OK, then we just have to find out what the people who originated various GUIs called those screen-work areas, before Microsoft wanted "Windows" all to itself. Palo Alto Research Center and others
Looks like about a dozen precursors.
THIS company advertised their windows technology on nationwide (USA) TV for years before Microsoft ever thought of claiming ownership of that word. (Is Microsoft planning on owning the word "Word" also?)
Since $ (or yen, marks, rubles, lira, etc) is all that any spammer wants in the first place, it logically follows that any of them can be bribed to spill all the secrets (like how to gatecrash, or instead to formally invite an antispammer, etc).
I see some other comments about PDA-type gadgets with voice-recording ability. Perhaps the voice recorder (single-feature devices that are pretty small these days) is all you really need. Then when you get home fire up a voice-recognition program, feed the voice to it, and then clean up the typos.
Well, I'm not that much of a geologist, to be able to say. However, in a way, the Mid-Ocean Ridges count as cracks in the crust, through which magma currently outpours. Maybe not as fast as perhaps happened in Siberia, the Deccan, the Columbia Plateau, and other places. What I wonder is what they would find, if they decided to LOOK for coincidental magma outpours and giant meteor craters. When the Columbia Plateau formed, what was at (or near, due to impact angle) the antipode? When the African Vredevoort Ring formed, was any magma event recorded at its antipode? And so on.
Assuming Mercury is mostly solid, due to having greater surface-to-volume ratio than Earth, and geologically cooled-off faster than Earth, then if the Caloris impact did that much damage on the far side of Mercury, then on Earth any decently large strike should be able to crack open the crust on the opposite side (remember to take direction of impact into account). That should be enough to let lots of magma pour out, because it does already, whenever the crust splits open, even without a meteor impact. And because of the way impact energy spreads and reconverges on the other side of the globe, a large region of cracks should appear, all letting-loose magma, while the impact site itself is a comparatively small puncture.
Now we have the volcanic Siberian outpourings of the Permian era, accompanied by a giant meteor impact in Australia (and after taking 200 megayears of continental drift into account, they could well have been on opposite sides of the Earth at that time).
Years ago, when Mariner 10 went and disovered the Caloris Basin and wierd terrain on Mercury, I immediately wondered if something like that could happen on Earth. I was one of the first to notice that the volcanic Deccan Traps that formed in India at the time of the dinosaur extinction just happened to be located (after taking contintental drift into account) on the opposite side of the Earth from Chixulub. (As I recall, I wrote a letter to Scientific American about it, way back then...but they didn't think it publishable) And now the evidence seems to be accumulating, in favor of exactly such scenarios.
It seems to me that as long as multiprocessor machines qualify as supercomputers, then the Google cluster counts as the fastest right now, and will still count as the fastest long after this new DOE computer is built.
There was published in "Scientific American" magazine a while back an article about the computer program that Lady Ada wrote, including bugs. See this brief description.
I see that someone else already mentioned Charles Babbage, who designed a mechanical proccessing engine, in addition to mechanical calculating engines. But Lady Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, wrote the first computer program for Babbage's Analytical Engine... (and you folks may recall that there is today a programming language named in her honor).
Actually, considering the many thousands of KPH of impact speed, almost anything that actually hits you in space is going to do serious damage to you, hardsuit or not. However, a very loose lightweight aluminum-foil outer layer (like a rain poncho) will have an interesting effect; small space debris (like paint flakes or micrometeoroids) that impact against this "poncho" will be vaporized, making a tiny hole in it -- and the skinsuit will very likely protect you adequately from the spray of fast-moving gas. The loose space between poncho and skinsuit gives the gas room to expand, see?
Pournell's column was non-fiction, although it was published in an SF mag ("Galaxy" if I recall right). Here is a page that contains some info (seek the word "suit").
The suits from the Apollo era are rotting away in museums, in spite of efforts to preserve them. I sometimes wonder just how long those suits on the International Space Station will be usable, because they NEED to be usable when an emergency happens. Next, the 1960s-era suits were also quite cumbersome to put on and work in. Fixing those two things will be essential if we want a long-term human presence in space.
