I'd say it has gone downhill a lot in the last 15 years if not more. First started watching Discovery channel around 1996 in Canada - Discovery 2000. Had some interesting "what-if" programs on New Orleans being hit by a hurricane, the discovery of microwaves (a chocolate bar melted in somebodies pocket).
The best education programs were IMHO, in the 1980's/1990's - Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Open University, Television for Schools, Horizon. Then, we only had three TV channels.
There were some fascinating programs on "razzle-dazzle" camouflage for military vehicles (lots of light bulbs made a tank on the horizon "disappear") as well as paint patterns for ships. Always made me wonder, if someone hasn't already attached outdoor LED displays to the fuselage of aircraft.
But now, it's as you say. Science programs used to concentrate on the science, explaining equations, doing cool animations. Now, it's more some guy running around derelict buildings scribbling grafitti on walls.
What I meant that that before Windows 95, you could power up your PC, got into MSDOS, and if you wanted, just type 'win' to get Windows, as you could with any other application of the time; autocad, wordstar, tempra.
Windows 95 took away that option. You couldn't just "opt out" of Windows and stay in the boot loader or customized MSDOS.
Now Microsoft want to make Windows an application again, so it can be run on any device as an option.
Code optimization in those days was fun. Compilers in those days would generate how many bytes of code and data each module (.c or.cpp) file would generate.
You could keep rearranging things (merging small functions, turning switch statements into lookup function tables) around until the absolute minimum of code was generated.
I've tried doing that recently, but the compilers just do that automatically, so it makes no difference to code size.
In the old days, there was two ways for a programmer to optimize code; for speed, or for size. You couldn't afford to not design your code, otherwise you would immediately run into memory and performance issues. 16-bit compilers wouldn't allow you to allocate more than 64K at a time. After your application loaded, there would be less than 128K free anyway.
So you would have to take care to plan ahead where and when you were going to use memory. Is the variable going to be a persistent data block that is allocated when the module is first started (IO cache block), something that is just loaded and then discarded (configuration parameters), or loaded until the user no longer wants it (data file). For every variable, you would have to decide whether it was 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit, signed or unsigned and assign it accordingly.
Floating point was expensive and you would use fixed-point integers whenever possible, at least until the 80486 came out.
2D FFT on a large image (512x512) was implemented by loading in each row of pixels separately from disk, applying the transform, and writing out that row again. This would be repeated again for each column.
Even if you did get everything planned out, there was still the chance you would run out of memory. Then you would have to go back and prune every variable for size. Do name strings really need 128 bytes? Do attribute flags really need to be 16-bit? Do coordinates need to be 16-bit?
These days, there are two ways to write code; for shortest project completion time; or for reusable code. Either deadlines are so tight that everyone just throws in code on top of each other, or there is actually time to design and plan ahead.
No one really bothers with whether structure or class variables are 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit, or whether an array should have an upper limit of 32, 128 or 1024, whether result codes should be returned to indicate whether the memory was allocated. Just defining variables as 'int' is good enough, and C++ container classes takes care of the dynamic allocation of arrays.
The funny thing is that when Windows 95 came, they announced that the PC wouldn't boot into a command line. The original DOS command line would become a virtual machine like DOS box.
Then they announce that they are going to make the next generation of Windows an application that can be run separately.
A submerged city would have be covered with sediment, coral and fauna. A 1970's archeological survey map simplified for audiences would consist of some black squiggly lines superimposed over a blurry underwater photograph, providing conclusive proof that the structure was man-made.
A lot of users just see the computer as utility like a cooker or television. They just expect to be able to press a button to do a particular task and have that task complete.
It's a royal pain-in-the-ass when they want to open a file sent by a friend (dancing pig emoticons for E-mail, let alone a zip file) and the PC then tells them that they need to download or purchase XYZ application to view that file. So off they go to start up a browser, search for that file data type, find the application website, click on the download button, click on the execute file button, ignore the warning about the killer space-baboons that are coming to destroy their planet, and just click on the "install application and destroy my computer" button. Problem solved. Back to reading that E-mail before watching the movie.
The insane thing is that so many application disk would actually replace OS DLL files - this was particularly obvious with foreign version CD's. They wouldn't just install the app, but also upgrade the GUI DLL files including the internationalization strings of directory browsing windows.
