I had a C2-4P. It had 8k of ram and a cassette as well, but then I work the entire summer at Six Flags to save the $1100 necessary to add another 8K and 5.25" floppy drive. Eventually I added a 3rd party graphics card and another 32K of RAM. Finally added a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem and I was living large!
I have to disagree with you on this. Back in the day, "Hacker" was a positive term, meaning someone who really got into and deeply understood the systems at hand. A "cracker" on the other hand was someone who used such information nefariously, ie to crack into a system. I suppose these days the difference would be white hat vs black hat.
So indeed the term has meaning, and it is used correctly here. To your point though, over the past several decades, that meaning has been obscured by sensationalist media not bothering to check their facts.
Leave it to Eric Raymond to give us old guys a forum.
I too cut my teeth on BASIC and 6502 assembly.
I haven't seen any reference yet to the fine art of EGA's 16 of 64 color choices, horizontal and vertical timing, blanking interrupts and the like.
Back in those days before the likes of Google and Wikipedia I had a set of IBM PC DOS manuals including all the Int 21 functions, disassembled boot code and more. It is fun to reminisce, but like Mr. Raymond says, I don't miss it at all.
According to the AP, the quote is: "We know he's guilty. Turn him over," as seen at http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-a p-attacks-washington1015oct14.story?coll=sns%2Dap% 2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines
Take care
Re:Question for Iridium-knowledgeable, haiku form
on
A Eulogy for Iridium
·
· Score: 1
two four oh oh baud on one satellite channel oh far too too bad
These guys want you to send money, or get a credit card. There is no way that a bunch of well meaning part time volunteer geeks would be able to get any sort of benefit from the constellation.
Motorola (or Iridium LLC) still holds the rights to the frequencies, and I would imagine the going price for that would be far greater than what a volunteer group would be able to raise, assuming this is on the level.
Even if it were possible to put software in the satellites to do something more than 2400baud, the task of keeping the satellites on orbit is emmence! Why do you think the operating costs of the constellation were so high? It is because the vehicles are not smart. Their orbits drift and they must be tracked very carefully then commanded from the ground to be repositioned.
As much fun as it is to think about giving this "to the people" I would submit that it is better to cut the losses and instead think about running fiber everywhere.
It is sad to see something as big and complex as this fail, but sometimes it is better to just pull the plug and let the patient die.
Cheap is a relative term, of course. At around $50K per vehicle, the Iridium satellites were very inexpensive.
The largest single-ticket expense was the cost of launching the constellation. Also, the development cost was several times what they had anticipated. The task turned out to be extremely difficult. No one had ever attempted to coordinate the operation of so many space vehicles so there was no way to judge the true cost.
They were hardly trying to milk anyone. They knew that it was going to be a massively expensive project, but this was to be only the first of many such constellations. As such, Iridium was developed with an eye towards reuse. As any good engineer knows, this sort of project "investment" increases costs. That was the case here.
It is too bad, really. The systems used to keep the constellation aloft work very well. And of course, the fact that the signal emitted constantly emitted by the satellites in order to allow the phones to locate them leaked into radio-astronomy frequencies was a problem.
I must say that for what Iridium did, it did well. Technically. (Since I worked on the software I'm not going to say it sucked;-) It's just too bad that by the time Iridium came to market, the market didn't care!
As far as the satellites are conserned, they will either (1) go in to safe mode then auto-deboost after some period of silence, or (2) Motorola will continue to spend money to command the satellites in order to control their descent so no one gets banged by space junk.
I seriously doubt the constellation will be of much use for anything other than what it was designed for, since the satellites were built for cheap and Iridium would have liked to capitalize on any alternative use.
This is wonderful, I can now start a business selling aluminum foil hats to all my fellow Missourians who will shortly be emerging from their y2k survival huts, relieved they survived the apocolyps that didn't happen (again) but are now terrified that the government tracking satellites are *REAL*!
As a St. Louis native, I must say I am not the least bit suprised by this. St. Louis seems quite determined to squander its advantages whenever possible, particularly when it is related to something progressive, innovative, or technological.
