RTFA, he states that he knows he can use FPGA's etc. but doesn't want to. He WANTS the nostalgia value of wiring everything from bare basics and, short of wiring millions of transistors together, has done it. It was a personal project that was never supposed to have any value except that he can say "I made that".
Another point is that the FPGAs, CPUs and stuff
we use today didn't just appear out of nowhere.
Somebody designed them. Somebody had to know
how this stuff works at a hardware gate level.
I've played with FPGAs myself, but have
also designed and wire-wrapped the occasional board. Nothing
as big as a whole computer, though.
...laura who remembers computers that were
whole shelves of boards covered with TTL
The standard day-to-day time system is UTC (rather mysteriously standing for Coordinated Universal Time) and it is based on the rotation of the earth. This is decided by the BIPM. As the length of a day is not precisely divisible by a second, leap seconds occasioanlly have to be added.
The Big International Scientific Conference that
got together to define a new time scale to replace GMT had no difficulty coming up with
the name "Coordinated Universal Time", but deadlocked when it
came time to decide between the English acronym (CUT) or the French one
(TUC). So
they decided to use the symbol UTC, which doesn't stand for anything.
Leap seconds are used to keep UTC in sync with the Earth's
rotation. Since the Earth's rotation is steadily
slowing down, UTC would drift away from
any sensible time if it wasn't adjusted
every now and then. So they add the occasional extra second to keep them in sync.
GPS time runs at the same rate as UTC, but
has no leap seconds, and is currently 13 seconds
different. People who navigate by the stars use UT1.
Then there is the Terrestrial Dynamical
Time that astronomers use, which is another matter entirely.
On a day-to-day basis I run in to four kinds of CPUs: x86 (typing this on one), UltraSPARC (most
of the boxes at work, plus an Ultra 5 I bought on EBay
to play with), ARM (my Palm - one of the new ones), Power PC (stuff at work) and several 68k derivatives
(various boxes at work from little to seriously studly).
This doesn't include the niche processors, Analog
Devices and TI DSPs, various PICs, and so on.
...laura who actually owns a DragonBall development board
They could pretty much dispense with steps 2 and onwards. They'd probably just pack the nuclear fuel round some conventional explosives, oil and ammonium nitrate mix and contaminate as large an area as possible.
This is what scares the crap out of so many people.
You would actually need some fairly high-level radioactive materials to make a good dirty bomb: uranium ore will make a geiger counter nervous, but nothing much happens
until you start concentrating the stuff.
You don't need to bother making plutonium if you want to make a fission
bomb, by the way. You can come up with critical
mass of uranium 235 without too much difficulty (relatively
speaking) and still make quite a bang.
I have some radioactive camera lenses (Kodak Aero Ektar,
Pentax Super-Takumar - thorium, y'know), but
am always on the lookout for some orange
FiestaWare (uranium, y'know)
It's puzzling, to me, that Card (a writer whom I respect greatly, BTW) spends his entire column arguing that the "Star Trek" series(es) should be cancelled because ST:TOS was a bad show.
I would never characterize ST:TOS as a bad show.
40 years later (sigh...) some episodes look horribly dated, and, yes, there are a few
clunkers that are positively embarrassing. We
may complain now about the cheesy sets
and wooden
acting (or over-acting, as the case may be), but
all shows from that era suffered from
the same problems, and few of them attempted
what ST:TOS did.
Dated, in places, yes. A few bad episodes, yes. Bad series, no.
I don't know about anyone else, but as planes become more "fly-by-wire" - I become less willing to fly. I can hear it now - you are at 42,000 feet and the pilot comes on and says, "We need to reboot the rudder computer." or, "Ummm, the right wing controller just did a BSOD!". Thanks, I work with computers - I now how much they can "hang" I'll stick with the old fashioned wires and hydraulics - thanks. This A380 has a LOT of computer control - so does the 777 - I'll stick to older 737s thanks.
And when was the last time the flight control system failed on a fly-by-wire plane?
The people who design and make these things are not fools, and they know what's at stake if they screw up.
All modern airliners have extensive computer control. New revisions of old designs
(e.g. 737-800, 747-400) do as well. It makes them
safer and more reliable. Not less.
The vast majority of my flights in the last
few years have been on A320s and 767s, and
I sleep very well knowing that their makers did their homework.
The way Solaris does it is to have 32-bit and 64-bit user-land libraries and utilities side-by-side so that you can run 32-bit and 64-bit binaries on the same 64-bit system at the same time.
