This is at least the 2nd time the BBC restored a B&W Doctor Who episode to color [sic]. The first was by combining an early color videotape recording (by a fan in Texas for the color) and the B&W film for the image itself. They just superimposed the fuzzy chroma on the film image. The result was surprisingly sharp and colorful (but then I watch NTSC standard definition so I ain't picky).
They had to adjust the picture shape just a tad because the VHS image wasn't an exact match for the film.
*sic: Since the color tape was from a U.S. fan, I spelled it the U.S. way.
I've seen some mighty tiny AM radios; sometimes using the case and that big bag
of saltwater holding it as an antenna.
What I haven't seen is a wide-band AM transmitter crammed into the same cubic
centimeter as an AM receiver. Digital devices tend to produce a lot of RF that
AM radios pick up. The way AM picks up stray signals is the reason FM
was developed.
Back in the day (before computer sound hardware) the most common technique to produce
"music" (more of a pitched buzzing) with a computer was to take advantage
of various loops producing pitches you could hear on an AM radio. It was also
used for diagnostics; I could sometimes hear the system go off the rails (Gad
I am old).
The one that got me was "some mapping software" (Mashups are game-changing for anyone dealing with
physical tracking of anything....you know, like all the commerce in the real world?
Not to mention the multiple innovations in dealing with and indexing obscene amounts of data in the back end. mSQL
just isn't going to cut it, you know? That's impressed me beyond words: The back end has radically changed and it just keeps
working.
The redundancy and failover are stunning and I don't think you get that without innovation.
The exact implementations may not leak out but the rough ideas do and we all benefit from that. Hadoop anyone?
Amendments 13-15 (no slavery, citizenship rights, race not a bar to voting) are EXTREMELY special cases and not a good example for your case.
They were passed soon after a full-out war by the single party in power with the CSA politically out of the picture. Once the former confederate rejoined the federal government fully; the 15th amendment was ignored for almost a century.
So, YES the constitution was amended (yay) but it took a full-out war to do it and there was a lot of backsliding afterward.
Pascal is relatively straightforward; at least until you hit something it wasn't designed to do.
C, C++, Perl and (heaven help me) APL programmers have been known to take it as point of pride their code is "so clever nobody but me and the interpreter/compiler understand it").
Which one would you rather grade?
There is indeed a reason to change the port number for ssh:
NOISE REDUCTION!
On one machine I see, say, a thousand ssh break in attempts a day. If I change the ssh port from 22 to 578 (for instance) I just cut that 1000 down to maybe 20 + legitimate users...and those 20 are the ones to be most worried about out of the 1000! That's a win.
A wise wise network engineer at UW once showed me the following diagram several years ago:
INTERNET -> PORT80, PORT443
His point being more and more is routed through ports 80 and 443 in an effort to avoid
firewall restrictions. I often think he was right. Consequences for firewalls left up to reader.
Typically Credit Unions are less jerky about this stuff. Mine was very fast and, as a policy,
treats identity theft of credit card AND debit cards the same.
That's not to say any given Bank might not be better than any given Credit Union but, on the whole,
I have WAY more trust in my local credit union than my now non-existing bank.
Some programs (e.g. TouchTerm on the iPhone) have an interesting twist on screen real estate:
Translucent Keyboard
I don't like it as much as my old Droid and Palm physical keyboards but it does let me see more of the screen when using an on-screen keyboard by letting me see THROUGH the keyboard.
but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.
I don't really understand this. I do assume "for all time" is hyperbole.
Important, popular, projects where most of the work is by one or two developers are common.
Example: UW-IMAP (At least until recent UW budget cuts). Most used imap implementation on the planet?
Example: troff, the original little-commented PDP-11 assembly language version. It was tense for those who depended troff to write manuals, dissertations or books when the developer died.
