How long will it be before kids ask their folks: How come you say "dial" a number instead of push a number?
Anyone *really* old remember the letter prefix phone numbers? "Just call Zenith 4265. Operators standing by..."
How can I forget them from years of TV commercials? (Excuse my walk down memory lane, non-Detroiters.)
TExas4-1100 (Twin Pines Dairy)
WO3-8925 (I don't remember what this was. I hope it was not a pawn shop.)
and the immortal TYler8-7100 (The original Mr. Belvedere. "We do good work". He's still on TV.)
and another favorite:
LI-DRUGS (Lincoln Drugs) - still a drugstore, I think!
BTW, I remember living in Ann Arbor in the late 70s and being able to dial any other number in the 66 (NOrmandy) exchange by dialing only the last 5 digits.
I'm dubious but the idea is interesting. The concept of a chemical signal forcing something to do a binary like signal is intriguing but difficult for me to belive. Proteins typically have a fairly complex receptor site that forbids anything that doesn't match from activating it. A cyclical response with temporal input appears, at first glance, to be questionable
You are forgetting the concept of a threshold. Let's look at nerve cells. An action potential propagating down a neuron is an all or nothing event. But there may be many nerve cells moderating the sensitivity of a particular neuron to stimuli. In addition, there is a refractory period too. On a macroscopic scale you see periodic behavior all the time - it's called "brain waves".
Wrong. Since Morse code does not represent all letters with the same number of dashes and dots (as, for example, ASCII does) [snip]
Variable length is the essential. It's like a Huffman encoding where the most frequently used letters have the shortest (and simplest) Morse representations.
"How do you deal with it?"... "I don't. I use Linux."
Ah, security through obscurity!
Unless you want to argue that Linux applications are inherently more secure, the main source of protection for Linux users is that it is not as common a target as Windows. All software has bugs, even open source.
Even Multics, which was designed to be secure and to run on hardware which supposedly was more secure had vulnerabilities. Just Google up the Air Force report on Multics holes.
The irony is that America is surprisingly Communist itself. An enormous number of Americans are supported by the government [snip] And guess who paid for the hardware and software at Harvard on which Gates cross-developed Altair Basic? Why did Gates agree to drop out of school instead of facing an inquiry about using university resources for private gain?
Gollum suffers from a severe case of being a book/movie character with behavior patterns that may have some similarities to real-world ailments, but which are ultimately artificial constructs of Tolkein's/Jackson's minds and therefore fruitless to "research."
It's well known that medical students often go off on far out diagnostic limbs (particularly when doing self diagnosis). Hence the old medical proverb "When you hear hoofbeats think of horses, not of zebras."
Your're from the State of Rhode Island, Secretary of State's Office?
1. Rhode Island is the Ocean State. So anything about boats. Design a boat, create a model and race it.
2. Assuming you handle the state's DMV, teach the students a bit of simple queing theory using a simulation language.
3. Revise the old BASIC game of Hammurabi. You are the mayor of Providence and you have to run the city. Given your budget, how should you divide the funds among pork barrel projects, graft and cleaning up Hope Street?
Actually corporate crap percolates down from the top. While waiting for breakfast at the local Burger King, I was horrified to read a sign posted near the cash register. The grammar was fine, the typography was clean but the notice was cluttered with corporate buzzwords that I am sure the average customer would not understand. At least 100 words to explain what could have been said simply and concisely:
Because the hurricanes in Florida wiped out most of the tomato crop, you must ask for tomatoes until the shortage is over.
Instead of some corporate BS explaining how much BK values its customers and is doing everything possible to provide tomatoes of the utmost quality, etc......
It's not just that letters and e-mails are poorly written but also that corporate communications are often dressed up to conceal a real lack of content.
In short simple words "The Emperor has no clothes." [Suitable punishment would be to force CXOs to actually read _Strunk and White_.]
no I have not seen one of those but I did use a system based on SCPs. Back in the late 80s - early 90s the state of Michigan was developing a network to link public universities and research institutions. It was possible to dial into a local node and then connect to the computer system at one of the state universities plus other sites. Instead of establishing a SLIP or PPP connection, you dialed in with a comm program + terminal emulation software and got a "Which Host?" prompt. Later on the system (Merit, now MichNet) moved over to TCP/IP and for a while offered free in state SLIP/PPP access. It was loads of fun using KA9Q on a dos box to access library catalogs, the software archive at the University of Michigan and the (now defunct) Simtel mirror at Oakland University (oak.oakland.edu).
