The PDP-11 has always been one of those canonical architectures that everybody studies
(or should, if they don't), even if they never actually see or use one. Very clean, very orthogonal.
I did an undergrad course in operating systems using
XINU on an LSI-11. Great fun. I worked for DEC for a while
in the early '90s, but only played with VAXen. It was the beginning of DEC's death spiral,
so it wasn't a fun place to be.
I've sometimes thought it would be fun to own a real PDP-11, cool front panel and all. No idea
what I'd do with it, but that's another matter.:-)
My employers' primary business has, until recently, been based on T1. We are now migrating to VoIP.
The customer experience is improved (if they notice the change at all),
we're opening up new paths for future development, and we're getting away from obsolete legacy hardware that is no longer manufactured
or supported.
We're also saving the company oodles of money. What the telcos want for T1 these days just isn't pretty.
I'm 51, BTW. Old dogs can indeed learn new tricks.
The best perk for me has always been interesting work in a congenial environment. Everything else is secondary.
It helps to be a senior person, so my tasks are usually along the lines of "Figure out $newtechnology. Find a way
for the company to make money with it."
I've worked for a number of companies who did the "we pay less but we're such a great place to work!" thing.
Someday I'd like to at least visit a "we pay lots but it sucks to work here" company, just to see what it's like.
I'm such a cheap drunk that I voluntarily observe a limit of zero when I'm driving. I remember one
night when I was tired and hungry and managed to get completely blasted
on one can of american beer.:-)
For flying the limit is zero as well, with the requirement of eight hours from the last drink to takeoff.
The real solution is social: make it utterly unfashionable to drink and drive.
Customers have choice. If you make content available under reasonable terms, they may be your customer.
If not, they won't.
I decided a couple of years ago that the cable company's terms were unreasonable, so I cancelled my cable.
With over the air HD, internet streaming and DVDs, I don't miss it.
While many tv shows people have mentioned are from U.S. cable tv networks, I've seen top-quality stuff from
other sources. Recent faves include Borgen and
Scott & Bailey, both from "regular" (albeit European) TV channels. Who would have thought
Danish parliamentary democracy would make such gripping drama? And Janet and Rachel can arrest me any time they like.:-)
I've watched Borgen on DVD, and am currently streaming S&B on youtube. When ITV get around to releasing series 3 on DVD I'll buy it.
Reasonable terms, remember.
Funny how we call helium a scarce resource... it's the 2nd most common element in the Universe.
In the universe, yes. On Earth, no. All the helium on Earth has been here from the beginning, and no process on
Earth is creating more. Once it's released in to the atmosphere, it's gone.
I'm always envious of stuff like this. Where I live (southwestern British Columbia, Canada), it would be very difficult to retrieve
a payload that came down 100 km away, in just about any direction. A steerable RC glider is an option I've thought about. Live video, GPS and telemetry would make me even more motivated to get the aircraft back.
One of those legacy applications here is a customer service web page. The search function is particularly useless: it
returns nothing at all, every document on the site, or a random selection of dead links. I've suggested to its maintainer
that it should be rewritten (if it serves any purpose at all, which is debatable...). He's dragging his heels.
A long time ago I noted that the biggest challenge
of the Internet was going to be finding things. As an undergrad I earned a bit of extra money working
in the university library, and was told, on my very first day, that if you don't put something in the right place
you might as well throw it away, because it's unlikely anybody will be able to find it otherwise. Now we
have Google. Dave Cheriton was one of my undergrad profs, BTW, a 2nd year course in data structures that used
Pascal.
Another lesson from my undergrad days is that the structure of a product is isomorphic to the structure of the
group that created it. I currently support legacy software that was created by people who never talked
to each other, who never even sat down for a chat over lunch. It shows. The interface specs read like legal contracts.
The product line worked for a while, but is now unmaintainable, unsupportable, well in to its end of life
bug explosion, and we are actively developing replacements.
The company imploded in 2001. What was left tried a looser development process. It sort of worked, but eventually
failed. The biggest issue was a couple of extremely forceful
people who steamrollered their own pet ideas and who refused to listen to others. The bosses needed to rein them in, and didn't. It cost us the
company.