Example: TeX
Example: Macintosh Window Clipping
Example: Trumpet Winsock (DOS/Early Windows TCP/IP)
Yes and No (mostly "No"). Although a tape cartridge can be a physically reliable device; tape drives (except perhaps at the extreme high end) are typically not. Further, they often evolve in not-backwards-compatible ways.
A disk drive contains both the media and the mechanism. It typically costs 2x as much as tape EVEN IF YOU CONSIDER THE WHOLE DRIVE THE MEDIA.
Tape drives, on the other hand, are expensive and touchy beasts where the moving parts are exposed to air and dust.
Further while the mechanism to read the tape involves some kind of fairly standard interface that doesn't change all that fast (e.g. SCSI, IDE) the tape itself tends to evolve. Reading a first generation 8mm Exabyte tape isn't even possible on recent tape drives (is that format even still in use?).
A disk more typically needs to have some kind of format that's still around, power and a standard interface (SCSI, IDE) and that's it.
This means the total system: tape+drive is less likely (in my opinion) to be available/documented/repairable than a disk drive.
I've read 20 year old tapes and 20 year old disks and neither was a pleasant experience....but I'll take the disks. Especially if I have a lot of the same kind of disks (for parts). Also, I suspect less magnetic leakage since in a tape the magnetic regions are close to each other in 3 rather than 2 dimensions.
Reliably reading 50 year old tapes for any reasonable amount of money is, again in my opinion, something of a fantasy. Same for magnetic disks at that age although I have hopes for DVD-type media....but I am not an expert in archive media, just someone that actually has to read the stuff.
As funny as that is (and it is) I find it interesting that when young I often did foolish things to impress women.....without asking them what they thought about it first. That was non-optimal.
Now I'm older and it's one woman.
With her help I do WAAAY less foolish things BUT since the foolish is being pointed out more often; it feels like I'm doing more foolish things.
It should be obvious she isn't here right now as post this.
Get the budget balanced and as rational as you can: every year.
An example: It is not uncommon to see one part of an operation (e.g. phone lines) subsidize another (e.g. networking). There can be great reasons to do that kind of thing but it tends to bite eventually.
People may abandon the expensive service (especially in a tough economy) and come to expect the cheap subsidized service as a right (understandably). In this particular example the cheap networking can replace the expensive phone lines and suddenly you are laying off dozens of people and seeing sarcastic plays written about IT management in the local University bookstore.
While I agree FORTRAN (especially the older dialects) is relatively easy to optimize for parallel operations
and clusters and the like and the libraries are platinum, I do think they need rewrites from time to
time; those libraries can be hard to understand and I want every generation
to have lots of people who understand, not just use, the things.
Also, every 10-20 years assumptions change. The early libraries did floating point entirely in
software and memory was tight, in 2009 we can almost assume any desktop (and most laptops) have floating point to IEEE standards available in single and double precision plus virtual memory.
Now we are seeing GPU's being used in non-graphics computation
so algorithms that are stable in single precision and can actually use
64 pipelines are being written and memory is tighter.
It's not so useful from USB (not useless, but not at its best. It
does its best work talking to the disk at a low level USB hides).
It works much better on an IDE/EIDE/SATA/SCSI connection.
There are several things going on:
1) It used to be almost my only tool and worked maybe 4/5th of the time
on disks that could still spin but had enough hardware problems
to be un-mountable. In those days disks were very expensive.
I am less inclined to use it first because I want to depend on a
flaky drive as little as possible. ddrescue does
a pretty good job there: get the good data off fast, try to get
the flaky data off next, no writes to the flaky hardware and
with luck you have the data you need and SpinRite is still available.
2) Using SpinRite as a repair tool: SpinRite tries to fix things which
means depending on copying and writing on flaky hardware. It
does an AWESOME job working around that flakiness and it is persistent.
It feels like magic when it works and it usually does. I usually
run it on the failing disk even if I have a ddrescue copy.
When SpinRite is done I
usually have all the data, when ddrescue is done I often have most
of the data.