There really needs to be separate user account levels for system files that should never be touched, device drivers and applications that can be shared between users, and individual user files.
Theoretically, if you had a fast enough light sensor, you could use video capture to record the changing reflections of light on an object due to the Martian wind. Like the old cub-scout science badge experiment of gluing a small piece of mirror to a plastic membrane over a paper cup, then watching the changing reflections of light due to air vibrations.
And the Chinese will then resell the goods back to the American people but with exotic histories like "turn of the century new world settler cutlery and plate set".
Where do you put the 100-foot extension cord? Do you wrap it around the supporting beams of the house, or the desk?
I'd hate to imagine what kind of electromagnetic field a 100-foot cable at 120V/240V is going to generate. Our workplace had urban legends of having coils of cable around objects like metal trashcans, and heating things to the extent they caught fire (batteries, extension cords, etc...)
This looks like the typical situation of company A trying to fuck over company B, just when company B is about to release a product. Company A won't be wanting to help you out, but simply get you away from company B. They probably won't treat you any better, if not worse.
I'd stay until the project is complete - explain that to company B. If they don't appreciate that, then they don't really want you that badly.
Seen this happen before to other people, and happen to myself. In the long term, having worked on a project from start to finish counts more than leaving half-way through. Who knows, it might be get bought out by a large company.
It may not have been available in Poland, or even Europe. Lots of technology items were like that in those days.
Used to be commonplace with console games - small businesses could buy them abroad and sell them locally (known as "grey imports"). Bought legally, paid all the taxes, but sold against the marketing strategy of the company. If you had a relative who just happened to be going on holiday to the USA/Canada/Japan, you could usually bribe them to bring some things back for you.
With a colour CRT, there is actually a mask for each electron gun (RGB) so that the beams line up with the phosphor elements in the screen. Placing a strong magnetic field close to the screen will distort this mask, so that the beams and phosphor elements would not line up.
A monochrome TV is safe enough - the picture on the screen will distort in in the shape of the o)|(o pattern of a bar magnet.
Remember some time ago (back between 1996 and 2001), there was a petition for Apple to adopt OpenGL for 3D rendering.
Not sure if it was the same petiition, but a group of Apple employees who petitioned their department manager to make a decision over this were all fired. Then months later, the decision was made and Apple begged them to come back.
Nick Leeson worked in the IT department before he became a trader. He learned all the phrases traders used when a false-positive alarm was triggered; "Oh, I'm just clearing up a wrong transfer", "Just rolling through some accounts", "sorry, the other guy was logged in at my terminal", "Just tidying up an old account".
Then when he became a trader, he knew about the test accounts to store his losses, as well as how to smooth over the tripwire alarm system whenever IT called him up.
One of our family friends died from bladder cancer - doctors treated it with tuberculosis (standard treatment). Ended up being in so much agony that he had to be doped up with morphine to the point that he went into coma and died.
But for the first wave of personal computers? Everything in that era cost a shitload of money and did fuck-all. That was the cost of components. You would need to get hardware engineers to design the motherboards, custom case and keyboard layout. if not ASIC's as well. You would also need some software engineers to write the GUI as well.
Did lead to an incredible diversity in hardware at the time.
One of the problems in Silicon Valley, was that may chip fabrication plants stored their chemicals in underground tanks. When these started to leak, they contaminated the groundwater. This was only detected when clusters of rare cancers were detected.
It's in the Wikipedia entry for Steve Jobs. There is mention of a rip-off - they were offered $30 per component, managed to eliminate 50, but only got half.
Reading computer magazines between the 1970's and1990's was an experience. Seeing the evolution of computing from home-assembled S-100 boards in the 1970's to Apple ]['s, Apple Mac, NEXT workstations in the early 1990's, hand-held devices like the Newton in the later years.
How many other people need three separate pages of historical time lines to list all the products that they were involved in designing?
The easiest way to form these Penrose tiling patterns is through fractal growth methods. Start with a simple combination of tiles ( ecagon star, pentagon) then replace small combinations of tiles with a larger combinations (kites and darts).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say it has gone downhill a lot in the last 15 years if not more. First started watching Discovery channel around 1996 in Canada - Discovery 2000. Had some interesting "what-if" programs on New Orleans being hit by a hurricane, the discovery of microwaves (a chocolate bar melted in somebodies pocket).