Our current development model is basically a surgical team in a skunkworks sort of environment. Head office
is in Dallas. I'm in Vancouver. The physical separation is helpful. There aren't enough of us in the company to
do much else. It works. We're doing good work. The company is making money. The bosses are happy. We're happy.
I like a lot of what Google is doing. I like the encouragement to be creative. Good people are
creative, and if they're going to be creative, you might as well get them to be creative for you. And you have to take some
risks. Not all decisions are right. Not all products are winners. But if you don't risk failure, you don't risk
success either.
I have issues with the work/life balance implicit in the Googleplex work environment. Maybe I'm too old
or something (I'm 51), but I expect to have a life apart from my work.
It's interesting to be able to put faces to names. But I've always had the nagging
suspicion that the producers started out making a film about something else, ran out of money,
and edited what they had in to Revolution OS.
The sad thing is that there are enough people buying this shit to keep the robocallers
and spammers in business.
I routinely get robocalls wanting to reduce my credit card debt. A good trick, since I don't have any.
I always wonder how the political polling people can possibly pretend their conclusions have any validity,
since everybody hangs up on them.
And so on. A medium that used to be useful has been poisoned by abuse.
I view Do Not Call as intrinsically self-defeating. Like "opting out" of spam, it provides a list of
known-good phone numbers. If the robocalls originate from offshore, there is little the local
authorities can do about it anyway.
Many countries, not just the U.S.A., have provisions that legislation must be passed by both a majority of population and a majority of geography. Hence
congress allocated by population, but each state has two senators, whether it's Wyoming or California.
Canada doesn't. Our Senate is appointed by population (by regions on paper,
but by population in practice), so Ontario has the most MPs and the most senators. Here in B.C. we
have similar issues: the vast majority of the population live in the southwestern corner of the province, but the happening industry is
in the northeast, which feels more kinship with neighbouring Alberta. Including using the same time zone.
We've also looked at proportional representation in B.C., but that didn't get off the ground. I would have
welcomed it.
I was told by former colleagues from Sweden and Belgium that given the choice between a crappy
translation and the original English, they'd take the original English.
A good translation, on the other hand, would be noticed. And respected.
Tech docs in English, please. Unless you're Arianespace or Airbus.
As others have pointed out, strings grow in most other languages.
To smoke out i18n issues one former employer used Pig Latin. YMMV.
Since Bellingham is already a hot-spot for Vancouver-ites doing their cross-border shopping, it's gotta be easy to book vendors! Looks like a great event.
Not necessarily. Unless you hit a sale at Fry's, computer stuff is often cheaper in Vancouver than in Bellingham or Seattle.
My criterion for bringing something back is 50% off the Canadian price, or just plain unobtainable.
The border
people can be unpredictable: I've been waived through and told to have a nice day on a day trip with $800 worth of stuff, and I've done all the paperwork
for $50. On one memorable trip I had collected a new
telescope mount in
Anacortes. Even the cashier said "ouch!" when she punched
it up in the computer.
I'll be 77 in 2038, but expect to be very much alive and kicking.
Closer to the time, I expect this to be much like Y2K: some genuine issues that will be quietly handled
behind the scenes, irresponsible media reporting and nutcases being, well, nutcases. Like Y2K, it's not like
we'll need to back out any changes.
I did my own Y2K audit in 1998, while preparing to move across the country and deciding what to take
with me. My VCR had several Y2K bugs: it would not accept a date after 31 December 1999, it rolled over from Friday 31 December
1999 to Monday 1 January "00", and when I tried to set a program to start recording the evening of 31 December 1999 and stop the morning of 1
January, it overflowed internal data structures (including tuner PLL settings) and required a cold reboot to recover its sanity.
In my work we've had to deal with GPS week number rollovers, every 1023 weeks from 1 January 1980. It happened in 1999, and
will happen again in 2019.
A print of the southern Milky Way, from the Pointers (Alpha and Beta Centauri) to the Eta
Carinae nebula. Including the Southern Cross and the Coal Sack.
A Georgia O'Keeffe print of a Jimson Weed flower that looks like a dogwood but isn't.
Face it: language changes. The English of Beowulf is a foreign language to modern speakers. Chaucer
is heavy going. Hell, many people struggle with Shakespeare and Dickens.
