slooh and LightBuckets come to mind. Typically their scopes are well-sited and at least as big/capable as anything you're likely to have as an amateur. The CEO of LightBuckets (who isn't by any means a professional astronomer - he used to work for Norton/Symantec) was a classmate of mine in an astronomy class last year, and just for kicks, he used one of his company's telescopes to do a survey (14 hours of imaging over the course of a week) using a 24-inch R-C, to see whether it would turn up any new asteroids. Found 17 of them.
mac mini (essentially thin client hardware)
Let's see... Core 2 Duo at 2.26-2.66 GHz with 3MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, 2GB-4GB of DDR3 RAM, GeForce 9400M video, Mini DisplayPort and MiniDVI video out (2 ports, so you can have 2 monitors) 160-500GB internal disk, 5 USB ports, optical digital audio in/out, 1 FireWire-800 port, and a DVD+-R/DL burner...
Geez, thin clients have an awful lot of features nowadays.
(In other words, the Mac mini is essentially laptop hardware, only with more ports than you get on an Apple laptop, and I have no idea where you got this "thin client" idea from.)
I'll second this. I transitioned from dot-coms (Solaris on the backend, Windows on desks, a *few* Macs and Linux boxen) to astronomy about 6 years ago. At that point in time, a typical person's office had a PC for accessing stuff on Windows servers, a Solaris workstation for "doing real work," and a PowerBook that they took home, to conferences, etc. Nowadays, those same people have a Mac(Book) Pro which does their "real work" (ported to OS X), accesses the Windows servers, runs Windows apps in VMware or Parallels if so desired, and leaves enough room on their desk for some seriously big LCD panels.
The idea of being able to use (in the real world) or teach (in a school) Windows, plus the Mac interface, plus UNIX, in a single machine, is quite nice.
Just wondering. Is there a "prize?" Like getting the first dose of whatever-it-turns-into?
In countries were [sic] people earn a few $1,000 a year or even a few hundred, I don't see how Apple could make a product cheap enough to make $$.
I spent 2 weeks in Uganda at the beginning of this year. (There was a nice annular solar eclipse.) Per-capita GDP is about $1,300. Of course, that's an average - some folks make less, some make more - and includes kids and whatever.
Anyway, anyone who makes enough above that average has an iPod. At least a shuffle or a nano. People who can afford one - say, managers - have an iPhone 3G S. There are ads for the iPhone all over Kampala. There's an Apple authorized reseller downtown.
There's also a lot of counterfeit product from China in the market, which is a lot cheaper and typically breaks after a few months. It's interesting to go to a market that doesn't have the level of IP law and trade regulation in place that the US does.