I recently completed an "Ethics in the Information Age" class for grad school (my earlier M.S. and undergrad predated such focused classes). As part of the discussions, we talked quite a bit about the Software Engineering Code of Ethics created by the ACM and IEEE and how such a code was a precursor to making software engineering an licensed, certified profession (akin to a CPA). So I figured it'd be neat to link to ACM's page advocating licensing.
Some have suggested using PDFs. To do this, I use Ghostscipt and Ghostword. Here is a good description from O'Reilly's Word Hacks on how to install it in Word.
void avoid_flamebait_mods(void)
{
/* Customize the following two strings for your application */
char *pol1 = "** NAME OF FIRST POLITICIAN YOU LOATHE **";
char *pol2 = "** NAME OF SECOND POLITICIAN OR POLITICAL ADVISOR YOU LOATHE **";
printf("What if instead of $50M for a round trip, we got two $25M one way tickets for %s and %s?\n", pol1, pol2);
}
If you're interested in taking a peek at the shuttle and/or ISS from the ground, this page has a list of sighting opportunities by city. If the sky's clear, it should be easy to see them with the naked eye.
It's been years since I saw one, but it was impressive. At first, it's just a little dot in the sky, kind tough to find. Then, as I was starting to feel diappointed at how tiny it was, my eyes started playing tricks. Something in the back of my head noticed the depth perception, realized it was further away than any plane I'd ever seen. Only then, when I began to understand the scale of the distances, did I start to get a real feel for how fast the thing was moving.
A very cool sight, much of which is lost on a video screen. It really is best seen firsthand.
Home Observatories (Not Quite OT)
on
Astronomy Hacks
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The other day I stumbled across The Observatories of Sky & Telescope, a collection of online articles where where the staff at S&T detail the construction of their own home observatories. Lots of photos and hints. They also provide an alternative for those of us who won't be pouring concrete any time soon.
At first glance, I thought the article read Remaining Customers Patented by Amazon. It made me nervous that the textbook I'm expecting on Friday would come with a patent inspector who'd staple a bar code to me or something.
I know Elfman has been busy with his movie projects, but I've been hoping since '95 they'd get back together. Halloween just hasn't been the same in SoCal without them. I'll probably be the oldest geezer in the pit.
Years ago I dreamt up and championed a UNIX System Programming extension class through Cal State, Fullerton. It took tons of work to develop the class, to get the department to market it, and and then finally offer it. It was a dream come true. I used Stevens APUE as the primary text.
About three weeks into it, though, I realized I was struggling. My lectures were flat and the class really wasn't getting much out of it. I asked Paul Banks, a student who'd taken several courses with me, what I was doing wrong. "You're reading your slides, Kevin. You're not interacting with the subject matter like you usually do."
I realized that, basically, I was intimidated as Hell by Stevens' mastery of the subject. I changed my approach. The next lecture, when there was something I couldn't entirely wrap my brain around, I tried something different. I stepped away from the lectern, sat down in the chair at the front of the class and admitted my ignorance. "I don't have direct experience on this. This is how I think this thing works. Is that how you guys read it?" Sure enough, someone in the class indicated that they'd touched on the issue in their code, but had been confused. The class came alive as my lecture became a discussion, which is my preferred mode of teaching.
Looking back, I guess I owe that success to Stevens as much as the problem (and, yes, the problem was really between my ears, thank you very much...). His books have always been about experimentation as a means of understanding, not dictating down lessons down to the reader. If only I'd taken that tack when I started the class I could have saved myself much trouble. I'm just glad I corrected my approach and that everyone got a lot out of that class.
Paul passed away a few years ago and I was glad that I had made a point of thanking him profusely for his advice. My only regret about the class is that I never did the same to Stevens for APUE.
Sockets were an issue with us, too. IIRC we generally did not use them on the 512K upgrade because we were concerned about the RAM eventually working loose. Also, I think there were only enough address lines to handle the 128Kx1 chips - it wasn't like we could upgrade further. On the Monster Macs, I think the earliest versions were socketed but evnetually all of the DRAMs were soldered.
