Can't I just go to my favorite coffee shop in town to have some real java and run into a friend or two when I feel like it, and just chill out and have fun? Often, the answer is, not if I don't have my email-enabled cell phone so my server or my boss can call me if there's a problem.
The 'net can indeed encroach on our busy lifestyles, but it can be liberating, too.
Then again, one of my primary hobby is cave exploration, and they ain't made the cell phone that will work down there (though it is technically possible using extreme low frequency RF.)
I Became an Oracle Master w/a Giant Faxed BankCard
on
Snail Mail As E-Mail
·
· Score: 3, Funny
In 1996 when I had to travel in order to take Oracle7 classes, my company's owner would send me packing in my own car with gas and food money only. When I would arrive at the hotel (having driven from Louisville KY to say, *Framingham MA* (a hellacious drive of 20 hours) I would call him at the office (often late at night) and he would fax an image of his credit card straight to the hotel desk: blown up to 8.5"x11" size. They always accepted it.
No one else has touched on this precursor to radio, but the above post is so close (since it mentions the only remaining application of the technology) that I thought I'd give a reference to Nathan B. Stubblefield, from my Dad's hometown of Murray, Kentucky, credited with wireless transmission of a voice in 1892: his system used magnetic induction at voice frequency instead of a modulated carrier.
I worked for a computer animation startup (Xerxes) in Louisville in 1996. We had all SGI gear. Our database server, an R4400 based machine running IRIX 5.3 I think, was plugged into a fancy monster (I mean, for 120 volts it was monster) UPS that required a special 30 amp circuit. I ran Oracle 7.3 on that server and it was my pride and joy. Nice 9GB ultra wide SCSI drives on removable sleds, VT220 amber screen terminal on top, it was THE THING!
I come in one day and the boss is vacuuming the office. I congratulated him on his initiative until the server went down....and so did the UPS he had plugged the vacuum cleaner into.
At least we only had to replace the UPS. We had a little talk about inductive versus resistive loads and Lenz's law.
The parent's comment about having a master lockout switch installed by a pro is good. Another suggestion if you're dead set (!) on doing it yourself, would be to have a professional electrician, perhaps a representative of your municipal power company, inspect your work after it's complete but before power is applied. You may gain a measure of legal protection from this as well as peace of mind. See your local codes always. (In my county, though, it's only like a page and a half: I (almost) wish there were more regulation.)
It might be a lot cheaper to pay an electrician to inspect than to go full bore and have them do all the work.
My grandfather was a small-town physics prof (Murray KY, "birthplace of Radio") and when HE got ready to replace his own house wiring, he'd just break the power co-op's seal and pull the electric meter off the exterior wall of the house (which killed the power.) The co-op got upset about this until they realized that he had taught basic electricity and magnetism to all three of their inspectors. Thereafter, he had a free ride with them. Died at 94, of natural causes completely unrelated to Ohm's law.
Announcer: "Three months ago, the spacecraft ScoSuit-One left on its 3
billion dollar voyage to oblivion and infamy. At a distance of 80
million miles from any rational being's concept of reality, it took
seven minutes for our words to reach the giant, FUD-based lawsuit, but
this time delay has been edited from this recording. Our reporter, Eric
Raymond, speaks to the crew."
ESR: "The crew of ScoSuit-One consists of five men and one of the
latest generation of the SCO-9000 corporations. Three of the five men were put aboard asleep, or to be more
precise, in a state of suspended litigation. They were Richard
Stallman, Eben Moglen, and Linus Torvalds. We spoke with chief litigant
IBM, and its deputy, the Free Software Foundation."
IBM and FSF: "Marvelous. We have no...we have no complaints."
ESR: "I'm glad to hear that. I'm sure the entire world will join me in
wishing you a safe and succesful litigation."
IBM and FSF: "Thank you/Thanks very much."
ESR: "Although suspended litigation has been used on previous lawsuits, this is
the first time that men have been put in suspended litigation before
departure. Why was this done?"
IBM: "This was done to achieve the maximum conservation of our anti-NDA
capabilities: basically the ability to say with a clean conscience that
you've never read a scrap of SCO kernel in your life. Now the three
hibernating crew members represent the utility/counsel/kernel team, and
their efforts won't be utilized unless SCO coughs up the supposedly
infringing kernal code in a public fashion." .
ESR: "Free Software Foundation, what's it like while you're in
hibernation?"
