The Germans used the Enigma to encrypt messages and it was a polish mathematician, Marian Rejewski,who worked out the first attack on the Enigma cipher.
When you look at a map of Europe in the 1920s
it's no surprise that the Poles were interested in
Enigma. I think shit-scared is a better term, with
Germany on one border and the Soviet Union on the
other...
A propos The Gay Thing - had Turing not been so
royally fucked over
solely due to his sexuality, it would be the non-issue it
should be. But he was royally fucked over,
the only reason for it was his sexuality,
and it was a direct cause of his suicide. A shame:
the world lost a great thinker.
I thought I'd put in a word for "A Guide to LaTeX" by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, Addison-Wesley, 1999
Now that brings back memories! I did
my M.A.Sc. thesis with LaTeX, and this was
my reference on the finer points of LaTeX.
I did the diagrams with xfig. This was
also my first
non-trivial use of a digital camera,
taking pictures of antenna feeds and radios
and things.
I do lots of documents with LaTeX. Still.
I'd rather type first and worry about the formatting later.
WYSIWYG processors almost guarantee that you will
be preoccupied with layout, formatting and such.
But what the hell: if it spellchecks OK,
it mast bee wright!
My job is not dissimilar. Flex hours,
minimal supervision, wheelbarrowloads
of money, lots of toys to play with. As one
of the senior people it's up to me to figure out what to do, to
find new ideas the company could develop
into products and make more money. It takes
time to get in to such a position. My new grad days
were a long time ago.
With this responsibility comes stress. A little bit
of stress is good. As the old adage goes,
if you're comfortable, you're not learning anything. The biggest stress isn't the technology;
it's the bad-attitude
buttheads who should be digging ditches or
doing some other job better suited to their talents.
My uncle is a movie-techno-geek from a
long way back, and recently set
up just such a system.
He found two things that needed adjusting.
The first was that these projectors are
designed for computer presentations
in large rooms, so the light was ridiculously
bright for DVDs and such in a home theater.
Solution: a neutral density filter between the
optics and the screen.
The second was that the colour temperature
was much too high (too blue). Solution: a
warming filter. It's a very pale rose pink
colour. People don't look like aliens anymore.
In an era where CDs rarely have more
than one or two good songs anyway, I
like to gather collections together on a single CD.
Since the songs are from different CDs,
different performers, etc., there is nothing
to lose by
telling the CD player to play them in random order.
What kinds of problems can only be figured out by sniffing packets?
I too am a software engineer, and would be
lost without Ethereal. I develop and
maintain lots of IP-based products, and
Ethereal has saved my butt on more than one occasion.
Our products use a number of proprietary protocols
that run on TCP and UDP, and, needless to
say, the build of Ethereal I use groks
them. That was a very interesting project,
and a good test of how well I really knew
the protocols.
My guess is that encrypting your email makes it easier for the NSA -- only a tiny fraction of email traffic is encrypted. Outside of the tinfoil hat community, very, very few people bother to secure their email, so the simple act of sending an encrypted message (which can be spotted due to the low information content of cyphertext, or due to specific comments in the message header) probably flags you for attention.
There are ways to be really secure.
One-time pads are perfectly secure. The only
time one-time pad encryption is ever broken
is if agents use the same key more than once.
In which case they should be (and often are) shot.
Then there are codes. Used
correctly, there is no way to decide
if "Aunt Mary is going on holiday" means
"We drop the supplies tomorrow" or "Get
out! They're
on to us!". By themselves, such messages aren't
likely to attract the attention of the various
three-letter agencies because they look like plain text. Even if you send lots of
cipher-text, if they can't break it, they can't read it.
It's not just the colleges: there is a whole
high-tech mindset that you find in
areas like Silicon Valley, the Route 128 corridor,
and similar places.
Rumour has it there is a 7-11 in Sunnyvale
that sells RAM. That's high-tech.
A propos Austin: I'm reminded of what Mark Twain
said about Texas, that if he owned both
hell and Texas he'd live in hell and rent out Texas. Excessively hot weather can
lower quality of life, which
probably helps explain the
placing of states like Arizona and
Nevada.
...can be made from PVC/ABS pipe, available from your friendly local hardware superstore. Get the 2.5 inch ID pipe, between 4 and 8 ft long, and Google for digerdoo and PVC.
You'll get better sound quality with a vacuum
cleaner hose.:-)
One interesting part of the development of color tv relates to the YUV color space used. This color space calculates color by the difference between two of the channels, the third channel is the detail.