Some changes I've seen in my own life. I'm 51.
Loss of distinction between adjectives and adverbs in spoken English, particularly "good" vs. "well".
Loss of "hw". "Whale" and "wail" are homonyms except in a few regional accents.
Singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun. I like this and use it myself.
Very few people use colons or semicolons in written English. Fewer still know how to use them correctly.
My grandparents were born from 1884 (paternal grandfather) to 1905 (maternal grandmother) and used the subjunctive mood.
It was largely gone before I was born. It only survives in
fossilized expressions like "so be it" and the song title "Let it be".
I find maps endlessly fascinating. I routinely access FlightAware for information on commercial flights I've taken,
then visualize the route in Google Maps.
When I flew to visit family over Christmas I got the flight plans (and later tracking data) from FlightAware and drew maps with the results, though "CYVR V347 GARRE SEATN J534 CYWL" may not mean much if you're not a pilot.
On a night flight back from Dallas (via Phoenix)
in October I solved a mystery with FlightAware and Google Maps. At one point we flew just east of a prominent city with several obvious suburbs. Way off
in the distance was a very large urban area, right on the horizon. My first thought was Salt Lake City, but that was way east of the great circle route.
I knew we were west of the great circle route to avoid the restricted airspace north of Las Vegas (including R-4808N, i.e. Area 51). I had made a note of the time of the Big City,
so I got tracking data from FlightAware, figured out how far the horizon was at our cruising altitude, fed the results in to Google Maps and found
that the city was Reno, while the lights off in the distance were the central valley of California, from Sacramento down to Stockton.
I see two motivations for learning another language or six. It doesn't matter which one(s).
The first motivation is that learning another language gives you better perspective on your own. You have a basis for comparison
that you didn't have before. I learned way more about English in French class, and added to that
insight when I studied German and Spanish on my own.
The second motivation is that it opens doors. Language is a window on culture. It shows how people think. If you travel,
it will be helpful. If you don't, it may not be. My German and Spanish are decidedly fumbling, ungrammatical and arm-wavey, but the attempt
is respected and opens doors. The less said about my Russian the better...
In a past job I worked with customers in France, Belgium, England, Germany, and Quebec. An important distributor were near Orly airport. Paris
looks very different when you have an expense account.:-)
If you want to do it you have to go cold turkey. Just like other countries have done. Stop printing $1 bills,
start issuing $1 coins. Done.
In the 20th Century in Canada we ditched $0.25, $1 and $2 notes in favour of coins, and ditched $1000 notes entirely. The last series of 25 cent notes were dated 1923, withdrawn by
the Bank of Canada with the 1935 series, BTW.
A few years ago I was in the market for a car, and I considered a used police car.
The car makers usually have a police option group, including heavy duty front suspension and a heavy duty electrical system. Just
what I need for driving up mountains with radios and telescopes.
Not to mention the intimidation factor. Around here, the cops like Ford Crown Victorias. And only cops drive them. Ford
haven't sold them to private individuals for a long time, and they were never a big seller anyway.
I sometimes look at the ads for the local computer stores and add up what it would cost to roll
my own cluster. At 2012 prices a 32 core cluster (say, 8 Core i5 CPUs) would cost only a little more than
my first computer, that I bought in 1986. And that's at retail prices. I'm sure if I wanted a bulk purchase,
the stores would cut me a deal.
Then I wonder what I would do with it, and decide I have better things to spend my money on...
At home I've only ever used Slackware, from 1997 (Slackware 3.1 aka Slackware '96) to the present day.
I did my thesis on a Slackware box, initially a 486/66, upgraded to a snazzy (?) Pentium 233 MMX. My personal development/play machine at work is Slackware.
The Powers That Be insist on RedHat for production, but tolerate us using CentOS for development. So be it.
I've played with Debian on Sun UltraSPARC boxes, but the novelty has since worn off.
Slashdot Mirror
The PDP-11 has always been one of those canonical architectures that everybody studies (or should, if they don't), even if they never actually see or use one. Very clean, very orthogonal.
I did an undergrad course in operating systems using XINU on an LSI-11. Great fun. I worked for DEC for a while in the early '90s, but only played with VAXen. It was the beginning of DEC's death spiral, so it wasn't a fun place to be.