The UltraSPARC version of Debian (which I run on an Ultra 5) works exactly like
Solaris: the kernel is 64 bits, user apps are
32 bits by default, but you can make 64 bit apps
if you need them. There are parallel 32 nd 64 bit shared libraries.
When you compile the kernel
you get to specify, in addition to the usual
stuff about support for ELF and a.out, whether you want
to support 64 bit executables.
So far the only applications I've found
that really benefit from being 64 bits are database servers.
For the ignorant ones, the making of the PCB's themselves is not a simple process. Think about the traces you see on the surface, then place about 4-6 layers on top of each other. The fact that the PCB's are outsourced takes a huge load off the remaining process.
I wouldn't have minded seeing that part of the process. Modern boards have zillions of layers for circuitry, power distribution, grounding and shielding. It must take some doing to get them right, let alone manufacture them.
The first Pentium III motherboard I owned (an Intel
SE440BX-2) looked like the product of an alien civilization.
I still have the computer I built around it; I'm using it now, in fact. Slackware 10 (kernel 2.6.9), 550 MHz Slot 1 Pentium III, 768 MB RAM, 110 GB disk (80 + 30), ADSL. It serves me well.
On the other hand, AMEX is an owner instrument. Only the owner of the card is allowed to use it. IIRC, Diners' Club is the same way. You must be the owner of the card...
Amex cards say right on them that they are not transferrable. This saved my butt a few years
ago.
My card was due to expire, and my new card hadn't
shown up yet. About the time I was starting to wonder
I had a call from American Express. Had I received my card? No. Did I live alone? Yes. And a bunch more such questions.
It turned out that somebody had stolen my card
from the mail and had gone on a shopping spree. I asked,
very specifically, what my liability was, and they
said zero, because the merchants hadn't verified
the identity of the person who had used
the card, and it was abundantly obvious
that the name on the card and the person using
it didn't match.
My bill was interesting that month. About 20 pages of charges, then 20 more pages of refunds for
fraudulent charges.
It is just that there is a whole section of classical/trad music just for lulling babies to sleep. It is called a lullaby. While some of them have disturbing lyrics the baby doesn't care.
Benjamin Britten had something to say on the subject (A Charm, Op. 41):
Quiet!
Sleep! or I will make
Erinnys whip thee with a snake,
And cruel Rhadamanthus take
Thy body to the boiling lake,
Where fire and brimstones never slake;...
A few years ago my Mum was practising this before
a concert (she's an accomplished musician)
and heard a little girl, shaking, ask her
Mum afterwards "Sh-sh-sh'e's k-k-kidding, isn't
she?"
I wouldn't say you should really trust them more than any other crypto group, but look at it this way: These alogrithms are public and known. The NSA, though a big employer, doesn't even begin to have all the math and crypto people in the world. These things get looked at by people from all across the world, and the findings are published.
This is why it's so good to have algorithms
like these published: they can be examined by others,
tested by others, and their security (or lack thereof)
can be established, known, and understood.
I've often toyed with hooking my geiger counter up to my
computer, generating a CD full of random numbers
(really random, not computer-generated
pseudorandom numbers) and using
one-time pad encryption to send
email to my Mom.:-)
Pounds measure weight, my friend. As in the effect of a gravitational field on a certain mass.
Those who use pounds as force use slugs as the unit of
mass. Same relationship as mass in kilograms and weight in newtons (i.e.
Newton's 2nd Law), except for the weird-ass numbers.
Just how many hogsheads are there in a fortnight, anyway?
A Mersenne number is all ones when written in binary. If its prime, it is a Mersenne prime.
A fun sidebar to this is
perfect
numbers, numbers who factors (other than one and themselves)
add up to the number. Ancient Greek numerology, y'know.
It's not at all difficult to show that a Mersenne Prime
times the next smaller power of two is perfect.
Perfect numbers thus have an interesting binary
representation.
Nobody has yet proven that all perfect numbers
are of this form, or even that they're all even.
Maybe I missed seeing this in the other comments, but massive arrays here on earth are approaching and surpassing Hubble's abilities. So it is not true that we will be plunged into an eternal darkness until the new scope goes up.
While Hubble does have perfect seeing in space,
it is really starting to suffer by being just not very big.
Frontline research telescopes on Earth like
Keck
are far larger (thus more light gathering power), and, with adaptive optics,
rival Hubble's resolution. Also, earthbound
radio astronomers are doing high-resolution
imagery with aperture synthesis that is
of the same order of resolution as Hubble.
Bear in mind too that those were 1.5 billion 1980s dollars. Inflation will have changed that
number by now.
