Computer stuff: a couple of Sun Ultra 5 workstations. It's not that long ago that I ditched my IBM PS/2-25,
bought brand new in 1987. While it was useless for anything real by then, it lived on for a long time
running cross-assemblers for
PIC microcontrollers.
Other tech stuff: Collins 51J-4 radio, circa 1957 (low serial number). Works. Various Kodak cameras, mid-1930s. They work too.
No matter who is running NASA, Congress (i.e. the U.S. taxpayer) pays the bills, and
Congress tells NASA what its priorities are. Congress told
NASA to flush billions down the toilet that is ISS. Congress told
NASA to go back to the Moon, but didn't give them
any money to do it with. Congress (and the President) can
change NASA's priorities in minutes, with no warning or
appeal.
In the 1960s NASA had clear direction and lots of money, and they
landed men on the Moon. Now they have neither, and
have been going around in circles (literally)
for the last 35 years. Sad.
I've always felt slightly shortchanged by how things worked out. When I was little (the 1960s),
space was everywhere and the sky was a challenge, not the limit.
I came of age in the 1970s, just in time for the space
program to implode. It looks now like the next people
to go higher than low Earth orbit will do so just in time for me to
retire.
Parking at work is free. My van is paid for,
though I would have to make loan/lease payments
anyway, whether I drove or not.
To drive to work every day I would have to up the insurance and buy more diesel. After adding in more frequent distance-related maintenance, it's pretty well even with public transit. The
economics would change if my commute was longer
(fuel consumption, insurance rates), or if I
had to pay for parking at work.
As it is, I drive to work one day a week to remind myself
why I take the bus the other four days.
About the only one I never used was self-modifying code. Does patching binaries with a hex editor count?
I always thought hungarian notation was a crock. It
alway seemed
to be preoccupied with low-level data types, when what
you were supposed to to was define data types that said what
your data did, and leave it at that. I actually rather liked the
way Pascal defined numeric types, leaving it up to the compiler
to select an appropriate representation while you go on with your
work.
...laura, who has programmed in APL and who has used punched cards
Here in British Columbia we are having a referendum
in a couple of weeks on adopting
STV for provincial elections.
B.C. politics have become so heavily polarized that
I am in favour of anything that would break the current
logjam.
We use paper ballots, and have always done so. I don't see
this changing, and would oppose any moves to do so. A ballot is
definitive: an actual person made marks on it, and an actual person counted
it. This is as it should be.
M31 is an easy naked-eye object if you have good
dark skies. If
your skies are really dark you can try for M33,
though it just looks like a piece of sky that isn't as dark as the
rest of the sky. I've seen both from northern Canada.
Both are theoretically visible from Costa Rica, but are pretty low in the northern sky.
The most distant object I've ever observed was on an astronomy trip to Costa Rica in February. I had set myself the challenge of sighting the nearest star in the night sky (Alpha Centauri C, aka Proxima Centauri), and the most distant object visible in all but the largest amateur-size telescopes, the quasar 3C273.
I nailed them both in a single night with patience, finder charts and an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain. 4.2 light years and 2.5 to 3 billion, depending on which reference you use. Proxima is in a cluttered Milky Way field, while 3C273 appears to form a double star with a star in the Milky Way, not far from Gamma Virginis.
It's a loss-leader. They sell it for a minimal
(or zero) profit (don't forget manufacturing,
R&D, support, etc.)
and make money on the books they sell
for it. They probably also make money on the publicity,
when people realize how trendy Amazon are and buy even
more books.
There is an element of "halo product"
about Kindle as well. It generates interest and hype
far beyond what just selling a little box with
a screen will create.
As others have noted when looking at pictures like
the Hubble Deep Fields, Sir Arthur got it wrong. What Dave Bowman should have said was "My God, it's
full of galaxies!"
I have the same reaction whenever I wander around
the Virgo Cluster with my big Dob.
University was never intended to be job training. Grad school
even more so.
Do it because you are interested. This is the only reason to do
so. Do it because you want to, because you want to learn new things and find things out.
Do it whether they are going to pay you afterwards or not.
Though it must be admitted a Masters degree is highly saleable.
I paid for mine in 3 months after I graduated.
