15 years ago, would be 1995 - there were search engines back then. Mainly gopher, and Windows 95 did come with Internet Explorer. You would find the file you were looking for by running a gopher search on a keyword - that would list the ftp site you wanted, and then you would send an E-mail to have the file uuencoded to you, or you could download it directly. My workplace had a 64K ISDN line to the nearest university, whose own internet access was referred to "as reliable a wet piece of string".
20 years ago, would be 1990 - that would have been a totally different environment. You would be lucky to have ISDN, or even a phone line that was reliable enough to support a 9600 baud modem. International internet access was restricted to academic researchers and corporations. Look at the distribution of class A/B/C internet domain ranges. All the UNIX workstation vendor had their own class-A IP address - a whole 16 million+ addresses each.
To find any reference (book or paper), you would have to go down to the library or local technical book store. The book store would be able to make a special order for you, but you would have to wait two weeks. If the library didn't have the book or paper/journal in physical form, you would have to fill out an inter-library loan request as a hand-written form. You would have to get the author, title, journal spelled exactly as described, otherwise the request would fail - even a single full stop in the wrong place would lead to a miss.
Sometime the library would have documents in micro-fiche cache archive form (early Byte magazines or SIGGRAPH papers). You'd get a iphone size paper box with a whole bunch of transparent sheets with each A4 page shrunk to the size of a SIM card. Using the magnifier you would have to search through the set of cards to find the correct index like Z-18, or Q-34 which was the row and column of the first page. To get a print-out copy, you would have to fill out another form listing the references you wanted printed out. There was a special printer that could handle micro-fiche caches, but it was operated manually.
Surely, there are other tests using standard blood chemistry that could be performed? A standard annual blood test would test for a whole variety of things - glucose levels, hormone levels, antibody levels.
Wouldn't the brothers have different glucos levels, immune responses or ratios of antibodies?
Traditionally, the way to start a career with a political party was to volunteer to post flyers and do the canvassing, help arrange conferences and other such work. State unions would probably make sure anyone in the public sector was paid something.
You would need to add rules relating to aerodynamics and biology.
What is the cassowary's wing span and surface area? There is a relationship between volume, mass and surface area. And lifting power/stability is dependent on wing shape.
Which part of the world does it live? That gives a list of potential food sources, nesting and breeding grounds. Does it nest in treetops, mountains, rivers or just spend all time gliding?
If it is 200lbs, it is unlikely to eat insects as it's main diet, and would be limited by it's lifting power.
Is it the legendary thunderbird that lives in mountains, and only appears after thunderstorms, because only the thermals of those storms will provide it with enough lift?
AI was a big thing back in the 1990's. The assumption was that the knowledge of experts could be extracted through debriefings and walkthroughs on example problems, then encoded and stored as expert systems. The original assumption was that this knowledge would be stored as a flowchart with basic yes/no/don't know decisions all the way down to the conclusions. Deductive languages which did pattern matching like Prolog were though the best way to do this. LISP was another preferred language, the idea that all the rules could be listed recursively.
The main disadvantage in this era was the high cost of memory and relatively slow clock speeds (a 4 Mega-byte 60Hz 68020 was a monochrome screen was considered state of the art).
Then fuzzy logic and neural networks took over, because they realized that each decision wasn't 100% certain, but had a probabilty of being right or wrong. When there became too much data for a single neural network to process, it became data mining technology, trying to find correlations between multi-dimensional data.
The idea of vouchers was that schools could be opened and closed like restaurants in a downtown area. Then customers (parents) could pick which school they wanted and the bad ones (poor educators) would go out of business.
The main disadvantage is that for rural areas, there isn't going to be much choice. There may only be enough population for one high-school in a ten-mile radius. For inner-city areas, there may not be space for a popular school to expand or even for another one to form. The left prefer large schools (1200+) because they claim it gives the school more money to spend on resource like technology and sporting equipment, then they'll set this as the minimum requirement for any new school to form.
Best way is to get the data off that drive as quickly as possible. Even with old floppy disk and CD-ROMS, you may only get one chance to read the data, so you have to do it right the first time. Make sure you have a UPS when you are doing the work. A single scratch could lose you the data. Use the serial port. You just need to hex dump every file out. Don't try and tar things, because you would be writing to the drive, and things could be fried if there is a power failure or spike. One scrambled bit in a header could scramble everything, and you would have to start all over again.
I recovered files off an old Atari 800 in a similar way - set up the 850 serial port module to communicate to a laptop via a RS232 patch cable. Wrote a hex-dumper on the Atari side to write out the data, and used kermit on the other side to log all the output. All the disks copied within a day.