If the franchise takes 5 years off, and comes back with new people at the helm (and not Berman or Braga - they had their chance, it's time for fresh blood), it might actually be something that can reignite fandom again.
Star Trek's roots are in social criticism, raw idealism, and triumphalism about the human spirit...
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. They don't
need to take a few years off. They need to
take a whole generation off.
That's what made ST:TNG special. Time had passed and
the world had changed. There were new stories they
could tell, and fresh looks at old stories. Yeah, a few were poor (particularly in the first season), but
they figured it out, got it right, and eventually did very
well indeed.
Since then the quality has slid, from DS9 (had its moments)
to Voyager (unwatchable) to Enterprise (why?). They
need fresh ideas, and fresh new things to write about. Until that happens, and it will take time,
there is little point in continuing.
The dismal quality of the writing and the excessive use of various
deus-ex-machina devices (particularly time travel)
hasn't helped. Give it a rest!
"Political Correctness" isn't exactly a good thing, but it's hardly the bogeyman you think it is. Throwing it out like some kind of shibboleth is just bleating to the same conservative crowd, but actually tells no one anything of substance.
In my experience the only people who invoke
Political Correctness for anything other than
ironic effect are those (usually male, white and heterosexual)
who are horrified to find that the world
has changed, and that the political, economic and social
power they once monopolized must now be shared.
When I was a first year undergrad back in the Old Stone Age
(1978), the record for computing pi stood at
1001250 digits. They used a CDC 7600 computer.
No idea how long it took. Probably a while.
The computer I'm typing this on now
(far from state of the art: Pentium III, 733 MHz) just did it in under a minute, while I was reading Slashdot. How times have changed...
Uh, wouldn't it be France where real French is spoken?
I've heard at least three claims to be the "best" French:
Quebec, because they use the fewest anglicismes (thanks in part to the
Office quebecois
de la langue francaise), though their French maintains features that are archaic in France.
Liege, where les Liegeois universally claim they speak the best French.
The Loire Valley, where la Touraine is
supposedly the best dialect of the bunch.
Yep. If you fly in to the U.S. you get to fill out one of those blue
and white customs declarations, and one of the things
they ask is where you'll be staying.
I've had two amusing times filling such out. One was
a connecting flight in Honolulu (flying Vancouver to Melbourne), so I gave my U.S.
address as "Honolulu International Airport, Honolulu HI". Another time I thought it might be fun to blow
a bit of my (enormous) bonus that year on something
crazy and frivolous, and I decided a day trip
to San Francisco might be fun. It was, but
it really weirded out the U.S. Customs
folks, who seemed certain I was up to something,
but couldn't figure out just what it might be.
Driving to Seattle (2 hours) for the day is
OK; I've done it many times. Flying to San Francisco (also 2 hours) for the day apparently isn't. Dunno...
Like all good bosses, mine acts as a flywheel, damping out the excesses that
might otherwise happen.
He sets the general direction, under instruction from the not-so-technical-but-nevertheless-very-savvy higher ups. It's my responsibility to figure out how to implement such directions.
...laura who rather likes both her job and her work environment
I don't see any major corporations thinking this is a good investment. I don't see many PHB's going along with this idea, regardless of how successful Google is with it.
An important part of my job amounts to "Find new and interesting things to help the company make more money."
Some of my personal initiatives have panned out and opened up whole
new areas for us. Some haven't. That's the nature of the beast.
But as long as the
rest of my work gets done, my employers don't care, and give me enormous latitude. I use that
latitude,
and they get their money's worth.
The fact
that I'm number two in engineering, the de facto
Tsarina of Technology may
have something to do with it. Junior
people don't usually have such flexibility.
Are those lumps of ice as one suggested or are they rocks?
At those temperatures water is a rock.
Despite the low perceived quality of the images, I
continue to be astonished by them. Titan
is a place, unlike any we've seen before,
waiting to be explored. How soon do we (NASA/ESA/anybody) go back?
First new world humans (or their emissaries) have landed on since 1976. That's one for the history books!
Slashdot Mirror
Another point is that the FPGAs, CPUs and stuff we use today didn't just appear out of nowhere. Somebody designed them. Somebody had to know how this stuff works at a hardware gate level.
I've played with FPGAs myself, but have also designed and wire-wrapped the occasional board. Nothing as big as a whole computer, though.
...laura who remembers computers that were whole shelves of boards covered with TTL
The Big International Scientific Conference that got together to define a new time scale to replace GMT had no difficulty coming up with the name "Coordinated Universal Time", but deadlocked when it came time to decide between the English acronym (CUT) or the French one (TUC). So they decided to use the symbol UTC, which doesn't stand for anything.
