Comcast's local support number actually has the audacity to state: "If you have not installed the comcast software press 1. If you have installed the software, press 2."
If you press one, it says "Please install the software, downloadable from www.comcast.net/connectioncenter/, and call back *hangup*".
Hilarious. A living example of the old joke about TV in the Soviet Union. It had two channels. Channel 1 was state television. Channel 2 had a KGB agent saying "tune back to channel 1."
I don't know if I could ever trust a company with the word "Wang" in it's name.
I won't forget the day the Madison Wisc. "Isthmus" ran a picture of a sign at the local Holiday Inn reading "Welcome Wang Users".
[The "Ursula Understands" column accompanying the picture fielded several hardware and software questions, and was priceless.]
Apparently in Australia they had more trouble with their slogan "Wang Cares".
As for vaporware, the system was supposed to be secure, but somehow one of the secretaries at university hospital pushed the wrong button and dumped a report of the salaries of the top thoracic surgeons. My that was an interesting day!
but I suggest we read Pi in something like base 42....or base 500....something to keep that repetition of digits down.
Why don't we just crank out the digits base 26, read them off, and save people the tedium of posting and reading Slashdot. Perhaps we can can find the collected works of Shakespeare or the Bible Code in there as well.
I watched a few episodes of CSI last season and gave up in disgust. While the science angle is nice to see, the characters of the show are ridiculous. Since when do scientists go and interrogate suspects?!? This happened on two consecutive episodes and that was enough for me.
It's the same mistake made on the old "Quincy" and now current "Crossing Jordan". M.E.s would never do the kind of investigation portrayed on TV, nor would they get so personally involved in cases or particular issues. But having the M.E.s office in a large city staffed largely with foreign trained doctors is right on the money.
I made the mistake once of asking the state's chief M.E. what he thought about "Qunicy" - he made a face that would stop a clock, and simply said "Go Away!".
The good thing about Quincy is that it showed the public what pathologists actually do, and it explained the difference between coroners, who are often elected officials without medical training and M.E.s, who are pathologists.
It's a classic scam. Build up a rep for being honest, upright, soforth. Once everyone trusts you, you can strike it big with little difficulty.
Right, there's a name for that scam. I can't remember. Hang on... thinking about it... oh ya!
Retorical question - what's the source of the term "con man"? It comes from the term "confidence scheme", where the crook gains the "mark"s trust and then runs the scam.
The big question is: Did this guy plan it from the beginning? If he did, I applaud his patience and cunning, while also disapproving of the result of his actions. If he decided on the spur of the moment to do this, i.e. let temptation get the better of him, I have nothing but contempt for him.
Local news coverage seems to indicate that he did, apparently he withdrew money from several bank accounts and skipped town. His wife reported him missing to local authorities.
"White Lake Twp. Businessman Missing"
Investigators with the Oakland County Sheriff's Department and the FBI believe Richardson sold thousands of dollars worth of figurines and other items on eBay, took the money and never delivered. from WXYZ-TV, Channel 7 in Detroit.
The benefits of the mainframe are plenty. Awsome uptime, its in years, not months. Amazing I/O and storage capabilities.
Steve Comstock, in comp.lang.asm370, posted a link to a document he wrote from the IBM point of view which discusses how Unix is hosted on z/os. It also does a good job of describing MVS and z/os for those from the Unix side. Considering the architecture that Unix and Linux were written for, it's a wonder that it *can* be run in a mainframe environment, given how different the mainframe really is. For example, a mainframe really doesn't have the same type of terminal session as a Unix system and batch jobs are really alien to Unix.
see http://www.trainersfriend.com/Papers/zos_unix.pdf
Basically, the anti-matter/matter reaction is the most efficent mass to energy conversion there is.
This brings us closer to one of the propulsion systems envisioned by hard science fiction writer and physicist Robert L. Forward in a number of his books, the latest of which is "Indistinguishable From Magic".
http://www.whidbey.com/forward/
His books are prime reading for slashdotters. They are a throwback to the early SF of Campbell and Heinlein, but with much more real science thrown in.
Think of Schneier's honeynet project. What if we set up a "honey-relay" that from the users perspective looks excactly like an open mail relay, but actually it doesn't forward email, merely logs users?
Done - do a google search on tokarev and ralsky. Toakrev did just that and followed Ralsky's trail through several isps.
The increased risk exceeded 15% for those reporting more than 8.5 hours sleep or less than 3.5 or 4.5 hours
Such a low relative risk (1.15) usually indicates the effect is not real. I am usually skeptical of a relative risk of less than 2. Usually when you do a formal confidence interval analysis of the relative risk, you see that it's likely that 1 (no real effect) is within the interval for probable true values.