3) SpinRite is also good at seeing trouble coming, which is
no small thing but you actually have to run it regularly and few
people do that.
Assuming the disk works at all: Work on a clone, not the original.
If you are working on a 2nd generation clone you can afford to take risks in restoring
the filesystem. "Oh it that didn't work, fire up another clone and try something else".
ddrescue (and other damaged disk oriented cloners) lets you work on a copy (or in my preference: a copy of a copy). This preserves the original disk if it has to go to a specialist lab later.
SpinRite has also saved my bacon more than once but that's something run on the
original drive: not done lightly.
(Warning: dd_rescue is not Gnu ddrescue and Debian Linuxes rename dd_rescue to
ddrescue. dd_rescue is a similar but not identical).
Finally: I need to add Windows NTFS rescue (built in) impressed me last time I needed it. It trundled for many hours but at the end, I had a mostly intact copy of a filesystem on my 2nd generation cloned drive. The original disk had been a mess.
Sun has and had great tech. I hope and expect IBM to run with some of it (Zettabyte Filesystem,
Dtrace and Java being software examples). Personally I found Solaris more pleasant
than AIX but maybe that's just me (they are both overkill for most of my current job anyway)
and the SPARC instruction set very clean (at least in the beginning).
Sun also has some wicked-efficient and brilliant hardware (multicore UltraSPARC,
the "thumper" fileserver in the x86 space) and seemed to have influenced AMD designs
a bit.
....but....they recently developed a talent for hiding what I want with really quirky
nomenclature. Not traditionally an IBM strong point either.
This naming weirdness extended all the way to Sun's stock ticker: JAVA.
Java is a big deal but it isn't Sun Microsystems.
If you can't even consistently name your company, you have a problem.
I really want Sun to continue as a company, they always punched above their
weight and their current business strategy had promise. As always: clever....
but clever doesn't always work out.
Here's a tip: If a major tech company outsources its education sales; they will be in
trouble within 10 years. So far I've only seen it happen to IBM (it recovered but is
a radically different company), GE, RCA, Honeywell, DEC, Data General, Prime, SGI, Sun
and a few others so maybe it isn't always true.
My theory is there some exec who goes around from successful
company to successful company cutting costs in sales to the education market...they move on
before this happens:
Undergraduates stop seeing your name, they become
Graduates who never desire your equipment, they become
Young heads of startups who say (and I have heard this more than once: "Sun who?").
"What peer institutions are using your system?" and "Give us the names of the people at those schools responsible for making it work".
As more Universities go this route the questions we think to ask (and more) will be addressed. Sometimes well, sometimes poorly but they will
be addressed (e.g. HIPAA, Sunshine Laws, ITAR, DOD research, etc.). Holding out a little while longer means they may get addressed better. Going
earlier likely means you have more influence (if Google solves U of Oregons's issues, they have solved most of U of Alaska's too) on how they are
addressed. Place your bets and take your chances.
As our local managers have pointed out: Google has N hundred security engineers, can you compete with that? Well we had a shot until half the security staff were let go but now, No we can't.
This may be of use to someone, if not the poster.
The Palm Centro (typically $100) is a fullblown Treo (Thankyou Apple for forcing Palm to cut price of a Treo by 75%) but more compact.
It works well for me, is usable as a fairly decent speed modem with my laptop, can do ssh, a bluetooth keyboard is available (although I would just use my laptop) and has taken several hits with just minor scratches.
Please also note that if you don't like your phones browser, many phones can accept the free
mini-Opera browser, although PalmOS needs a (freebie) Java download to take full advantage of it.
I believe it was the last 8 columns used for sequence numbering; at least it was
in my old Fortran IV decks. The 1st 5 were for labels, the 6th for "continuation"
Which left the middle ones for actual coding.
An interesting sidelight: Although you could get any decent keypunch to sequence
your cards automatically, even though you could use a sequencer to reorder your
out-of-sequence cards with almost no effort: I never met anyone who actually
used the sequence numbers! It was considered unstudly in the little groups I was
in to use them.
