[off topic] Ah but do you rememebr the 6502 processor? It had one single accumulator, a stack pointer and the X and Y reference registers. Rather slim. Yet elegant.
I certainly do. The instruction set was so simple that I could (long ago) assemble code in my head and patch programs without recourse to the mini-assembler.
One of my favorite WOZisms was his short but sweet routine to convert binary to decimal. It put the processor into DECIMAL mode. In that mode addition and subtraction work with packed BCD. (The 6502 has no DAA or DAS type instructins.) At each step it shifted the binary number left into carry, then added the sum to itself with carry. [back on topic]
Here's a rhetorical question. Why do some slashdoters heap scorn on Microsoft but not Borland when both have handed out free developer tools (command line C++ compilers and tools) that are not open source?
Does it have something to do with the more reasonable prices that Borland charged for its products?
If it is truly from 1962, IBM 1401 assembly language would be the most likely candidate.
And the place to find experts in this would be...... INDIA. Because of the export embargo from the US to India up until the late 80s, people in India were running old equipment long since scrapped in the US. (Sort of like the cars in Havana.) You want to find a manual on RPG (the programming language not the type of game) dollars to doughnuts it's on an Indian website.
"IBM will do you HR for you so you can focus on your company"
I remember when IBM Global services took over the already F-d HR and payroll provided by a now bankrupt shill for a F-d mutual fund company. The disaster could not have been any worse.
For the first few months, paychecks were totally wrong. We had state taxes taken out for two states (where we were and where HQ was) or just HQ state taxes were taken out. [Sorry, I resent paying MA taxes particulary since I don't live or work there.] It took me 9 months to get a pay stub for my last pay check. Finally, I spent 2 days working at an office in a local city which was shortly thereafter closed down. I ended up having to pay city income tax for that city for my entire year's wages there due to an accounting screw up.
In my expreience PWC consultants are no better than Accenture (Andersen). I remember meeting some former consultants at a trade show when I stopped to see a demo of a well known business software program. This was at 2 PM and the show had been open since 10 AM. Since their network was down and they hadn't a clue how to fix it, they showed me a canned demo instead of the real thing. What a waste of time. [True to form, the booth critter was young, female, attractive and perky, but she didn't know s---.]
1. probably the effect of some other factor that separates the heavy video game players from others, perhaps age. Also note that both residents (younger) and older staff surgeons were involved [confounding by age?]
2. How did they determine how many time the participants spent playing video games? By questionnaire or did they measure it? [recall bias]
3. I'm sure the reported gains in the gamer group are not in fact relative risks. Even if they were, a 30% decrease may be simply due to chance in such a small study group [statistical insignificance]. A good rule of thumb is that if a study doesn't cut the risk of something at least by half, it probably isn't measuring anything at all.
4. Do the surgeons who play video games more have more manual dexterity to begin with? [confusing correlation with causation]. Perhaps we could also relate it to hours per week spent on fly-tying or birdhouse building?
5. Does this study pass the test of reasonableness? Let's see if giving the surgical residents an extra 3 hours of *sleep* a week makes them better surgeons.
Once upon a time a man and his wife were in a terrible auto accident. The wife was severely injured but the man was barely hurt. Unfortunately she was nearly a vegetable. The man felt sorry for his wife and decided to go to a mad scientist. The mad scientist showed him the IQ Reducing machine. "10 seconds in here will make you more like your wife" he said. But instead of 10 seconds, the man got a 1/2 hour dose, since the mad scientist's broker called while he was in the booth. "Oh my god, what have I done?" the mad scientist said as he realized his mistake. Quickly he unlocked the booth and the man stumbled out. Miraculously he was still able to speak. With a glazed look on his face, he exclaimed "Go Bucky!"
Today, despite HEAVY competition from Europe and Japan, UAW auto workers:
Make $45k or more Have a health/benefits/retirement package second to none Have incredibly safe, well-lit, comfortable workplaces, with all the ergonomics they need. Never get bored; they don't spend years installing door panels. They get rotated, often on a weekly basis, among different tasks. Guess what? That includes the training to be able to do the new task.