Your mention of Dr. Dobbs & AMUG really made me stop and think: can you imagine making significant hardware mods on modern motherboards with simple instructions from magazine articles? For that matter, can you imagine starting an entire business based on DIY instructions from a user group? Man, those were the days.
least-productive tendency: pre-emptive and often arbitrary constraint of end-user options
While that plan was folly for Apple, it worked out pretty well for third market folks. Back in 1986, I was working at an independent Mac repair shop in La Mirada called "Computer Quick" that could upgrade a 128K to 512K or even (gasp!) 2 Megabytes.
I absolutely hated the 512K jobs. First, you would take a pair of cutters and cut the 16 64K x 1 bit RAM chips off the board, leaving the pins in place and usually making a mess of the thing. Next, you'd use a desoldering iron (we had an industrial grade one with a pump, thankfully. None of this squeeze bulb garbage, thank heavens) to remove the pins and clean out the holes. Inevitably, you'd wind up pulling up a trace or shorting something out here, so you had to inspect it very carefully. Finally, you'd solder the new chips (128K x 1 bit) in and solder in a thumb sized daughter board that would handle all the address line magic. Then power it up and keep your fingers crossed for "Happy Mac" to show his face.
In comparison, the 2 Meg upgrades were a piece of cake. We used daughter boards called "Monster Macs" from a San Diego company named Levco. Since there was no expansion slot, you'd cut the 68000 out and add a socket. Then the daughter board (which had its own 68000) clipped right on top, neat as can be. Levco also had a controller board that could clip on top of that for SCSI hard drives - a "grandaughter" board.
When we had accumlated a stack of clipped 68000 chips, we'd file off the edges and drill a couple of holes to make keychains. Very cool. I had mine for a decade before it got stolen. Only worked on the plastic cased chips, though. The ceramics would crack.
Levco was known for a pretty cool sense of humor. When you powered the thing up, "Happy Mac" had fangs (since they'd had to hack the Mac ROMS to make it work anyways). Also, there were four PALs on the board labeled Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. My boss told me some of the Levco engineers had wanted to name "Zeppo" "Karl" but he'd warned their management about the fallout this might've caused. Remember, the Berlin Wall was still up and Reagan was in office.
I know that these days a megabyte seems absolutely trivial, but back then it was an absolute phenomenon. You simply never heard the term "Megabyte" except with hard drives and even that was a pretty new thing. Kind of like gigabyte drives a few years back. And its utility was beyond question - Levco let slip that Apple's finance department in Cuppertino used Monster Macs for their accounting.
Alas, all good things come to an end. Computer Quick's was surface mount technology in the Mac Plus. I was ecstatic the first time I saw SIM memory - no more soldering! Our chief tech tried to fix a trace on the logic board and it took him twelve hours once he got done repairing the damage he'd caused. He handed it over to our boss and told him, "That's it. We're out of business."
I enrolled in a four year school and decided to go into software instead of continuing as a tech as I'd originally planned. Computer Quick was out of business by my sophmore year. The era of garage based computer businesses was over.
the era of scroll wheels is short-lived if Logitech applies the same design to its desktop equivalent products...
...and they drop the price by an order of magnitude.
It will be interesting to see if they can get the manufacturing costs down to $1-3 to adapt into a mouse. A quick check shows most touchpad mouse alternatives bottoming at about $30. How much of that is on the retail end (market demand & cost of stocking less popular goods) and the manufacturing end (dedicated USB stuff, case - stuff that goes away when integrated into a mouse) is anyone's guess.
An engineering challenge, to bring the concept of a touchpad onto a mouse for a low cost, but with the right price pressures (especially from competition) I wouldn't mind dropping an extra buck or three on this. Not too much more than that, though.
Coming from the embedded world, I agree wholeheartedly. First, a caveat; I'm talking individual chips here, not whole cards. So, your milage may vary...
<rant>
With that said, we actually do get decent specs on individual chips or chipsets, they are always in just paper of PDF form. Even the most complex devices (UARTs, ethernet controllers, etc.) simply come with a Rosetta stone of diagrams. Then we start the regular cycle: I take the diagrams, decode them, build up a low layer of software to talk to the thing, add more stuff to exercise the features we want, test it, and finally integrate it into a WinCE/Linux/Tornado/whatever driver that does what we're using. All this despite the fact that they ship development kits with binaries (usually Windows or DOS programs) that already talk to the stupid things.