There are infinitely-many sets of primary colours
you could use to represent RGB colour. In an
RGB colour space any set of three linearly-independent vectors
will do for the primary colours.
The YUV model was designed for
compatibility (Y = black and white) and
realism, since the U and V primaries are closely related
to important colours like human skin tones.
Can't have people looking like Vulcans,
now can we?:-)
We never had a colour TV when I was growing up.
Always black and white. When we moved out to the
country colour was irrelevant anyway (snowy pictures
look much worse in colour), until
we got a satellite system.
Historical tidbit: the Apollo video from
the Moon used a frame-sequential colour system,
which was converted once it got back to Earth.
Technical tidbit: some ham radio folks use
a system called Slow Scan TV (
SSTV), which
transmits still images over the radio. They
usually use a line-sequential colour system, which
gives the signals a distinctive waltz-like
sound. Your best bet for such signals
is around 14230 kHz. People used to use all
kinds of weird and wonderful dedicated hardware,
but now a computer with a sound
card is the usual setup.
When's the last time you used calculus in your business application?
I use calculus, statistics
and group theory at work. They were anything
but a waste of time.
Even if you never use such things, mastery of
undergraduate calculus shows that you can
think, and shows that
you understand the sometimes veering approach
mathematics takes to solving problems. If
I ever interview you, I want to see
evidence of these qualities. I don't give a shit
if you think it's useful or not. It is
useful, though the reasons may not be immediately
apparent to you.
... almost anything goes. Maybe we're more open minded. Maybe we're a little less uptight. Maybe we watch a little too much American TV.
One small addition: in context almost
anything goes. You're not going to hear
nasty words during the day, and
that's exactly as it should be. But at night, when
the kids should be in bed, that's another matter.
If it's right for the story, leave it alone.
I was amused when the
CBC showed
the last Prime Suspect.
When Helen Mirren said "fuck", they left
it alone. When anybody else said it, they
bleeped it out. Come to think of it, can
anybody think of an un-bleeped usage on
the CBC prior
to the Degrassi movie?
Our other official language has different
views on what's obscene, and while
the French equivalents of the usual
four-letter words come in handy -
try translating a sentence like
"I don't give a damn about Windows!"
without them - the only word I've ever
heard bleeped out was the Quebec-only
obscenity "tabernacle".
What? Who in 1727 came up with the idea of an android (ie, a robot in the form of a human)? And how, considering that "robot" wasn't thought up to the early 1900s? I wish the site was a bit more specific about such an oddity in their listing.
The notion of human-shaped machines goes
a lot further back than that - right back
to Greek mythology. But such things were
considered magic and/or supernatural: only
with the Industrial Revolution did it become
possible to think of machines that
were manufactured, which is about the right date
for a 1727 citation.
Even at that, robots remained nasty
dangerous
things-Man-wasn't-intended-to-know (cf Frankenstein) until the 20th Century,
when writers like Capek created/popularized
the concept (and the word, too: depends on who you ask), and Asimov depicted them
as tools, designed for a purpose by engineers.
2.4 meters (all the usual references) isn't
all that big by 2004 standards. Hubble
has the best sensors money can buy, and
operates in the perfect seeing of space,
but its performance is (and will always be)
limited by its small aperture.
Others have mentioned adaptive
optics, but what excites me is
optical interferometry.
John Glenn lost all credibility with me when, as a US senator, he pulled that garbage line about "exploring the effects of age on space travel" as an excuse to get NASA to launch him back to space.
Can't say I blame him. I I could
pull some strings for a shuttle ride, I would.
Wouldn't you?
I thought it was totally dumb, but also
totally understandable.
I must live a charmed life, think pure thoughts or
something, because my 2.6 experience has
been nothing but positive.
My first experience was with a Compaq laptop, Slackware
9.0 and 2.6.0-test4. I found that I broke the
2.4 modutils
when I upgraded to module-init-tools, but since
2.6 worked so well, I really didn't care.
Oh, and I've never had any trouble with that
crazy mouse touchpad
thingy.
Slackware 9.1 says it's 2.6-ready, and it
is. I've installed it on a number of systems
and upgraded the kernel easily.
My current challenge is my Sun Ultra 5, which
currently runs Debian (woody) with the 2.4.18 kernel
it came with. I ended up building
64 bit SPARC gcc and friends as cross compilers on an x86 box. But hello world still doesn't link...:-(
My response to you: do you want people
to access the information on your web pages?