Leap seconds are used to keep UTC in sync with the Earth's rotation. Since the Earth's rotation is steadily slowing down, UTC would drift away from any sensible time if it wasn't adjusted every now and then. So they add the occasional extra second to keep them in sync.
GPS time runs at the same rate as UTC, but has no leap seconds, and is currently 13 seconds different. People who navigate by the stars use UT1. Then there is the Terrestrial Dynamical Time that astronomers use, which is another matter entirely.
...laura
You know the old saying: "There are three kinds of people. Those who can count, and those who can't."
...laura who still thinks ARM processors are cool
On a day-to-day basis I run in to four kinds of CPUs: x86 (typing this on one), UltraSPARC (most of the boxes at work, plus an Ultra 5 I bought on EBay to play with), ARM (my Palm - one of the new ones), Power PC (stuff at work) and several 68k derivatives (various boxes at work from little to seriously studly).
This doesn't include the niche processors, Analog Devices and TI DSPs, various PICs, and so on.
...laura who actually owns a DragonBall development board
Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
All your base are belong to us.
...laura, badly in need of a life. As usual.
This is what scares the crap out of so many people.
You would actually need some fairly high-level radioactive materials to make a good dirty bomb: uranium ore will make a geiger counter nervous, but nothing much happens until you start concentrating the stuff.
You don't need to bother making plutonium if you want to make a fission bomb, by the way. You can come up with critical mass of uranium 235 without too much difficulty (relatively speaking) and still make quite a bang.
I have some radioactive camera lenses (Kodak Aero Ektar, Pentax Super-Takumar - thorium, y'know), but am always on the lookout for some orange FiestaWare (uranium, y'know)
...laura whose geiger counter came from Russia
I would never characterize ST:TOS as a bad show.
40 years later (sigh...) some episodes look horribly dated, and, yes, there are a few clunkers that are positively embarrassing. We may complain now about the cheesy sets and wooden acting (or over-acting, as the case may be), but all shows from that era suffered from the same problems, and few of them attempted what ST:TOS did.
Dated, in places, yes. A few bad episodes, yes. Bad series, no.
...laura
And when was the last time the flight control system failed on a fly-by-wire plane?
The people who design and make these things are not fools, and they know what's at stake if they screw up.
All modern airliners have extensive computer control. New revisions of old designs (e.g. 737-800, 747-400) do as well. It makes them safer and more reliable. Not less.
The vast majority of my flights in the last few years have been on A320s and 767s, and I sleep very well knowing that their makers did their homework.
...laura
The UltraSPARC version of Debian (which I run on an Ultra 5) works exactly like Solaris: the kernel is 64 bits, user apps are 32 bits by default, but you can make 64 bit apps if you need them. There are parallel 32 nd 64 bit shared libraries.
When you compile the kernel you get to specify, in addition to the usual stuff about support for ELF and a.out, whether you want to support 64 bit executables.
So far the only applications I've found that really benefit from being 64 bits are database servers.
...laura
The first Pentium III motherboard I owned (an Intel SE440BX-2) looked like the product of an alien civilization. I still have the computer I built around it; I'm using it now, in fact. Slackware 10 (kernel 2.6.9), 550 MHz Slot 1 Pentium III, 768 MB RAM, 110 GB disk (80 + 30), ADSL. It serves me well.
...laura
With the right despreading key, you get signals.
Otherwise, you get noise.
...laura
Amex cards say right on them that they are not transferrable. This saved my butt a few years ago.
My card was due to expire, and my new card hadn't shown up yet. About the time I was starting to wonder I had a call from American Express. Had I received my card? No. Did I live alone? Yes. And a bunch more such questions.
It turned out that somebody had stolen my card from the mail and had gone on a shopping spree. I asked, very specifically, what my liability was, and they said zero, because the merchants hadn't verified the identity of the person who had used the card, and it was abundantly obvious that the name on the card and the person using it didn't match.
My bill was interesting that month. About 20 pages of charges, then 20 more pages of refunds for fraudulent charges.
...laura
Benjamin Britten had something to say on the subject (A Charm, Op. 41):
A few years ago my Mum was practising this before a concert (she's an accomplished musician) and heard a little girl, shaking, ask her Mum afterwards "Sh-sh-sh'e's k-k-kidding, isn't she?"
...laura
This is why it's so good to have algorithms like these published: they can be examined by others, tested by others, and their security (or lack thereof) can be established, known, and understood.