On several occasions I have told the sales guys at hardware vendors that providing source code to some chunk of software that simply does some basic communication with the part would give it big brownie points in the selection process - save us a month of programmer time and you bet we'll think hard about your chip. When I ask if they could part with some of the stuff to help us skip steps 1-3 above, they always give a uniform NO. It doesn't matter what NDA we've signed or a if we are willing to take the code stripped of features and with no warranty. Sometimes I'll get sympathy from application engineers instead of sales droids, but whenever they try to get approval up the food chain they get shut down.
I understand that source code is an incredibly valuable asset (heck, I write the stuff), but why don't hardware/chip vendors realize that handing out or (or selling it cheap) helps sell chips? After all, the stuff's worthless unless you actually get your hardware out there to be used!
</rant>
Whew! That feels better. Anyone from the hardware manufacturing end want to chime in?
Good points. I undoubtedly will loose money some times, since I'm putting money in every week. Every time the S&P drops a hair, the $100 I put is that week is only worth $99.
Taking a long view, though, I'm gambling the S&P 500 will have more ups than downs. Since it has a historic return of 11.5% and an index fund has almost no overhead to it, I believe there's very little risk there, especially if I only assume a 9% return for all my long term plans. Frankly, the risk of my savings being gobbled up by inflation if left in a lower interest money market or savings account is more disturbing to me. I view the S & P 500 (or any other broad index, for that matter) as a good, low maintenance way to mediate the inherent risk of the stock market over the long term.
The key to this or any stock based investment strategy, of course, is being able to ride out a few tough years. I'm already mulling how to change the distribution of my investments to bonds as I approach retirement. Taking a 20% hit in my 401K at 36 is frustrating, but recoverable. I still have time. Taking it at 63, when I'm already eying a rocking chair (or bicycle trip along the Great Wall of China - whatever), is not.
I know you loathe the guy, but you have to give him this: at least
he keeps scoreonhispredictions. That's a Hell of a lot more than anyone else in the pundit biz does. If he's wrong on this one, you count on him publicly eating crow over it (eventually).
Disclaimer: Personally, I have no idea on how much faith to put in this particular prediction, either. I just keep my money in the S&P 500 and don't loose any sleep over the specifics.
When multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred.
Thus, we can conclude that IT security at the New York Daily News is lax and some "nerd" has figured out a way to post prank stories. Expect a deluge of stories about the Duke Nukem Forever release party.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what: They don't, although they appear to be hedging their bets with safety critical software.
An interesting read...
I don't know, but it sounds like a great idea for a Fark photoshop contest to me.
P.S. You submitted this with a funnier headline
The overall discussion was about Intel/Apple, but it seems he called this one (at least the first part) right.
I could really use a speling cheker.
Some have suggested using PDFs. To do this, I use Ghostscipt and Ghostword. Here is a good description from O'Reilly's Word Hacks on how to install it in Word.
Well, given that you weigh a sixth of your weight here, that looks like an 83% discount to me.
Oh. You mean mass. Never mind.
"What do you mean we can't reach him?! These monthly status charts are urgent, dammit!"
{
char *pol1 = "** NAME OF FIRST POLITICIAN YOU LOATHE **";
char *pol2 = "** NAME OF SECOND POLITICIAN OR POLITICAL ADVISOR YOU LOATHE **";
printf("What if instead of $50M for a round trip, we got two $25M one way tickets for %s and %s?\n", pol1, pol2);
}
I'll probably get the FB tag anyways. *SIGH*
It's been years since I saw one, but it was impressive. At first, it's just a little dot in the sky, kind tough to find. Then, as I was starting to feel diappointed at how tiny it was, my eyes started playing tricks. Something in the back of my head noticed the depth perception, realized it was further away than any plane I'd ever seen. Only then, when I began to understand the scale of the distances, did I start to get a real feel for how fast the thing was moving.
A very cool sight, much of which is lost on a video screen. It really is best seen firsthand.