If the answer is "Yes", then you must take
care to make sure that people can, that there are
no impediments to people doing so. You must
stick to standards, and>you have to test it.
I've seen too many web sites that were only
"tested" with some version of IE and
fell flat on their face with Mozilla or Opera.
If the answer is "No", then go home.
My usual baseline is that web pages
that look right in Opera will look right in anything. Usability in Lynx is a plus.
I'm still unsure if Flash is
a disease or a crime.
Indeed. Here in Vancouver (the one in Canada),
we had 4 large record stores downtown until
quite recently (A&B Sound, Sam the Record Man,
HMV, Virgin). We've had others
over the years (Kelly's, A&A, Phantasmagoria)
and a strong independent business. My
fave was the Charles Bogle Phonograph
Dispensary (yes, I know, I'm
showing my age)...Sam's entire chain went bust,
HMV pulled out of downtown, A&B never seem to have
anything I want, and I haven't bothered with
Virgin in ages, because they too never
seemed to have anything. I usually
walk out of A&B empty-handed, and my last
couple of visits have had a definitesympathy-fuck
feel to them. I may not bother going back.
On my last visit to London I dropped
a bundle at Virgin and HMV in Oxford Street.
I'm not averse to shopping in record stores
at all. As long as they have what I'm looking for,
or even something remotely tempting.
I don't download much, but I'm a regular customer of
CDNow/Amazon. They have the stuff,
and they can ship it. I can
have a listen to most stuff before I
buy. So I do.
The industry isn't dead. But it is
getting shaken up, by both marketing and technology.
Yes, the submission should probably read 'Current x86 Processors Tested with Linux', but in reality the vast majority of individual Linux boxen will be using x86 based hardware so I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Having just had my first experience running Linux
on something other than an x86, I was curious too.
You can blame it on this very forum - after
reading the article I bought an Ultra 5 on
EBay and loaded
Debian on it last night. Installed most of the packages
over my ADSL connection. Worked
like a charm.
I guess slackware will remain a distro for people with special needs.
Interesting. I've always used Slackware on my
home systems, and am helping my employers work
out the details of using Linux for new products,
based on high-availability clusters and such.
They like the stability and performance, and
they like the congenial development environment, which
leverages our current Sun-based experience. They
really like the price.
At first RedHat looked like a no-brainer
(I'm typing this on a heavily
patched/upgraded RH 7.3 system),
but it's
not clear that we can pass RedHat support costs
on to our customers. So we're looking at Slackware,
which I've likened to a toolkit for building
Linux systems. As opposed to RedHat, where
you open the can and pour the contents out,
ready to go.
Debian is interesting, and I'm looking
very hard at it. I have a P2/266 box
in my cubicle right now running woody.
If it runs well on a crappy system, it will
run very well on a good one.
The satellite in question used a Hamming
code on its RAM for single-bit error correction
(which happened lots, and was
reported in the telemetry) and two-bit error detection
(crash! - happened a couple of times).
This was easy to implement and worked
well. Bear in mind that the more
circuitry you have up there, the more there
is to fail. A hardware watchdog with
error-correcting RAM was judged
to be cheaper and more reliable than the
multiple-bank memory system you suggested.
The voting system would be subject to
radiation problems too.
This particular satellite didn't have any ROM.
Flight software was uploaded by ground stations
through a hardware front panel, just like
flipping the switches on an Altair...
Something like 2/3 of NASA's recent missions have failed in some way or another. Is it quite possible that NASA engineers simply have not mastered the art and science of designing hardware and software operable in the harshest of environments?
Maybe they have. That's how they know
how difficult a task it is to get it right.
I am something of an aerospace engineer,
and work professionally with real-time
systems (based on VxWorks - fancy that!). Let me
illustrate the kind of bizarre bug
that can happen on a spacecraft, and how it was fixed from the ground.
Consider a satellite with a simple
on-board computer. To guard against the
OS locking up (no matter how good the software
is, you can't protect against radiation-induced bit flips
in memory), it has a hardware watchdog timer.
The software resets the timer periodically,
before the hardware can reboot the system. Things
run well for a while.
Then the on-board system starts resetting for
no apparent reason. No suggestion of memory problems, no
apparent hardware problems. The problem is traced to a radiation-induced change
in component values in the watchdog timer,
causing the timer to go off sooner than expected. Until the satellite is finally turned
down a few years later, an important task of the ground stations was checking for watchdog resets
and adjusting the software watchdog task accordingly. When the
software eventually spent all its time resetting the watchdog
timer, the satellite could no longer function and was turned down.