I still buy CDs, and I buy the occasional song
(or full album) on iTunes.
I almost never buy any CDs locally, though, because
the selection in local stores is pathetic. Instead,
I buy from Amazon, HMV in England and FNAC in France. If I can't get it through any of
them, I
probably don't need it anyway.
Yes, I too find most of the current "music"
awful, and have heard little of interest
since about 1991.
You can't blame me for not buying stuff that sucks. Other than reissues of old stuff,
my most recent CD purchases include Dial M for Monkey by Bonobo,
Hakol Ze Letova by Dana International,
and Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno.
I bought Bonobo on iTunes, Dana International online, and
Azucar Moreno at a record store (albeit one in
Costa Rica).
I've met a few "Josh" type in my life, but have never met the female version. Do they exist?
I've known some frighteningly smart women, and am pretty handy with a C compiler myself. But somehow women do not get in to this mode, apparently having only minor
issues with personal hygiene, working with others, and so on. Why?
...laura, who has her eccentricities, but nothing like Josh
Here is a list of crap that I won't put up with:
...
Region locks.
...
Waiting a week longer than American audiences (BBC iplayer)
My DVD player is region-free and will play anything. I have two DVD drives hooked up to my Mac, one set to Region 2 (U.K.) and the other set to Region 4 (Australia). If it's on DVD I can watch it, and I can rip it.
I still get the occasional online "you can't watch this from Canada", which I think is missing the point of the internet. The Top Gear web site is bad for this.
Top Gear is a good example of how the old ways collide with the new ways, actually. BBC Canada just started showing Series 11, which I saw online last year when it was on in England. I don't mind waiting, and I don't mind paying BBC Canada to see Top Gear. What I do mind is seeing the heavily cut "export" version, with so much missing to make room for commercials.
I find I am increasingly watching stuff on DVD, and downloading programs. I'll happily toss some money to the CBC to download programs like jPod and Being Erica from iTunes, commercial-free.
Here in Vancouver I get 5 digital channels over the air: CBC, Global and CTV, plus KVOS (independent) and KBCB (home shopping - shudder!)
from Bellingham, Washington. This is with a little antenna on top of my TV, plus
a digital converter box
I bought at Radio Shack in
Portland last fall.
KVOS and KBCB went 100% digital last night. Their former analogue
channels are dead air this morning.
KVOS had been running ads that said that
while the deadline had been extended, they were
going to pull the plug in February, as originally
planned. They did.
This reminds me of the setup I use
with the laptop the company issued me. It's a nice
Dell laptop, except that it came with XP, and
for a variety of reasons I can't blow XP away and
put a Real OS (tm) on it. I have an older Toshiba
laptop that runs Linux (and only Linux), and it's my network tool: plug it in and it talks to things, every time.
It's saved my butt (and the company's) on many occasions.
My solution: Linux (Slackware, naturally:-)
under Virtual PC. Except that Linux on a virtual
system works better than XP does on
the real hardware.
The networking may actually be faster, and
all the usual network stuff, including NFS and X, works
just fine.
There's got to be a lesson there somewhere,
but I can't quite figure out what it is.
My first Slackware box was a 486/66 with Slackware '96 aka Slackware 3.1. It came with 8 MB of RAM, which was fine for everything but Netscape, which worked, but only after
a minute of page thrashing. I maxed the box out to 32 MB and everything
was fine.
My current development box at work is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM. It runs Slackware 10.2, though heavily updated (gcc, kernel, etc.). I just updated the kernel to 2.6.28.3. I refuse
to run Gnome; the desktop is KDE. Needless to say, it flies...
I play with Debian on Sun UltraSPARC boxes, and have uCLinux on a number of little embedded computers.
In 2000 I was a seasoned Slackware user, and had been so for several years. I did my Master's thesis in LaTeX on a Pentium 233MMX box (which I still have), complete with diagrams done in xfig.
I did a lot of course work on that box: Viterbi decoding, polyspectral analysis, lots more.
I did have one MS Windows box for a few months, so I named it after a vegetable -- that seemed appropriate.
Around our office we've decided we will use nasty diseases for host names should the Powers That Be
decide we need to play with Vista. We'll flip a coin to see who gets ebola...
