I just this month brought my TRS-80 to work and hooked it up. First time it's seen power in over 15 years, and it still works! Kind of. The monitor itself seems to work, but the text disintegrates a few seconds after the CPU/keyboard is turned on. No problem with executing a "Hello World" program, even typing it in blind. I suspect some crystal has gone kaput. This being Slashdot, I suspect someone out there knows exactly what to do...
I never did hook up a disk drive. I did find some printouts of my old code (and man is it ugly). If I can get the old girl up and running, I'll probably hook up the cassette port to the audio in/out of the P-IV and start downloading. Meanwhile, though, it makes a great desk ornament!
I mean, who else really thinks we actually need more of these??
You must have missed the part that said it was Texas A&M who created the cloned deer. Here in Texas, Aggie jokes are a beloved source of humor. Here are a couple (from here) that are apropos:
Two Aggies were pulling a large deer through the woods. They came across a
Longhorn and he said, "Really nice buck you got there, but I think if you pulled him by his horns it would be a lot better than dragging him by his hind legs."
The Aggies tried it and after a while one said "This sure is better. It's a lot smoother over the ground." The other said, "Yeah, but we sure a getting farther away from the truck."
And another one (adapted a bit):
A Longhorn, a
Baylor Bear, and an Aggie went hunting. The Baylor kid went and came back with deer. The Longhorn said, "Wow how did you get that?" "I followed the tracks."
So the Longhorn went out and came back with a bear. The Aggie said, "How did you get that?" "I followed the tracks."
So the Aggie went out and came back all beat up. They both said, "What happened to you?" "I followed the tracks like you said, but before I could shoot anything, the train came!"
Are you still here?
How many Aggies does it take to eat an armadillo?
Three. One to do the eating, and two to watch for cars.
Well, the new job listing in your link, for the "Director of Financial Reporting" position (posted 12/08/03), does seem to be missing one important detail under "Job Responsibilities".
I don't see "Serving as scapegoat during inevitable corporate collapse." Do you think that's what they mean by "Additional special projects will be given on an 'as occurring' basis?"
I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing I worked with more coders like Linus Torvalds. How many times have we programmers found some code that didn't work like it should, asked the original coder about it, and had our heads bitten off for daring to suggest that there was anything sub-optimum about their baby?
Mr. Torvalds, on the other hand, shows his value by his honesty:
- I wrote them [ctype.h] (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so;)... So there is definitely a lot of proof that my ctype.h is original work.
It's like a doctor admitting a misdiagnosis to the patient... a wizard willing to work on Dorothy's side of the curtain. I hope that I'm as honest about my code as Linus -- and that my management continues to understand that you don't get good code by pretending you never make mistakes.
SARS is thought to have made the leap into people in the live-animal marketplaces of Guangdong province, China. Researchers have so far found the culprit virus in three animals from the markets: masked palm civets, raccoon dogs and ferret badgers.
Damn! There go my Christmas barbeque plans. How the heck am I going to keep up my reputation without my signature ferret badger brule'?
I mean, Turducken is sooo 2002, and do you know how big a freezer you'd need for the leftovers from just oneStuffed Camel?
I guess we're going to have to fall back on the barn cats. Again.
This is the reason i have a fireplace in addition to central heat and air.
We used to shred constantly until we moved out to the country. Now, we're never short of kindling for the trash barrel! Too bad I didn't "remember" to update the address on all my domain name registrations, though. Heh.
It's not about bears stealing your identity, though I pity the bear that applies for a Visa card with a FICO as bad as mine! But it is an interesting tale:
Then there are the people: One older woman set out a batch of syrup-slathered pancakes for the bears, and some parents smeared peanut butter on their children's faces so they could photograph cubs licking it.
So you have reptiles that look like tree bark, butterflies that look like snake eyes, and bugs that look like expensive rocks.
Now that'steh funny!
Actually, it would work quite well if your primary predator was the adult, married male (homo sapiens desperatus). Viceroy butterflies avoid being eaten by looking like poisonous Monarchs. A bird that takes a bite out of a Monarch is highly unlikely to even attempt a Viceroy. Similarly, these bugs would avoid being picked up by curious males, since we've picked up shiny rocks before and been hurt in the hip pocket.
Me too, because they're the local boys (and girl). But the SS1 folks are breaking the sound barrier while Armadillo is still working on their fuel mixture. It just doesn't look too good for Carmack & Co, at least not for the X-Prize.