A number of the posters here have referred to the long design, test and deployment cycle in the military, and in very many cases, their comments are accurate. But, there is a history of wartime hacks thought up by soldiers or people who knew soldiers.
BYO (bring your own) dates back to at least the Revolutionary War. It wasn't uncommon during the Civil War or WWI (considering the awful French machine guns supplied to US troops....). During Korea, aviators modified their airplanes for higher speed or better performance (by applying wax or pounding nails into strategic points).
a lamb with a human liver is no more human than a human with a pig heart is a pig. It's about DNA, not body parts
Actually transplants from animals to humans have been going on for many years, for example heart valves from pigs were among the first used for valve replacements in humans.
You've got to be kidding! Quincy became presonally involved in cases as no forensic pathologist would ever do. Pathologists and criminalists don't do the work of detectives. But Quincy *did* do one good thing - it explained to the public the difference between a coroner - often an elected official without any medical training - and the medical examiner - who is an MD and a forensic pathologist.
Of course CSI is not realistic. My favorite goof is when someone grinds up something from a crime scene in a mortar and pestle, adds a bit of liquid (sometimes), then injects it directly into a GCMS (gas chromatograph - mass spectrometer). Sorry, you can't do that in real life unless you like ruining very expensive laboratory equipment.
The article says that the slowing-down effect for paper-like objects is much larger than normal "parachuting" effect. I wonder if this could be used in some way for parachutes.
This failed miserably on a recent episode of "Mythbusters" because it was impossible to control the motion of a sheet of plywood held overhead.
Actually its been around a lot longer then you think. The Apple II used a form of sub pixel rendering written by steve wozniak himself.
Brilliant hardware design but messy for software writers. Actually the kind of display you saw depended on what type of monitor you used. Two adjacent bits determined the color of the pixel on a color display plus the high bit of each byte introduced a color shift for all the bits in that byte. That lead to a bizarre set of rules for mixing colors. It was possible, as was used in a number of games, to create the illusion of a larger number of colors by *dithering* which combined patterns of dots. On a black and white monitor you might be able to see 1 dot per bit but if I remember correctly, setting two adjacent bits on just increased the brightness of the pixels so I'm not sure you really increased the horizontal resolution of the screen. (I'll spare you the horrors of the non linear screen addressing and the wonders of "screen holes".)
4! I dreamed of a four as a kid, back when radios bragged right on the front panel about the number of silicon devices inside.
Of course there were some advantages to vacuum tubes. I enjoyed my bedside "All American 5" tube set. The lovely glow served as a night light and I could use it as a hand warmer when it was cold. Also, it was great fun to turn the set off and listen to the sound disappear as the tubes cooled.
(You know you are getting old when you remember the days when you had to "warm up" electronic equipment before it would work!)
If you look at the expanded pic of the "shirt-pocket radio", you also see a Zenith hearing aid, which has a shape (especially considering the location of the earphone) surprisingly similar to an iPod...
"Why a hearing aid?" you may ask. Interesting history there - Bell Labs, probably in view of the work done by Alexander Graham Bell with the deaf and hard of hearing, allowed transistors to be used in hearing aids without royalty payments. If you have ever seen the large B batteries once used with vacuum tubes, you will understand why the transistor was such a breakthrough in creating a wearable hearing aid.
I cannot agree with you more. As a developer I continually question the specs that I am given (so our client wants to capture customer feedback via the web. What kind of database do they have? What's the application platform? Any idea of how much traffic they expect? Why didn't YOU ask these questions?) which makes me look like I'm being difficult but in the end produces a *much* better product.
You actually *had* specs! On the last major software project that I worked on, the largest problem was that the customer did not know what he wanted. 6 months after starting work on the project, I found out that people were tired of having to order two different units at the same time (right and left) instead of being able to order one unit or a pair. The developer had to do an almost complete redesign (in Access + VBA - bleech.)