The best education programs were IMHO, in the 1980's/1990's -
Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Open University, Television for Schools, Horizon. Then, we only had three TV channels.
There were some fascinating programs on "razzle-dazzle" camouflage for military vehicles (lots of light bulbs made a tank on the horizon "disappear") as well as paint patterns for ships. Always made me wonder, if someone hasn't already attached outdoor LED displays to the fuselage of aircraft.
But now, it's as you say. Science programs used to concentrate on the science, explaining equations, doing cool animations. Now, it's more some guy running around derelict buildings scribbling grafitti on walls.
What I meant that that before Windows 95, you could power up your PC, got into MSDOS, and if you wanted, just type 'win' to get Windows, as you could with any other application of the time; autocad, wordstar, tempra.
Windows 95 took away that option. You couldn't just "opt out" of Windows and stay in the boot loader or customized MSDOS.
Now Microsoft want to make Windows an application again, so it can be run on any device as an option.
Code optimization in those days was fun. Compilers in those days would generate how many bytes of code and data each module (.c or .cpp) file would generate.
You could keep rearranging things (merging small functions, turning switch statements into lookup function tables) around until the absolute minimum of code was generated.
I've tried doing that recently, but the compilers just do that automatically, so it makes no difference to code size.
In the old days, there was two ways for a programmer to optimize code; for speed, or for size. You couldn't afford to not design your code, otherwise you would immediately run into memory and performance issues. 16-bit compilers wouldn't allow you to allocate more than 64K at a time. After your application loaded, there would be less than 128K free anyway.
So you would have to take care to plan ahead where and when you were going to use memory. Is the variable going to be a persistent data block that is allocated when the module is first started (IO cache block), something that is just loaded and then discarded (configuration parameters), or loaded until the user no longer wants it (data file). For every variable, you would have to decide whether it was 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit, signed or unsigned and assign it accordingly.
Floating point was expensive and you would use fixed-point integers whenever possible, at least until the 80486 came out.
2D FFT on a large image (512x512) was
implemented by loading in each row of pixels separately from disk, applying the transform, and writing out that row again. This would be repeated again for each column.
Even if you did get everything planned out, there was still the chance you would run out of memory. Then you would have to go back and prune every variable for size. Do name strings really need 128 bytes? Do attribute flags really need to be 16-bit? Do coordinates need to be 16-bit?
These days, there are two ways to write code; for shortest project completion time; or for reusable code. Either deadlines are so tight that everyone just throws in code on top of each other, or there is actually time to design and plan ahead.
No one really bothers with whether structure or class variables are 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit, or whether an array should have an upper limit of 32, 128 or 1024, whether result codes should be returned to indicate whether the memory was allocated. Just defining variables as 'int' is good enough, and C++ container classes takes care of the dynamic allocation of arrays.
The funny thing is that when Windows 95 came, they announced that the PC wouldn't boot into a command line. The original DOS command line would become a virtual machine like DOS box.
Then they announce that they are going to make the next generation of Windows an application that can be run separately.
Try using wget or another intelligent command line http downloader. A Typical slashdot page alone is around 500K.
A submerged city would have be covered with sediment, coral and fauna. A 1970's archeological survey map simplified for audiences would consist of some black squiggly lines superimposed over a blurry underwater photograph, providing conclusive proof that the structure was man-made.
A lot of users just see the computer as utility like a cooker or television. They just expect to be able to press a button to do a particular task and have that task complete.
It's a royal pain-in-the-ass when they want to open a file sent by a friend (dancing pig emoticons for E-mail, let alone a zip file) and the PC then tells them that they need to download or purchase XYZ application to view that file. So off they go to start up a browser, search for that file data type, find the application website, click on the download button, click on the execute file button, ignore the warning about the killer space-baboons that are coming to destroy their planet, and just click on the "install application and destroy my computer" button. Problem solved. Back to reading that E-mail before watching the movie.
The insane thing is that so many application disk would actually replace OS DLL files - this was particularly obvious with foreign version CD's. They wouldn't just install the app, but also upgrade the GUI DLL files including the internationalization strings of directory browsing windows.
There really needs to be separate user account levels for system files that should never be touched, device drivers and applications that can be shared between users, and individual user files.