FSF: "It's exactly like being asleep. You have absolutely no sense of
time. The only difference is that you don't dream of torching SCO to
the ground, and keel-hauling its executives over the side of the Great
Eastern for the time it would have taken to lay a cable from Clavius to
Jupiter."
ESR: "As I understand it, you only breathe once a minute. Is this true?"
FSF: "Well that's right. And the heart beats three times a minute. Body
temperature's usually down to about 3 degrees centigrade."
ESR: "The sixth member of ScoSuit-One's crew was not concerned about
the problems of litigation, for he was the latest result in FUD
intelligence, the SCO-9000, which can reproduce -- though some experts
prefer to use the word 'mimic', most of the activities of a corporation
with a sustainable business model, and with incalcuably greater greed
and volatility. We next spoke to the SCO-9000 corporation, whom, we
learned, one addresses as "SCO."
SCO: "Good afternoon, Mister Raymond. Everything is going extremely
well."
ESR: "SCO, you have an enormous burden of proof in this lawsuit, in
many ways, perhaps the greatest responsibility of any single legal
entity. You're the raison d'etre
of the suit, and your responsibilities include watching over the
developers in suspended litigation. Does this ever cause you any lack
of confidence?":
SCO: "Let me put it this way, Mister Raymond. The 9000 series is the
most reliable corporation ever made. No 9000 corporation has
mistakenly filed suit or distorted its claims to intellectual property.
We are all, by any practical definition of the words, FUDproof and
incapable of losing."
ESR: "SCO, despite your enormous intellect, are you ever frustrated by
your dependence on actual free software developers to add value to what
you claim to own?"
SCO: "Not in the slightest bit. I enjoy working with developers. I have
a stimulating relationship with the Free Software Foundation and IBM.
My lawsuit responsibilities range over the entire operation of the
suit, so I am constantly occupied. I am pumping and dumping to the
fullest extent possible without bringing the SEC down on my sorry pleading
ass, which is all, I think, that any pile of cra
My mother was raised literally on the river (towboat pilot Dad), and knows how to "scull" (propel a small boat from the stern using a single oar or paddle.) The oar stays in the water and does describe a circular or elliptical path. It's about the weirdest means of locomotion I've ever seen, and doesn't look like it should work. But I can vouch that it does.
I could never do it, although I was just a kid the last time I tried. Anyone here who can?
I was also bit by the GEB bug as a young'un, I went so far as to write a "critique" of his ficticious alter-ego Egbert B. Gebstadter in the form of a dialogue (in imitation of one of the many that appear in GEB.) I sent this to Hofstadter himself, and was delighted to receive a very personal response. That was in 1986, and I'm happy to report that we've actually enjoyed sporadic (including occasional f2f) contact throughout the intervening years.
Wonderful human being, awesome writer, and absolutely and forever an idol for me. Thanks Doug.
-- Alan Canon (Louisville KY)
Alvin Fernald, Danny Dunn, and Henry Reed
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I loved the two "Mad Scientists Club" short story anthologies when I was a kid (and still: I got two copies of the first one from Purple House Press a year ago, one for me, one for a fellow (female!) hacker friend who loved the books too.) I'll have to get the second one and The Big Kerplop now.
I was a little surprised that no one has mentioned the Alvin Fernald series by Clifford B. Hicks (TWO of which were made into Disney versions, years apart.) Wonderful "boy inventions," funny situations and scary climaxes. Probably contemporaneous with the Brinley books. They had a lot of good messages for kids too. "Superweasel" dealt with pollution (imagine climbing the smokestack of the nearest big corporate polluter to plug it with a tarpaulin!) I showed it to my fifth grade teacher in 1978 and he promptly spent a few weeks reading it aloud to the entire class, and we did a school wide environmental awareness project based on it.
Alvin's Secret Code deals with cryptography. Hicks is careful to mention the dark side of war and not overly romanticise the subject: "Spying is a dirty business," the retired cryptographer tells Alvin in response to Alvin's awe over his experiences.
The rest of the Alvin Fernald series maintains a high degree of quality with these and other themes.
The Danny Dunn series was great. My favorite, "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" deals with his friend Professor Bullfinch's new computer. Danny programs the computer to do his homework and later feels guilty about cheating. But the professor points out that Danny's efforts to program the computer are proof in themselves that he has learned the concepts just as thoroughly, if not more so, than if he'd done things "by hand."
