You don't know if you are making an international call if it is forwarded from a local/USA call. This happens all the time -- legitimately -- when calling an "800" number (US intra-country long distance) gets routed to a call center in India.
I had a weird charge for "Auctions eBay" show up out of the blue on my wireless bill. I've never used my phone for anything like that. Fortunately, I was able to have that removed with a simple call to my provider. Better still would be if it never happened.
If you or your parents have a land-line from AT&T, I suggest you check their bill. "Inside wiring" is another mostly useless charge. How often does wiring go bad?
As repugnant as it may be, it is physically impossible for the population to outstrip the food supply.
Actually, it's quite easy for a population to outstrip the food supply... at least in the short term. That's when you have mass starvation die-offs.
Since we humans as a population (not individuals) have yet to prove ourselves to be smarter than yeast growing in a bottle, mass starvation will be the inevitable result at some point in the future.
In that case, I'm well prepared to defend myself from:
1. Naked girls willing to share my bed. 2. Inexplicably discovering I'm nude in public, even if no one else seems to notice. 3. Elevator doors that spring open, exposing a long fall down an open shaft.
My first computer experience was in 1977, using a Univac 70/7 mainframe running the TSOS operating system. It was really a relabeled RCA Spectra/70 machine. In a sense, this box was the first "Amdahl" in the sense it was machine instruction compatible with an IBM 360. We even used IBM 360 green cards for programming in BAL (the assembly language.
I don't know the specs for the 70/7, but the newer/faster replacement mainframe was a Univac 90/80, with 3 megabytes of memory--a huge amount of memory in 1978.
I think another facet of "hacking" things is the feeling of being more in control. For much of our lives in modern society, from manufactured products to fast food, things are created by other people to be sold to us at a profit. What's really in that chicken pot pie?
Doing for yourself gives back some measure of control and satisfaction, even if it is in relatively small ways. For example, I prefer to drive a manual transmission car. I would bet a larger percentage of the Slashdot population drive manuals than the general population in the USA.
I also ejoy making pancakes, scons, and biscuits from scratch. Similar recipes, yet quite different outcomes. With that level of control, I can make custom pancakes by adding whole wheat, or other types of wheat. Yummy pancakes you will never find in a predefined one-size-fits-all mix at the store. As a bonus, it's also cheaper than buying mixes too.
Way back in 1977 when I was a student at GSU and working for student slave wages, I was a "Terminal Room Consultant," which meant I helped fellow students with problems using the Univac 70/7 mainframe via hard-wired terminals (no PC's in those days).
For whatever reason, some people would refer to the mainframe as "he" or "she." One day the Univac crashed, which was noticable by the sudden silence in the terminal room when all the terminals quit printing.
Girl 1: Did he go down on you? Girl 2: Yes, he went down on me too.
Sitting behind the two girls was some guy with a shocked expression, his eyes practically popping out of his head.
Okay, C code then. And here I though switch programming was the last bastion of assembler.:-)
Back in 1987, the compiler optimizers in GCOS-8 SR2300 (the OS being used at the time on the DPS-88) generally did more harm than good, and weren't worth invoking. The machine instruction set on that mainframe was the opposite of RISC; it had many very complicated instructions available, known as EIS (Extended Instruction Set) that the compilers mostly ignored. So in that environment, you could easily write much better code in assembler than was generated by the Fortran or COBOL compiler.
The entire GCOS operating system was written in GMAP, and the source code was available to the SA's (open source all over again). It was not unusual for customer sites to make local modifications to the OS. GCOS even provided "hooks" to allow local code to be added, such as defining new batch job classes.
However, except for GCOS coding, it was usually not worth the effort to write in assembler.
If you want to eek out every bit of hardware performace, you still can't beat coding in assembler. This of course assumes it is worth the time and effort. I haven't the foggiest idea if switches are still coded in assembler, but they still were at the time of the failure.
Way back when I still worked on Honeywell mainframes like the DPS-88, I would write the occasional application in assembler (called GMAP) because there were some very nice multi-word machine instructions that would do a lot of stuff for you. For example, the MVT command would move data from one area to another, while converting it from ASCII to EBCDIC. One machine instruction. That's much more efficient than coding the same thing in C.