Are you implying what it looks like you are implying?
The story made it to evening news (CNN, NBC, ABC). It was the film processing technician who reported the pictures to the authorities. Once customers realized that their family photographs weren't just being processed automatically from reel to picture envelope, but that a third party would be making moral judgements on what they considered wrong, then I'd imagine they might want to cut that person out of the loop. There were other stories about parents getting into trouble for taking bath-time pictures. At the same time, digital cameras were coming down in price ($200 - $500), which also happened to eliminate the cost of film processing.
Teenagers have probably been sending pictures for the past ten years. Maybe about a decade ago, there was a late-night documentary about magazine photographers. One photographer said "Hey, anyone can be a photographer, just get an old camera, you don't need any film in it, and just pretend to take pictures. Have some fun.". Next thing, there is a news report about a pair of teenagers who had done just that. But they had failed to check to see if there was any film in the camera, and when they sent the film reel to be developed, they were both in deep trouble. After that, sales of digital camera rocketed, and sales of traditional film cameras tanked.
I've read about the more recent news stories about teenagers sending pictures to each other, and it does seem incredible that we put the technology into small mobile phones without ever thinking of the consequences - that users are going to taking pictures of everything and anything, and sending them to each other, not understanding that it breaks some law (or a whole bunch of laws that normally would only apply to expensive photography equipment).
IT project go over budget because the committees keep changing the specifications as they go along. Then the consultants aren't the people doing the actual coding, they're the ones writing specifications and handing them over to the backroom code-monkeys in India or wherever.
In order to implement the ID card system, it will be necessary for every individual to keep their details up to date. This includes whenever the individual changes nationality, employer or address. Failure to do so within three weeks will result in a fine and/or jail sentence.
The people purchasing the child porn with their credit cards or online services are the ones encouraging the predators to produce the stuff.
The moral issue over kids send photographs to each other is that they are doing because they believe it is the only way to make friends and start relationships.
Do you send such pictures to potential employers or customers when you are looking for a new job?
Two alternative news media websites were blocked accidentally:
Thankfully, this draconian measure does not effect all internet users in New Zealand however. It appears to be confined to those whose internet server providers, (ISPs), use Asia Netcom for their international internet traffic. Telstraclear, Vodafone and Worldxchange Communications users are not effected, while Woosh, Orcon, Slingshot, Telecom and Ihug users are.
An avid fan of Infowars.com and a 9/11 truth activist, Jeff Mitchell, reported on Saturday that he contacted his ISP, Orcon, to establish what was causing the block, and was advised by a computer technician who did a traceroute, that the break in traffic to the two websites was found to be occurring at Asia Netcom's router in Sydney.
Since many countries use and share satellite uplinks/downlinks for communication as well as underground fibre-optic cables, and that these are split into private networks for corporations, it makes enforcing filters that bit more trick. Many multi-national corporations actually have their network point of connection with the outside world through their corporate headquarters, rather than through local connections. That makes the enforcement of security policy far simpler. Long distance communication companies do the same as well. So applying filtering at one router is going to affect a whole load of countries at the same time. They would have to split up the IP addresses according to country and then filter them using individual routers.
You could spend months just trying to optimize a single large algorithm for a single video card (Terrain rendering) - there are now so many different ways of organizing data, pipelining routines between CPU, compute languages/CUDA and the GPU. The average GPU is now more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1980's.
While the hardware for home computers remained the same, programmers were rapidly learning how to different things. We went from text only games in the six months of release, to custom character sets, single sprite block characters, to multi-sprite block characters, scrolling multi-level screens, isometric views, pseudo-3d racing game tracks, digitized speech, all within ten years.
What about freeway exchanges (spaghetti junctions) where the roads are above each other. Would GPS be able to accurately tell the difference between the two altitudes?
Ironically, it is the Greek public sector workers who are joining the protests because they are being forced to give up the traditional deal of having a modest public sector salary in return for a generous long-term state pension.
One of my line managers (around 18 years ago) used to do that - assign himself the easy work and give everyone else the "critical path" work. He gets to go home at 6pm. Everyone else has to work evenings and early mornings.
If it is anything like the integrated database and ID card system that the UK was proposing, it would cross-link the registered addresses of your car, the property that you owned, your registered council tax address, term time address, home address, previous holiday addresses, current and previous car registration plates and car models, all your children and dependents and the schools/hospitals that they attended. If any one of these was inconsistent, you would be flagged for further investigation.
Oh, if only you had not posted as anonymous coward, I could have dazzled you with my wisdom...