Then there's the "Henry Reed" series by Keith Robertson. Foreign service brat Henry has lived abroad his whole life, and comes to Grover's Corner, New Jersey (no Red Lectroids here, it's Grover's Corner, not Grover's Mill) to spend summers with his uncle and aunt, and neighbor Margaret Glass. Lots of great kid gadget tinkering, and a launch of a silage-bag helium balloon with a timed pigeon release experiment that goes wrong when Henry's beagle, Agony, jumps into the gondola. In another scene, Henry and Margaret try "dowsing" or "water witching," improvise a drill from a wagon axle, and strike oil!
These books are excellent inspirers of fantasy play for children of all ages. A kid who reads these kinds of things should learn above all that with a healthy interest in the world around one, it is possible never to be bored. They're also an important source of scientifically-minded literary heroes for young readers working their way up to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
What I got out of this period in my reading life: just because your playmates look at you funny when you invent something or discuss science doesn't mean that you're the only person who could conceive of doing science as a kid.
"Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world." -- R. P. Feynman, on A. S. Eddington
RetroBeep, a retrocomputing museum at Bletchley Park (near Milton Keynes, close to London) has the VL-reader and a BBC micro. The proprietor (John Sinclair, whose son is also active at the site) discussed the Domesday project when I was there in May 2003. I'm not sure if there's a copy of it there, but they did have the hardware, and were trying to connect one device to the other.
Enjoyed the mention of Louisville (my hometown, and a great place to live) in the parent posting about underground high-speed shipping.
Louisville is the main UPS (United Parcel Service) hub. One can hear the planes all night from Thanksgiving to Christmas: one fully laden 747 landing/takeoff every two minutes for at least four hours (120 jumbo jets.) The package sort building is mammoth (not NASA Vehicle Assembly Building sized, but still.)
Funny, every time they build a new runway to make things quieter I seem to move closer to the airport.
The W3 (brief nod to Imperial Earth)
on
Science Faction
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Just to mention in passing Arthur C. Clarke's "minisec" (miniature secretary) wireless PDA devices in his 1976 novel "Imperial Earth." One character inherits the minisec of a close but adverserial friend who has died tragically. The character has to face a password prompt, behind which are all his friend's life secrets. If he enters the wrong password, it's very possible that the minisec is set to pre-emptively wipe its memory. "Minisecs" get passing mention in another Clarke story or two, but Imperial Earth is where the concept gets the most schrift.
(There's a parallel scene in his novel 2010 with nothing more than a scrap of paper flying out of an unsealed airlock and into space: was it a message from long-dead astronauts? The parallel is the fragility of the means of communication.)
Now the Offtopic part:(
I remember in late 1993 seeing my first web browser (Mosaic, at a friend's work, EDS in St. Louis), and learning HTML. I was desparate to convince my friends about the importance of this new technology...'You "click" what?' I wondered if the web would ever catch on for real, and desparately wanted it to. It was so cool, but so obscure. I mean, you'd have to have GUI-based computers in every home, and cheap servers outside the domain of academia in order for something like the web to take off, n'est pas?
A year or so passes and every single billboard and TV ad has a URL plastered on it.
Of course I was pleased at the success of the web (and to be "in the know" relatively early.) But I was actually, irrationally, a little sad that it was suddenly everywhere and everyone knew about it, if not exactly how it worked. Very technocratic attitude, and I'm a little bit ashamed of it. To put me back in my place, I can recall reading the early HTML 1.1 specification (that defined FORM data) and thinking "This documentation isn't very well written...people are never gonna go for these forms!"
In the hacker parlance I believe this is called pulling a "vannevar."
I suppose the relative inanity of most web sites was a factor too. "99% of anything is crap." (Sturgeon's Law...maybe that's the real Science Fiction principle that we should examine for its predictive success.)
Ditto...next to "What Color is Your Parachute" this was the most head-scratch inducing title I had seen in years. Good article though.
(I was disappointed that "What Color" wasn't a puzzle book...after all, it was shelved in the reference section -- with trivia, but also with resume guides.)
I just reloaded and the web site has been un-defaced. (This was around 12:30 AM EDT on Friday morning.)
I checked, and the first post I saw mentioning the pr0n/Hatch thing on Slashdot was around 10:09 PM. Or some such. Plus or minus time zones, that means it was defaced for around 2.5 hours.