This page has audio of the Phoenix probe descending through the amosphere
There is an animation of objects moving in the wind
Theoretically, if you had a fast enough light sensor, you could use video capture to record the changing reflections of light on an object due to the Martian wind. Like the old cub-scout science badge experiment of gluing a small piece of mirror to a plastic membrane over a paper cup, then watching the changing reflections of light due to air vibrations.
And the Chinese will then resell the goods back to the American people but with exotic histories like "turn of the century new world settler cutlery and plate set".
Where do you put the 100-foot extension cord? Do you wrap it around the supporting beams of the house, or the desk?
I'd hate to imagine what kind of electromagnetic field a 100-foot cable at 120V/240V is going to generate. Our workplace had urban legends of having coils of cable around objects like metal trashcans, and heating things to the extent they caught fire (batteries, extension cords, etc...)
This looks like the typical situation of company A trying to fuck over company B, just when company B is about to release a product. Company A won't be wanting to help you out, but simply get you away from company B. They probably won't treat you any better, if not worse.
I'd stay until the project is complete - explain that to company B. If they don't appreciate that, then they don't really want you that badly.
Seen this happen before to other people, and happen to myself. In the long term, having worked on a project from start to finish counts more than leaving half-way through. Who knows, it might be get bought out by a large company.
It may not have been available in Poland, or even Europe. Lots of technology items were like that in those days.
Used to be commonplace with console games - small businesses could buy them abroad and sell them locally (known as "grey imports"). Bought legally, paid all the taxes, but sold against the marketing strategy of the company. If you had a relative who just happened to be going on holiday to the USA/Canada/Japan, you could usually bribe them to bring some things back for you.
With a colour CRT, there is actually a mask for each electron gun (RGB) so that the beams line up with the phosphor elements in the screen. Placing a strong magnetic field close to the screen will distort this mask, so that the beams and phosphor elements would not line up.
A monochrome TV is safe enough - the picture on the screen will distort in in the shape of the o)|(o pattern of a bar magnet.
Didn't they start becoming invisible and reappearing in the desert?
Remember some time ago (back between 1996 and 2001), there was a petition for Apple to adopt OpenGL for 3D rendering.
Not sure if it was the same petiition, but a group of Apple employees who petitioned their department manager to make a decision over this were all fired. Then months later, the decision was made and Apple begged them to come back.
First level contact was to ask the trader to recheck their transactions, then escalate to supervisors.
Nick Leeson worked in the IT department before he became a trader. He learned all the phrases traders used when a false-positive alarm was triggered; "Oh, I'm just clearing up a wrong transfer", "Just rolling through some accounts", "sorry, the other guy was logged in at my terminal", "Just tidying up an old account".
Then when he became a trader, he knew about the test accounts to store his losses, as well as how to smooth over the tripwire alarm system whenever IT called him up.
One of our family friends died from bladder cancer - doctors treated it with tuberculosis (standard treatment). Ended up being in so much agony that he had to be doped up with morphine to the point that he went into coma and died.
If you reduce the cost of transport to close to zero, would that benefit locally made products or imports? W
But for the first wave of personal computers?
Everything in that era cost a shitload of money and did fuck-all. That was the cost of components. You would need to get hardware engineers to design the motherboards, custom case and keyboard layout. if not ASIC's as well. You would also need some software engineers to write the GUI as well.
Did lead to an incredible diversity in hardware at the time.
One of the problems in Silicon Valley, was that may chip fabrication plants stored their chemicals in underground tanks. When these started to leak, they contaminated the groundwater. This was only detected when clusters of rare cancers were detected.
Toxic Chips
It's in the Wikipedia entry for Steve Jobs. There is mention of a rip-off - they were offered $30 per component, managed to eliminate 50, but only got half.
Steve Jobs and Woz did work for Atari as technicians.
Wikipedia has a story on how they were paid to reduce the chip count on some arcade boards. They worked together to create one ASIC to replace 50 logic chips.
Reading computer magazines between the 1970's and1990's was an experience. Seeing the evolution of computing from home-assembled S-100 boards in the 1970's to Apple ]['s, Apple Mac, NEXT workstations in the early 1990's, hand-held devices like the Newton in the later years.
How many other people need three separate pages of historical time lines to list all the products that they were involved in designing?
Time Line of Apple Products
The easiest way to form these Penrose tiling patterns is through fractal growth methods. Start with a simple combination of tiles ( ecagon star, pentagon) then replace small combinations of tiles with a larger combinations (kites and darts).