Perhaps this is true where there are still jobs, but here in Michigan, jobs have been fleeing the state in record numbers. Large sections of major cities look like they were bombed out in WW2. Please drive through Detroit, Flint or Saginaw. I dare you.
Wow, 20 years is a long time to work on a problem without cracking. Congratulations, Toshikatsu.
20 years is a long time to work on anything. Do you think this invention would have been possible if Wall Street had been breathing down his neck? Of course in Japan, a "short term" economic program is 50 years!
I'm sure the engineers at NASA will have no trouble designing a high-powered space space station stereo system with plenty of earth-shattering-kaboom bass.
No, just borrow the one from the Army they used to drive General Noriega insane.
I seem to remember one overhead parking garage that looked like an elongated rectangular ferris wheel that parked cars overhead and rotated to retrieve them. I think it was in Ann Arbor across the Huron River from where the new hospital is now. This was sometime back in the 70s.
I hope that I never have to book tickets using a credit card in any systems that you've been within ten miles of.
I also hope that your customers never trust you with business critical data.
If you can't see why, think about how you enforce data integrity and security if a customer asks you (or more likely someone else) to write, say, a new web interface to your data?
Please tell me then, why very large and secure database systems have been built on Pick and Mumps for years? Neither of these is a toy.
In particular, point #3 is not an exclusive property of relational databases.
stop misusing spreadsheets/excel as databases- They are for calculating numbers, not creating lists of things
1. Blame AppleWorks first. Before excel it made spreadsheets like databases.
2. If you look at the history of the spreadsheet, you will see that VisiCalc was designed for "What If?" not large scale calculating work. I was taught that spreadsheets are for the display of information - not calculation.
3. Of course I don't even need a database for storing some kinds of information. An ordinary text file is actually good enough. For example my address book is a text file.
4. I think the greatest misuse of spreadsheets is in using them to consolidate financial data. It's seductive. You get to see what you are doing, you get visual feedback, but
a. data is not protected against alteration b. formulas are not protected against alteration c. there is no audit trail d. you are using explicit formulas instead of looping over data files
5. Lastly, you can say to yourself when you use a spreadsheet, "Look Mom, I'm not programming." Pretty soon you are using Macros, then Word Basic then Visual Basic for Applications. Pretty soon you have a maintenance nightmare since you have spent more time getting immediate answers than you have spent in thinking about design.
6. Yet the usual database products are a disease in themselves. I think that relational databases are not the best for transaction processing. I prefer to use programming languages with built in database support.
7. Last, using a computer gives you the illusion that numbers are real. Printed numbers assume god like authority. But of course projections are not facts or reality, except perhaps in government or the business world!
Byte hasn't been credible since 1979 when Carl Helmers sold it to McGraw/Hill.
Bingo! Along with "Creative Computing" which was interesting to read before ZD went product oriented and "PC Magazine" which I believe came to stand for "Product Catalog". Press releases and publicity photos have always masqueraded as trade "journalism". Now that the dot bomb boom is bust, I get no more trade rags in my mailbox.
There is a definite de-emphasis on math and science in American schools....
Yup. Last week I pointed out a Dilbert cartoon in the newspaper to my girlfriend. The main character was being punished. His punishment was to provide the exact value of 22/7.
Needless to say my girlfirend didn't think it was funny. I thought about explaining it to her, and wisely gave up without trying.
This will not be the first bone headed action taken by the U of M.
a) putting Nike logos on athletic uniforms b) punishing today's basketball teams for yesterday's scandals c) supporting a quota based system for admissions d) adding garish signs above the top row of seats at Michigan Stadium
U of M is a strange school. It has a history of campus unrest and leftist politics on par with UC Berkeley, but at the same time it has to dance to the tune set by the state legislature, its board of regents and the auto industry.
Considering the way the current president has rolled over on the Webber affair, I don't expect the University to put up much of a fight. She already has been willing to indulge in self-flagellation in order to appear politically correct.
On the other hand, it also featured arbitrary precision mathematics, which is a pretty nifty and not altogether common feature for a language.