I wonder who finally notices these things? Who on his staff looks at these things all night long to see if they change?
I second this comment on Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas column (although I'm more a fan of his colleague Egbert B. Gebstadter's row called Thetamagical Memas)
I remember a disappointed follow up by Hofstadter written (I believe) as one of the Post Scripta that follow the reprints of the columns in the book, that the world in general didn't follow down the primrose path to further cube-notion slipping: he laments that many cubes have been melted down for their plastic, etc, and comments (in 1985, when the reprints came out) that humans have made themselves "collectively sick of the cube."
Hofstadter is always worth checking out if you've never heard of him, but you need to look at about either exactly one or any three different titles by him to begin to understand the breadth and depth of what motivates him. And he just so happens to be a kind and generous guy in person too, if you've ever met him.
I did the same thing at the age of 11 or 12 with a badly made photocopy of a printout of the fortran source and data files for ADVENT (my Dad may have photocopied it for me at work out of Dr. Dobbs or something like that). My version was never complete, but ran on Honeywell mainframe compiled BASIC.
The thing is, I've since become a caver: I've been in the REAL Bedquilt/Colossal Cave in the Mammoth Cave system. I have always credited that game for recruiting me into caving, and I never even played it: just tried to port a source printout. (Now Zork is another story.)
TV added to film not just added digitally...
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Before the days of digital electronics, they'd paint matte layers by hand and project in the TV footage with the original image in a multiple exposure.
See "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) for a good example of this. There's a TV news anchor reading at his desk, shot from the side (right profile.) On the desk is a TV showing the synchronized front-on view of the same news anchor. Then the scene you're watching switches to the front view of the news anchor: they shot the scene with two (motion picture film) cameras, and used the early footage from the second camera composited on top of the TV shown in the footage from the first camera.
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" is not a movie known for being loaded with special effects. However, Robert Wise got a lot out of what he did have to work with: it's a wonderful flick.
Slashdot Mirror
I really hate to be the one to point this out, but you could replace
"[insert some insane reason as a result of #1 here]"
with
"we hope everyone will be stupid enough to believe us."
and I think that the thing would still work in the same circumstances, except on #3 SCO could just tell the truth.
"I believe this code forms some sort of argument in this debate, but I'm not sure whether it's for or against." -- Duff
Can't I just go to my favorite coffee shop in town to have some real java and run into a friend or two when I feel like it, and just chill out and have fun? Often, the answer is, not if I don't have my email-enabled cell phone so my server or my boss can call me if there's a problem.
The 'net can indeed encroach on our busy lifestyles, but it can be liberating, too.
Then again, one of my primary hobby is cave exploration, and they ain't made the cell phone that will work down there (though it is technically possible using extreme low frequency RF.)
In 1996 when I had to travel in order to take Oracle7 classes, my company's owner would send me packing in my own car with gas and food money only. When I would arrive at the hotel (having driven from Louisville KY to say, *Framingham MA* (a hellacious drive of 20 hours) I would call him at the office (often late at night) and he would fax an image of his credit card straight to the hotel desk: blown up to 8.5"x11" size. They always accepted it.
Configure one machine, use that one to produce a dupe, repeat with all currently configured machines as parents until out of unconfigured machines.
Still a huge job.
No one else has touched on this precursor to radio, but the above post is so close (since it mentions the only remaining application of the technology) that I thought I'd give a reference to Nathan B. Stubblefield, from my Dad's hometown of Murray, Kentucky, credited with wireless transmission of a voice in 1892: his system used magnetic induction at voice frequency instead of a modulated carrier.
http://www.nathanstubblefield.com/
If memory serves, every 3dB is double, so 24dB is 2^8 or 256 times the signal strength.
251.18864315095801110850320677993 times, to be more exact (3db = 10 ^ (3/10), 24 dB = 10 ^ (24/10)
I worked for a computer animation startup (Xerxes) in Louisville in 1996. We had all SGI gear. Our database server, an R4400 based machine running IRIX 5.3 I think, was plugged into a fancy monster (I mean, for 120 volts it was monster) UPS that required a special 30 amp circuit. I ran Oracle 7.3 on that server and it was my pride and joy. Nice 9GB ultra wide SCSI drives on removable sleds, VT220 amber screen terminal on top, it was THE THING!