The DMCA isn't about patents in that way, it's about copyright. That guy can't have his serial cable because he could use it(not bloody likely) to circumvent the copyright protection on music CDs and (possibly, depending on interpetation), dreamcast disks.
That's the reason the DMCA is such a bad law. It bans anything (ANYTHING) which can be used to circumvent copy protection.
This explains why my former boss has been unable to ship used CRTs from Canada to the US. So far none of them have cleared customs. Obviously since they might be used on computers, they *could* be used to violate the DMCA! Why customs lets modems through without a peep, is another story!
It's not the escape KEY, it's the concept of an escape SEQUENCE. I.E. a character or characters that modifies the meaning of the following characters so that they do something meaningful with the computer. In the "old days" (perhaps not the original old days, but 20+ years ago when I started programming) this was mostly used for cursor positioning on dumb terminals; esc[12;25 would put your cursor at line 12 column 25 or some such.
Before ASCII and ANSI, the character now known as "escape" was commonly called "alt-mode" after the key on the teletype machine. So the only way to end a command string in TECO was "altmode" "altmode". Also before character standardization ^ was up-arrow and _ was back-arrow. Add to that numerous EBCDIC encodings - no there isn't just *one* of them, and you had alphabet soup. Bemer had a principal role in standardizing the character set.
Before the year 2000 problem hit, Bemer proposed a temporary solution for IBM mainframes involving zoned decimals which seems to have disappered along with the Y2K hype.
It's nice to see one of the old guys sticking a knife into the patent monster with a good solid claim of "prior art".
Re:A little dose of reality never hurt anyone.
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 1
Meanwhile, if you're one of the few who actually treat your career as a discipline, then you should have either held onto your job, or have found work by now. UNIX is a discipline -- If you have an O'Reilly book within 15 feet of your bed, count yourself among the lucky ones who decided not to ride the Win32 train.
It's not about Win32 vs Unix. It's not about open source vs proprietary software (in spite of the juvenile biases displayed here). Professionalism comes from breadth of knowledge and understanding of principles beyond getting what is in front of you to work. Unix and Linux aren't holy religions, but an enormous number of important ideas and technologies did come from the Unix world. Most of the good programming books on my shelf, with the exception of Knuth, came from people with some connection to Unix or Bell Labs.
One major problem with today's job market is the over emphasis on specific skills which are current today but will be gone in a few years. But business is only concerned today with short term profits, so they want more for less. Hiring a good technical person is not like hiring a window washer, it's more like getting a skilled machinist + engineer.
What I am seeing more and more is jobs being "declassed", or "Taylorized". This means that jobs that used to require a BS in CS are now going for a 2 year degree and some certs. Eventually they will go back to hiring high school kids for $10/hour, and I will have more work than I will know what to do with cleaning up their mess - assuming I can last that long.
...well, at least as implemented in OS/360 and its descendants: device-independent I/O. The point of all of that was that you could redirect your program's input or output to any dataset (file, in modern terms for anyone who's not a mainframer), be it on tape, disk, card (reader or punch, as appropriate), or printer. This was NOT a Unix invention: OS/360 had it in the late 60s. (Other OSes may well have had it before that). The statement
//SYSIN DD *
is the same idea as the Unix < redirection operator. To change that input to a different dataset, all you had to do was change that one JCL statement; no program changes were needed.
MTS (Michigan Terminal System) had similar facilities [*source* and *sink*] and no JCL! The University of Michigan ran MTS until 1996. Wayne State University ran theirs a few years longer. The last known system was at RPI, which lasted until 1998.
I've finally found some documentation on the web for MTS.
http://www.clock.org/~jss/work/mts/index.html has several documents with an overview of MTS.
http://www.msu.edu/~mrr/mycomp/mts/mtsframe.htm
has help files and some other articles.
I know it's hard to imagine evolutionary time, where things require a few hundred thousand years to be relevant, but really this assertion that we have stopped evolving is so much crap.
Modern medicine and sanitation are pretty much developments of the last two thousand years (the Romans had pretty elaborate sewer and aqueduct systems), while speedy air and land travel has only been around for a hundred years. These really only register as a blip on the scale of evolutionary time.
Evolution takes place on such a large time scale, that recent human history is just the blink of an eye on its scale. Even with technological progress, evolution will still take place, through the processes of mutation, selection and recombination of genes. What might not happen so readily is speciation which depends on reproductive isolation.