Hopefully, though, they'll still be in the running for future commercial applications. Sometimes, it's better to be second or third...
From the reference cited in the parent: Opal was formed millions of years ago, when silica and water, mixed together, flowed into cracks and spaces in the ground, then gradually hardened, solidified and became opal.
Based on this article -- and on the fact that "96% of the worlds supply" (ref) comes from the isolated continent that just happens to be home to an opal-bearing bug -- I wonder if the theory of opal formation needs to be changed?
After all, "silica and water" are a couple of the most abundant compounds on the planet. Wouldn't you expect somewhere besides Australia to have the right conditions for forming those silica nano-beads?
My theory: Opal was formed millions of years ago, when dead Pachyrhynchus argusbeetles and water, mixed together, flowed into cracks and spaces in the ground, then gradually hardened, solidified and became opal.
There's probably a few other options, but for everbodys sake, we should avoid the truth at all costs!
Isn't that the American Way?:)
I myself won the "Most Improved Player" award more than once, and it was indeed because I thoroughly sucked before.
Back in my original posting, many generations ago now, I called India a "Developing" nation. I was taken to task (lightly) for it, but further replies seem to bear out the description. And my flippant reply aside, it's not really such a bad thing to be "Developing".
In a hundred years or so, historians may look back and decry not the poverty of the "Developing" nations, but the excesses of the "Developed" nations -- just before they became the "Declining" nations.
Think of how unstoppable Iraq will be once you master Paragraph technology
Actually, the original post does have WMP's (Weapons of Mass Parsing). They were hidden by the previous regime, and they should turn up Any Day Now. The Slashdot editors have been allocated 87c to find them (though some have decried the debt that will be incurred by this expense).
There's no shame in being called "developing". It means that progress is being made.
So, it's like winning the "Most Improved Player" award in Little League, right? You just have to gloss over the fact that to be "improved", you probably really sucked before.
Though here in the US, I guess we've bought into it. But for some reason, when a product says "New Improved Whitening Formula", I always wonder why I should buy a product that admits it didn't used to work.
It refers to the meter as 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to the equator through Paris
I wonder, though... in those days, did they think that there was something special about the line through Paris as opposed to, say, a line through the Atlantic ocean? Or was mentioning Paris just a political gimme?
I wonder if they originally intended to attempt to measure the effect of mountains and hills in the original definition of a kilometer, too... though at the scales involved, I don't suppose it would add up to much (especially with 1700s measurement accuracy).
Of course, now the meter is defined in terms of wavelengths of light of a certain radioactive element in a microfortnight, right?
I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name.
50 years from now, will the class of 2060 recognize the name "Brian Binnie"? If this works out, they darn well should... especially if he's the one who gets to fly the craft "for real", twice in two weeks.
* 1903: Orville & Wilbur Wright achieve controlled, manned flight (but birds fly on a regular basis)
* 1947: Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in a military aircraft (but ordinary people fly on a regular basis)
* 2003: Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype (but ordinary people fly faster than sound on a regular basis)
* 2050: What's the next big advance when ordinary people fly to space on a regular basis?
I was sure rooting for the local boys (& girl), but I don't see how they can catch up to Scaled Composites' entry.
This device will probably have more conventional thruster units that allow for high thrust and greater manueverability - especially if trying to catch objects that are no longer in orbit.
Well, technically, if it's up there, it's "in orbit" around the Earth's center of gravity. It just may be the case that at some point in the object's orbit, the distance to the center of the earth is less than the earth's radius!
The problem with the low-power ion engine would be conservation of momentum, I'd think (though I'm not any sort of expert). If the craft is moving "forward", and the object it encounters is at the same altitude but moving "backward", capturing the object will cause some sort of change in the momentum of both objects.
The small object will abruptly begin moving in the opposite direction (unless it punches a hole in yer scoop!), but its kinetic energy (???) will slow down the big object. Just like the atmosphere, thin as it is, exerts a drag on objects in orbit that's proportional to the number of atoms hitting the object (which is proportional to the object's surface area).
That's when orbital mechanics kicks in. The slower you go, the smaller your orbit. Each "hit" sends the catcher closer to a fiery end, kind of like a celestial Slashdot effect.
Also, how will the satellite "catch" its targets?You can't just step on the accelerator to catch up to something, because increasing your orbital velocity increases your altitude. To go "up", you have to accelerate forward, to go "down", you have to accelerate backward, and I still don't fully understand what happens when you accelerate in some direction outside your orbital path!