Given the similarities between Python and Object REXX, I now wonder if there would be any compelling reason for anyone to pick up Object REXX as a new language. Sadly, many will see it as a "fringe" language and may never even consider it.
Programming for the Windows API is somewhat similar between REXX (Regina) and Python. Plenty of open source libraries are available for both.
In the past, REXX was a good alternative scripting language to DOS batch. Two features that I still use are exact decimal arithmetic and an essentially unlimited number of decimal digits in calculations. While this facility can be slow, it's so easy to just say NUMERIC DIGITS 20 (for example) and just program away. [Decimal arithmetic is one of the reasons we still have dinosaur languages like COBOL around today.]
telephone service as part of corporate IT
on
Will VoIP Kill the PBX?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
is not going away any time soon. A good example is the University of Michigan which has run a large on-campus phone system for many years. http://www.itcom.itcs.umich.edu/telephone/about.ht ml They do have some VoIP service.
It is interesting to note that most students on campus (Ann Arbor) are going to 7 digit dialing (565 exchange) and that service at U Hospital is going over to SBC.
It's about time. Every class I took as an undergrad in physiology and neuroscience always just glossed over olfaction. It's amazing how little we know about this sense compared to the other senses.
Among brain functions, smell is one of the most primitive, so an understanding of smell helps us understand a variety of other organisms. Mapping receptors to genes may also give us insight into how other neural sensory systems work. Finally, there are close and very primitive relationships between smell and the old emotional parts of the brain (the limbic system) so this type of study may ultimately shed some light on emotional or mental disorders as well.
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Troi maybe, but Riker? Come on, the man is a legend.
Especially after hosting "Alien Autopsy"!
How long will it be before kids ask their folks: How come you say "dial" a number instead of push a number?
Anyone *really* old remember the letter prefix phone numbers? "Just call Zenith 4265. Operators standing by..."
How can I forget them from years of TV commercials? (Excuse my walk down memory lane, non-Detroiters.)
TExas4-1100 (Twin Pines Dairy)
WO3-8925 (I don't remember what this was. I hope it was not a pawn shop.)
and the immortal
TYler8-7100 (The original Mr. Belvedere. "We do good work". He's still on TV.)
and another favorite:
LI-DRUGS (Lincoln Drugs) - still a drugstore, I think!
BTW, I remember living in Ann Arbor in the late 70s and being able to dial any other number in the 66 (NOrmandy) exchange by dialing only the last 5 digits.
I'm dubious but the idea is interesting. The concept of a chemical signal forcing something to do a binary like signal is intriguing but difficult for me to belive. Proteins typically have a fairly complex receptor site that forbids anything that doesn't match from activating it. A cyclical response with temporal input appears, at first glance, to be questionable
You are forgetting the concept of a threshold. Let's look at nerve cells. An action potential propagating down a neuron is an all or nothing event. But there may be many nerve cells moderating the sensitivity of a particular neuron to stimuli. In addition, there is a refractory period too. On a macroscopic scale you see periodic behavior all the time - it's called "brain waves".
Morse code is considered binary right?
Wrong. Since Morse code does not represent all letters with the same number of dashes and dots (as, for example, ASCII does) [snip]
Variable length is the essential. It's like a Huffman encoding where the most frequently used letters have the shortest (and simplest) Morse representations.
"How do you deal with it?" ... "I don't. I use Linux."
Ah, security through obscurity!
Unless you want to argue that Linux applications are inherently more secure, the main source of protection for Linux users is that it is not as common a target as Windows. All software has bugs, even open source.
Even Multics, which was designed to be secure and to run on hardware which supposedly was more secure had vulnerabilities. Just Google up the Air Force report on Multics holes.
The irony is that America is surprisingly Communist itself. An enormous number of Americans are supported by the government [snip]
And guess who paid for the hardware and software at Harvard on which Gates cross-developed Altair Basic? Why did Gates agree to drop out of school instead of facing an inquiry about using university resources for private gain?
You gotta wonder if that robot is going to hold up a HUSKIES sign.
