Actually, it was probably better than what we have now in many ways.
Well, it's 50/50 chance (here on/.) that you are over 25 years old, right? If yes, you would be considered an OLD man in those "good old times", pretty much ready to die any time now... And yeah, from 12 to 20 you were trying to make children every year, but you were lucky if two of them survived...
On a bright side, I recall a story about some (US? Maybe Russian? Do not remember now exactly when and where I heard the story) guy inventing some special shape/orientation of a hydroplane wing which was supposed to be at, say, 47.25 degrees to the water level... According to the story, Japanese subsequently patented all possible orientations of that wing in 0.25 degree steps +- 5 degrees. The problem was that the original description had a typo, it was supposed to be 57.25 degrees!;-)
Not that I have any idea if it is true or not, but the parent IS very true. Just two words: "Bell Labs"...
And yes, I do have some very close Japanese friends.
The classic example of "cheating" would be professor announcing a closed-book exam (telling you that you are not supposed to use any information besides what is stored in your head) and you call your friend on a cell phone asking for an answer from a textbook. Casinos rarely operate in this way, you do not get any warning not to use everything you can to beat the odds. It is more like managing to solve a tough computational problem by hooking up a network of computers together with some hardware accelerators and optimizing the datalink between them, something which might get you promoted rather than being accused of cheating... Or do you think that medieval monks who started the whole probability theory were also cheaters because they tried to apply new techniques to predicting the outcomes of their favorite dice games?;-) I think that the casino is at fault for not using cryptographically strong RNGs and THEY can be sued by public for violating some kind of "reasonable expectation of randomness"...;-)
Well, I was trying to remember what kind of a port the thing used, my first thought was that it was a parallel port, but passing a gig through that would be way too long.
What is the BW of an (analog) video signal, like about 10 MHz, 20 Mbps for optimal (Shannon) encoding? Throw in some ECC and you get back down to 10+ Mbps, which would give you 10M/s*3600s=36 Gb/tape for one hour tape. I think that the densities were more like a Gb or two per tape, limited by the BW of the interface (IDE?), but definitely outside of the parallel port capability...
... before the DAT or even 1/2" tape drives became reasonably cheap some clever Russian hackers managed to make a setup to back-up data on videotape using more or less standard VCR and custom interface card. I've heard it worked pretty good, with some hundreds of MBs fitting on a tape". But then, again, it was in 1988 or something...
See here
http://lkml.org/lkml/1998/7/28/161
There was a long discussion on LKML
if beer-drinking Tux on boot-up screen
is 'politically correct';-)
Paul B.
Yes, but I was making more of a design philosophy point rather than technical point (though I understand that the original question was technical in nature and your answer might be more appropriate!;-) ).
Well, not exactly, but I think that you will find that many tools which evolved within UNIX culture (not necessarily only on Linux) have much higher degree of built-in scriptability.
In addition to pretty (or not so pretty) GUIs, their designers felt obliged to incorporate an alternative text-based interface, not to mention that many useful packages started from being text-based and grew their GUI skins later on. In any case, most often everything that you can do with keyboard and mouse (and then some) can be done via some kind of command line.
Gimp and OpenOffice.org are good examples of build-in scriptability, and, of course, EMACS Rulez!!!;-)
Of course if no single program can do everything that you need you can tie programs together either by generating scripts (in, e.g., Perl) and calling the progams from within a perl script, or using the built-in language of whatever main tool you are using and calling arbitrary scripts and programs using its system() facility.
... like, 30 ft/day, or something? The DARPA thing needs to move 20 mph on average through the rocky desert road (ever driven a Jeep at 20+ mph off-road? not pleasant, huh?;-) ). I bet that 3D vision algorithms used in NASA rover are pretty old and conservative compared to what can be run on even the simplest laptop likely to be built into that truck.
Apparently you've never seen what patent attorneys do with even simplest ideas. Basically they are paid to put all those numbers next to every identifiable feature on all diagrams and then explain what's going on in "plain";-) text. As in, "After process step "define" (110) an "analyse" step (120) has to be taken"...
draws brains away from research in technology with no or little military application, things that might have great benefit in the day-to-day lives of most citizens.
And what EXACTLY those technologies might be? Anything powerful enough to heal people can be used to kill them as well...
* Scheme, due to it's small size and powerful, easily extendable syntax, seems to be quite common when it comes to extension langauges. A list of programs that use Scheme (or a similar lisp dialect) off the top of my head includes: SIAG Office, The Gimp, Emacs, TeXmacs, Gnumeric, AutoCAD, Sawfish, GnuCash, Snd Sound Editor, etc.
Well, add Cadence (one of prolly 2 or 3 top-notch IC (ASIC) design suites, sellable to the tune of couple 100,000/seat) to the list, and take AutoCAD off (it's not really Scheme, more of old LISP, actually Xlisp).
Paul B.