You do not have an XBox 360 controller on Windows 7 phones, and you do not have a touch screen or keyboard on the XBox 360, the fact is the platforms DO have differences
We can appreciate that. But you should not allow the API to the hardware to go beyond the input classes of your game. There is always going to be a point where the hardware events (keyboard press/release, controller press/release) are read or processed as an event call and converted into user-input events (PLAYER_CROUCH PLAYER_JUMP PLAYER_FIRE). You are still going to do this just to support custom keyboard configurations, especially since not everyone has a QWERTY keyboard either. Even the DOS games support custom keyboard configurations. Custom controllers are still going to have to be mapped to input events. It shouldn't be too difficult to have some function call to return the console system type and then use some C++ to generate the relevant derived class to handle those input events. The old fashioned way of writing a game was to read the controllers directly. Your main loop cons
The boards are then conveyed into the reflow soldering oven. They first enter a pre-heat zone, where the temperature of the board and all the components is gradually, uniformly raised. The boards then enter a zone where the temperature is high enough to melt the solder particles in the solder paste, bonding the component leads to the pads on the circuit board. The surface tension of the molten solder helps keep the components in place, and if the solder pad geometries are correctly designed, surface tension automatically aligns the components on their pads. There are a number of techniques for reflowing solder. One is to use infrared lamps; this is called infrared reflow. Another is to use a hot gas convection. Another technology which is becoming popular again is special fluorocarbon liquids with high boiling points which use a method called vapor phase reflow. Due to environmental concerns, this method was falling out of favor until lead-free legislation was introduced which requires tighter controls on soldering. Currently, at the end of 2008, convection soldering is the most popular reflow technology using either standard air or nitrogen gas.
The researchers are proposing to replace these methods with a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field that would heat the solder to melting point
My thought, is it possible to map black and white photographs taken over 50 years ago to this? Some websites are selling reprints of antique postcards, which are in fact high-resolution photographs. The landscape in many cases is slightly different; buildings have had balconies added, trees are several meters taller. In some scenes, group photographs have been taken. I've wonder whether it would be possible to combine the photographs and streetview together so you could see the people as if they were cardboard cutout figures.
Slashdot Mirror
These situations have happened before, and have been captured on video.
The shooting of British troops by A-10 pilots.
Missionary family shot out of sky by anti-drug smuggling operations
Usually they had some doubt but still made the decision.
15 years ago, would be 1995 - there were search engines back then. Mainly gopher, and Windows 95 did come with Internet Explorer. You would find the file you were looking for by running a gopher search on a keyword - that would list the ftp site you wanted, and then you would send an E-mail to have the file uuencoded to you, or you could download it directly. My workplace had a 64K ISDN line to the nearest university, whose own internet access was referred to "as reliable a wet piece of string".
20 years ago, would be 1990 - that would have been a totally different environment. You would be lucky to have ISDN, or even a phone line that was reliable enough to support a 9600 baud modem. International internet access was restricted to academic researchers and corporations. Look at the distribution of class A/B/C internet domain ranges. All the UNIX workstation vendor had their own class-A IP address - a whole 16 million+ addresses each.
To find any reference (book or paper), you would have to go down to the library or local technical book store. The book store would be able to make a special order for you, but you would have to wait two weeks. If the library didn't have the book or paper/journal in physical form, you would have to fill out an inter-library loan request as a hand-written form. You would have to get the author, title, journal spelled exactly as described, otherwise the request would fail - even a single full stop in the wrong place would lead to a miss.
Sometime the library would have documents in micro-fiche cache archive form (early Byte magazines or SIGGRAPH papers). You'd get a iphone size paper box with a whole bunch of transparent sheets with each A4 page shrunk to the size of a SIM card. Using the magnifier you would have to search through the set of cards to find the correct index like Z-18, or Q-34 which was the row and column of the first page. To get a print-out copy, you would have to fill out another form listing the references you wanted printed out. There was a special printer that could handle micro-fiche caches, but it was operated manually.
Surely, there are other tests using standard blood chemistry that could be performed? A standard annual blood test would test for a whole variety of things - glucose levels, hormone levels, antibody levels.
Wouldn't the brothers have different glucos levels, immune responses or ratios of antibodies?
Traditionally, the way to start a career with a political party was to volunteer to post flyers and do the canvassing, help arrange conferences and other such work. State unions would probably make sure anyone in the public sector was paid something.
You would need to add rules relating to aerodynamics and biology.
What is the cassowary's wing span and surface area? There is a relationship between volume, mass and surface area. And lifting power/stability is dependent on wing shape.
Which part of the world does it live? That gives a list of potential food sources, nesting and breeding grounds. Does it nest in treetops, mountains, rivers or just spend all time gliding?