A Central Office (CO) switch is basically a mainframe-class computer programed in assembler. A few years back, a newly-installed switch failed due to a bug in the code, causing a cascading failure of the phone system for a few hours.
Indeed there is. The Enterprise was on its way back to Earth when it had a near-miss with an undetected black hole while at warp speed. The accident caused the Enterprise to be thrown back in time, conveniently knocked everyone temporarily unconcious, so that the Enterprise wound up dropping down in Earth's atmosphere over the US, low enough so that a jet fighter could scramble up to their altitude and take some pictures. All that happened in the teaser before the credits.
Painted green on top, and sky blue on bottom. From the ground, the Spitfire was supposed to blend in with the sky. Viewed from above, it was supposed to blend in with the ground.
Of course, that didn't help a lot if you were flying low over water, for example.
Take a close look the the "artist concept" picture that goes with the article.:-) There's more curvature of the Earth seen here than Astronauts see out the window of an orbiting space shuttle. High altitude indeed.
But really, how is asking for papers any different than asking for a driver's license?
BTW, in Georgia, it's not a retinal scan; rather, you place the pad of each index finger on a biometric scanner, in the order specified. The information is combined into a barcode-like pattern on the back of the license.
And no, I don't know what happens if you are missing one or more index fingers.
Yes, I agree with you on shorthand references as an easy way to remember momentus events. I could throw in a few more from history, like "Remember the Alamo" or "Remember the Maine". The problem is when we ONLY remember the stock phrase, and not the events behind them.
For example, one of the really bad events of the US Civil War, and a forshadowing of things to come, could be summed up as "Andersonville Georgia." Could I have a showing of hands who knows what this means?
BTW, I assume you were just writing in haste, but it was the Jews and others killed in gas chambers, not the Nazis.:-) About 1500 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, not 3000.
YES! It was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the headline. But, aside from vivid memories about Chicken Little, I'll be darned if I can remember what story it was from.
For those who don't know, "Chicken Little" was the term used in a SF story about an artificially grown hunk of meat. It was kept alive by being hooked to a device that kept it feed and growing indefinitely. Once in a while, when someone wanted a steak or whatever, you simply cut a slice off the thing.
Sounds like Science is close to catching up with fiction.
Taking your joke at face value, the Harrison clocks are Y2K compliant, just like my Grandma's Anniversary clock, or any cheap analog clock at Wal Mart.
Harrison didn't try to build in any calendar functions; they were simply built to be very accurate 12-hour clocks.
There are some rather interesting antique clocks, usually built for the amusement of royalty, that (tried to) track all kinds of stuff, like moon phases and movement of the planets.
In fact, it was quite safe for John Harrison to disagree with the captain, since he was there to mind the clock, and the primary purpose of the voyage was to field test the H1.
The captain maintained his own set of records using the traditional "dead reckoning", while Harrison maintained his independent records using his clock. The purpose was to have a basis of comparison, to see which method was more accurate. When Harrison's calculations proved to be superior, the captain became his most enthusiastic supporter.
If a CREWMAN disagreed with an officer's findings, OTOH, he was subject to being hanged on the spot for mutiny. This in fact happened to a crewman a few years earlier. As it turned out, the hanged crewman was right, the officers were wrong, and the fleet ran aground, killing many men. The captain who order the hanging made it to shore, but was killed and plundered by a thief as he lay on the beach. This event was one of the reasons for offering a prize for a method to determine longitude.
Exactly right. Later on, he also hit on constructing bimetal parts; smaller, easier, and works the same. Unlike a cheap wind-up clock you might buy at Wal-Mart today, Harrison's clocks of 250 years ago were not affected by temperature changes. Quite an accomplishment.
Hmmm. Sounds rather like the way pointy-haired bosses today are more impressed with the Lebert A/C units out on the computer room floor than the Sun and HP servers nearby.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know if you are making an international call if it is forwarded from a local/USA call. This happens all the time -- legitimately -- when calling an "800" number (US intra-country long distance) gets routed to a call center in India.
I had a weird charge for "Auctions eBay" show up out of the blue on my wireless bill. I've never used my phone for anything like that. Fortunately, I was able to have that removed with a simple call to my provider. Better still would be if it never happened.