P.S. the abundance of ()'s might reflect the amount of time I've spent in that particular environment...;-)
... which does nothing but gradually making IE report itself as Mozilla/Linux. Immediately all the big companies (at least one who check out netcraft regularly) will start producing Linux apps...
Not that I would condone this antisocial behavour, but the next logical step for a worm would be to install Lindows instead of W* (while preserving all user's files and settings, of course!)...
Thanks for a number of interesting links, especially the first three were absolutely new to me!;-) (No, I'm kidding, but the fourth one I've never seen and I liked it).
Maybe it would be better to separate two of my statements into two separate posts. In no way I was in favor of making Internet the likes of SWIFT, the latter was just an example that a (semi-)secure network can be built.
Strong crypto being a foundation of any information exchange on the Internet-X does not necessarily contradict the free information exchange culture, only makes the culture less vulnerable to the "bad" (or, "way too good";-) ) guys.
... as in, with crypto-signed messages (or even individual packets) going around...
I am wondering how much spam is going between banks on the SWIFT network (or whatever the proper name for that thing they use to move big $$ around). let me remind you, banks ARE businesses, but they have a bit more at stake than a chance to sell a $10 bottle of Viagra.;-)
I can see your point (as well as I am pleased to see that you are approaching it with an intellectual honesty), so couple more things for you to think about:
duggies (dealers, trafficers, etc)
etc being users? Does it really match your libertarian position?
Do you support the whole "three strikes" approach? Or after serving the time the (now ex-)felon is supposed to pay her;-) debt to society?
What about sexual assault cases and Megan law? WHY can those be an exemption?
They've replaced solid hydrogen with a cryocooler on Chandra, I guess (or was it Hubble? Which one is IR?), but I agree that they do not have propellants onboard.
Remember that too, spent WAAAY too much of my night time playing that.
Your "orange screen" must've been one of those driven by "high-res" Hercules card, not standard CGA.
And about the questions you had to answer (Re: next post in thread) -- if it was hard for you, imagine how hard it was for a teen growing up in Russia!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... and go work for a defence contractor or any large computer company doing any kind of work for the Govt.
No, seriously...
Paul B.
And? What part of the difference between "spend a year in jail" and "give us the source code and maybe pay some fine" you have problems understanding?
Paul B.
I struggle with this. I am an aerospace engineer, and right now if I want to work in the field I love, I need to work for a defense contractor.
;-) Yeah, I can hear your sentiment, really...
On the corner of Marine and Aviation, by any chance?
Paul B.
Actually, it was probably better than what we have now in many ways.
/.) that you are over 25 years old, right? If yes, you would be considered an OLD man in those "good old times", pretty much ready to die any time now... And yeah, from 12 to 20 you were trying to make children every year, but you were lucky if two of them survived...
Well, it's 50/50 chance (here on
Paul B.
really...
;-)
On a bright side, I recall a story about some (US? Maybe Russian? Do not remember now exactly when and where I heard the story) guy inventing some special shape/orientation of a hydroplane wing which was supposed to be at, say, 47.25 degrees to the water level... According to the story, Japanese subsequently patented all possible orientations of that wing in 0.25 degree steps +- 5 degrees. The problem was that the original description had a typo, it was supposed to be 57.25 degrees!
Not that I have any idea if it is true or not, but the parent IS very true. Just two words: "Bell Labs"...
And yes, I do have some very close Japanese friends.
Paul B.
The classic example of "cheating" would be professor announcing a closed-book exam (telling you that you are not supposed to use any information besides what is stored in your head) and you call your friend on a cell phone asking for an answer from a textbook. Casinos rarely operate in this way, you do not get any warning not to use everything you can to beat the odds. It is more like managing to solve a tough computational problem by hooking up a network of computers together with some hardware accelerators and optimizing the datalink between them, something which might get you promoted rather than being accused of cheating... Or do you think that medieval monks who started the whole probability theory were also cheaters because they tried to apply new techniques to predicting the outcomes of their favorite dice games? ;-) I think that the casino is at fault for not using cryptographically strong RNGs and THEY can be sued by public for violating some kind of "reasonable expectation of randomness"... ;-)
Paul B.
Well, I was trying to remember what kind of a port the thing used, my first thought was that it was a parallel port, but passing a gig through that would be way too long.
What is the BW of an (analog) video signal, like about 10 MHz, 20 Mbps for optimal (Shannon) encoding? Throw in some ECC and you get back down to 10+ Mbps, which would give you 10M/s*3600s=36 Gb/tape for one hour tape. I think that the densities were more like a Gb or two per tape, limited by the BW of the interface (IDE?), but definitely outside of the parallel port capability...
Paul B.
... before the DAT or even 1/2" tape drives became reasonably cheap some clever Russian hackers managed to make a setup to back-up data on videotape using more or less standard VCR and custom interface card. I've heard it worked pretty good, with some hundreds of MBs fitting on a tape". But then, again, it was in 1988 or something...
Paul B.
See here http://lkml.org/lkml/1998/7/28/161 ;-)
Paul B.