Not a problem. First, Microsoft has $40Billion to play with, and fortunes that large tend to grow from sheer accumulation of interest, if nothing else. Second, costs of storage and computer cycles is constantly dropping. Third, Longhorn isn't due for a while yet, so those first two factors will only be enhanced. Fourth, it is not UNTIL Longhorn (assuming it will indeed require WiFi hardware) that Microsoft would have a true wide-open back door into every computer running it. Currently, you have to choose to connect to the Net (and you can always unplug the connection when you want). With Longhorn, you are practically guaranteed to be connected, whenever your computer is on. So, if Microsoft sees you firing up some non-MS software (OpenOffice, for example), they could remotely crash your machine. And no matter how many hardware inspections or OpenOffice software patches you add in hopes of preventing it, if you are connected, you are still vulnerable -- and Microsoft can continue to claim that their OS is working "properly"! (so the problem must be inside OpenOffice; why not use "reliable" MS Office instead?). Note very carefully Law #2 on this list created by Microsoft. Then remember that MS is a CONVICTED monopolist, and therefore meets the definition of "bad guy". Oh, and Fifth of these points, it has been claimed that MS and the NSA have done covert work together before, so if Microsoft provides as public a back door into Longhorn as a requirement-of-WiFi indicates, then you can bet the NSA will be right there, using it too.
When I first read that tidbit yesterday, I assumed it was so Microsoft could snoop on all future Windows machines. Now in ADDITION to that potential, they can beam you uninterruptible spam!
So, is there any chance that if those features are advertised widely, fewer people will buy Longhorn?
Sorry, but by "ALLOW" I meant that the tags should be designed for easy disabling. I do know that current tags are only disabled when essentially destroyed -- and obviously whatever it takes to destroy an existing tag might harm something else.
All techies presumably know about those little security tags that are attached to so many things these days. I'm sure they do a good job preventing theft, else the stores would tell their distributors how worthless they were, and that would be the beginning of the end of them.
Now note that the cashier has to put the tag close to a magnetic plate to disable it so you can leave the store without setting off the alarm system (doesn't always succeed, but does usually).
So imaging a bagfull of stuff you just bought, all decked out with RFID tags. The same alarm-detector at the door that seeks undisabled anti-theft tags can be modified to emit (AFTER passing the anti-theft test) a signal to permanently disable the bag-full of RFID tags. Why not? All the tag-makers have to do is ALLOW them to be disable-able!
This mostly comes from the bottom up, and not the top down, simply because there are more minds at the bottom than at the top. And as long as those control freaks at the top of foreign developer outfits continue to overspecify their requirements, the US will continue to lead the field. (And thanks, Boss!)
I think I've had enough of your insistence about WordPerfect. Why don't you actually read closely what I originally wrote in my "Lie of Omission?" post:
"competitor products like WordPerfect suddenly became incompatible"...
Do you see that word "like"??? Do you understand that that word means I wasn't specifying WordPerfect in particular? Yet neither does that mean that I excluded WordPerfect; I have used that program since Version 4.2 and the old DOS days. From what I recall, the program basically did run on the next version of DOS, but sometimes a desired feature no longer worked right. Does that qualify as "incompatible"? It does if you really want that feature, and have to go buy a newer word processor. So, when you find that only MS-Word has that feature in working order, it become easy to be confident that Microsoft was to blame for the new problem with WordPerfect. After all, if they REALLY wanted their next OS version to be backwards-compatible with old applications, they wouldn't declare ANY system or API function to be obsolete (including the hidden ones)! The FACT that they did can only mean that they want you to replace your non-MS apps with MS apps. The most historically famous example of this was when the Win95 Netscape browser failed to work on brand-new Win98 -- yet nobody was surprised, because past Microsoft actions gave everyone reason to think they would remain true to form.
They say that Google is preparing an IPO, but sometimes I wonder what they need the money for. They already had enough money for 10,000-100,000 servers, after all. If they doubled or quintupled that acreage of computer-farm, would your search-results come to you down the Internet pipe so much faster that you'd be glad the did?
And they had the money to hire the experts needed to manage that cluster like a single supercomputer. Sure, they probably got some of that initial funding from ordinary venture capitalists, but what if some Govt. outfit helped, on the grounds of requesting access for occasional factoring purposes? After that IPO gets invested in a bigger farm, not even 2048-bit keys may be safe.
Slashdot Mirror
If I recall right (and have the spelling right), then to see it, all you need is a Star Trek Original Series episode called "The Corbomite Maneuver".
OK, then we just have to find out what the people who originated various GUIs called those screen-work areas, before Microsoft wanted "Windows" all to itself.