The Gallarina is "prime" retail real estate. Located near the wealthiest neighborhoods, done up in pink marble, and catering exclusively to national retailers, they are not in danger of going out of business anytime soon. Unless they work hard enough at it, that is...
It is simply that Hycel, the mall owners, are part of the group of rich old white men group that own the region. They are not interested in anything other than what they have. If they have the option to modify cut off their nose to spite their face, they will do it. They are not going to stop the Gap from putting up billboards with their url.
Whatever. In the local paper, the spokesdroid for the mall said they are only interested in keeping local money in the local mall. The powerful chains, like the Gap, are telling them to basically FO, and the weaker ones are knucking under. This won't last. It will be amusing to see if this ends up in court. Especially if it is the mall trying to drag some big retailer in. More likely they will "strike a deal" with the big ones, and bully the small ones.
In St. Louis, even though the area has quite a lot of advantages, the ROWM are obviously quite prepared to allow the region to deteriorate under their control, rather than work to make the region thrive, but with less ROWM influence.
I find it quite interesting that this is getting the attention it is. Good ole' STL, the only time it makes national news is when someone here does something stupid. Again.
by MS doublespeak. If they are truely interested in getting windows programs to integrate better in a diverse environment, they don't have to develop, from scratch, YET ANOTHER PROTOCOL!
They are admitting that DCOM is not the smashing success they anticipated. They also feel that CORBA is too complex. If MS were truely interested in better integration, they should just comp up with the MSORB, slap some visual tools with wizards on it and presto, folks that already use CORBA will not have to trash their existing infrastructure, and the world will not have to decide between an open standard which benefits from 10 years of development vs. some new drivel from MS which is close to, but not like whats out there. At least it has a catchy name.
In the end, they are not interested in helping the world with better tools, only in decomoditizing existing protocols. How much you wanna bet that while SOAP may be used on any platform, it only really works well on MS platforms...
*disclaimer* I am an employee of OCI directly involved in the commercial support of TAO.
ACE/TAO actually provides several layers of abstraction to support distributed programming. At the high end there is CORBA, as implemented in TAO. TAO is built on ACE and capitalizes on ACE's services model. The services model is an abstraction layer which allows you to separate the transport mechanism from the service implementation. This layer allows you to write distributed services that can communicate via a variety of mechanisms such as sockets, fifos, pipes, whatever. Combined with the service configurator, which provides dynamic (at run time), configuration of applications, you are able to write very complex distributed applications.
The next layer down is an OS abstraction layer. If the stuff described above is too much for you, ACE provides THIN (as in inlined functions) wrappers around most OS functions related to interprocess communications, threading, shared memory, etc. This is very useful in writing _portable_ multiplatform code. For work with sockets, there are some very decent C++ abstractions of sockets that take care of the dirty work for you (such as mapping a string hostname to an inet address struct, binding, etc)
The footprint for ACE alone is about 700K for everything, and can be broken apart to some extent for smaller footprints. If you want CORBA on top of that, TAO adds an additional 1M (about).
You can download precompiled binaries of ACE & TAO for linux from www.theaceorb.com.
I am 35 and my experience is similar to those of you youngsters nearly my age.;-) I am in great demand, see my salary increase every year, and do leading-edge system development. I do it by simply staying current with technology. As others have stated, I can approach a problem, regardless the domain, and find it similar to something I did 2, 5, or maybe 10 years ago.
Of course, I broke away from the traditional corporate employment to be a member of a small, in-demand consultancy.
People my age and older must keep one eye on what they are doing and one eye on what everyone else is doing. If they feel threatened, then they must take the initiative and learn something else. If they can't rely on their employers to look after their best interest, they must do it themselves.
That's how I freed myself from a dead-end coder job, and how I keep myself valuable today.
There is an open source ORB, TAO, available from http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html The significiant feature of this ORB is its real-time characteristics and its Audio-Visual service. This feature has been developed in conjunction with the Washington University School Of Medicine.
There are a number of example applications, generally built around some real problem. I don't know if there is one already for your particular problem, but certainly the tools are all there if you want to take a crack at a solution.