At one time, it was common to irradiate plants to create new variants. With the advent of "the bomb", mutant become an ugly word. While today's society may be reducing selection pressure, mutation will still take place. Perhaps mutation will be more common given some of the chemicals in our environment and our increased exposure to sunlight. In any case, what is dangerous from an evolutionary point of view is having a population with relatively uniform genetic makeup. Such a population is much more sensitive to random changes in the environment.
Come here, Maxwell, I have a little job for you to do....
Re:best wishes for success
on
Woz's New Startup
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Woz has done many creative things in life and will continue to do more.
(former member of the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club)
Considering some of his outrageous hacks, I would not be surprised. One of his early characteristics was to do outrageous things in hardware or software. Here are a few examples.
1. The screen memory on the Apple II was not laid out in a linear fashion but in a crazy quilt to lower the chip count on the motherboard. This resulted in headaches in converting a cursor address to a screen location.
2. Woz's Apple II parallel card didn't use a bit in a PIO to handshake with the printer, instead the handshake line *changed the addressing on a PROM* which toggled the executing code back and forth between active code and a do-nothing loop - talk about self modifying code!!!
3. One of the earliest cards for the Apple II was a modem with a "blue box" on a card. Obviously this was never produced in quantity.
4. Woz's binary to decimal conversion routine using the decimal addition mode of the 6502 chip is a classic. Unlike the 8080 and 80x86, which have decimal adjust instructions that are added after an addition or subtraction, on the 6502, the processor is put into and later taken out of decimal math mode. This made the 6502 lovely for controling devices using packed BCD (binary coded decimal), something that the 80xxx family does not do nearly as well.
Other possible security or military applications of this explosive might be the construction of information-collecting devices that self-destruct..."
Andersen should have equipped its auditors at Enron with these. Also we can finally realize the movie "Deadlock" where prisoners have embedded ID chips instead of those unweildly explosive collars.
I suspect that when they say "random" data, they are using marketing-speak random, not math-speak random. Therefore, by 'random', they mean "data with lots of repetition like music or video files, which we'll CALL random because none of you copyright-infringing IP thieving pirates will know the difference"
Actually, if you change the domain you can get what appears to be impressive compression. Consider a bitmapped picture of a child's line drawing of a house. Replace that by a description of the drawing commands. Of course you have not violated Shannon's theorem because the amount of information in the original drawing is actually low.
At one time commercial codes were common. They were not used for secrecy, but to transmit large amounts of information when telegrams were charged by the word. The recipient looked up the code number in his codebook and reconstructed a lengthy message: "Don't buy widgets from this bozo. He does not know what he is doing."
If you have a restricted set of outputs that appear to be random but are not, ie white noise sample #1, white noise sample #2... all you need to do is send 1, 2... and voila!
Somewhat unrelated --- Does anyone else miss Z-Modem.
The reason that Zmodem was faster than other types of file transfer was that it eliminated the handshaking and acknowledgement overhead of earlier protocols like xmodem, which operated on 128 byte CP/M style "records". Instead it sent the file in one chunk with ack at the end. You had to have compatible hardware error correction on both sending and receiving modems. In fact, this often involved wading through various modem setup strings and s-register values. If you lost one bit or dropped carrier, then your file download was history. Since TCP/IP is packet switched rather than involving transmission of individual characters, this changes things quite a bit.
Now you just need to combine that with the revolutionary algorithm to compress any data to one bit and power your computer by cold fusion, and you got one heck of a file transferring machine!
All you need is a Turing machine with an infinitely long tape and an infinite amount of time to encode, transmit and decode the message.
Seriously, I expect this to make a big splash like the fractal based image compression technique which has now faded into obscurity.
And I've always thought that the first programmers were all men. I do wonder: is there is a higher percentage of female programmers today or has it fallen in time?
Actually, Eve was the first programmer. She had an Apple in one hand and a Wang in the other.
Some very interesting computer history to check out. "Oldest post in the archive", "First mention of Microsoft" etc., very cool.
Gene Spafford's farewell to usenet reprints his famous description and fairly characterizes the current state of things:
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea --
massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a
source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect
it." --spaf (1992)
Just imagine if someone creates alt.history.usenet_archive that would contain the archive of all usenet messages (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive...))))...
In the future, we will look up old usenet postings in Godel's library catalog.
Slashdot Mirror
Comcast's local support number actually has the audacity to state: "If you have not installed the comcast software press 1. If you have installed the software, press 2."