The moral of the story: space is weird and hostile. Things happen. No matter how hard you try, you cannot
always get it right.
Let's give Star Trek a rest and maybe after a few years something worthwhile can be produced.
This has been my contention for a long time.
From TOS to TNG was a generation; the world changed, society
changed, and there were lots of new
stories to tell. New takes on old ones, too.
TNG worked, and it worked well.
DS9 had its moments but was fundamentally
dull. I found Voyager unwatchable, and
just don't see the point of Enterprise.
Give it a rest, come back when you have something
new to say.
Digital photographs have the potential to last in pristine condition forever (as long as you keep copying them to new media).
Therein lies the problem - why
should I have to do this? What happens
if I forget to copy my old files to the
New Improved Format until after the Old Outdated Format
is obsolete, so I can't access the data. Do I lose them?
Consider that 5 1/4 inch floppy discs
(which aren't all that old)
are largely unreadable now. But my
120 negatives are entirely printable,
and, with proper care, will outlast me.
The very format dates back to 1901
and is still well-supported.
Slashdot Mirror
When you look at a map of Europe in the 1920s it's no surprise that the Poles were interested in Enigma. I think shit-scared is a better term, with Germany on one border and the Soviet Union on the other...
A propos The Gay Thing - had Turing not been so royally fucked over solely due to his sexuality, it would be the non-issue it should be. But he was royally fucked over, the only reason for it was his sexuality, and it was a direct cause of his suicide. A shame: the world lost a great thinker.
...laura
Now that brings back memories! I did my M.A.Sc. thesis with LaTeX, and this was my reference on the finer points of LaTeX. I did the diagrams with xfig. This was also my first non-trivial use of a digital camera, taking pictures of antenna feeds and radios and things.
I do lots of documents with LaTeX. Still. I'd rather type first and worry about the formatting later. WYSIWYG processors almost guarantee that you will be preoccupied with layout, formatting and such. But what the hell: if it spellchecks OK, it mast bee wright!
Does your resume have a makefile?
...laura
Well said.
My job is not dissimilar. Flex hours, minimal supervision, wheelbarrowloads of money, lots of toys to play with. As one of the senior people it's up to me to figure out what to do, to find new ideas the company could develop into products and make more money. It takes time to get in to such a position. My new grad days were a long time ago.
With this responsibility comes stress. A little bit of stress is good. As the old adage goes, if you're comfortable, you're not learning anything. The biggest stress isn't the technology; it's the bad-attitude buttheads who should be digging ditches or doing some other job better suited to their talents.
My uncle is a movie-techno-geek from a long way back, and recently set up just such a system. He found two things that needed adjusting.
The first was that these projectors are designed for computer presentations in large rooms, so the light was ridiculously bright for DVDs and such in a home theater. Solution: a neutral density filter between the optics and the screen.
The second was that the colour temperature was much too high (too blue). Solution: a warming filter. It's a very pale rose pink colour. People don't look like aliens anymore.
The results are striking. I'm tempted myself.
...laura
In an era where CDs rarely have more than one or two good songs anyway, I like to gather collections together on a single CD. Since the songs are from different CDs, different performers, etc., there is nothing to lose by telling the CD player to play them in random order.
Brain-damaged? Yeah, right...
...laura
There are ways to be really secure. One-time pads are perfectly secure. The only time one-time pad encryption is ever broken is if agents use the same key more than once. In which case they should be (and often are) shot.
Then there are codes. Used correctly, there is no way to decide if "Aunt Mary is going on holiday" means "We drop the supplies tomorrow" or "Get out! They're on to us!". By themselves, such messages aren't likely to attract the attention of the various three-letter agencies because they look like plain text. Even if you send lots of cipher-text, if they can't break it, they can't read it.
...laura
It's not just the colleges: there is a whole high-tech mindset that you find in areas like Silicon Valley, the Route 128 corridor, and similar places.
Rumour has it there is a 7-11 in Sunnyvale that sells RAM. That's high-tech.
A propos Austin: I'm reminded of what Mark Twain said about Texas, that if he owned both hell and Texas he'd live in hell and rent out Texas. Excessively hot weather can lower quality of life, which probably helps explain the placing of states like Arizona and Nevada.
...laura
You'll get better sound quality with a vacuum cleaner hose. :-)
Some people put a lot more work in to their homebrew instruments.