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I had a C2-4P. It had 8k of ram and a cassette as well, but then I work the entire summer at Six Flags to save the $1100 necessary to add another 8K and 5.25" floppy drive. Eventually I added a 3rd party graphics card and another 32K of RAM. Finally added a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem and I was living large!
I have to disagree with you on this. Back in the day, "Hacker" was a positive term, meaning someone who really got into and deeply understood the systems at hand. A "cracker" on the other hand was someone who used such information nefariously, ie to crack into a system. I suppose these days the difference would be white hat vs black hat.
So indeed the term has meaning, and it is used correctly here. To your point though, over the past several decades, that meaning has been obscured by sensationalist media not bothering to check their facts.
Leave it to Eric Raymond to give us old guys a forum.
I too cut my teeth on BASIC and 6502 assembly.
I haven't seen any reference yet to the fine art of EGA's 16 of 64 color choices, horizontal and vertical timing, blanking interrupts and the like.
Back in those days before the likes of Google and Wikipedia I had a set of IBM PC DOS manuals including all the Int 21 functions, disassembled boot code and more. It is fun to reminisce, but like Mr. Raymond says, I don't miss it at all.
According to the AP, the quote is: "We know he's guilty. Turn him over," as seen at http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-a p-attacks-washington1015oct14.story?coll=sns%2Dap% 2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines
Take care
two four oh oh baud
on one satellite channel
oh far too too bad
;-)
These guys want you to send money, or get a credit card. There is no way that a bunch of well meaning part time volunteer geeks would be able to get any sort of benefit from the constellation.
Motorola (or Iridium LLC) still holds the rights to the frequencies, and I would imagine the going price for that would be far greater than what a volunteer group would be able to raise, assuming this is on the level.
Even if it were possible to put software in the satellites to do something more than 2400baud, the task of keeping the satellites on orbit is emmence! Why do you think the operating costs of the constellation were so high? It is because the vehicles are not smart. Their orbits drift and they must be tracked very carefully then commanded from the ground to be repositioned.
As much fun as it is to think about giving this "to the people" I would submit that it is better to cut the losses and instead think about running fiber everywhere.
It is sad to see something as big and complex as this fail, but sometimes it is better to just pull the plug and let the patient die.
This is clearly one such time.
Cheap is a relative term, of course. At around $50K per vehicle, the Iridium satellites were very inexpensive.
The largest single-ticket expense was the cost of launching the constellation. Also, the development cost was several times what they had anticipated. The task turned out to be extremely difficult. No one had ever attempted to coordinate the operation of so many space vehicles so there was no way to judge the true cost.
They were hardly trying to milk anyone. They knew that it was going to be a massively expensive project, but this was to be only the first of many such constellations. As such, Iridium was developed with an eye towards reuse. As any good engineer knows, this sort of project "investment" increases costs. That was the case here.
It is too bad, really. The systems used to keep the constellation aloft work very well. And of course, the fact that the signal emitted constantly emitted by the satellites in order to allow the phones to locate them leaked into radio-astronomy frequencies was a problem.
I must say that for what Iridium did, it did well. Technically. (Since I worked on the software I'm not going to say it sucked ;-) It's just too bad that by the time Iridium came to market, the market didn't care!
As far as the satellites are conserned, they will either (1) go in to safe mode then auto-deboost after some period of silence, or (2) Motorola will continue to spend money to command the satellites in order to control their descent so no one gets banged by space junk.
I seriously doubt the constellation will be of much use for anything other than what it was designed for, since the satellites were built for cheap and Iridium would have liked to capitalize on any alternative use.
This is wonderful, I can now start a business selling aluminum foil hats to all my fellow Missourians who will shortly be emerging from their y2k survival huts, relieved they survived the apocolyps that didn't happen (again) but are now terrified that the government tracking satellites are *REAL*!
As a St. Louis native, I must say I am not the least bit suprised by this. St. Louis seems quite determined to squander its advantages whenever possible, particularly when it is related to something progressive, innovative, or technological.