Palo Alto Research Center and others
Looks like about a dozen precursors.
THIS company advertised their windows technology on nationwide (USA) TV for years before Microsoft ever thought of claiming ownership of that word. (Is Microsoft planning on owning the word "Word" also?)
Since $ (or yen, marks, rubles, lira, etc) is all that any spammer wants in the first place, it logically follows that any of them can be bribed to spill all the secrets (like how to gatecrash, or instead to formally invite an antispammer, etc).
I see some other comments about PDA-type gadgets with voice-recording ability. Perhaps the voice recorder (single-feature devices that are pretty small these days) is all you really need. Then when you get home fire up a voice-recognition program, feed the voice to it, and then clean up the typos.
Well, I'm not that much of a geologist, to be able to say. However, in a way, the Mid-Ocean Ridges count as cracks in the crust, through which magma currently outpours. Maybe not as fast as perhaps happened in Siberia, the Deccan, the Columbia Plateau, and other places. What I wonder is what they would find, if they decided to LOOK for coincidental magma outpours and giant meteor craters. When the Columbia Plateau formed, what was at (or near, due to impact angle) the antipode? When the African Vredevoort Ring formed, was any magma event recorded at its antipode? And so on.
Assuming Mercury is mostly solid, due to having greater surface-to-volume ratio than Earth, and geologically cooled-off faster than Earth, then if the Caloris impact did that much damage on the far side of Mercury, then on Earth any decently large strike should be able to crack open the crust on the opposite side (remember to take direction of impact into account). That should be enough to let lots of magma pour out, because it does already, whenever the crust splits open, even without a meteor impact. And because of the way impact energy spreads and reconverges on the other side of the globe, a large region of cracks should appear, all letting-loose magma, while the impact site itself is a comparatively small puncture.
Roughly in chronological order are: :)
The original Copenhagen Interpretation
Bohm's Interpretation
The Many Worlds Interpretation
The Transactional Interpretation
My own Aethereal Interpretation (blatant plug
Now we have the volcanic Siberian outpourings of the Permian era, accompanied by a giant meteor impact in Australia (and after taking 200 megayears of continental drift into account, they could well have been on opposite sides of the Earth at that time).
Years ago, when Mariner 10 went and disovered the Caloris Basin and wierd terrain on Mercury, I immediately wondered if something like that could happen on Earth. I was one of the first to notice that the volcanic Deccan Traps that formed in India at the time of the dinosaur extinction just happened to be located (after taking contintental drift into account) on the opposite side of the Earth from Chixulub. (As I recall, I wrote a letter to Scientific American about it, way back then...but they didn't think it publishable) And now the evidence seems to be accumulating, in favor of exactly such scenarios.
It seems to me that as long as multiprocessor machines qualify as supercomputers, then the Google cluster counts as the fastest right now, and will still count as the fastest long after this new DOE computer is built.
There was published in "Scientific American" magazine a while back an article about the computer program that Lady Ada wrote, including bugs. See this brief description.
I see that someone else already mentioned Charles Babbage, who designed a mechanical proccessing engine, in addition to mechanical calculating engines. But Lady Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, wrote the first computer program for Babbage's Analytical Engine... (and you folks may recall that there is today a programming language named in her honor).
.PDF format
Actually, considering the many thousands of KPH of impact speed, almost anything that actually hits you in space is going to do serious damage to you, hardsuit or not. However, a very loose lightweight aluminum-foil outer layer (like a rain poncho) will have an interesting effect; small space debris (like paint flakes or micrometeoroids) that impact against this "poncho" will be vaporized, making a tiny hole in it -- and the skinsuit will very likely protect you adequately from the spray of fast-moving gas. The loose space between poncho and skinsuit gives the gas room to expand, see?
Pournell's column was non-fiction, although it was published in an SF mag ("Galaxy" if I recall right). Here is a page that contains some info (seek the word "suit").
Yes skinsuits have been studied and prototyped. Jerry Pournelle wrote about them years ago in his "A Step Farther Out" column.
The suits from the Apollo era are rotting away in museums, in spite of efforts to preserve them. I sometimes wonder just how long those suits on the International Space Station will be usable, because they NEED to be usable when an emergency happens. Next, the 1960s-era suits were also quite cumbersome to put on and work in. Fixing those two things will be essential if we want a long-term human presence in space.