If you press one, it says "Please install the software, downloadable from www.comcast.net/connectioncenter/, and call back *hangup*".
Hilarious. A living example of the old joke about TV in the Soviet Union. It had two channels. Channel 1 was state television. Channel 2 had a KGB agent saying "tune back to channel 1."
I don't know if I could ever trust a company with the word "Wang" in it's name.
I won't forget the day the Madison Wisc. "Isthmus" ran a picture of a sign at the local Holiday Inn reading "Welcome Wang Users".
[The "Ursula Understands" column accompanying the picture fielded several hardware and software questions, and was priceless.]
Apparently in Australia they had more trouble with their slogan "Wang Cares".
As for vaporware, the system was supposed to be secure, but somehow one of the secretaries at university hospital pushed the wrong button and dumped a report of the salaries of the top thoracic surgeons. My that was an interesting day!
but I suggest we read Pi in something like base 42....or base 500....something to keep that repetition of digits down.
Why don't we just crank out the digits base 26, read them off, and save people the tedium of posting and reading Slashdot. Perhaps we can can find the collected works of Shakespeare or the Bible Code in there as well.
I watched a few episodes of CSI last season and gave up in disgust. While the science angle is nice to see, the characters of the show are ridiculous. Since when do scientists go and interrogate suspects?!? This happened on two consecutive episodes and that was enough for me.
It's the same mistake made on the old "Quincy" and now current "Crossing Jordan". M.E.s would never do the kind of investigation portrayed on TV, nor would they get so personally involved in cases or particular issues. But having the M.E.s office in a large city staffed largely with foreign trained doctors is right on the money.
I made the mistake once of asking the state's chief M.E. what he thought about "Qunicy" - he made a face that would stop a clock, and simply said "Go Away!".
The good thing about Quincy is that it showed the public what pathologists actually do, and it explained the difference between coroners, who are often elected officials without medical training and M.E.s, who are pathologists.
It's a classic scam. Build up a rep for being honest, upright, soforth. Once everyone trusts you, you can strike it big with little difficulty.
Right, there's a name for that scam. I can't remember. Hang on... thinking about it... oh ya!
Retorical question - what's the source of the term "con man"? It comes from the term "confidence scheme", where the crook gains the "mark"s trust and then runs the scam.
The big question is: Did this guy plan it from the beginning? If he did, I applaud his patience and cunning, while also disapproving of the result of his actions. If he decided on the spur of the moment to do this, i.e. let temptation get the better of him, I have nothing but contempt for him.
Local news coverage seems to indicate that he did, apparently he withdrew money from several bank accounts and skipped town. His wife reported him missing to local authorities.
"White Lake Twp. Businessman Missing"
Investigators with the Oakland County Sheriff's Department and the FBI believe Richardson sold thousands of dollars worth of figurines and other items on eBay, took the money and never delivered. from WXYZ-TV, Channel 7 in Detroit.
http://www.detnow.com/news/0202221202.html
The benefits of the mainframe are plenty. Awsome uptime, its in years, not months. Amazing I/O and storage capabilities.
Steve Comstock, in comp.lang.asm370, posted a link to a document he wrote from the IBM point of view which discusses how Unix is hosted on z/os. It also does a good job of describing MVS and z/os for those from the Unix side. Considering the architecture that Unix and Linux were written for, it's a wonder that it *can* be run in a mainframe environment, given how different the mainframe really is. For example, a mainframe really doesn't have the same type of terminal session as a Unix system and batch jobs are really alien to Unix.
see http://www.trainersfriend.com/Papers/zos_unix.pdf
8 types of country music songs
Q:What do you get when you play a country music record backwards?
A:First you get your truck back, then you get your dog back, then you get your wife back, then you stop drinking.
[BTW, I do listen to country music, it sets the mood when I have to make service calls in Flint (MI).]
Basically, the anti-matter/matter reaction is the most efficent mass to energy conversion there is.
This brings us closer to one of the propulsion systems envisioned by hard science fiction writer and physicist Robert L. Forward in a number of his books, the latest of which is "Indistinguishable From Magic".
http://www.whidbey.com/forward/
His books are prime reading for slashdotters. They are a throwback to the early SF of Campbell and Heinlein, but with much more real science thrown in.
Think of Schneier's honeynet project. What if we set up a "honey-relay" that from the users perspective looks excactly like an open mail relay, but actually it doesn't forward email, merely logs users?
Done - do a google search on tokarev and ralsky.
Toakrev did just that and followed Ralsky's trail through several isps.