All this is facinating, but boy, does it make my head spin...
The 'Space Robot' (SR), with an in-built 'RUDAC' communication signal processor, will be used to capture damaged satellites and space debris from crashing to Earth, CSRDC-CSRL and ISRDO Director Dr M Sreedhar Dayal told UNI.
Putting aside the poor translation, it's clear that the article's writer doesn't have much of a scientific background. Unless you're talking about a mass comparable to the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory or perhaps the Hubble, there's not much need to prevent debris from "crashing into the earth". 100,000 feet of atmosphere does a fine job by itself, and puts on a great light show to boot.
The obvious benefit of this space scoop is to clear NEO of the sort of debris that occasionally causes the ISS and the Shuttle to take evasive maneuvers from time to time.
But I know what I'd be interested in, if I were a developing nation with orbital capability. The space around Earth is turning into the next big salvage yard, especially if the costs of this mission are comparable to a high-profile terrestrial salvage operation. What better way to find out what other nations have been doing in the space above your country, than to grab a few samples of their equipment?
It's even better than a earthbound salvage operation, because there's no weathering beyond radiation and collisions with other pieces of debris. A defunct spy satellite would be in as good a condition now as it was the day it entered orbit, especially in terms of reverse-engineering. The chips may have a few bits shorted out, but the circuit boards, wiring harnesses, optics, propulsion systems, and so on could hold a trove of information.
And there's one thing I'm dying to do -- buy space knicknacks. NASA and the Russians could probably fund a significant space program by simply selling off that ton or so of "trash" brought back by each shuttle mission or burnt up in the used Progress craft. If India can bring back space nuts, old thruster bells, and the like, they could make a killing on eBay!
Slashdot Mirror
I just this month brought my TRS-80 to work and hooked it up. First time it's seen power in over 15 years, and it still works! Kind of. The monitor itself seems to work, but the text disintegrates a few seconds after the CPU/keyboard is turned on. No problem with executing a "Hello World" program, even typing it in blind. I suspect some crystal has gone kaput. This being Slashdot, I suspect someone out there knows exactly what to do...
I never did hook up a disk drive. I did find some printouts of my old code (and man is it ugly). If I can get the old girl up and running, I'll probably hook up the cassette port to the audio in/out of the P-IV and start downloading. Meanwhile, though, it makes a great desk ornament!
You must have missed the part that said it was Texas A&M who created the cloned deer. Here in Texas, Aggie jokes are a beloved source of humor. Here are a couple (from here) that are apropos:And another one (adapted a bit):Are you still here?
I just set that as my desktop background. Thanks!
(Just wish http://www.dragg.net/users/pennywitt/ had put up an index page so I could thank her, too!)
I wonder if the other ones quit?
Well, the new job listing in your link, for the "Director of Financial Reporting" position (posted 12/08/03), does seem to be missing one important detail under "Job Responsibilities".
I don't see "Serving as scapegoat during inevitable corporate collapse." Do you think that's what they mean by "Additional special projects will be given on an 'as occurring' basis?"
I can show you the VB wizards I've used to write my latest mission-critical application for NASA.
Oh, crap, someone found my VB posts!
Hmmm... what was that link about deleting embarassing Slashdot posts? click click click... Damn!
I can't believe anyone on Slashdot doesn't know who Linus is.
He's Lucy's baby brother, dumbass! You know, the one with the blanket?
Where have you *been* the last 50 years?
I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing I worked with more coders like Linus Torvalds. How many times have we programmers found some code that didn't work like it should, asked the original coder about it, and had our heads bitten off for daring to suggest that there was anything sub-optimum about their baby?
;) ... So there is definitely a lot of proof that my ctype.h is original work.
Mr. Torvalds, on the other hand, shows his value by his honesty:
- I wrote them [ctype.h] (and looking at the original ones, I'm a bit ashamed: the "toupper()" and "tolower()" macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so
It's like a doctor admitting a misdiagnosis to the patient... a wizard willing to work on Dorothy's side of the curtain. I hope that I'm as honest about my code as Linus -- and that my management continues to understand that you don't get good code by pretending you never make mistakes.
SARS is thought to have made the leap into people in the live-animal marketplaces of Guangdong province, China. Researchers have so far found the culprit virus in three animals from the markets: masked palm civets, raccoon dogs and ferret badgers.