I've sometimes thought it would be fun to own a real PDP-11, cool front panel and all. No idea what I'd do with it, but that's another matter. :-)
...laura
My employers' primary business has, until recently, been based on T1. We are now migrating to VoIP.
The customer experience is improved (if they notice the change at all), we're opening up new paths for future development, and we're getting away from obsolete legacy hardware that is no longer manufactured or supported. We're also saving the company oodles of money. What the telcos want for T1 these days just isn't pretty.
I'm 51, BTW. Old dogs can indeed learn new tricks.
...laura
The best perk for me has always been interesting work in a congenial environment. Everything else is secondary. It helps to be a senior person, so my tasks are usually along the lines of "Figure out $newtechnology. Find a way for the company to make money with it."
I've worked for a number of companies who did the "we pay less but we're such a great place to work!" thing. Someday I'd like to at least visit a "we pay lots but it sucks to work here" company, just to see what it's like.
...laura
I'm such a cheap drunk that I voluntarily observe a limit of zero when I'm driving. I remember one night when I was tired and hungry and managed to get completely blasted on one can of american beer. :-)
For flying the limit is zero as well, with the requirement of eight hours from the last drink to takeoff.
The real solution is social: make it utterly unfashionable to drink and drive.
...laura
Customers have choice. If you make content available under reasonable terms, they may be your customer. If not, they won't. I decided a couple of years ago that the cable company's terms were unreasonable, so I cancelled my cable. With over the air HD, internet streaming and DVDs, I don't miss it.
While many tv shows people have mentioned are from U.S. cable tv networks, I've seen top-quality stuff from other sources. Recent faves include Borgen and Scott & Bailey, both from "regular" (albeit European) TV channels. Who would have thought Danish parliamentary democracy would make such gripping drama? And Janet and Rachel can arrest me any time they like. :-)
I've watched Borgen on DVD, and am currently streaming S&B on youtube. When ITV get around to releasing series 3 on DVD I'll buy it. Reasonable terms, remember.
...laura
Funny how we call helium a scarce resource... it's the 2nd most common element in the Universe.
In the universe, yes. On Earth, no. All the helium on Earth has been here from the beginning, and no process on Earth is creating more. Once it's released in to the atmosphere, it's gone.
I'm always envious of stuff like this. Where I live (southwestern British Columbia, Canada), it would be very difficult to retrieve a payload that came down 100 km away, in just about any direction. A steerable RC glider is an option I've thought about. Live video, GPS and telemetry would make me even more motivated to get the aircraft back.
...laura
Indeed.
One of those legacy applications here is a customer service web page. The search function is particularly useless: it returns nothing at all, every document on the site, or a random selection of dead links. I've suggested to its maintainer that it should be rewritten (if it serves any purpose at all, which is debatable...). He's dragging his heels.
...laura
...but I've followed them closely.
A long time ago I noted that the biggest challenge of the Internet was going to be finding things. As an undergrad I earned a bit of extra money working in the university library, and was told, on my very first day, that if you don't put something in the right place you might as well throw it away, because it's unlikely anybody will be able to find it otherwise. Now we have Google. Dave Cheriton was one of my undergrad profs, BTW, a 2nd year course in data structures that used Pascal.
Another lesson from my undergrad days is that the structure of a product is isomorphic to the structure of the group that created it. I currently support legacy software that was created by people who never talked to each other, who never even sat down for a chat over lunch. It shows. The interface specs read like legal contracts. The product line worked for a while, but is now unmaintainable, unsupportable, well in to its end of life bug explosion, and we are actively developing replacements.
The company imploded in 2001. What was left tried a looser development process. It sort of worked, but eventually failed. The biggest issue was a couple of extremely forceful people who steamrollered their own pet ideas and who refused to listen to others. The bosses needed to rein them in, and didn't. It cost us the company.
Our current development model is basically a surgical team in a skunkworks sort of environment. Head office is in Dallas. I'm in Vancouver. The physical separation is helpful. There aren't enough of us in the company to do much else. It works. We're doing good work. The company is making money. The bosses are happy. We're happy.