The increased risk exceeded 15% for those reporting more than 8.5 hours sleep or less than 3.5 or 4.5 hours
Such a low relative risk (1.15) usually indicates the effect is not real. I am usually skeptical of a relative risk of less than 2. Usually when you do a formal confidence interval analysis of the relative risk, you see that it's likely that 1 (no real effect) is within the interval for probable true values.
The DMCA isn't about patents in that way, it's about copyright. That guy can't have his serial cable because he could use it(not bloody likely) to circumvent the copyright protection on music CDs and (possibly, depending on interpetation), dreamcast disks.
That's the reason the DMCA is such a bad law. It bans anything (ANYTHING) which can be used to circumvent copy protection.
This explains why my former boss has been unable to ship used CRTs from Canada to the US. So far none of them have cleared customs. Obviously since they might be used on computers, they *could* be used to violate the DMCA! Why customs lets modems through without a peep, is another story!
It's not the escape KEY, it's the concept of an escape SEQUENCE. I.E. a character or characters that modifies the meaning of the following characters so that they do something meaningful with the computer. In the "old days" (perhaps not the original old days, but 20+ years ago when I started programming) this was mostly used for cursor positioning on dumb terminals; esc[12;25 would put your cursor at line 12 column 25 or some such.
Before ASCII and ANSI, the character now known as "escape" was commonly called "alt-mode" after the key on the teletype machine. So the only way to end a command string in TECO was "altmode" "altmode". Also before character standardization ^ was up-arrow and _ was back-arrow. Add to that numerous EBCDIC encodings - no there isn't just *one* of them, and you had alphabet soup. Bemer had a principal role in standardizing the character set.
Before the year 2000 problem hit, Bemer proposed a temporary solution for IBM mainframes involving zoned decimals which seems to have disappered along with the Y2K hype.
It's nice to see one of the old guys sticking a knife into the patent monster with a good solid claim of "prior art".
Meanwhile, if you're one of the few who actually treat your career as a discipline, then you should have either held onto your job, or have found work by now. UNIX is a discipline -- If you have an O'Reilly book within 15 feet of your bed, count yourself among the lucky ones who decided not to ride the Win32 train.
It's not about Win32 vs Unix. It's not about open source vs proprietary software (in spite of the juvenile biases displayed here). Professionalism comes from breadth of knowledge and understanding of principles beyond getting what is in front of you to work. Unix and Linux aren't holy religions, but an enormous number of important ideas and technologies did come from the Unix world. Most of the good programming books on my shelf, with the exception of Knuth, came from people with some connection to Unix or Bell Labs.
One major problem with today's job market is the over emphasis on specific skills which are current today but will be gone in a few years. But business is only concerned today with short term profits, so they want more for less. Hiring a good technical person is not like hiring a window washer, it's more like getting a skilled machinist + engineer.
What I am seeing more and more is jobs being "declassed", or "Taylorized". This means that jobs that used to require a BS in CS are now going for a 2 year degree and some certs. Eventually they will go back to hiring high school kids for $10/hour, and I will have more work than I will know what to do with cleaning up their mess - assuming I can last that long.
...well, at least as implemented in OS/360 and its descendants: device-independent I/O. The point of all of that was that you could redirect your program's input or output to any dataset (file, in modern terms for anyone who's not a mainframer), be it on tape, disk, card (reader or punch, as appropriate), or printer. This was NOT a Unix invention: OS/360 had it in the late 60s. (Other OSes may well have had it before that). The statement
is the same idea as the Unix < redirection operator. To change that input to a different dataset, all you had to do was change that one JCL statement; no program changes were needed.
MTS (Michigan Terminal System) had similar facilities [*source* and *sink*] and no JCL! The University of Michigan ran MTS until 1996. Wayne State University ran theirs a few years longer. The last known system was at RPI, which lasted until 1998.
I've finally found some documentation on the web for MTS.
http://www.clock.org/~jss/work/mts/index.html has several documents with an overview of MTS.
http://www.msu.edu/~mrr/mycomp/mts/mtsframe.htm
has help files and some other articles.
I know it's hard to imagine evolutionary time, where things require a few hundred thousand years to be relevant, but really this assertion that we have stopped evolving is so much crap.
Modern medicine and sanitation are pretty much developments of the last two thousand years (the Romans had pretty elaborate sewer and aqueduct systems), while speedy air and land travel has only been around for a hundred years. These really only register as a blip on the scale of evolutionary time.