There was a long discussion on LKML if beer-drinking Tux on boot-up screen is 'politically correct'
Yes, but I was making more of a design philosophy point rather than technical point (though I understand that the original question was technical in nature and your answer might be more appropriate! ;-) ).
Paul B.
Yeah... You and grandparent got modded up, while I burnt my karma on getting 'offtopic' ;-) Well, I have plenty of karma anyway.
Paul B.
Well, not exactly, but I think that you will find that many tools which evolved within UNIX culture (not necessarily only on Linux) have much higher degree of built-in scriptability.
;-)
In addition to pretty (or not so pretty) GUIs, their designers felt obliged to incorporate an alternative text-based interface, not to mention that many useful packages started from being text-based and grew their GUI skins later on. In any case, most often everything that you can do with keyboard and mouse (and then some) can be done via some kind of command line.
Gimp and OpenOffice.org are good examples of build-in scriptability, and, of course, EMACS Rulez!!!
Of course if no single program can do everything that you need you can tie programs together either by generating scripts (in, e.g., Perl) and calling the progams from within a perl script, or using the built-in language of whatever main tool you are using and calling arbitrary scripts and programs using its system() facility.
Hope this helps.
Paul B.
Rather, quite a reasonable observation...
... like, 30 ft/day, or something? The DARPA thing needs to move 20 mph on average through the rocky desert road (ever driven a Jeep at 20+ mph off-road? not pleasant, huh? ;-) ). I bet that 3D vision algorithms used in NASA rover are pretty old and conservative compared to what can be run on even the simplest laptop likely to be built into that truck.
Paul B.
Apparently you've never seen what patent attorneys do with even simplest ideas. Basically they are paid to put all those numbers next to every identifiable feature on all diagrams and then explain what's going on in "plain" ;-) text. As in, "After process step "define" (110) an "analyse" step (120) has to be taken"...
Paul B.
This IS informative, and I've just let my 4 mod points to expire... ;-(
Paul B
draws brains away from research in technology with no or little military application, things that might have great benefit in the day-to-day lives of most citizens.
And what EXACTLY those technologies might be? Anything powerful enough to heal people can be used to kill them as well...
Paul B.
Finally something positive coming out of /. ;-)
Paul B,
* Scheme, due to it's small size and powerful, easily extendable syntax, seems to be quite common when it comes to extension langauges. A list of programs that use Scheme (or a similar lisp dialect) off the top of my head includes: SIAG Office, The Gimp, Emacs, TeXmacs, Gnumeric, AutoCAD, Sawfish, GnuCash, Snd Sound Editor, etc.
Well, add Cadence (one of prolly 2 or 3 top-notch IC (ASIC) design suites, sellable to the tune of couple 100,000/seat) to the list, and take AutoCAD off (it's not really Scheme, more of old LISP, actually Xlisp).
Paul B.
P.S. the abundance of ()'s might reflect the amount of time I've spent in that particular environment...
... which does nothing but gradually making IE report itself as Mozilla/Linux. Immediately all the big companies (at least one who check out netcraft regularly) will start producing Linux apps...
Not that I would condone this antisocial behavour, but the next logical step for a worm would be to install Lindows instead of W* (while preserving all user's files and settings, of course!)...
Hmm, sick...
Paul B.
Thanks for a number of interesting links, especially the first three were absolutely new to me! ;-) (No, I'm kidding, but the fourth one I've never seen and I liked it).
;-) ) guys.
Maybe it would be better to separate two of my statements into two separate posts. In no way I was in favor of making Internet the likes of SWIFT, the latter was just an example that a (semi-)secure network can be built.
Strong crypto being a foundation of any information exchange on the Internet-X does not necessarily contradict the free information exchange culture, only makes the culture less vulnerable to the "bad" (or, "way too good"
Paul B.
... as in, with crypto-signed messages (or even individual packets) going around...
;-)
I am wondering how much spam is going between banks on the SWIFT network (or whatever the proper name for that thing they use to move big $$ around). let me remind you, banks ARE businesses, but they have a bit more at stake than a chance to sell a $10 bottle of Viagra.
Paul B.
I can see your point (as well as I am pleased to see that you are approaching it with an intellectual honesty), so couple more things for you to think about:
;-) debt to society?
duggies (dealers, trafficers, etc)
etc being users? Does it really match your libertarian position?
Do you support the whole "three strikes" approach? Or after serving the time the (now ex-)felon is supposed to pay her
What about sexual assault cases and Megan law? WHY can those be an exemption?
Just a couple of thoughts...
Paul B.
They've replaced solid hydrogen with a cryocooler on Chandra, I guess (or was it Hubble? Which one is IR?), but I agree that they do not have propellants onboard.
Paul B.
Remember that too, spent WAAAY too much of my night time playing that.
;-)
Your "orange screen" must've been one of those driven by "high-res" Hercules card, not standard CGA.
And about the questions you had to answer (Re: next post in thread) -- if it was hard for you, imagine how hard it was for a teen growing up in Russia!
Paul B.