The first naming scheme I saw was a group
of then-new Sun 3 workstations that were named after
cheeses. The NFS server was chedder. How creative!
Where I currently work, the names are cars. I've had
twingo, tatra and model-t, while our new wickedly fast server
was, naturally, veyron. The system I'm typing this
on is a little crude but brutally fast: monaro.
Going a very long way back, when I was
with Digital the DECnet node names were limited
to 6 characters, but some of them were interesting. The main box at an office in Arizona was TOOHOT. GATORS? Florida, naturally. How could SRFSUP be anywhere but L.A.?
There was an article along these lines in New Scientist a couple of week ago,
looking at the availability of DNA and the availability of
modern host species. Some are fairly good, like tasmanian tigers, which
have lots of tissue samples available and a good candidate for
a host, the anything-but-extinct tasmanian devil. Marsupials also have very short gestation, with the embryo completing its development in the mother's pouch.
Other are farther out, like the dodo (no good DNA samples), the woolly rhinoceros (lots of DNA, the modern host
is itself seriously endangered), and so on. One extinct species of armadillo would be the size of a VW Beetle. Even if you had
DNA, no modern armadillo or related creature is anywhere nearly big
enough.
I got creative with our HP printers a few years ago,
trying to see what it would take to get some of our
programming team to speak up, or to say anything without
being explicitly told what to say. You know the type, I'm sure...
The first person to notice INSERT COIN was my former boss, who spluttered and then demanded an
explanation of our sysadmin. Sysadmin claimed total ignorance, but admitted it might be a good idea. I heard this going on and after I regained my
composure went in to his office and spilled the beans. And gave him a copy
of the perl script.:-)
One of our summer students was terribly confused at first, because he couldn't figure out where
to put money in, or how much.
Slashdot Mirror
Computer stuff: a couple of Sun Ultra 5 workstations. It's not that long ago that I ditched my IBM PS/2-25, bought brand new in 1987. While it was useless for anything real by then, it lived on for a long time running cross-assemblers for PIC microcontrollers.
Other tech stuff: Collins 51J-4 radio, circa 1957 (low serial number). Works. Various Kodak cameras, mid-1930s. They work too.
...laura
No matter who is running NASA, Congress (i.e. the U.S. taxpayer) pays the bills, and Congress tells NASA what its priorities are. Congress told NASA to flush billions down the toilet that is ISS. Congress told NASA to go back to the Moon, but didn't give them any money to do it with. Congress (and the President) can change NASA's priorities in minutes, with no warning or appeal.
In the 1960s NASA had clear direction and lots of money, and they landed men on the Moon. Now they have neither, and have been going around in circles (literally) for the last 35 years. Sad.
I've always felt slightly shortchanged by how things worked out. When I was little (the 1960s), space was everywhere and the sky was a challenge, not the limit. I came of age in the 1970s, just in time for the space program to implode. It looks now like the next people to go higher than low Earth orbit will do so just in time for me to retire.
...laura
Parking at work is free. My van is paid for, though I would have to make loan/lease payments anyway, whether I drove or not.
To drive to work every day I would have to up the insurance and buy more diesel. After adding in more frequent distance-related maintenance, it's pretty well even with public transit. The economics would change if my commute was longer (fuel consumption, insurance rates), or if I had to pay for parking at work.
As it is, I drive to work one day a week to remind myself why I take the bus the other four days.
...laura
Yikes!
About the only one I never used was self-modifying code. Does patching binaries with a hex editor count?
I always thought hungarian notation was a crock. It alway seemed to be preoccupied with low-level data types, when what you were supposed to to was define data types that said what your data did, and leave it at that. I actually rather liked the way Pascal defined numeric types, leaving it up to the compiler to select an appropriate representation while you go on with your work.
...laura, who has programmed in APL and who has used punched cards
Here in British Columbia we are having a referendum in a couple of weeks on adopting STV for provincial elections. B.C. politics have become so heavily polarized that I am in favour of anything that would break the current logjam.
We use paper ballots, and have always done so. I don't see this changing, and would oppose any moves to do so. A ballot is definitive: an actual person made marks on it, and an actual person counted it. This is as it should be.