It's likely a much harder problem but if your grid is planet sized, and
that isn't practical short of superconducting power cables or something like
them, you may not need much power storage.
The lightside could help power the darkside.
Although unlikely any time soon, it would be a nice technology to have.
I too have seen RAID controller failure (5 year old raid controllers) and had the unpleasant
experience that: 1) At least some RAID controllers do a proprietary low-level format and
2) For at least some companies this low level format may change over time.
For this reason it's a good idea to buy spare controllers and, if you can manage it:
Have a warm-spare
machine using software RAID. It's slower but it also means you can get your data back even if
all you have is a sufficient number of working disks, a box to hold them, and a standard PC.
Thanks. Actually we appear to be in violent agreement.
If the goal is to be logically correct, I didn't do too bad a job. If the goal is clarity
and understanding: well, let's face it: The majority of responses have a subject line
of "No No No": pretty miserable!
I confused the heck out
of people who are plenty smart enough to understand what I was trying to express; if only I had expressed
it better from the beginning. That is a failing and I think it a big one.
Now I've added purple cows for heavens sake and fear only making things worse.
Ah well, on to less controversial things: like emacs vs vi:-).
Slashdot Mirror
This is at least the 2nd time the BBC restored a B&W Doctor Who episode to color [sic]. The first was by combining an early color videotape recording (by a fan in Texas for the color) and the B&W film for the image itself. They just superimposed the fuzzy chroma on the film image. The result was surprisingly sharp and colorful (but then I watch NTSC standard definition so I ain't picky). They had to adjust the picture shape just a tad because the VHS image wasn't an exact match for the film. *sic: Since the color tape was from a U.S. fan, I spelled it the U.S. way.
Back in the day (before computer sound hardware) the most common technique to produce "music" (more of a pitched buzzing) with a computer was to take advantage of various loops producing pitches you could hear on an AM radio. It was also used for diagnostics; I could sometimes hear the system go off the rails (Gad I am old).
Not to mention the multiple innovations in dealing with and indexing obscene amounts of data in the back end. mSQL just isn't going to cut it, you know? That's impressed me beyond words: The back end has radically changed and it just keeps working.
The redundancy and failover are stunning and I don't think you get that without innovation.
The exact implementations may not leak out but the rough ideas do and we all benefit from that. Hadoop anyone?
They were passed soon after a full-out war by the single party in power with the CSA politically out of the picture. Once the former confederate rejoined the federal government fully; the 15th amendment was ignored for almost a century.
So, YES the constitution was amended (yay) but it took a full-out war to do it and there was a lot of backsliding afterward.
Pascal is relatively straightforward; at least until you hit something it wasn't designed to do. C, C++, Perl and (heaven help me) APL programmers have been known to take it as point of pride their code is "so clever nobody but me and the interpreter/compiler understand it"). Which one would you rather grade?
On one machine I see, say, a thousand ssh break in attempts a day. If I change the ssh port from 22 to 578 (for instance) I just cut that 1000 down to maybe 20 + legitimate users...and those 20 are the ones to be most worried about out of the 1000! That's a win.
INTERNET -> PORT80, PORT443
His point being more and more is routed through ports 80 and 443 in an effort to avoid firewall restrictions. I often think he was right. Consequences for firewalls left up to reader.
That's not to say any given Bank might not be better than any given Credit Union but, on the whole, I have WAY more trust in my local credit union than my now non-existing bank.
Translucent Keyboard
I don't like it as much as my old Droid and Palm physical keyboards but it does let me see more of the screen when using an on-screen keyboard by letting me see THROUGH the keyboard.
but as the OSTATIC article points out, if Gnome accessibility work was really just two layoffs away from ending for all time, there were problems with the project before Oracle ever got here.
I don't really understand this. I do assume "for all time" is hyperbole.
Important, popular, projects where most of the work is by one or two developers are common.