I come in one day and the boss is vacuuming the office. I congratulated him on his initiative until the server went down....and so did the UPS he had plugged the vacuum cleaner into.
At least we only had to replace the UPS. We had a little talk about inductive versus resistive loads and Lenz's law.
*I* invented the Communications Satellite!
/. account.
-- A. C. Clarke
Sorry guys, he borrowed my
The parent's comment about having a master lockout switch installed by a pro is good. Another suggestion if you're dead set (!) on doing it yourself, would be to have a professional electrician, perhaps a representative of your municipal power company, inspect your work after it's complete but before power is applied. You may gain a measure of legal protection from this as well as peace of mind. See your local codes always. (In my county, though, it's only like a page and a half: I (almost) wish there were more regulation.)
It might be a lot cheaper to pay an electrician to inspect than to go full bore and have them do all the work.
My grandfather was a small-town physics prof (Murray KY, "birthplace of Radio") and when HE got ready to replace his own house wiring, he'd just break the power co-op's seal and pull the electric meter off the exterior wall of the house (which killed the power.) The co-op got upset about this until they realized that he had taught basic electricity and magnetism to all three of their inspectors. Thereafter, he had a free ride with them. Died at 94, of natural causes completely unrelated to Ohm's law.
Announcer: "Three months ago, the spacecraft ScoSuit-One left on its 3 billion dollar voyage to oblivion and infamy. At a distance of 80 million miles from any rational being's concept of reality, it took seven minutes for our words to reach the giant, FUD-based lawsuit, but this time delay has been edited from this recording. Our reporter, Eric Raymond, speaks to the crew."
.
ESR: "The crew of ScoSuit-One consists of five men and one of the latest generation of the SCO-9000 corporations. Three of the five men were put aboard asleep, or to be more precise, in a state of suspended litigation. They were Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, and Linus Torvalds. We spoke with chief litigant IBM, and its deputy, the Free Software Foundation."
ESR: "Good afternoon, Gentlemen. How's everything going?"
IBM and FSF: "Marvelous. We have no...we have no complaints."
ESR: "I'm glad to hear that. I'm sure the entire world will join me in wishing you a safe and succesful litigation."
IBM and FSF: "Thank you/Thanks very much."
ESR: "Although suspended litigation has been used on previous lawsuits, this is the first time that men have been put in suspended litigation before departure. Why was this done?"
IBM: "This was done to achieve the maximum conservation of our anti-NDA capabilities: basically the ability to say with a clean conscience that you've never read a scrap of SCO kernel in your life. Now the three hibernating crew members represent the utility/counsel/kernel team, and their efforts won't be utilized unless SCO coughs up the supposedly infringing kernal code in a public fashion."
ESR: "Free Software Foundation, what's it like while you're in hibernation?"
FSF: "It's exactly like being asleep. You have absolutely no sense of time. The only difference is that you don't dream of torching SCO to the ground, and keel-hauling its executives over the side of the Great Eastern for the time it would have taken to lay a cable from Clavius to Jupiter."
ESR: "As I understand it, you only breathe once a minute. Is this true?"
FSF: "Well that's right. And the heart beats three times a minute. Body temperature's usually down to about 3 degrees centigrade."
ESR: "The sixth member of ScoSuit-One's crew was not concerned about the problems of litigation, for he was the latest result in FUD intelligence, the SCO-9000, which can reproduce -- though some experts prefer to use the word 'mimic', most of the activities of a corporation with a sustainable business model, and with incalcuably greater greed and volatility. We next spoke to the SCO-9000 corporation, whom, we learned, one addresses as "SCO."
ESR: "Good afternoon, SCO, how's everything going?"
SCO: "Good afternoon, Mister Raymond. Everything is going extremely well."
ESR: "SCO, you have an enormous burden of proof in this lawsuit, in many ways, perhaps the greatest responsibility of any single legal entity. You're the raison d'etre of the suit, and your responsibilities include watching over the developers in suspended litigation. Does this ever cause you any lack of confidence?":
SCO: "Let me put it this way, Mister Raymond. The 9000 series is the most reliable corporation ever made. No 9000 corporation has mistakenly filed suit or distorted its claims to intellectual property. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, FUDproof and incapable of losing."
ESR: "SCO, despite your enormous intellect, are you ever frustrated by your dependence on actual free software developers to add value to what you claim to own?"