Not a problem. First, Microsoft has $40Billion to play with, and fortunes that large tend to grow from sheer accumulation of interest, if nothing else. Second, costs of storage and computer cycles is constantly dropping. Third, Longhorn isn't due for a while yet, so those first two factors will only be enhanced. Fourth, it is not UNTIL Longhorn (assuming it will indeed require WiFi hardware) that Microsoft would have a true wide-open back door into every computer running it. Currently, you have to choose to connect to the Net (and you can always unplug the connection when you want). With Longhorn, you are practically guaranteed to be connected, whenever your computer is on. So, if Microsoft sees you firing up some non-MS software (OpenOffice, for example), they could remotely crash your machine. And no matter how many hardware inspections or OpenOffice software patches you add in hopes of preventing it, if you are connected, you are still vulnerable -- and Microsoft can continue to claim that their OS is working "properly"! (so the problem must be inside OpenOffice; why not use "reliable" MS Office instead?). Note very carefully Law #2 on this list created by Microsoft. Then remember that MS is a CONVICTED monopolist, and therefore meets the definition of "bad guy". Oh, and Fifth of these points, it has been claimed that MS and the NSA have done covert work together before, so if Microsoft provides as public a back door into Longhorn as a requirement-of-WiFi indicates, then you can bet the NSA will be right there, using it too.
When I first read that tidbit yesterday, I assumed it was so Microsoft could snoop on all future Windows machines. Now in ADDITION to that potential, they can beam you uninterruptible spam!
So, is there any chance that if those features are advertised widely, fewer people will buy Longhorn?
Sorry, but by "ALLOW" I meant that the tags should be designed for easy disabling. I do know that current tags are only disabled when essentially destroyed -- and obviously whatever it takes to destroy an existing tag might harm something else.
All techies presumably know about those little security tags that are attached to so many things these days. I'm sure they do a good job preventing theft, else the stores would tell their distributors how worthless they were, and that would be the beginning of the end of them.
Now note that the cashier has to put the tag close to a magnetic plate to disable it so you can leave the store without setting off the alarm system (doesn't always succeed, but does usually).
So imaging a bagfull of stuff you just bought, all decked out with RFID tags. The same alarm-detector at the door that seeks undisabled anti-theft tags can be modified to emit (AFTER passing the anti-theft test) a signal to permanently disable the bag-full of RFID tags. Why not? All the tag-makers have to do is ALLOW them to be disable-able!
This mostly comes from the bottom up, and not the top down, simply because there are more minds at the bottom than at the top. And as long as those control freaks at the top of foreign developer outfits continue to overspecify their requirements, the US will continue to lead the field. (And thanks, Boss!)
I think I've had enough of your insistence about WordPerfect. Why don't you actually read closely what I originally wrote in my "Lie of Omission?" post:
"competitor products like WordPerfect suddenly became incompatible"...
Do you see that word "like"??? Do you understand that that word means I wasn't specifying WordPerfect in particular? Yet neither does that mean that I excluded WordPerfect; I have used that program since Version 4.2 and the old DOS days. From what I recall, the program basically did run on the next version of DOS, but sometimes a desired feature no longer worked right. Does that qualify as "incompatible"? It does if you really want that feature, and have to go buy a newer word processor. So, when you find that only MS-Word has that feature in working order, it become easy to be confident that Microsoft was to blame for the new problem with WordPerfect. After all, if they REALLY wanted their next OS version to be backwards-compatible with old applications, they wouldn't declare ANY system or API function to be obsolete (including the hidden ones)! The FACT that they did can only mean that they want you to replace your non-MS apps with MS apps. The most historically famous example of this was when the Win95 Netscape browser failed to work on brand-new Win98 -- yet nobody was surprised, because past Microsoft actions gave everyone reason to think they would remain true to form.
They say that Google is preparing an IPO, but sometimes I wonder what they need the money for. They already had enough money for 10,000-100,000 servers, after all. If they doubled or quintupled that acreage of computer-farm, would your search-results come to you down the Internet pipe so much faster that you'd be glad the did?
And they had the money to hire the experts needed to manage that cluster like a single supercomputer. Sure, they probably got some of that initial funding from ordinary venture capitalists, but what if some Govt. outfit helped, on the grounds of requesting access for occasional factoring purposes? After that IPO gets invested in a bigger farm, not even 2048-bit keys may be safe.