...laura
M31 is an easy naked-eye object if you have good dark skies. If your skies are really dark you can try for M33, though it just looks like a piece of sky that isn't as dark as the rest of the sky. I've seen both from northern Canada.
Both are theoretically visible from Costa Rica, but are pretty low in the northern sky.
...laura
Congrats to the scientists!
The most distant object I've ever observed was on an astronomy trip to Costa Rica in February. I had set myself the challenge of sighting the nearest star in the night sky (Alpha Centauri C, aka Proxima Centauri), and the most distant object visible in all but the largest amateur-size telescopes, the quasar 3C273.
I nailed them both in a single night with patience, finder charts and an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain. 4.2 light years and 2.5 to 3 billion, depending on which reference you use. Proxima is in a cluttered Milky Way field, while 3C273 appears to form a double star with a star in the Milky Way, not far from Gamma Virginis.
...laura
It's a loss-leader. They sell it for a minimal (or zero) profit (don't forget manufacturing, R&D, support, etc.) and make money on the books they sell for it. They probably also make money on the publicity, when people realize how trendy Amazon are and buy even more books.
There is an element of "halo product" about Kindle as well. It generates interest and hype far beyond what just selling a little box with a screen will create.
Neither of these are new concepts.
...laura
I'm glad to hear it.
These things are relative, of course: Professor Hawking's "good health" is a serious illness by most usual standards. He's not a young man, either.
Nevertheless, I wish him well.
...laura
"My God, it's full of stars!"
As others have noted when looking at pictures like the Hubble Deep Fields, Sir Arthur got it wrong. What Dave Bowman should have said was "My God, it's full of galaxies!"
I have the same reaction whenever I wander around the Virgo Cluster with my big Dob.
...laura
University was never intended to be job training. Grad school even more so.
Do it because you are interested. This is the only reason to do so. Do it because you want to, because you want to learn new things and find things out.
Do it whether they are going to pay you afterwards or not. Though it must be admitted a Masters degree is highly saleable. I paid for mine in 3 months after I graduated.
...laura, B.Sc., M.A.Sc.
Buy all the memory you can afford. Then buy some more.
Virtualization is a memory pig. Cool, fun to play with, but still a memory pig.
...laura
As a new grad you are not expected to know everything. You are, however, expected to learn as necessary to do the job.
...laura
Just like Data used to say.
Some of the very best science has come from somebody looking over data, scratching their head and thinking, "That's funny..."
...laura
I still buy CDs, and I buy the occasional song (or full album) on iTunes.
I almost never buy any CDs locally, though, because the selection in local stores is pathetic. Instead, I buy from Amazon, HMV in England and FNAC in France. If I can't get it through any of them, I probably don't need it anyway.
Yes, I too find most of the current "music" awful, and have heard little of interest since about 1991. You can't blame me for not buying stuff that sucks. Other than reissues of old stuff, my most recent CD purchases include Dial M for Monkey by Bonobo, Hakol Ze Letova by Dana International, and Bailando con Lola by Azucar Moreno. I bought Bonobo on iTunes, Dana International online, and Azucar Moreno at a record store (albeit one in Costa Rica).
...laura
I've met a few "Josh" type in my life, but have never met the female version. Do they exist?
I've known some frighteningly smart women, and am pretty handy with a C compiler myself. But somehow women do not get in to this mode, apparently having only minor issues with personal hygiene, working with others, and so on. Why?
...laura, who has her eccentricities, but nothing like Josh
Here is a list of crap that I won't put up with:
...
Region locks.
...
Waiting a week longer than American audiences (BBC iplayer)
My DVD player is region-free and will play anything. I have two DVD drives hooked up to my Mac, one set to Region 2 (U.K.) and the other set to Region 4 (Australia). If it's on DVD I can watch it, and I can rip it.
I still get the occasional online "you can't watch this from Canada", which I think is missing the point of the internet. The Top Gear web site is bad for this.
Top Gear is a good example of how the old ways collide with the new ways, actually. BBC Canada just started showing Series 11, which I saw online last year when it was on in England. I don't mind waiting, and I don't mind paying BBC Canada to see Top Gear. What I do mind is seeing the heavily cut "export" version, with so much missing to make room for commercials.