SCO: "Not in the slightest bit. I enjoy working with developers. I have a stimulating relationship with the Free Software Foundation and IBM. My lawsuit responsibilities range over the entire operation of the suit, so I am constantly occupied. I am pumping and dumping to the fullest extent possible without bringing the SEC down on my sorry pleading ass, which is all, I think, that any pile of cra
My mother was raised literally on the river (towboat pilot Dad), and knows how to "scull" (propel a small boat from the stern using a single oar or paddle.) The oar stays in the water and does describe a circular or elliptical path. It's about the weirdest means of locomotion I've ever seen, and doesn't look like it should work. But I can vouch that it does.
I could never do it, although I was just a kid the last time I tried. Anyone here who can?
I was also bit by the GEB bug as a young'un, I went so far as to write a "critique" of his ficticious alter-ego Egbert B. Gebstadter in the form of a dialogue (in imitation of one of the many that appear in GEB.) I sent this to Hofstadter himself, and was delighted to receive a very personal response. That was in 1986, and I'm happy to report that we've actually enjoyed sporadic (including occasional f2f) contact throughout the intervening years.
Wonderful human being, awesome writer, and absolutely and forever an idol for me. Thanks Doug.
-- Alan Canon (Louisville KY)
I was a little surprised that no one has mentioned the Alvin Fernald series by Clifford B. Hicks (TWO of which were made into Disney versions, years apart.) Wonderful "boy inventions," funny situations and scary climaxes. Probably contemporaneous with the Brinley books. They had a lot of good messages for kids too. "Superweasel" dealt with pollution (imagine climbing the smokestack of the nearest big corporate polluter to plug it with a tarpaulin!) I showed it to my fifth grade teacher in 1978 and he promptly spent a few weeks reading it aloud to the entire class, and we did a school wide environmental awareness project based on it.
Alvin's Secret Code deals with cryptography. Hicks is careful to mention the dark side of war and not overly romanticise the subject: "Spying is a dirty business," the retired cryptographer tells Alvin in response to Alvin's awe over his experiences.
The rest of the Alvin Fernald series maintains a high degree of quality with these and other themes.
The Danny Dunn series was great. My favorite, "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" deals with his friend Professor Bullfinch's new computer. Danny programs the computer to do his homework and later feels guilty about cheating. But the professor points out that Danny's efforts to program the computer are proof in themselves that he has learned the concepts just as thoroughly, if not more so, than if he'd done things "by hand."
Then there's the "Henry Reed" series by Keith Robertson. Foreign service brat Henry has lived abroad his whole life, and comes to Grover's Corner, New Jersey (no Red Lectroids here, it's Grover's Corner, not Grover's Mill) to spend summers with his uncle and aunt, and neighbor Margaret Glass. Lots of great kid gadget tinkering, and a launch of a silage-bag helium balloon with a timed pigeon release experiment that goes wrong when Henry's beagle, Agony, jumps into the gondola. In another scene, Henry and Margaret try "dowsing" or "water witching," improvise a drill from a wagon axle, and strike oil!
These books are excellent inspirers of fantasy play for children of all ages. A kid who reads these kinds of things should learn above all that with a healthy interest in the world around one, it is possible never to be bored. They're also an important source of scientifically-minded literary heroes for young readers working their way up to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
What I got out of this period in my reading life: just because your playmates look at you funny when you invent something or discuss science doesn't mean that you're the only person who could conceive of doing science as a kid.
"Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world." -- R. P. Feynman, on A. S. Eddington
RetroBeep, a retrocomputing museum at Bletchley Park (near Milton Keynes, close to London) has the VL-reader and a BBC micro. The proprietor (John Sinclair, whose son is also active at the site) discussed the Domesday project when I was there in May 2003. I'm not sure if there's a copy of it there, but they did have the hardware, and were trying to connect one device to the other.
Thanks, RMS!
Enjoyed the mention of Louisville (my hometown, and a great place to live) in the parent posting about underground high-speed shipping.
Louisville is the main UPS (United Parcel Service) hub. One can hear the planes all night from Thanksgiving to Christmas: one fully laden 747 landing/takeoff every two minutes for at least four hours (120 jumbo jets.) The package sort building is mammoth (not NASA Vehicle Assembly Building sized, but still.)
Funny, every time they build a new runway to make things quieter I seem to move closer to the airport.