It's perfect, although somewhat slow, for working with very large integers. No special programming is required. Just add NUMERIC DIGITS 20 (for example) and you have 20 digit decimal numbers. It was very easy to translate an old program for Knuth's algorithm S (the spectral test) that once used UCSD Pascal's "long integers" (31 decimal digits + sign) into REXX.
But then again, no IT guys have to work in feces in a sweaty, humid, tiny room
Reminds me of my 2nd worst service call ever. I had to travel across town to remove a worm from 5 machines on an office LAN. The lunch man came and I bought my usual sandwich.... 1/2 hour later I ran for the john before the staff could warn me of an impending plug up. It seems that someone had dropped a quarter into the toilet and it had worked its way into the vent pipe. And it was my un-lucky day. No flushing action whatever. So the plumber came and had to unbolt the commode from the floor. He found that the quarter was permanently wedged but loosened it enough for the toilet to flush. Needless to say I was mortified and I would gladly have paid the plumber out of my own pocket to get it fixed. After spending the morning cursing network cards, Windows and Bill Gates' ancestry, I was glad that I wasn't a plumber!
Of course. Better that than "Dr. Strangelove". My first association for "Looking Glass" was the perpetually flying alternate command post for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) during the cold war. Let's hope using this interface does not start WW3. Or perhaps you'd like a nice game of chess???
As clifgriffin, I speak for myself when I say that "vigilante" is not a word we ever claimed. We aren't raging against internet piracy or p2p. We're just doing a social experiment...to see how a program spreads, who downloads it, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
[off topic]
Ah but do you rememebr the 6502 processor? It had one single accumulator, a stack pointer and the X and Y reference registers. Rather slim. Yet elegant.
I certainly do. The instruction set was so simple that I could (long ago) assemble code in my head and patch programs without recourse to the mini-assembler.
One of my favorite WOZisms was his short but sweet routine to convert binary to decimal. It put the processor into DECIMAL mode. In that mode addition and subtraction work with packed BCD. (The 6502 has no DAA or DAS type instructins.) At each step it shifted the binary number left into carry, then added the sum to itself with carry.
[back on topic]
Here's a rhetorical question. Why do some slashdoters heap scorn on Microsoft but not Borland when both have handed out free developer tools (command line C++ compilers and tools) that are not open source?
Does it have something to do with the more reasonable prices that Borland charged for its products?
There once was a fear of AC as opposed to DC, Edision wanted everyone to believe that AC was much too dangerous to be used.
So Edison promoted the use of Westinghouse's AC in the newly invented electric chair.
If it is truly from 1962, IBM 1401 assembly language would be the most likely candidate.
...... INDIA. Because of the export embargo from the US to India up until the late 80s, people in India were running old equipment long since scrapped in the US. (Sort of like the cars in Havana.) You want to find a manual on RPG (the programming language not the type of game) dollars to doughnuts it's on an Indian website.
And the place to find experts in this would be
"IBM will do you HR for you so you can focus on your company"
I remember when IBM Global services took over the already F-d HR and payroll provided by a now bankrupt shill for a F-d mutual fund company. The disaster could not have been any worse.
For the first few months, paychecks were totally wrong. We had state taxes taken out for two states (where we were and where HQ was) or just HQ state taxes were taken out. [Sorry, I resent paying MA taxes particulary since I don't live or work there.] It took me 9 months to get a pay stub for my last pay check. Finally, I spent 2 days working at an office in a local city which was shortly thereafter closed down. I ended up having to pay city income tax for that city for my entire year's wages there due to an accounting screw up.
In my expreience PWC consultants are no better than Accenture (Andersen). I remember meeting some former consultants at a trade show when I stopped to see a demo of a well known business software program. This was at 2 PM and the show had been open since 10 AM. Since their network was down and they hadn't a clue how to fix it, they showed me a canned demo instead of the real thing. What a waste of time. [True to form, the booth critter was young, female, attractive and perky, but she didn't know s---.]
1. probably the effect of some other factor that separates the heavy video game players from others, perhaps age. Also note that both residents (younger) and older staff surgeons were involved [confounding by age?]