If you or your parents have a land-line from AT&T, I suggest you check their bill. "Inside wiring" is another mostly useless charge. How often does wiring go bad?
As repugnant as it may be, it is physically impossible for the population to outstrip the food supply.
Actually, it's quite easy for a population to outstrip the food supply... at least in the short term. That's when you have mass starvation die-offs.
Since we humans as a population (not individuals) have yet to prove ourselves to be smarter than yeast growing in a bottle, mass starvation will be the inevitable result at some point in the future.
In that case, I'm well prepared to defend myself from:
1. Naked girls willing to share my bed.
2. Inexplicably discovering I'm nude in public, even if no one else seems to notice.
3. Elevator doors that spring open, exposing a long fall down an open shaft.
My first computer experience was in 1977, using a Univac 70/7 mainframe running the TSOS operating system. It was really a relabeled RCA Spectra/70 machine. In a sense, this box was the first "Amdahl" in the sense it was machine instruction compatible with an IBM 360. We even used IBM 360 green cards for programming in BAL (the assembly language.
I don't know the specs for the 70/7, but the newer/faster replacement mainframe was a Univac 90/80, with 3 megabytes of memory--a huge amount of memory in 1978.
So, does that explain why early mammals and dinosaurs are mostly much bigger than living mammals today?
*Note to humor impaired: Observe the smiley.
I had a caller who borrowed the DSL installation disk from her friend and was trying to install "The Internet" on her DVD player.
Ha! That's like wanting to install the Interstate Highway System in your toaster.
I think another facet of "hacking" things is the feeling of being more in control. For much of our lives in modern society, from manufactured products to fast food, things are created by other people to be sold to us at a profit. What's really in that chicken pot pie?
Doing for yourself gives back some measure of control and satisfaction, even if it is in relatively small ways. For example, I prefer to drive a manual transmission car. I would bet a larger percentage of the Slashdot population drive manuals than the general population in the USA.
I also ejoy making pancakes, scons, and biscuits from scratch. Similar recipes, yet quite different outcomes. With that level of control, I can make custom pancakes by adding whole wheat, or other types of wheat. Yummy pancakes you will never find in a predefined one-size-fits-all mix at the store. As a bonus, it's also cheaper than buying mixes too.
Way back in 1977 when I was a student at GSU and working for student slave wages, I was a "Terminal Room Consultant," which meant I helped fellow students with problems using the Univac 70/7 mainframe via hard-wired terminals (no PC's in those days).
For whatever reason, some people would refer to the mainframe as "he" or "she." One day the Univac crashed, which was noticable by the sudden silence in the terminal room when all the terminals quit printing.
Girl 1: Did he go down on you?
Girl 2: Yes, he went down on me too.
Sitting behind the two girls was some guy with a shocked expression, his eyes practically popping out of his head.
Geheime Staats Poletzei translates as "Secret State Police". Near enough to Homeland Security.
Okay, C code then. And here I though switch programming was the last bastion of assembler. :-)
Back in 1987, the compiler optimizers in GCOS-8 SR2300 (the OS being used at the time on the DPS-88) generally did more harm than good, and weren't worth invoking. The machine instruction set on that mainframe was the opposite of RISC; it had many very complicated instructions available, known as EIS (Extended Instruction Set) that the compilers mostly ignored. So in that environment, you could easily write much better code in assembler than was generated by the Fortran or COBOL compiler.
The entire GCOS operating system was written in GMAP, and the source code was available to the SA's (open source all over again). It was not unusual for customer sites to make local modifications to the OS. GCOS even provided "hooks" to allow local code to be added, such as defining new batch job classes.
However, except for GCOS coding, it was usually not worth the effort to write in assembler.
Ha! Perhaps I should have said "squeak" instead :-).
If you want to eek out every bit of hardware performace, you still can't beat coding in assembler. This of course assumes it is worth the time and effort. I haven't the foggiest idea if switches are still coded in assembler, but they still were at the time of the failure.