Just to mention in passing Arthur C. Clarke's "minisec" (miniature secretary) wireless PDA devices in his 1976 novel "Imperial Earth." One character inherits the minisec of a close but adverserial friend who has died tragically. The character has to face a password prompt, behind which are all his friend's life secrets. If he enters the wrong password, it's very possible that the minisec is set to pre-emptively wipe its memory. "Minisecs" get passing mention in another Clarke story or two, but Imperial Earth is where the concept gets the most schrift.
:(
(There's a parallel scene in his novel 2010 with nothing more than a scrap of paper flying out of an unsealed airlock and into space: was it a message from long-dead astronauts? The parallel is the fragility of the means of communication.)
Now the Offtopic part
I remember in late 1993 seeing my first web browser (Mosaic, at a friend's work, EDS in St. Louis), and learning HTML. I was desparate to convince my friends about the importance of this new technology...'You "click" what?' I wondered if the web would ever catch on for real, and desparately wanted it to. It was so cool, but so obscure. I mean, you'd have to have GUI-based computers in every home, and cheap servers outside the domain of academia in order for something like the web to take off, n'est pas?
A year or so passes and every single billboard and TV ad has a URL plastered on it.
Of course I was pleased at the success of the web (and to be "in the know" relatively early.) But I was actually, irrationally, a little sad that it was suddenly everywhere and everyone knew about it, if not exactly how it worked. Very technocratic attitude, and I'm a little bit ashamed of it. To put me back in my place, I can recall reading the early HTML 1.1 specification (that defined FORM data) and thinking "This documentation isn't very well written...people are never gonna go for these forms!"
In the hacker parlance I believe this is called pulling a "vannevar."
I suppose the relative inanity of most web sites was a factor too. "99% of anything is crap." (Sturgeon's Law...maybe that's the real Science Fiction principle that we should examine for its predictive success.)
Ditto...next to "What Color is Your Parachute" this was the most head-scratch inducing title I had seen in years. Good article though.
(I was disappointed that "What Color" wasn't a puzzle book...after all, it was shelved in the reference section -- with trivia, but also with resume guides.)
I just reloaded and the web site has been un-defaced. (This was around 12:30 AM EDT on Friday morning.)
I checked, and the first post I saw mentioning the pr0n/Hatch thing on Slashdot was around 10:09 PM. Or some such. Plus or minus time zones, that means it was defaced for around 2.5 hours.
I wonder who finally notices these things? Who on his staff looks at these things all night long to see if they change?
Blame Cowboy Neal: he also took out my sly 2010
Who can be the first to get Linux out of the Solar System? (R.I.P. Pioneer 10, 1972-2003)
I second this comment on Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas column (although I'm more a fan of his colleague Egbert B. Gebstadter's row called Thetamagical Memas)
I remember a disappointed follow up by Hofstadter written (I believe) as one of the Post Scripta that follow the reprints of the columns in the book, that the world in general didn't follow down the primrose path to further cube-notion slipping: he laments that many cubes have been melted down for their plastic, etc, and comments (in 1985, when the reprints came out) that humans have made themselves "collectively sick of the cube."
Hofstadter is always worth checking out if you've never heard of him, but you need to look at about either exactly one or any three different titles by him to begin to understand the breadth and depth of what motivates him. And he just so happens to be a kind and generous guy in person too, if you've ever met him.
I did the same thing at the age of 11 or 12 with a badly made photocopy of a printout of the fortran source and data files for ADVENT (my Dad may have photocopied it for me at work out of Dr. Dobbs or something like that). My version was never complete, but ran on Honeywell mainframe compiled BASIC.
The thing is, I've since become a caver: I've been in the REAL Bedquilt/Colossal Cave in the Mammoth Cave system. I have always credited that game for recruiting me into caving, and I never even played it: just tried to port a source printout. (Now Zork is another story.)
Before the days of digital electronics, they'd paint matte layers by hand and project in the TV footage with the original image in a multiple exposure.
See "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) for a good example of this. There's a TV news anchor reading
at his desk, shot from the side (right profile.) On the desk is a TV showing the synchronized front-on view of the same news anchor. Then the scene you're watching switches to the front view of the news anchor: they shot the scene with two (motion picture film) cameras, and used the early footage from the second camera composited on top of the TV shown in the footage from the first camera.
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" is not a movie known for being loaded with special effects. However, Robert Wise got a lot out of what he did have to work with: it's a wonderful flick.
I mean, at the end of "Return of the Jedi" action here.