Example: UW-IMAP (At least until recent UW budget cuts). Most used imap implementation on the planet?
Example: troff, the original little-commented PDP-11 assembly language version. It was tense for those who depended troff to write manuals, dissertations or books when the developer died.
Example: TeX
Example: Macintosh Window Clipping
Example: Trumpet Winsock (DOS/Early Windows TCP/IP)
Example: 4K Micro-soft [sic] BASIC
What tape has over hard disks is simplicity.
Yes and No (mostly "No"). Although a tape cartridge can be a physically reliable device; tape drives (except perhaps at the extreme high end) are typically not. Further, they often evolve in not-backwards-compatible ways.
A disk drive contains both the media and the mechanism. It typically costs 2x as much as tape EVEN IF YOU CONSIDER THE WHOLE DRIVE THE MEDIA.
Tape drives, on the other hand, are expensive and touchy beasts where the moving parts are exposed to air and dust.
Further while the mechanism to read the tape involves some kind of fairly standard interface that doesn't change all that fast (e.g. SCSI, IDE) the tape itself tends to evolve. Reading a first generation 8mm Exabyte tape isn't even possible on recent tape drives (is that format even still in use?).
A disk more typically needs to have some kind of format that's still around, power and a standard interface (SCSI, IDE) and that's it.
This means the total system: tape+drive is less likely (in my opinion) to be available/documented/repairable than a disk drive.
I've read 20 year old tapes and 20 year old disks and neither was a pleasant experience....but I'll take the disks. Especially if I have a lot of the same kind of disks (for parts). Also, I suspect less magnetic leakage since in a tape the magnetic regions are close to each other in 3 rather than 2 dimensions.
Reliably reading 50 year old tapes for any reasonable amount of money is, again in my opinion, something of a fantasy. Same for magnetic disks at that age although I have hopes for DVD-type media....but I am not an expert in archive media, just someone that actually has to read the stuff.
It should be obvious she isn't here right now as post this.
Get the budget balanced and as rational as you can: every year.
An example: It is not uncommon to see one part of an operation (e.g. phone lines) subsidize another (e.g. networking). There can be great reasons to do that kind of thing but it tends to bite eventually.
People may abandon the expensive service (especially in a tough economy) and come to expect the cheap subsidized service as a right (understandably). In this particular example the cheap networking can replace the expensive phone lines and suddenly you are laying off dozens of people and seeing sarcastic plays written about IT management in the local University bookstore.
Not that this has ever happened.
While I agree FORTRAN (especially the older dialects) is relatively easy to optimize for parallel operations and clusters and the like and the libraries are platinum, I do think they need rewrites from time to time; those libraries can be hard to understand and I want every generation to have lots of people who understand, not just use, the things.
Also, every 10-20 years assumptions change. The early libraries did floating point entirely in software and memory was tight, in 2009 we can almost assume any desktop (and most laptops) have floating point to IEEE standards available in single and double precision plus virtual memory.
Now we are seeing GPU's being used in non-graphics computation so algorithms that are stable in single precision and can actually use 64 pipelines are being written and memory is tighter.
It's not so useful from USB (not useless, but not at its best. It does its best work talking to the disk at a low level USB hides).
It works much better on an IDE/EIDE/SATA/SCSI connection.
There are several things going on:
1) It used to be almost my only tool and worked maybe 4/5th of the time on disks that could still spin but had enough hardware problems to be un-mountable. In those days disks were very expensive.
I am less inclined to use it first because I want to depend on a flaky drive as little as possible. ddrescue does a pretty good job there: get the good data off fast, try to get the flaky data off next, no writes to the flaky hardware and with luck you have the data you need and SpinRite is still available.
2) Using SpinRite as a repair tool: SpinRite tries to fix things which means depending on copying and writing on flaky hardware. It does an AWESOME job working around that flakiness and it is persistent. It feels like magic when it works and it usually does. I usually run it on the failing disk even if I have a ddrescue copy.