Way back when I still worked on Honeywell mainframes like the DPS-88, I would write the occasional application in assembler (called GMAP) because there were some very nice multi-word machine instructions that would do a lot of stuff for you. For example, the MVT command would move data from one area to another, while converting it from ASCII to EBCDIC. One machine instruction. That's much more efficient than coding the same thing in C.
A Central Office (CO) switch is basically a mainframe-class computer programed in assembler. A few years back, a newly-installed switch failed due to a bug in the code, causing a cascading failure of the phone system for a few hours.
Indeed there is. The Enterprise was on its way back to Earth when it had a near-miss with an undetected black hole while at warp speed. The accident caused the Enterprise to be thrown back in time, conveniently knocked everyone temporarily unconcious, so that the Enterprise wound up dropping down in Earth's atmosphere over the US, low enough so that a jet fighter could scramble up to their altitude and take some pictures. All that happened in the teaser before the credits.
They really did fly upside down over water. I had forgotten that tidbit.
Painted green on top, and sky blue on bottom. From the ground, the Spitfire was supposed to blend in with the sky. Viewed from above, it was supposed to blend in with the ground.
Of course, that didn't help a lot if you were flying low over water, for example.
Take a close look the the "artist concept" picture that goes with the article. :-) There's more curvature of the Earth seen here than Astronauts see out the window of an orbiting space shuttle. High altitude indeed.
Die Antwort ist "Kiss my grits!". :-)
But really, how is asking for papers any different than asking for a driver's license?
BTW, in Georgia, it's not a retinal scan; rather, you place the pad of each index finger on a biometric scanner, in the order specified. The information is combined into a barcode-like pattern on the back of the license.
And no, I don't know what happens if you are missing one or more index fingers.
Yes, I agree with you on shorthand references as an easy way to remember momentus events. I could throw in a few more from history, like "Remember the Alamo" or "Remember the Maine". The problem is when we ONLY remember the stock phrase, and not the events behind them.
:-) About 1500 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor, not 3000.
For example, one of the really bad events of the US Civil War, and a forshadowing of things to come, could be summed up as "Andersonville Georgia." Could I have a showing of hands who knows what this means?
BTW, I assume you were just writing in haste, but it was the Jews and others killed in gas chambers, not the Nazis.
YES! It was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the headline. But, aside from vivid memories about Chicken Little, I'll be darned if I can remember what story it was from.
For those who don't know, "Chicken Little" was the term used in a SF story about an artificially grown hunk of meat. It was kept alive by being hooked to a device that kept it feed and growing indefinitely. Once in a while, when someone wanted a steak or whatever, you simply cut a slice off the thing.
Sounds like Science is close to catching up with fiction.
Taking your joke at face value, the Harrison clocks are Y2K compliant, just like my Grandma's Anniversary clock, or any cheap analog clock at Wal Mart.
Harrison didn't try to build in any calendar functions; they were simply built to be very accurate 12-hour clocks.
There are some rather interesting antique clocks, usually built for the amusement of royalty, that (tried to) track all kinds of stuff, like moon phases and movement of the planets.
Sounds like a bit of dramatic license.
In fact, it was quite safe for John Harrison to disagree with the captain, since he was there to mind the clock, and the primary purpose of the voyage was to field test the H1.
The captain maintained his own set of records using the traditional "dead reckoning", while Harrison maintained his independent records using his clock. The purpose was to have a basis of comparison, to see which method was more accurate. When Harrison's calculations proved to be superior, the captain became his most enthusiastic supporter.
If a CREWMAN disagreed with an officer's findings, OTOH, he was subject to being hanged on the spot for mutiny. This in fact happened to a crewman a few years earlier. As it turned out, the hanged crewman was right, the officers were wrong, and the fleet ran aground, killing many men. The captain who order the hanging made it to shore, but was killed and plundered by a thief as he lay on the beach. This event was one of the reasons for offering a prize for a method to determine longitude.
Exactly right. Later on, he also hit on constructing bimetal parts; smaller, easier, and works the same. Unlike a cheap wind-up clock you might buy at Wal-Mart today, Harrison's clocks of 250 years ago were not affected by temperature changes. Quite an accomplishment.
Hmmm. Sounds rather like the way pointy-haired bosses today are more impressed with the Lebert A/C units out on the computer room floor than the Sun and HP servers nearby.