Damn! There go my Christmas barbeque plans. How the heck am I going to keep up my reputation without my signature ferret badger brule' ?
I mean, Turducken is sooo 2002, and do you know how big a freezer you'd need for the leftovers from just one Stuffed Camel?
I guess we're going to have to fall back on the barn cats. Again.
This is the reason i have a fireplace in addition to central heat and air.
We used to shred constantly until we moved out to the country. Now, we're never short of kindling for the trash barrel! Too bad I didn't "remember" to update the address on all my domain name registrations, though. Heh.
I tried to use Google News to find a registration-free link. No luck. Will this do?
Dumpster-diving bears at greater risk
It's not about bears stealing your identity, though I pity the bear that applies for a Visa card with a FICO as bad as mine! But it is an interesting tale:
Then there are the people: One older woman set out a batch of syrup-slathered pancakes for the bears, and some parents smeared peanut butter on their children's faces so they could photograph cubs licking it.
Where's Darwin when you need him?
So you have reptiles that look like tree bark, butterflies that look like snake eyes, and bugs that look like expensive rocks.
Now that's teh funny!
Actually, it would work quite well if your primary predator was the adult, married male (homo sapiens desperatus). Viceroy butterflies avoid being eaten by looking like poisonous Monarchs. A bird that takes a bite out of a Monarch is highly unlikely to even attempt a Viceroy. Similarly, these bugs would avoid being picked up by curious males, since we've picked up shiny rocks before and been hurt in the hip pocket.
And we're still friends with these Yahoos?
No, I haven't been friends with Yahoo! in quite a while. I much prefer Google.
Now I'm going to have two -1 offtopic.
:)
Well, for what it's worth, I got your original comment in M2 and modded the "Offtopic" as "Unfair". Merry Christmas!
I'm personally rooting for Armadillo Aerospace
Me too, because they're the local boys (and girl). But the SS1 folks are breaking the sound barrier while Armadillo is still working on their fuel mixture. It just doesn't look too good for Carmack & Co, at least not for the X-Prize.
Hopefully, though, they'll still be in the running for future commercial applications. Sometimes, it's better to be second or third...
From the reference cited in the parent:
Opal was formed millions of years ago, when silica and water, mixed together, flowed into cracks and spaces in the ground, then gradually hardened, solidified and became opal.
Based on this article -- and on the fact that "96% of the worlds supply" (ref) comes from the isolated continent that just happens to be home to an opal-bearing bug -- I wonder if the theory of opal formation needs to be changed?
After all, "silica and water" are a couple of the most abundant compounds on the planet. Wouldn't you expect somewhere besides Australia to have the right conditions for forming those silica nano-beads?
My theory:
Opal was formed millions of years ago, when dead Pachyrhynchus argus beetles and water, mixed together, flowed into cracks and spaces in the ground, then gradually hardened, solidified and became opal.
There's probably a few other options, but for everbodys sake, we should avoid the truth at all costs!
:)
Isn't that the American Way?
I myself won the "Most Improved Player" award more than once, and it was indeed because I thoroughly sucked before.
Back in my original posting, many generations ago now, I called India a "Developing" nation. I was taken to task (lightly) for it, but further replies seem to bear out the description. And my flippant reply aside, it's not really such a bad thing to be "Developing".
In a hundred years or so, historians may look back and decry not the poverty of the "Developing" nations, but the excesses of the "Developed" nations -- just before they became the "Declining" nations.
Think of how unstoppable Iraq will be once you master Paragraph technology
Actually, the original post does have WMP's (Weapons of Mass Parsing). They were hidden by the previous regime, and they should turn up Any Day Now. The Slashdot editors have been allocated 87c to find them (though some have decried the debt that will be incurred by this expense).
There's no shame in being called "developing". It means that progress is being made.
So, it's like winning the "Most Improved Player" award in Little League, right? You just have to gloss over the fact that to be "improved", you probably really sucked before.
Though here in the US, I guess we've bought into it. But for some reason, when a product says "New Improved Whitening Formula", I always wonder why I should buy a product that admits it didn't used to work.
It refers to the meter as 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to the equator through Paris
I wonder, though... in those days, did they think that there was something special about the line through Paris as opposed to, say, a line through the Atlantic ocean? Or was mentioning Paris just a political gimme?