When SpinRite is done I usually have all the data, when ddrescue is done I often have most of the data.
3) SpinRite is also good at seeing trouble coming, which is no small thing but you actually have to run it regularly and few people do that.
If you are working on a 2nd generation clone you can afford to take risks in restoring the filesystem. "Oh it that didn't work, fire up another clone and try something else".
ddrescue (and other damaged disk oriented cloners) lets you work on a copy (or in my preference: a copy of a copy). This preserves the original disk if it has to go to a specialist lab later.
SpinRite has also saved my bacon more than once but that's something run on the original drive: not done lightly.
(Warning: dd_rescue is not Gnu ddrescue and Debian Linuxes rename dd_rescue to ddrescue. dd_rescue is a similar but not identical).
Finally: I need to add Windows NTFS rescue (built in) impressed me last time I needed it. It trundled for many hours but at the end, I had a mostly intact copy of a filesystem on my 2nd generation cloned drive. The original disk had been a mess.
Sun also has some wicked-efficient and brilliant hardware (multicore UltraSPARC, the "thumper" fileserver in the x86 space) and seemed to have influenced AMD designs a bit.
This naming weirdness extended all the way to Sun's stock ticker: JAVA.
Java is a big deal but it isn't Sun Microsystems.
If you can't even consistently name your company, you have a problem.
I really want Sun to continue as a company, they always punched above their weight and their current business strategy had promise. As always: clever.... but clever doesn't always work out.
My theory is there some exec who goes around from successful company to successful company cutting costs in sales to the education market...they move on before this happens:
Undergraduates stop seeing your name, they become Graduates who never desire your equipment, they become Young heads of startups who say (and I have heard this more than once: "Sun who?").
It was the most popular math book for over a millennium. Might be worth a look.
"What peer institutions are using your system?" and "Give us the names of the people at those schools responsible for making it work".
As more Universities go this route the questions we think to ask (and more) will be addressed. Sometimes well, sometimes poorly but they will be addressed (e.g. HIPAA, Sunshine Laws, ITAR, DOD research, etc.). Holding out a little while longer means they may get addressed better. Going earlier likely means you have more influence (if Google solves U of Oregons's issues, they have solved most of U of Alaska's too) on how they are addressed. Place your bets and take your chances.
As our local managers have pointed out: Google has N hundred security engineers, can you compete with that? Well we had a shot until half the security staff were let go but now, No we can't.
This may be of use to someone, if not the poster. The Palm Centro (typically $100) is a fullblown Treo (Thankyou Apple for forcing Palm to cut price of a Treo by 75%) but more compact. It works well for me, is usable as a fairly decent speed modem with my laptop, can do ssh, a bluetooth keyboard is available (although I would just use my laptop) and has taken several hits with just minor scratches. Please also note that if you don't like your phones browser, many phones can accept the free mini-Opera browser, although PalmOS needs a (freebie) Java download to take full advantage of it.
An interesting sidelight: Although you could get any decent keypunch to sequence your cards automatically, even though you could use a sequencer to reorder your out-of-sequence cards with almost no effort: I never met anyone who actually used the sequence numbers! It was considered unstudly in the little groups I was in to use them.
The lightside could help power the darkside.
Although unlikely any time soon, it would be a nice technology to have.
For this reason it's a good idea to buy spare controllers and, if you can manage it:
Have a warm-spare machine using software RAID. It's slower but it also means you can get your data back even if all you have is a sufficient number of working disks, a box to hold them, and a standard PC.
If the goal is to be logically correct, I didn't do too bad a job. If the goal is clarity and understanding: well, let's face it: The majority of responses have a subject line of "No No No": pretty miserable!
I confused the heck out of people who are plenty smart enough to understand what I was trying to express; if only I had expressed it better from the beginning. That is a failing and I think it a big one.
Now I've added purple cows for heavens sake and fear only making things worse.
Ah well, on to less controversial things: like emacs vs vi :-).