Evolution takes place on such a large time scale, that recent human history is just the blink of an eye on its scale. Even with technological progress, evolution will still take place, through the processes of mutation, selection and recombination of genes. What might not happen so readily is speciation which depends on reproductive isolation.
At one time, it was common to irradiate plants to create new variants. With the advent of "the bomb", mutant become an ugly word. While today's society may be reducing selection pressure, mutation will still take place. Perhaps mutation will be more common given some of the chemicals in our environment and our increased exposure to sunlight. In any case, what is dangerous from an evolutionary point of view is having a population with relatively uniform genetic makeup. Such a population is much more sensitive to random changes in the environment.
Er, I otto nae break them, anyway.
Come here, Maxwell, I have a little job for you to do....
Woz has done many creative things in life and will continue to do more.
(former member of the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club)
Considering some of his outrageous hacks, I would not be surprised. One of his early characteristics was to do outrageous things in hardware or software. Here are a few examples.
1. The screen memory on the Apple II was not laid out in a linear fashion but in a crazy quilt to lower the chip count on the motherboard. This resulted in headaches in converting a cursor address to a screen location.
2. Woz's Apple II parallel card didn't use a bit in a PIO to handshake with the printer, instead the handshake line *changed the addressing on a PROM* which toggled the executing code back and forth between active code and a do-nothing loop - talk about self modifying code!!!
3. One of the earliest cards for the Apple II was a modem with a "blue box" on a card. Obviously this was never produced in quantity.
4. Woz's binary to decimal conversion routine using the decimal addition mode of the 6502 chip is a classic. Unlike the 8080 and 80x86, which have decimal adjust instructions that are added after an addition or subtraction, on the 6502, the processor is put into and later taken out of decimal math mode. This made the 6502 lovely for controling devices using packed BCD (binary coded decimal), something that the 80xxx family does not do nearly as well.
Other possible security or military applications of this explosive might be the construction of information-collecting devices that self-destruct ..."
Andersen should have equipped its auditors at Enron with these. Also we can finally realize the movie "Deadlock" where prisoners have embedded ID chips instead of those unweildly explosive collars.
I suspect that when they say "random" data, they are using marketing-speak random, not math-speak random. Therefore, by 'random', they mean "data with lots of repetition like music or video files, which we'll CALL random because none of you copyright-infringing IP thieving pirates will know the difference"
Actually, if you change the domain you can get what appears to be impressive compression. Consider a bitmapped picture of a child's line drawing of a house. Replace that by a description of the drawing commands. Of course you have not violated Shannon's theorem because the amount of information in the original drawing is actually low.
At one time commercial codes were common. They were not used for secrecy, but to transmit large amounts of information when telegrams were charged by the word. The recipient looked up the code number in his codebook and reconstructed a lengthy message: "Don't buy widgets from this bozo. He does not know what he is doing."
... all you need to do is send 1, 2... and voila!
If you have a restricted set of outputs that appear to be random but are not, ie white noise sample #1, white noise sample #2
Somewhat unrelated --- Does anyone else miss Z-Modem.
The reason that Zmodem was faster than other types of file transfer was that it eliminated the handshaking and acknowledgement overhead of earlier protocols like xmodem, which operated on 128 byte CP/M style "records". Instead it sent the file in one chunk with ack at the end. You had to have compatible hardware error correction on both sending and receiving modems. In fact, this often involved wading through various modem setup strings and s-register values. If you lost one bit or dropped carrier, then your file download was history. Since TCP/IP is packet switched rather than involving transmission of individual characters, this changes things quite a bit.
Now you just need to combine that with the revolutionary algorithm to compress any data to one bit and power your computer by cold fusion, and you got one heck of a file transferring machine!
All you need is a Turing machine with an infinitely long tape and an infinite amount of time to encode, transmit and decode the message.
Seriously, I expect this to make a big splash like the fractal based image compression technique which has now faded into obscurity.
And I've always thought that the first programmers were all men. I do wonder: is there is a higher percentage of female programmers today or has it fallen in time?
Actually, Eve was the first programmer. She had an Apple in one hand and a Wang in the other.
Some very interesting computer history to check out. "Oldest post in the archive", "First mention of Microsoft" etc., very cool.
Gene Spafford's farewell to usenet reprints his famous description and fairly characterizes the current state of things:
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea --
massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a
source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect
it." --spaf (1992)
Just imagine if someone creates alt.history.usenet_archive that would contain the archive of all usenet messages (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive, (including alt.history.usenet_archive ...)))) ...
In the future, we will look up old usenet postings in Godel's library catalog.