I've often toyed with hooking my geiger counter up to my computer, generating a CD full of random numbers (really random, not computer-generated pseudorandom numbers) and using one-time pad encryption to send email to my Mom. :-)
...laura
Those who use pounds as force use slugs as the unit of mass. Same relationship as mass in kilograms and weight in newtons (i.e. Newton's 2nd Law), except for the weird-ass numbers.
Just how many hogsheads are there in a fortnight, anyway?
...laura
A fun sidebar to this is perfect numbers, numbers who factors (other than one and themselves) add up to the number. Ancient Greek numerology, y'know.
It's not at all difficult to show that a Mersenne Prime times the next smaller power of two is perfect. Perfect numbers thus have an interesting binary representation.
Nobody has yet proven that all perfect numbers are of this form, or even that they're all even.
...laura
While Hubble does have perfect seeing in space, it is really starting to suffer by being just not very big. Frontline research telescopes on Earth like Keck are far larger (thus more light gathering power), and, with adaptive optics, rival Hubble's resolution. Also, earthbound radio astronomers are doing high-resolution imagery with aperture synthesis that is of the same order of resolution as Hubble.
Bear in mind too that those were 1.5 billion 1980s dollars. Inflation will have changed that number by now.
...laura
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. They don't need to take a few years off. They need to take a whole generation off.
That's what made ST:TNG special. Time had passed and the world had changed. There were new stories they could tell, and fresh looks at old stories. Yeah, a few were poor (particularly in the first season), but they figured it out, got it right, and eventually did very well indeed.
Since then the quality has slid, from DS9 (had its moments) to Voyager (unwatchable) to Enterprise (why?). They need fresh ideas, and fresh new things to write about. Until that happens, and it will take time, there is little point in continuing.
The dismal quality of the writing and the excessive use of various deus-ex-machina devices (particularly time travel) hasn't helped. Give it a rest!
...laura
In my experience the only people who invoke Political Correctness for anything other than ironic effect are those (usually male, white and heterosexual) who are horrified to find that the world has changed, and that the political, economic and social power they once monopolized must now be shared.
With people like me.
...laura
When I was a first year undergrad back in the Old Stone Age (1978), the record for computing pi stood at 1001250 digits. They used a CDC 7600 computer. No idea how long it took. Probably a while.
The computer I'm typing this on now (far from state of the art: Pentium III, 733 MHz) just did it in under a minute, while I was reading Slashdot. How times have changed...
...laura
I've heard at least three claims to be the "best" French:
Quebec, because they use the fewest anglicismes (thanks in part to the Office quebecois de la langue francaise), though their French maintains features that are archaic in France.
Liege, where les Liegeois universally claim they speak the best French.
The Loire Valley, where la Touraine is supposedly the best dialect of the bunch.
Moi? J'sais pas...(Me? Dunno...)
...laura
Yep. If you fly in to the U.S. you get to fill out one of those blue and white customs declarations, and one of the things they ask is where you'll be staying.
I've had two amusing times filling such out. One was a connecting flight in Honolulu (flying Vancouver to Melbourne), so I gave my U.S. address as "Honolulu International Airport, Honolulu HI". Another time I thought it might be fun to blow a bit of my (enormous) bonus that year on something crazy and frivolous, and I decided a day trip to San Francisco might be fun. It was, but it really weirded out the U.S. Customs folks, who seemed certain I was up to something, but couldn't figure out just what it might be.
Driving to Seattle (2 hours) for the day is OK; I've done it many times. Flying to San Francisco (also 2 hours) for the day apparently isn't. Dunno...
...laura
Like all good bosses, mine acts as a flywheel, damping out the excesses that might otherwise happen.
He sets the general direction, under instruction from the not-so-technical-but-nevertheless-very-savvy higher ups. It's my responsibility to figure out how to implement such directions.
...laura who rather likes both her job and her work environment
An important part of my job amounts to "Find new and interesting things to help the company make more money."
Some of my personal initiatives have panned out and opened up whole new areas for us. Some haven't. That's the nature of the beast. But as long as the rest of my work gets done, my employers don't care, and give me enormous latitude. I use that latitude, and they get their money's worth.
The fact that I'm number two in engineering, the de facto Tsarina of Technology may have something to do with it. Junior people don't usually have such flexibility.
...laura
At those temperatures water is a rock.
Despite the low perceived quality of the images, I continue to be astonished by them. Titan is a place, unlike any we've seen before, waiting to be explored. How soon do we (NASA/ESA/anybody) go back?
First new world humans (or their emissaries) have landed on since 1976. That's one for the history books!
...laura