...laura
There are infinitely-many sets of primary colours you could use to represent RGB colour. In an RGB colour space any set of three linearly-independent vectors will do for the primary colours. The YUV model was designed for compatibility (Y = black and white) and realism, since the U and V primaries are closely related to important colours like human skin tones. Can't have people looking like Vulcans, now can we? :-)
We never had a colour TV when I was growing up. Always black and white. When we moved out to the country colour was irrelevant anyway (snowy pictures look much worse in colour), until we got a satellite system.
Historical tidbit: the Apollo video from the Moon used a frame-sequential colour system, which was converted once it got back to Earth.
Technical tidbit: some ham radio folks use a system called Slow Scan TV ( SSTV), which transmits still images over the radio. They usually use a line-sequential colour system, which gives the signals a distinctive waltz-like sound. Your best bet for such signals is around 14230 kHz. People used to use all kinds of weird and wonderful dedicated hardware, but now a computer with a sound card is the usual setup.
...laura
I use calculus, statistics and group theory at work. They were anything but a waste of time.
Even if you never use such things, mastery of undergraduate calculus shows that you can think, and shows that you understand the sometimes veering approach mathematics takes to solving problems. If I ever interview you, I want to see evidence of these qualities. I don't give a shit if you think it's useful or not. It is useful, though the reasons may not be immediately apparent to you.
...laura
One small addition: in context almost anything goes. You're not going to hear nasty words during the day, and that's exactly as it should be. But at night, when the kids should be in bed, that's another matter. If it's right for the story, leave it alone.
I was amused when the CBC showed the last Prime Suspect. When Helen Mirren said "fuck", they left it alone. When anybody else said it, they bleeped it out. Come to think of it, can anybody think of an un-bleeped usage on the CBC prior to the Degrassi movie?
Our other official language has different views on what's obscene, and while the French equivalents of the usual four-letter words come in handy - try translating a sentence like "I don't give a damn about Windows!" without them - the only word I've ever heard bleeped out was the Quebec-only obscenity "tabernacle".
...laura
The notion of human-shaped machines goes a lot further back than that - right back to Greek mythology. But such things were considered magic and/or supernatural: only with the Industrial Revolution did it become possible to think of machines that were manufactured, which is about the right date for a 1727 citation.
Even at that, robots remained nasty dangerous things-Man-wasn't-intended-to-know (cf Frankenstein) until the 20th Century, when writers like Capek created/popularized the concept (and the word, too: depends on who you ask), and Asimov depicted them as tools, designed for a purpose by engineers.
...laura, still a fan of Susan Calvin
2.4 meters (all the usual references) isn't all that big by 2004 standards. Hubble has the best sensors money can buy, and operates in the perfect seeing of space, but its performance is (and will always be) limited by its small aperture.
Others have mentioned adaptive optics, but what excites me is optical interferometry.
...laura
Can't say I blame him. I I could pull some strings for a shuttle ride, I would. Wouldn't you?
I thought it was totally dumb, but also totally understandable.
...laura
I must live a charmed life, think pure thoughts or something, because my 2.6 experience has been nothing but positive.
My first experience was with a Compaq laptop, Slackware 9.0 and 2.6.0-test4. I found that I broke the 2.4 modutils when I upgraded to module-init-tools, but since 2.6 worked so well, I really didn't care. Oh, and I've never had any trouble with that crazy mouse touchpad thingy.
Slackware 9.1 says it's 2.6-ready, and it is. I've installed it on a number of systems and upgraded the kernel easily.
My current challenge is my Sun Ultra 5, which currently runs Debian (woody) with the 2.4.18 kernel it came with. I ended up building 64 bit SPARC gcc and friends as cross compilers on an x86 box. But hello world still doesn't link... :-(
...laura
My response to you: do you want people to access the information on your web pages?
If the answer is "Yes", then you must take care to make sure that people can, that there are no impediments to people doing so. You must stick to standards, and>you have to test it. I've seen too many web sites that were only "tested" with some version of IE and fell flat on their face with Mozilla or Opera.
If the answer is "No", then go home.
My usual baseline is that web pages that look right in Opera will look right in anything. Usability in Lynx is a plus. I'm still unsure if Flash is a disease or a crime.