2. How did they determine how many time the participants spent playing video games? By questionnaire or did they measure it? [recall bias]
3. I'm sure the reported gains in the gamer group are not in fact relative risks. Even if they were, a 30% decrease may be simply due to chance in such a small study group [statistical insignificance]. A good rule of thumb is that if a study doesn't cut the risk of something at least by half, it probably isn't measuring anything at all.
4. Do the surgeons who play video games more have more manual dexterity to begin with? [confusing correlation with causation]. Perhaps we could also relate it to hours per week spent on fly-tying or birdhouse building?
5. Does this study pass the test of reasonableness? Let's see if giving the surgical residents an extra 3 hours of *sleep* a week makes them better surgeons.
Once upon a time a man and his wife were in a terrible auto accident. The wife was severely injured but the man was barely hurt. Unfortunately she was nearly a vegetable. The man felt sorry for his wife and decided to go to a mad scientist. The mad scientist showed him the IQ Reducing machine. "10 seconds in here will make you more like your wife" he said. But instead of 10 seconds, the man got a 1/2 hour dose, since the mad scientist's broker called while he was in the booth. "Oh my god, what have I done?" the mad scientist said as he realized his mistake. Quickly he unlocked the booth and the man stumbled out. Miraculously he was still able to speak. With a glazed look on his face, he exclaimed "Go Bucky!"
Today, despite HEAVY competition from Europe and Japan, UAW auto workers:
Make $45k or more
Have a health/benefits/retirement package second to none
Have incredibly safe, well-lit, comfortable workplaces, with all the ergonomics they need.
Never get bored; they don't spend years installing door panels. They get rotated, often on a weekly basis, among different tasks. Guess what? That includes the training to be able to do the new task.
Perhaps this is true where there are still jobs, but here in Michigan, jobs have been fleeing the state in record numbers. Large sections of major cities look like they were bombed out in WW2. Please drive through Detroit, Flint or Saginaw. I dare you.
and for something truely frightening, listen to his rendition of "let the mighty eagle soar".
If the A/G really wants to establish a state religion, then I'm all for the separation of church and state.
I am not a doctor, but I think its an inguinal hernia[snip]
Thank $deity you aren't. The inguinal region is where the abdomen meets the thigh.
Wow, 20 years is a long time to work on a problem without cracking. Congratulations, Toshikatsu.
20 years is a long time to work on anything. Do you think this invention would have been possible if Wall Street had been breathing down his neck? Of course in Japan, a "short term" economic program is 50 years!
But Kaleri's spacesuit overheated and became damp, and the spacewalk had to be cut short
Is this what they mean by a "wardrobe malfunction"?
I'm sure the engineers at NASA will have no trouble designing a high-powered space space station stereo system with plenty of earth-shattering-kaboom bass.
No, just borrow the one from the Army they used to drive General Noriega insane.
I seem to remember one overhead parking garage that looked like an elongated rectangular ferris wheel that parked cars overhead and rotated to retrieve them. I think it was in Ann Arbor across the Huron River from where the new hospital is now. This was sometime back in the 70s.
stupid consumer warning labels
Perhaps this is an urban legend, but one of my favorites is "do not stand ladder on frozen manure".
I hope that I never have to book tickets using a credit card in any systems that you've been within ten miles of.
I also hope that your customers never trust you with business critical data.
If you can't see why, think about how you enforce data integrity and security if a customer asks you (or more likely someone else) to write, say, a new web interface to your data?
Please tell me then, why very large and secure database systems have been built on Pick and Mumps for years? Neither of these is a toy.
In particular, point #3 is not an exclusive property of relational databases.
stop misusing spreadsheets/excel as databases- They are for calculating numbers, not creating lists of things
1. Blame AppleWorks first. Before excel it made spreadsheets like databases.
2. If you look at the history of the spreadsheet, you will see that VisiCalc was designed for "What If?" not large scale calculating work. I was taught that spreadsheets are for the display of information - not calculation.
3. Of course I don't even need a database for storing some kinds of information. An ordinary text file is actually good enough. For example my address book is a text file.