I'm betting on D.E.I.
Gollum suffers from a severe case of being a book/movie character with behavior patterns that may have some similarities to real-world ailments, but which are ultimately artificial constructs of Tolkein's/Jackson's minds and therefore fruitless to "research."
It's well known that medical students often go off on far out diagnostic limbs (particularly when doing self diagnosis). Hence the old medical proverb "When you hear hoofbeats think of horses, not of zebras."
Your're from the State of Rhode Island, Secretary of State's Office?
1. Rhode Island is the Ocean State. So anything about boats. Design a boat, create a model and race it.
2. Assuming you handle the state's DMV, teach the students a bit of simple queing theory using a simulation language.
3. Revise the old BASIC game of Hammurabi. You are the mayor of Providence and you have to run the city. Given your budget, how should you divide the funds among pork barrel projects, graft and cleaning up Hope Street?
People just don't care anymore, do they?
Actually corporate crap percolates down from the top. While waiting for breakfast at the local Burger King, I was horrified to read a sign posted near the cash register. The grammar was fine, the typography was clean but the notice was cluttered with corporate buzzwords that I am sure the average customer would not understand. At least 100 words to explain what could have been said simply and concisely:
Because the hurricanes in Florida wiped out most of the tomato crop, you must ask for tomatoes until the shortage is over.
Instead of some corporate BS explaining how much BK values its customers and is doing everything possible to provide tomatoes of the utmost quality, etc......
It's not just that letters and e-mails are poorly written but also that corporate communications are often dressed up to conceal a real lack of content.
In short simple words "The Emperor has no clothes." [Suitable punishment would be to force CXOs to actually read _Strunk and White_.]
no I have not seen one of those but I did use a system based on SCPs. Back in the late 80s - early 90s the state of Michigan was developing a network to link public universities and research institutions. It was possible to dial into a local node and then connect to the computer system at one of the state universities plus other sites. Instead of establishing a SLIP or PPP connection, you dialed in with a comm program + terminal emulation software and got a "Which Host?" prompt. Later on the system (Merit, now MichNet) moved over to TCP/IP and for a while offered free in state SLIP/PPP access. It was loads of fun using KA9Q on a dos box to access library catalogs, the software archive at the University of Michigan and the (now defunct) Simtel mirror at Oakland University (oak.oakland.edu).
And send that scuzzbag Alan Ralsky to prison.
Any excuse for Ohioans to bash Michigan. I guess they're still sore that they got Toledo and we got the Upper Penninsula.
(No, I don't like Ralsky either.)
A number of the posters here have referred to the long design, test and deployment cycle in the military, and in very many cases, their comments are accurate. But, there is a history of wartime hacks thought up by soldiers or people who knew soldiers.
BYO (bring your own) dates back to at least the Revolutionary War. It wasn't uncommon during the Civil War or WWI (considering the awful French machine guns supplied to US troops....). During Korea, aviators modified their airplanes for higher speed or better performance (by applying wax or pounding nails into strategic points).
a lamb with a human liver is no more human than a human with a pig heart is a pig. It's about DNA, not body parts
Actually transplants from animals to humans have been going on for many years, for example heart valves from pigs were among the first used for valve replacements in humans.
I would much rather watch re-runs of Quincy.
You've got to be kidding! Quincy became presonally involved in cases as no forensic pathologist would ever do. Pathologists and criminalists don't do the work of detectives.
But Quincy *did* do one good thing - it explained to the public the difference between a coroner - often an elected official without any medical training - and the medical examiner - who is an MD and a forensic pathologist.
Of course CSI is not realistic. My favorite goof is when someone grinds up something from a crime scene in a mortar and pestle, adds a bit of liquid (sometimes), then injects it directly into a GCMS (gas chromatograph - mass spectrometer). Sorry, you can't do that in real life unless you like ruining very expensive laboratory equipment.
Do I lie to my Doctor? No, but I want him to know the truth.
You've never taken a poll at a VD clinic, have you?
So, Bush gets in with a 51% majority and that now makes the earlier torture and basic violation of human rights OK? I see.