I find I am increasingly watching stuff on DVD, and downloading programs. I'll happily toss some money to the CBC to download programs like jPod and Being Erica from iTunes, commercial-free.
...laura
Here in Vancouver I get 5 digital channels over the air: CBC, Global and CTV, plus KVOS (independent) and KBCB (home shopping - shudder!) from Bellingham, Washington. This is with a little antenna on top of my TV, plus a digital converter box I bought at Radio Shack in Portland last fall.
KVOS and KBCB went 100% digital last night. Their former analogue channels are dead air this morning. KVOS had been running ads that said that while the deadline had been extended, they were going to pull the plug in February, as originally planned. They did.
...laura
This reminds me of the setup I use with the laptop the company issued me. It's a nice Dell laptop, except that it came with XP, and for a variety of reasons I can't blow XP away and put a Real OS (tm) on it. I have an older Toshiba laptop that runs Linux (and only Linux), and it's my network tool: plug it in and it talks to things, every time. It's saved my butt (and the company's) on many occasions.
My solution: Linux (Slackware, naturally :-)
under Virtual PC. Except that Linux on a virtual
system works better than XP does on
the real hardware.
The networking may actually be faster, and
all the usual network stuff, including NFS and X, works
just fine.
There's got to be a lesson there somewhere, but I can't quite figure out what it is.
...laura
My first Slackware box was a 486/66 with Slackware '96 aka Slackware 3.1. It came with 8 MB of RAM, which was fine for everything but Netscape, which worked, but only after a minute of page thrashing. I maxed the box out to 32 MB and everything was fine.
My current development box at work is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM. It runs Slackware 10.2, though heavily updated (gcc, kernel, etc.). I just updated the kernel to 2.6.28.3. I refuse to run Gnome; the desktop is KDE. Needless to say, it flies...
I play with Debian on Sun UltraSPARC boxes, and have uCLinux on a number of little embedded computers.
...laura
In 2000 I was a seasoned Slackware user, and had been so for several years. I did my Master's thesis in LaTeX on a Pentium 233MMX box (which I still have), complete with diagrams done in xfig.
I did a lot of course work on that box: Viterbi decoding, polyspectral analysis, lots more.
...laura
I did have one MS Windows box for a few months, so I named it after a vegetable -- that seemed appropriate.
Around our office we've decided we will use nasty diseases for host names should the Powers That Be decide we need to play with Vista. We'll flip a coin to see who gets ebola...
...laura
The first naming scheme I saw was a group of then-new Sun 3 workstations that were named after cheeses. The NFS server was chedder. How creative!
Where I currently work, the names are cars. I've had twingo, tatra and model-t, while our new wickedly fast server was, naturally, veyron. The system I'm typing this on is a little crude but brutally fast: monaro.
Going a very long way back, when I was with Digital the DECnet node names were limited to 6 characters, but some of them were interesting. The main box at an office in Arizona was TOOHOT. GATORS? Florida, naturally. How could SRFSUP be anywhere but L.A.?
...laura
There was an article along these lines in New Scientist a couple of week ago, looking at the availability of DNA and the availability of modern host species. Some are fairly good, like tasmanian tigers, which have lots of tissue samples available and a good candidate for a host, the anything-but-extinct tasmanian devil. Marsupials also have very short gestation, with the embryo completing its development in the mother's pouch.
Other are farther out, like the dodo (no good DNA samples), the woolly rhinoceros (lots of DNA, the modern host is itself seriously endangered), and so on. One extinct species of armadillo would be the size of a VW Beetle. Even if you had DNA, no modern armadillo or related creature is anywhere nearly big enough.
...laura
I got creative with our HP printers a few years ago, trying to see what it would take to get some of our programming team to speak up, or to say anything without being explicitly told what to say. You know the type, I'm sure...
The first person to notice INSERT COIN was my former boss, who spluttered and then demanded an explanation of our sysadmin. Sysadmin claimed total ignorance, but admitted it might be a good idea. I heard this going on and after I regained my composure went in to his office and spilled the beans. And gave him a copy of the perl script. :-)
One of our summer students was terribly confused at first, because he couldn't figure out where to put money in, or how much.
The same printer now says SIT VIS TECUM.
...laura