I like a lot of what Google is doing. I like the encouragement to be creative. Good people are creative, and if they're going to be creative, you might as well get them to be creative for you. And you have to take some risks. Not all decisions are right. Not all products are winners. But if you don't risk failure, you don't risk success either.
I have issues with the work/life balance implicit in the Googleplex work environment. Maybe I'm too old or something (I'm 51), but I expect to have a life apart from my work.
...laura
Reminds me of the old joke:
Q: What's the best way to tell the difference between a Canadian and an American?
A: Casually comment that there isn't any.
...laura, proudly Canadian
It's interesting to be able to put faces to names. But I've always had the nagging suspicion that the producers started out making a film about something else, ran out of money, and edited what they had in to Revolution OS.
...laura
The sad thing is that there are enough people buying this shit to keep the robocallers and spammers in business.
I routinely get robocalls wanting to reduce my credit card debt. A good trick, since I don't have any. I always wonder how the political polling people can possibly pretend their conclusions have any validity, since everybody hangs up on them.
And so on. A medium that used to be useful has been poisoned by abuse.
I view Do Not Call as intrinsically self-defeating. Like "opting out" of spam, it provides a list of known-good phone numbers. If the robocalls originate from offshore, there is little the local authorities can do about it anyway.
...laura
Many countries, not just the U.S.A., have provisions that legislation must be passed by both a majority of population and a majority of geography. Hence congress allocated by population, but each state has two senators, whether it's Wyoming or California.
Canada doesn't. Our Senate is appointed by population (by regions on paper, but by population in practice), so Ontario has the most MPs and the most senators. Here in B.C. we have similar issues: the vast majority of the population live in the southwestern corner of the province, but the happening industry is in the northeast, which feels more kinship with neighbouring Alberta. Including using the same time zone.
We've also looked at proportional representation in B.C., but that didn't get off the ground. I would have welcomed it.
...laura
Are Amazon deliberately trying to discredit the USPTO, or even the entire patent system?
This patent fails on so many criteria: prior art, lack of novelty, obvious. If it's granted, it's a crock.
...laura
A few thoughts:
I was told by former colleagues from Sweden and Belgium that given the choice between a crappy translation and the original English, they'd take the original English. A good translation, on the other hand, would be noticed. And respected.
Tech docs in English, please. Unless you're Arianespace or Airbus.
As others have pointed out, strings grow in most other languages.
To smoke out i18n issues one former employer used Pig Latin. YMMV.
...laura
Since Bellingham is already a hot-spot for Vancouver-ites doing their cross-border shopping, it's gotta be easy to book vendors! Looks like a great event.
Not necessarily. Unless you hit a sale at Fry's, computer stuff is often cheaper in Vancouver than in Bellingham or Seattle.
My criterion for bringing something back is 50% off the Canadian price, or just plain unobtainable.
The border people can be unpredictable: I've been waived through and told to have a nice day on a day trip with $800 worth of stuff, and I've done all the paperwork for $50. On one memorable trip I had collected a new telescope mount in Anacortes. Even the cashier said "ouch!" when she punched it up in the computer.
...laura
I agree.
VisiCalc was the first killer app, an app that people would buy a computer so they could run it.
...laura
I'll be 77 in 2038, but expect to be very much alive and kicking.
Closer to the time, I expect this to be much like Y2K: some genuine issues that will be quietly handled behind the scenes, irresponsible media reporting and nutcases being, well, nutcases. Like Y2K, it's not like we'll need to back out any changes.
I did my own Y2K audit in 1998, while preparing to move across the country and deciding what to take with me. My VCR had several Y2K bugs: it would not accept a date after 31 December 1999, it rolled over from Friday 31 December 1999 to Monday 1 January "00", and when I tried to set a program to start recording the evening of 31 December 1999 and stop the morning of 1 January, it overflowed internal data structures (including tuner PLL settings) and required a cold reboot to recover its sanity.
In my work we've had to deal with GPS week number rollovers, every 1023 weeks from 1 January 1980. It happened in 1999, and will happen again in 2019.
...laura
A print of the southern Milky Way, from the Pointers (Alpha and Beta Centauri) to the Eta Carinae nebula. Including the Southern Cross and the Coal Sack.