4. I think the greatest misuse of spreadsheets is in using them to consolidate financial data. It's seductive. You get to see what you are doing, you get visual feedback, but
a. data is not protected against alteration
b. formulas are not protected against alteration
c. there is no audit trail
d. you are using explicit formulas instead of looping over data files
5. Lastly, you can say to yourself when you use a spreadsheet, "Look Mom, I'm not programming." Pretty soon you are using Macros, then Word Basic then Visual Basic for Applications. Pretty soon you have a maintenance nightmare since you have spent more time getting immediate answers than you have spent in thinking about design.
6. Yet the usual database products are a disease in themselves. I think that relational databases are not the best for transaction processing. I prefer to use programming languages with built in database support.
7. Last, using a computer gives you the illusion that numbers are real. Printed numbers assume god like authority. But of course projections are not facts or reality, except perhaps in government or the business world!
Byte hasn't been credible since 1979 when Carl Helmers sold it to McGraw/Hill.
Bingo! Along with "Creative Computing" which was interesting to read before ZD went product oriented and "PC Magazine" which I believe came to stand for "Product Catalog". Press releases and publicity photos have always masqueraded as trade "journalism". Now that the dot bomb boom is bust, I get no more trade rags in my mailbox.
There is a definite de-emphasis on math and science in American schools....
Yup. Last week I pointed out a Dilbert cartoon in the newspaper to my girlfriend. The main character was being punished. His punishment was to provide the exact value of 22/7.
Needless to say my girlfirend didn't think it was funny. I thought about explaining it to her, and wisely gave up without trying.
This will not be the first bone headed action taken by the U of M.
a) putting Nike logos on athletic uniforms
b) punishing today's basketball teams for yesterday's scandals
c) supporting a quota based system for admissions
d) adding garish signs above the top row of seats at Michigan Stadium
U of M is a strange school. It has a history of campus unrest and leftist politics on par with UC Berkeley, but at the same time it has to dance to the tune set by the state legislature, its board of regents and the auto industry.
Considering the way the current president has rolled over on the Webber affair, I don't expect the University to put up much of a fight. She already has been willing to indulge in self-flagellation in order to appear politically correct.
On the other hand, it also featured arbitrary precision mathematics, which is a pretty nifty and not altogether common feature for a language.
It's perfect, although somewhat slow, for working with very large integers. No special programming is required. Just add NUMERIC DIGITS 20 (for example) and you have 20 digit decimal numbers. It was very easy to translate an old program for Knuth's algorithm S (the spectral test) that once used UCSD Pascal's "long integers" (31 decimal digits + sign) into REXX.
But then again, no IT guys have to work in feces in a sweaty, humid, tiny room
Reminds me of my 2nd worst service call ever. I had to travel across town to remove a worm from 5 machines on an office LAN. The lunch man came and I bought my usual sandwich.... 1/2 hour later I ran for the john before the staff could warn me of an impending plug up. It seems that someone had dropped a quarter into the toilet and it had worked its way into the vent pipe. And it was my un-lucky day. No flushing action whatever. So the plumber came and had to unbolt the commode from the floor. He found that the quarter was permanently wedged but loosened it enough for the toilet to flush. Needless to say I was mortified and I would gladly have paid the plumber out of my own pocket to get it fixed. After spending the morning cursing network cards, Windows and Bill Gates' ancestry, I was glad that I wasn't a plumber!
Jurassic Park
Of course. Better that than "Dr. Strangelove". My first association for "Looking Glass" was the perpetually flying alternate command post for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) during the cold war. Let's hope using this interface does not start WW3. Or perhaps you'd like a nice game of chess???
As clifgriffin, I speak for myself when I say that "vigilante" is not a word we ever claimed. We aren't raging against internet piracy or p2p. We're just doing a social experiment...to see how a program spreads, who downloads it, etc...
Just like Robert Morris did in 1988?
The first one is not a miss, it's just used for calibration.
Would you like to find out more about killing bugs? Here's how!
no one gets inspired by the clothing though. I'm not quite ready to jump into tights yet.
Actually, it was the (relative) lack of clothing in the original series that got people's attention.