Quite neat.
-
Hack 18:
Print Custom Charts (PDF)
-
Hack 25:
Learn Urban Observing Skills (PDF)
-
Hack 41:
Counterweight a Dobsonian Scope (PDF)
-
Hack 58:
Enhance Lunar and Planetary Contrast and Detail (PDF)
Enjoy!At first glance, I thought the article read Remaining Customers Patented by Amazon. It made me nervous that the textbook I'm expecting on Friday would come with a patent inspector who'd staple a bar code to me or something.
What? Wireless maps? Oh. Never mind.
About three weeks into it, though, I realized I was struggling. My lectures were flat and the class really wasn't getting much out of it. I asked Paul Banks, a student who'd taken several courses with me, what I was doing wrong. "You're reading your slides, Kevin. You're not interacting with the subject matter like you usually do."
I realized that, basically, I was intimidated as Hell by Stevens' mastery of the subject. I changed my approach. The next lecture, when there was something I couldn't entirely wrap my brain around, I tried something different. I stepped away from the lectern, sat down in the chair at the front of the class and admitted my ignorance. "I don't have direct experience on this. This is how I think this thing works. Is that how you guys read it?" Sure enough, someone in the class indicated that they'd touched on the issue in their code, but had been confused. The class came alive as my lecture became a discussion, which is my preferred mode of teaching.
Looking back, I guess I owe that success to Stevens as much as the problem (and, yes, the problem was really between my ears, thank you very much...). His books have always been about experimentation as a means of understanding, not dictating down lessons down to the reader. If only I'd taken that tack when I started the class I could have saved myself much trouble. I'm just glad I corrected my approach and that everyone got a lot out of that class.
Paul passed away a few years ago and I was glad that I had made a point of thanking him profusely for his advice. My only regret about the class is that I never did the same to Stevens for APUE.
Your mention of Dr. Dobbs & AMUG really made me stop and think: can you imagine making significant hardware mods on modern motherboards with simple instructions from magazine articles? For that matter, can you imagine starting an entire business based on DIY instructions from a user group? Man, those were the days.
While that plan was folly for Apple, it worked out pretty well for third market folks. Back in 1986, I was working at an independent Mac repair shop in La Mirada called "Computer Quick" that could upgrade a 128K to 512K or even (gasp!) 2 Megabytes.
I absolutely hated the 512K jobs. First, you would take a pair of cutters and cut the 16 64K x 1 bit RAM chips off the board, leaving the pins in place and usually making a mess of the thing. Next, you'd use a desoldering iron (we had an industrial grade one with a pump, thankfully. None of this squeeze bulb garbage, thank heavens) to remove the pins and clean out the holes. Inevitably, you'd wind up pulling up a trace or shorting something out here, so you had to inspect it very carefully. Finally, you'd solder the new chips (128K x 1 bit) in and solder in a thumb sized daughter board that would handle all the address line magic. Then power it up and keep your fingers crossed for "Happy Mac" to show his face.
In comparison, the 2 Meg upgrades were a piece of cake. We used daughter boards called "Monster Macs" from a San Diego company named Levco. Since there was no expansion slot, you'd cut the 68000 out and add a socket. Then the daughter board (which had its own 68000) clipped right on top, neat as can be. Levco also had a controller board that could clip on top of that for SCSI hard drives - a "grandaughter" board.
When we had accumlated a stack of clipped 68000 chips, we'd file off the edges and drill a couple of holes to make keychains. Very cool. I had mine for a decade before it got stolen. Only worked on the plastic cased chips, though. The ceramics would crack.
Levco was known for a pretty cool sense of humor. When you powered the thing up, "Happy Mac" had fangs (since they'd had to hack the Mac ROMS to make it work anyways). Also, there were four PALs on the board labeled Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. My boss told me some of the Levco engineers had wanted to name "Zeppo" "Karl" but he'd warned their management about the fallout this might've caused. Remember, the Berlin Wall was still up and Reagan was in office.