If it is 200lbs, it is unlikely to eat insects as it's main diet, and would be limited by it's lifting power.
Is it the legendary thunderbird that lives in mountains, and only appears after thunderstorms, because only the thermals of those storms will provide it with enough lift?
AI was a big thing back in the 1990's. The assumption was that the knowledge of experts could be extracted through debriefings and walkthroughs on example problems, then encoded and stored as expert systems. The original assumption was that this knowledge would be stored as a flowchart with basic yes/no/don't know decisions all the way down to the conclusions. Deductive languages which did pattern matching like Prolog were though the best way to do this. LISP was another preferred language, the idea that all the rules could be listed recursively.
The main disadvantage in this era was the high cost of memory and relatively slow clock speeds (a 4 Mega-byte 60Hz 68020 was a monochrome screen was considered state of the art).
Then fuzzy logic and neural networks took over, because they realized that each decision wasn't 100% certain, but had a probabilty of being right or wrong. When there became too much data for a single neural network to process, it became data mining technology, trying to find correlations between multi-dimensional data.
The idea of vouchers was that schools could be opened and closed like restaurants in a downtown area. Then customers (parents) could pick which school they wanted and the bad ones (poor educators) would go out of business.
The main disadvantage is that for rural areas, there isn't going to be much choice. There may only be enough population for one high-school in a ten-mile radius. For inner-city areas, there may not be space for a popular school to expand or even for another one to form. The left prefer large schools (1200+) because they claim it gives the school more money to spend on resource like technology and sporting equipment, then they'll set this as the minimum requirement for any new school to form.
[Flash of light and mushroom cloud] ....
Best way is to get the data off that drive as quickly as possible. Even with old floppy disk and CD-ROMS, you may only get one chance to read the data, so you have to do it right the first time. Make sure you have a UPS when you are doing the work. A single scratch could lose you the data. Use the serial port. You just need to hex dump every file out. Don't try and tar things, because you would be writing to the drive, and things could be fried if there is a power failure or spike. One scrambled bit in a header could scramble everything, and you would have to start all over again.
I recovered files off an old Atari 800 in a similar way - set up the 850 serial port module to communicate to a laptop via a RS232 patch cable. Wrote a hex-dumper on the Atari side to write out the data, and used kermit on the other side to log all the output. All the disks copied within a day.
Are you implying what it looks like you are implying?
The story made it to evening news (CNN, NBC, ABC). It was the film processing technician who reported the pictures to the authorities. Once customers realized that their family photographs weren't just being processed automatically from reel to picture envelope, but that a third party would be making moral judgements on what they considered wrong, then I'd imagine they might want to cut that person out of the loop. There were other stories about parents getting into trouble for taking bath-time pictures. At the same time, digital cameras were coming down in price ($200 - $500), which also happened to eliminate the cost of film processing.
Teenagers have probably been sending pictures for the past ten years. Maybe about a decade ago, there was a late-night documentary about magazine photographers. One photographer said "Hey, anyone can be a photographer, just get an old camera, you don't need any film in it, and just pretend to take pictures. Have some fun.". Next thing, there is a news report about a pair of teenagers who had done just that. But they had failed to check to see if there was any film in the camera, and when they sent the film reel to be developed, they were both in deep trouble. After that, sales of digital camera rocketed, and sales of traditional film cameras tanked.
I've read about the more recent news stories about teenagers sending pictures to each other, and it does seem incredible that we put the technology into small mobile phones without ever thinking of the consequences - that users are going to taking pictures of everything and anything, and sending them to each other, not understanding that it breaks some law (or a whole bunch of laws that normally would only apply to expensive photography equipment).
IT project go over budget because the committees keep changing the specifications as they go along. Then the consultants aren't the people doing the actual coding, they're the ones writing specifications and handing them over to the backroom code-monkeys in India or wherever.
In order to implement the ID card system, it will be necessary for every individual to keep their details up to date. This includes whenever the individual changes nationality, employer or address. Failure to do so within three weeks will result in a fine and/or jail sentence.
The people purchasing the child porn with their credit cards or online services are the ones encouraging the predators to produce the stuff.
The moral issue over kids send photographs to each other is that they are doing because they believe it is the only way to make friends and start relationships.
Do you send such pictures to potential employers or customers when you are looking for a new job?
I think it is (b).
Two alternative news media websites were blocked accidentally:
Thankfully, this draconian measure does not effect all internet users in New Zealand however. It appears to be confined to those whose internet server providers, (ISPs), use Asia Netcom for their international internet traffic. Telstraclear, Vodafone and Worldxchange Communications users are not effected, while Woosh, Orcon, Slingshot, Telecom and Ihug users are.