...laura
Indeed. Here in Vancouver (the one in Canada), we had 4 large record stores downtown until quite recently (A&B Sound, Sam the Record Man, HMV, Virgin). We've had others over the years (Kelly's, A&A, Phantasmagoria) and a strong independent business. My fave was the Charles Bogle Phonograph Dispensary (yes, I know, I'm showing my age)...Sam's entire chain went bust, HMV pulled out of downtown, A&B never seem to have anything I want, and I haven't bothered with Virgin in ages, because they too never seemed to have anything. I usually walk out of A&B empty-handed, and my last couple of visits have had a definitesympathy-fuck feel to them. I may not bother going back.
On my last visit to London I dropped a bundle at Virgin and HMV in Oxford Street. I'm not averse to shopping in record stores at all. As long as they have what I'm looking for, or even something remotely tempting.
I don't download much, but I'm a regular customer of CDNow/Amazon. They have the stuff, and they can ship it. I can have a listen to most stuff before I buy. So I do.
The industry isn't dead. But it is getting shaken up, by both marketing and technology.
...laura
Having just had my first experience running Linux on something other than an x86, I was curious too.
You can blame it on this very forum - after reading the article I bought an Ultra 5 on EBay and loaded Debian on it last night. Installed most of the packages over my ADSL connection. Worked like a charm.
...laura
Interesting. I've always used Slackware on my home systems, and am helping my employers work out the details of using Linux for new products, based on high-availability clusters and such. They like the stability and performance, and they like the congenial development environment, which leverages our current Sun-based experience. They really like the price.
At first RedHat looked like a no-brainer (I'm typing this on a heavily patched/upgraded RH 7.3 system), but it's not clear that we can pass RedHat support costs on to our customers. So we're looking at Slackware, which I've likened to a toolkit for building Linux systems. As opposed to RedHat, where you open the can and pour the contents out, ready to go.
Debian is interesting, and I'm looking very hard at it. I have a P2/266 box in my cubicle right now running woody. If it runs well on a crappy system, it will run very well on a good one.
...laura
The satellite in question used a Hamming code on its RAM for single-bit error correction (which happened lots, and was reported in the telemetry) and two-bit error detection (crash! - happened a couple of times).
This was easy to implement and worked well. Bear in mind that the more circuitry you have up there, the more there is to fail. A hardware watchdog with error-correcting RAM was judged to be cheaper and more reliable than the multiple-bank memory system you suggested. The voting system would be subject to radiation problems too.
This particular satellite didn't have any ROM. Flight software was uploaded by ground stations through a hardware front panel, just like flipping the switches on an Altair...
...laura
Maybe they have. That's how they know how difficult a task it is to get it right.
I am something of an aerospace engineer, and work professionally with real-time systems (based on VxWorks - fancy that!). Let me illustrate the kind of bizarre bug that can happen on a spacecraft, and how it was fixed from the ground.
Consider a satellite with a simple on-board computer. To guard against the OS locking up (no matter how good the software is, you can't protect against radiation-induced bit flips in memory), it has a hardware watchdog timer. The software resets the timer periodically, before the hardware can reboot the system. Things run well for a while.
Then the on-board system starts resetting for no apparent reason. No suggestion of memory problems, no apparent hardware problems. The problem is traced to a radiation-induced change in component values in the watchdog timer, causing the timer to go off sooner than expected. Until the satellite is finally turned down a few years later, an important task of the ground stations was checking for watchdog resets and adjusting the software watchdog task accordingly. When the software eventually spent all its time resetting the watchdog timer, the satellite could no longer function and was turned down.
The moral of the story: space is weird and hostile. Things happen. No matter how hard you try, you cannot always get it right.
...laura
The patterns are subtle on the new Canadian $5 and $10 notes, but as far as I can tell:
Front: the circular pattern that's the background for the signatures.
Back, $10: the yellow floral pattern between the peacekeeper and the dove.
Back, $5: the yellow pattern next to the toboggan.
...laura
This has been my contention for a long time. From TOS to TNG was a generation; the world changed, society changed, and there were lots of new stories to tell. New takes on old ones, too. TNG worked, and it worked well.
DS9 had its moments but was fundamentally dull. I found Voyager unwatchable, and just don't see the point of Enterprise.
Give it a rest, come back when you have something new to say.
...laura
Therein lies the problem - why should I have to do this? What happens if I forget to copy my old files to the New Improved Format until after the Old Outdated Format is obsolete, so I can't access the data. Do I lose them?
Consider that 5 1/4 inch floppy discs (which aren't all that old) are largely unreadable now. But my 120 negatives are entirely printable, and, with proper care, will outlast me. The very format dates back to 1901 and is still well-supported.
...laura