A Georgia O'Keeffe print of a Jimson Weed flower that looks like a dogwood but isn't.
...laura
We're now using and at the start of sentences?
Yup.
Face it: language changes. The English of Beowulf is a foreign language to modern speakers. Chaucer is heavy going. Hell, many people struggle with Shakespeare and Dickens.
Some changes I've seen in my own life. I'm 51.
Loss of distinction between adjectives and adverbs in spoken English, particularly "good" vs. "well".
Loss of "hw". "Whale" and "wail" are homonyms except in a few regional accents.
Singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun. I like this and use it myself.
Very few people use colons or semicolons in written English. Fewer still know how to use them correctly.
My grandparents were born from 1884 (paternal grandfather) to 1905 (maternal grandmother) and used the subjunctive mood. It was largely gone before I was born. It only survives in fossilized expressions like "so be it" and the song title "Let it be".
...laura
I find maps endlessly fascinating. I routinely access FlightAware for information on commercial flights I've taken, then visualize the route in Google Maps.
When I flew to visit family over Christmas I got the flight plans (and later tracking data) from FlightAware and drew maps with the results, though "CYVR V347 GARRE SEATN J534 CYWL" may not mean much if you're not a pilot.
On a night flight back from Dallas (via Phoenix) in October I solved a mystery with FlightAware and Google Maps. At one point we flew just east of a prominent city with several obvious suburbs. Way off in the distance was a very large urban area, right on the horizon. My first thought was Salt Lake City, but that was way east of the great circle route. I knew we were west of the great circle route to avoid the restricted airspace north of Las Vegas (including R-4808N, i.e. Area 51). I had made a note of the time of the Big City, so I got tracking data from FlightAware, figured out how far the horizon was at our cruising altitude, fed the results in to Google Maps and found that the city was Reno, while the lights off in the distance were the central valley of California, from Sacramento down to Stockton.
...laura
I see two motivations for learning another language or six. It doesn't matter which one(s).
The first motivation is that learning another language gives you better perspective on your own. You have a basis for comparison that you didn't have before. I learned way more about English in French class, and added to that insight when I studied German and Spanish on my own.
The second motivation is that it opens doors. Language is a window on culture. It shows how people think. If you travel, it will be helpful. If you don't, it may not be. My German and Spanish are decidedly fumbling, ungrammatical and arm-wavey, but the attempt is respected and opens doors. The less said about my Russian the better...
In a past job I worked with customers in France, Belgium, England, Germany, and Quebec. An important distributor were near Orly airport. Paris looks very different when you have an expense account. :-)
...laura
If you want to do it you have to go cold turkey. Just like other countries have done. Stop printing $1 bills, start issuing $1 coins. Done.
In the 20th Century in Canada we ditched $0.25, $1 and $2 notes in favour of coins, and ditched $1000 notes entirely. The last series of 25 cent notes were dated 1923, withdrawn by the Bank of Canada with the 1935 series, BTW.
...laura
A few years ago I was in the market for a car, and I considered a used police car.
The car makers usually have a police option group, including heavy duty front suspension and a heavy duty electrical system. Just what I need for driving up mountains with radios and telescopes.
Not to mention the intimidation factor. Around here, the cops like Ford Crown Victorias. And only cops drive them. Ford haven't sold them to private individuals for a long time, and they were never a big seller anyway.
...laura
I sometimes look at the ads for the local computer stores and add up what it would cost to roll my own cluster. At 2012 prices a 32 core cluster (say, 8 Core i5 CPUs) would cost only a little more than my first computer, that I bought in 1986. And that's at retail prices. I'm sure if I wanted a bulk purchase, the stores would cut me a deal.
Then I wonder what I would do with it, and decide I have better things to spend my money on...
...laura
...is it worth doing?
At home I've only ever used Slackware, from 1997 (Slackware 3.1 aka Slackware '96) to the present day. I did my thesis on a Slackware box, initially a 486/66, upgraded to a snazzy (?) Pentium 233 MMX. My personal development/play machine at work is Slackware.
The Powers That Be insist on RedHat for production, but tolerate us using CentOS for development. So be it.
I've played with Debian on Sun UltraSPARC boxes, but the novelty has since worn off.
...laura