An avid fan of Infowars.com and a 9/11 truth activist, Jeff Mitchell, reported on Saturday that he contacted his ISP, Orcon, to establish what was causing the block, and was advised by a computer technician who did a traceroute, that the break in traffic to the two websites was found to be occurring at Asia Netcom's router in Sydney.
Since many countries use and share satellite uplinks/downlinks for communication as well as underground fibre-optic cables, and that these are split into private networks for corporations, it makes enforcing filters that bit more trick. Many multi-national corporations actually have their network point of connection with the outside world through their corporate headquarters, rather than through local connections. That makes the enforcement of security policy far simpler. Long distance communication companies do the same as well. So applying filtering at one router is going to affect a whole load of countries at the same time. They would have to split up the IP addresses according to country and then filter them using individual routers.
You could spend months just trying to optimize a single large algorithm for a single video card (Terrain rendering) - there are now so many different ways of organizing data, pipelining routines between CPU, compute languages/CUDA and the GPU. The average GPU is now more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1980's.
While the hardware for home computers remained the same, programmers were rapidly learning how to different things. We went from text only games in the six months of release, to custom character sets, single sprite block characters, to multi-sprite block characters, scrolling multi-level screens, isometric views, pseudo-3d racing game tracks, digitized speech, all within ten years.
What about freeway exchanges (spaghetti junctions) where the roads are above each other. Would GPS be able to accurately tell the difference between the two altitudes?
Ironically, it is the Greek public sector workers who are joining the protests because they are being forced to give up the traditional deal of having a modest public sector salary in return for a generous long-term state pension.
Am I missing something, but the article seems to be using the Oracle|Sun logo, while this is an astronomy discussion of the Sun.
Very true - to save money they are only open half the time - what half of the time naturally varies from post office to post office.
One of my line managers (around 18 years ago) used to do that - assign himself the easy work and give everyone else the "critical path" work. He gets to go home at 6pm. Everyone else has to work evenings and early mornings.
If it is anything like the integrated database and ID card system that the UK was proposing, it would cross-link the registered addresses of your car, the property that you owned, your registered council tax address, term time address, home address, previous holiday addresses, current and previous car registration plates and car models, all your children and dependents and the schools/hospitals that they attended. If any one of these was inconsistent, you would be flagged for further investigation.
Oh, if only you had not posted as anonymous coward, I could have dazzled you with my wisdom...
You do not have an XBox 360 controller on Windows 7 phones, and you do not have a touch screen or keyboard on the XBox 360, the fact is the platforms DO have differences
We can appreciate that. But you should not allow the API to the hardware to go beyond the input classes of your game. There is always going to be a point where the hardware events (keyboard press/release, controller press/release) are read or processed as an event call and converted into user-input events (PLAYER_CROUCH PLAYER_JUMP PLAYER_FIRE). You are still going to do this just to support custom keyboard configurations, especially since not everyone has a QWERTY keyboard either. Even the DOS games support custom keyboard configurations.
Custom controllers are still going to have to be mapped to input events. It shouldn't be too difficult to have some function call to return the console system type and then use some C++ to generate the relevant derived class to handle those input events.
The old fashioned way of writing a game was to read the controllers directly. Your main loop cons
It's for use with assembly line surface mount technology
The boards are then conveyed into the reflow soldering oven. They first enter a pre-heat zone, where the temperature of the board and all the components is gradually, uniformly raised. The boards then enter a zone where the temperature is high enough to melt the solder particles in the solder paste, bonding the component leads to the pads on the circuit board. The surface tension of the molten solder helps keep the components in place, and if the solder pad geometries are correctly designed, surface tension automatically aligns the components on their pads. There are a number of techniques for reflowing solder. One is to use infrared lamps; this is called infrared reflow. Another is to use a hot gas convection. Another technology which is becoming popular again is special fluorocarbon liquids with high boiling points which use a method called vapor phase reflow. Due to environmental concerns, this method was falling out of favor until lead-free legislation was introduced which requires tighter controls on soldering. Currently, at the end of 2008, convection soldering is the most popular reflow technology using either standard air or nitrogen gas.
The researchers are proposing to replace these methods with a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field that would heat the solder to melting point
Not until you see "2020: The year the mutant zombie pigs attacked"
My thought, is it possible to map black and white photographs taken over 50 years ago to this? Some websites are selling reprints of antique postcards, which are in fact high-resolution photographs. The landscape in many cases is slightly different; buildings have had balconies added, trees are several meters taller. In some scenes, group photographs have been taken. I've wonder whether it would be possible to combine the photographs and streetview together so you could see the people as if they were cardboard cutout figures.