No, Michael is expressing *his* political views by claiming that this story no longer is important since election day is over and his candidate lost.
The article says that the slowing-down effect for paper-like objects is much larger than normal "parachuting" effect. I wonder if this could be used in some way for parachutes.
This failed miserably on a recent episode of "Mythbusters" because it was impossible to control the motion of a sheet of plywood held overhead.
Actually its been around a lot longer then you think. The Apple II used a form of sub pixel rendering written by steve wozniak himself.
Brilliant hardware design but messy for software writers. Actually the kind of display you saw depended on what type of monitor you used. Two adjacent bits determined the color of the pixel on a color display plus the high bit of each byte introduced a color shift for all the bits in that byte. That lead to a bizarre set of rules for mixing colors. It was possible, as was used in a number of games, to create the illusion of a larger number of colors by *dithering* which combined patterns of dots. On a black and white monitor you might be able to see 1 dot per bit but if I remember correctly, setting two adjacent bits on just increased the brightness of the pixels so I'm not sure you really increased the horizontal resolution of the screen. (I'll spare you the horrors of the non linear screen addressing and the wonders of "screen holes".)
4! I dreamed of a four as a kid, back when radios bragged right on the front panel about the number of silicon devices inside.
Of course there were some advantages to vacuum tubes. I enjoyed my bedside "All American 5" tube set. The lovely glow served as a night light and I could use it as a hand warmer when it was cold. Also, it was great fun to turn the set off and listen to the sound disappear as the tubes cooled.
(You know you are getting old when you remember the days when you had to "warm up" electronic equipment before it would work!)
If you look at the expanded pic of the "shirt-pocket radio", you also see a Zenith hearing aid, which has a shape (especially considering the location of the earphone) surprisingly similar to an iPod...
"Why a hearing aid?" you may ask. Interesting history there - Bell Labs, probably in view of the work done by Alexander Graham Bell with the deaf and hard of hearing, allowed transistors to be used in hearing aids without royalty payments. If you have ever seen the large B batteries once used with vacuum tubes, you will understand why the transistor was such a breakthrough in creating a wearable hearing aid.
I cannot agree with you more. As a developer I continually question the specs that I am given (so our client wants to capture customer feedback via the web. What kind of database do they have? What's the application platform? Any idea of how much traffic they expect? Why didn't YOU ask these questions?) which makes me look like I'm being difficult but in the end produces a *much* better product.
You actually *had* specs! On the last major software project that I worked on, the largest problem was that the customer did not know what he wanted. 6 months after starting work on the project, I found out that people were tired of having to order two different units at the same time (right and left) instead of being able to order one unit or a pair. The developer had to do an almost complete redesign (in Access + VBA - bleech.)
Given the similarities between Python and Object REXX, I now wonder if there would be any compelling reason for anyone to pick up Object REXX as a new language. Sadly, many will see it as a "fringe" language and may never even consider it.
Programming for the Windows API is somewhat similar between REXX (Regina) and Python. Plenty of open source libraries are available for both.
In the past, REXX was a good alternative scripting language to DOS batch. Two features that I still use are exact decimal arithmetic and an essentially unlimited number of decimal digits in calculations. While this facility can be slow, it's so easy to just say NUMERIC DIGITS 20 (for example) and just program away. [Decimal arithmetic is one of the reasons we still have dinosaur languages like COBOL around today.]
is not going away any time soon. A good example is the University of Michigan which has run a large on-campus phone system for many years. http://www.itcom.itcs.umich.edu/telephone/about.ht ml They do have some VoIP service.
It is interesting to note that most students on campus (Ann Arbor) are going to 7 digit dialing (565 exchange) and that service at U Hospital is going over to SBC.
It's about time. Every class I took as an undergrad in physiology and neuroscience always just glossed over olfaction. It's amazing how little we know about this sense compared to the other senses.
Among brain functions, smell is one of the most primitive, so an understanding of smell helps us understand a variety of other organisms. Mapping receptors to genes may also give us insight into how other neural sensory systems work. Finally, there are close and very primitive relationships between smell and the old emotional parts of the brain (the limbic system) so this type of study may ultimately shed some light on emotional or mental disorders as well.