The Gallarina is "prime" retail real estate. Located near the wealthiest neighborhoods, done up in pink marble, and catering exclusively to national retailers, they are not in danger of going out of business anytime soon. Unless they work hard enough at it, that is...
It is simply that Hycel, the mall owners, are part of the group of rich old white men group that own the region. They are not interested in anything other than what they have. If they have the option to modify cut off their nose to spite their face, they will do it. They are not going to stop the Gap from putting up billboards with their url.
Whatever. In the local paper, the spokesdroid for the mall said they are only interested in keeping local money in the local mall. The powerful chains, like the Gap, are telling them to basically FO, and the weaker ones are knucking under. This won't last. It will be amusing to see if this ends up in court. Especially if it is the mall trying to drag some big retailer in. More likely they will "strike a deal" with the big ones, and bully the small ones.
In St. Louis, even though the area has quite a lot of advantages, the ROWM are obviously quite prepared to allow the region to deteriorate under their control, rather than work to make the region thrive, but with less ROWM influence.
I find it quite interesting that this is getting the attention it is. Good ole' STL, the only time it makes national news is when someone here does something stupid. Again.
by MS doublespeak. If they are truely interested in getting windows programs to integrate better in a diverse environment, they don't have to develop, from scratch, YET ANOTHER PROTOCOL!
They are admitting that DCOM is not the smashing success they anticipated. They also feel that CORBA is too complex. If MS were truely interested in better integration, they should just comp up with the MSORB, slap some visual tools with wizards on it and presto, folks that already use CORBA will not have to trash their existing infrastructure, and the world will not have to decide between an open standard which benefits from 10 years of development vs. some new drivel from MS which is close to, but not like whats out there. At least it has a catchy name.
In the end, they are not interested in helping the world with better tools, only in decomoditizing existing protocols. How much you wanna bet that while SOAP may be used on any platform, it only really works well on MS platforms...
*disclaimer* I am an employee of OCI directly involved in the commercial support of TAO.
ACE/TAO actually provides several layers of abstraction to support distributed programming. At the high end there is CORBA, as implemented in TAO. TAO is built on ACE and capitalizes on ACE's services model. The services model is an abstraction layer which allows you to separate the transport mechanism from the service implementation. This layer allows you to write distributed services that can communicate via a variety of mechanisms such as sockets, fifos, pipes, whatever. Combined with the service configurator, which provides dynamic (at run time), configuration of applications, you are able to write very complex distributed applications.
The next layer down is an OS abstraction layer. If the stuff described above is too much for you, ACE provides THIN (as in inlined functions) wrappers around most OS functions related to interprocess communications, threading, shared memory, etc. This is very useful in writing _portable_ multiplatform code. For work with sockets, there are some very decent C++ abstractions of sockets that take care of the dirty work for you (such as mapping a string hostname to an inet address struct, binding, etc)
The footprint for ACE alone is about 700K for everything, and can be broken apart to some extent for smaller footprints. If you want CORBA on top of that, TAO adds an additional 1M (about).
You can download precompiled binaries of ACE & TAO for linux from www.theaceorb.com.
phil
I am 35 and my experience is similar to those of you youngsters nearly my age. ;-) I am in great demand, see my salary increase every year, and do leading-edge system development. I do it by simply staying current with technology. As others have stated, I can approach a problem, regardless the domain, and find it similar to something I did 2, 5, or maybe 10 years ago.
Of course, I broke away from the traditional corporate employment to be a member of a small, in-demand consultancy.
People my age and older must keep one eye on what they are doing and one eye on what everyone else is doing. If they feel threatened, then they must take the initiative and learn something else. If they can't rely on their employers to look after their best interest, they must do it themselves.
That's how I freed myself from a dead-end coder job, and how I keep myself valuable today.
There is an open source ORB, TAO, available from
http://siesta.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html
The significiant feature of this ORB is its real-time characteristics and its Audio-Visual service. This feature has been developed in conjunction with the Washington University School Of Medicine.
There are a number of example applications, generally built around some real problem. I don't know if there is one already for your particular problem, but certainly the tools are all there if you want to take a crack at a solution.