I know that these days a megabyte seems absolutely trivial, but back then it was an absolute phenomenon. You simply never heard the term "Megabyte" except with hard drives and even that was a pretty new thing. Kind of like gigabyte drives a few years back. And its utility was beyond question - Levco let slip that Apple's finance department in Cuppertino used Monster Macs for their accounting.
Alas, all good things come to an end. Computer Quick's was surface mount technology in the Mac Plus. I was ecstatic the first time I saw SIM memory - no more soldering! Our chief tech tried to fix a trace on the logic board and it took him twelve hours once he got done repairing the damage he'd caused. He handed it over to our boss and told him, "That's it. We're out of business."
I enrolled in a four year school and decided to go into software instead of continuing as a tech as I'd originally planned. Computer Quick was out of business by my sophmore year. The era of garage based computer businesses was over.
Jim Phelps
All the hits I found were along the lines of "Did you hear that joke on the Onion..." instead of an actual archive. 'Didn't do the in depth.
(Couldn't find the link to the Onion story - they've pulled it)
...and they drop the price by an order of magnitude.
It will be interesting to see if they can get the manufacturing costs down to $1-3 to adapt into a mouse. A quick check shows most touchpad mouse alternatives bottoming at about $30. How much of that is on the retail end (market demand & cost of stocking less popular goods) and the manufacturing end (dedicated USB stuff, case - stuff that goes away when integrated into a mouse) is anyone's guess.
An engineering challenge, to bring the concept of a touchpad onto a mouse for a low cost, but with the right price pressures (especially from competition) I wouldn't mind dropping an extra buck or three on this. Not too much more than that, though.
<rant>
With that said, we actually do get decent specs on individual chips or chipsets, they are always in just paper of PDF form. Even the most complex devices (UARTs, ethernet controllers, etc.) simply come with a Rosetta stone of diagrams. Then we start the regular cycle: I take the diagrams, decode them, build up a low layer of software to talk to the thing, add more stuff to exercise the features we want, test it, and finally integrate it into a WinCE/Linux/Tornado/whatever driver that does what we're using. All this despite the fact that they ship development kits with binaries (usually Windows or DOS programs) that already talk to the stupid things.
On several occasions I have told the sales guys at hardware vendors that providing source code to some chunk of software that simply does some basic communication with the part would give it big brownie points in the selection process - save us a month of programmer time and you bet we'll think hard about your chip. When I ask if they could part with some of the stuff to help us skip steps 1-3 above, they always give a uniform NO. It doesn't matter what NDA we've signed or a if we are willing to take the code stripped of features and with no warranty. Sometimes I'll get sympathy from application engineers instead of sales droids, but whenever they try to get approval up the food chain they get shut down.
I understand that source code is an incredibly valuable asset (heck, I write the stuff), but why don't hardware/chip vendors realize that handing out or (or selling it cheap) helps sell chips? After all, the stuff's worthless unless you actually get your hardware out there to be used!
</rant>
Whew! That feels better. Anyone from the hardware manufacturing end want to chime in?
I'm just be worried when I can't be my favorite stuff on Beta anymore!.
</obligatory>
Taking a long view, though, I'm gambling the S&P 500 will have more ups than downs. Since it has a historic return of 11.5% and an index fund has almost no overhead to it, I believe there's very little risk there, especially if I only assume a 9% return for all my long term plans. Frankly, the risk of my savings being gobbled up by inflation if left in a lower interest money market or savings account is more disturbing to me. I view the S & P 500 (or any other broad index, for that matter) as a good, low maintenance way to mediate the inherent risk of the stock market over the long term.
The key to this or any stock based investment strategy, of course, is being able to ride out a few tough years. I'm already mulling how to change the distribution of my investments to bonds as I approach retirement. Taking a 20% hit in my 401K at 36 is frustrating, but recoverable. I still have time. Taking it at 63, when I'm already eying a rocking chair (or bicycle trip along the Great Wall of China - whatever), is not.
Disclaimer: Personally, I have no idea on how much faith to put in this particular prediction, either. I just keep my money in the S&P 500 and don't loose any sleep over the specifics.
Thus, we can conclude that IT security at the New York Daily News is lax and some "nerd" has figured out a way to post prank stories. Expect a deluge of stories about the Duke Nukem Forever release party.