I wonder if they originally intended to attempt to measure the effect of mountains and hills in the original definition of a kilometer, too... though at the scales involved, I don't suppose it would add up to much (especially with 1700s measurement accuracy).
Of course, now the meter is defined in terms of wavelengths of light of a certain radioactive element in a microfortnight, right?
I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name.
50 years from now, will the class of 2060 recognize the name "Brian Binnie"? If this works out, they darn well should... especially if he's the one who gets to fly the craft "for real", twice in two weeks.
* 1903: Orville & Wilbur Wright achieve controlled, manned flight (but birds fly on a regular basis)
* 1947: Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in a military aircraft (but ordinary people fly on a regular basis)
* 2003: Brian Binnie breaks the sound barrier in a home-built spacecraft prototype (but ordinary people fly faster than sound on a regular basis)
* 2050: What's the next big advance when ordinary people fly to space on a regular basis?
I was sure rooting for the local boys (& girl), but I don't see how they can catch up to Scaled Composites' entry.
There's several spanners loose up there along with a Hassleblad camera
When I first read your reply, I thought it said There's several spammers loose up there.
Spammers in space, with a Hasselblad? Just what I need, a mailbox full of zero-gee porn links.
On second thought...
Looks like they're on to us, again:
Please enter your Member ID: slash1234
Please enter your password: *********
Couldn't find your Member ID or Password. Please re-enter them.
This device will probably have more conventional thruster units that allow for high thrust and greater manueverability - especially if trying to catch objects that are no longer in orbit.
Well, technically, if it's up there, it's "in orbit" around the Earth's center of gravity. It just may be the case that at some point in the object's orbit, the distance to the center of the earth is less than the earth's radius!
The problem with the low-power ion engine would be conservation of momentum, I'd think (though I'm not any sort of expert). If the craft is moving "forward", and the object it encounters is at the same altitude but moving "backward", capturing the object will cause some sort of change in the momentum of both objects.
The small object will abruptly begin moving in the opposite direction (unless it punches a hole in yer scoop!), but its kinetic energy (???) will slow down the big object. Just like the atmosphere, thin as it is, exerts a drag on objects in orbit that's proportional to the number of atoms hitting the object (which is proportional to the object's surface area).
That's when orbital mechanics kicks in. The slower you go, the smaller your orbit. Each "hit" sends the catcher closer to a fiery end, kind of like a celestial Slashdot effect.
Also, how will the satellite "catch" its targets?You can't just step on the accelerator to catch up to something, because increasing your orbital velocity increases your altitude. To go "up", you have to accelerate forward, to go "down", you have to accelerate backward, and I still don't fully understand what happens when you accelerate in some direction outside your orbital path!
All this is facinating, but boy, does it make my head spin...
The 'Space Robot' (SR), with an in-built 'RUDAC' communication signal processor, will be used to capture damaged satellites and space debris from crashing to Earth, CSRDC-CSRL and ISRDO Director Dr M Sreedhar Dayal told UNI.
Putting aside the poor translation, it's clear that the article's writer doesn't have much of a scientific background. Unless you're talking about a mass comparable to the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory or perhaps the Hubble, there's not much need to prevent debris from "crashing into the earth". 100,000 feet of atmosphere does a fine job by itself, and puts on a great light show to boot.
The obvious benefit of this space scoop is to clear NEO of the sort of debris that occasionally causes the ISS and the Shuttle to take evasive maneuvers from time to time.
But I know what I'd be interested in, if I were a developing nation with orbital capability. The space around Earth is turning into the next big salvage yard, especially if the costs of this mission are comparable to a high-profile terrestrial salvage operation. What better way to find out what other nations have been doing in the space above your country, than to grab a few samples of their equipment?
It's even better than a earthbound salvage operation, because there's no weathering beyond radiation and collisions with other pieces of debris. A defunct spy satellite would be in as good a condition now as it was the day it entered orbit, especially in terms of reverse-engineering. The chips may have a few bits shorted out, but the circuit boards, wiring harnesses, optics, propulsion systems, and so on could hold a trove of information.
And there's one thing I'm dying to do -- buy space knicknacks. NASA and the Russians could probably fund a significant space program by simply selling off that ton or so of "trash" brought back by each shuttle mission or burnt up in the used Progress craft. If India can bring back space nuts, old thruster bells, and the like, they could make a killing on eBay!
I hate to destroy part of a good story.
I think the proper terminology in this case would be, "I hate to torpedo part of a good story."
Then again... maybe not.