Whether to vaccinate people or not, possibly with (serious?) side-effects. With smallpox eradicated and remaining stocks of live virus secured in just a few locations, the answer might be "NO: serious side-effects vs. 0 risk of contracting the disease". But professionals in the field are better equipped to answer that question than I am.
Whether to destroy all known stocks of live virus. That may not be a good idea when those stocks are few, well secured, and unknown stocks may exists (or even small pockets of live virus in the wild). Smallpox would be a bad choice as biological weapon anyway: over time, a 'successful' attack by (for example) a Muslim terrorist has potentially >1 billion Muslim victims, vs. 300+ million US citizens. A virus isn't selective who it infects, and it doesn't have a remote-control kill switch.
yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay?
There are some good reasons:
To support the 'good cause' of gathering news. For example: I much like the British BBC for their high quality documentaries. The making of these involves lots of research, putting people on the ground in conflict zones, undercover operations, etc. I would not mind paying a small amount each time I watch one of these documentaries, just to support putting them together. Surely I'm not alone there.
Added value, personalization: to get the news earlier than others, filtered/sorted according to personal preferences, adds removed, DRM-free downloadable format, etc, etc, you name it.
Personally I think just as big an obstacle for paid content on the web is a good payment system. You'd be talking very small amounts per use, and it would have to be secure, easy, reliable and available everywhere. PayPay isn't it (has some restrictions on use, eg. use for porn sites isn't allowed), credit cards are no good (not everybody has one, filling out credit card details for each use is too much hassle, subject to fraud) and other systems are supported on just a few sites. It's just too clumsy to use a different procedure on every paysite.
With an easy, universal micro-payment system in place, paid content on the web would be much more feasible.
Well a confusing headline... 1st thought is "bacteria convert radioactive into non-radioactive?!?". Ofcourse not. 2nd thought was they concentrate the stuff into a form that can easily be separated from other materials - nope. It's about turning the stuff into something that doesn't go anywhere besides where it's already at. Similar in purpose to melting radioactive material into a block of glass-like material.
which can then be separated mechanically ("settle to the bottom of a lake") from the environment.
Maybe I'm misreading the article, but where does it say about cleanup? All I'm reading is improving a way to keep the stuff from polluting a larger area.
If factory-set default passwords were used to gain access to the systems and use them, what exactly did they 'hack' ?
That would seem like a typical case of unauthorized use of a system to me, but hardly qualify as 'hacking'. When legal charges are to be brought, use a correct description of the crime, will you?
"Your honor, there was a gaping hole where the door used to be! I didn't even have to touch the doorknob!"
"I don't care! Since a computer system was involved, you broke into the place, understood?"
Is there a law prohibiting me from taking pictures of the insides of ATMs or armored cars?
Dunno about the US, but where I live there are only laws that say you can't (without permission) open up an ATM machine in order to take pictures of the insides. So technically, opening an ATM machine for that purpose would be illegal. But once opened up, taking pictures of the insides should be OK.
Is there a law prohibiting me from taking pictures of the insides of ATMs or armored cars?
Dunno about the US, but where I live there are only laws that say you can't (without permission) open up an ATM machine in order to take pictures of the insides. So technically, opening an ATM machine for that purpose would be illegal. But once opened up, taking pictures of the insides should be OK.
Funny how since the beginning of history, groups of people have been claiming that the world is going to end. And it keeps not happening.
That holds true whatever we do. If mankind would turn this planet into a radioactive, toxic wasteland that's uninhabitable for humans or animals, we might just succeed in making ourselves extinct (like the dinosaurs). Given enough time, environmental conditions would change/improve and other lifeforms would rule the planet. 'Mother earth' will be fine regardless.
But perhaps it's better to look at climate change as a simple cost problem. Raised CO2 levels might cause higher global temperatures, sea level rise, more often occuring weather extremes, droughts, crop losses etc. And from that: property damage, hunger disasters, armed conflicts and so on. The total of all these effects could be a huge price to pay, if ignored.
The problem is 2-fold:
It's often impossible to calculate all actual costs / benefits for any of your actions, due to the many (invisible) factors/effects involved, and
Much of that cost will be paid by other people than the ones doing the damage. That's true for many environmentally-destructive activities.
So is there an optimum, and how to determine it? Simple answer: perhaps, but impossible to calculate, or enforce. All you can do is make educated guesses, and stay on the safe side.
But IMHO there's nothing wrong with doing that as much as possible. If you build a new house or office building, make it as energy-efficient as reasonably possible (using existing tech or innovate along the way). If you buy a new car, make the fuel-efficiency among your top priorities, regardless of current fuel prices. If you have to route traffic trough an existing forest, build eco-friendly railroad first, before putting down a 5-line highway.
And what's optimal then? My guess is somewhere between 'going overboard' and 'relaxed, gradual, pro-active measures'. To be decided by improving ways to calculate total, real costs, and charging those parties causing them.
How is a microkernel going to protect against a phenomenon that happens completely within userland?
By making practically everything into userland, including hardware drivers, filesystems, GUI's, etc. In most OS'es that's a lot of code, and there are bugs and vulnerabilities in there too, you know.
By splitting software components that make up the whole of userland, in much smaller parts than in other popular operating systems, and most importantly:
By enforcing strict limitations on what each part can do. In a common OS, malicious code can do everything a normal user can do. In a microkernel OS, that part may have no disk access rights whatsover, and only permission to communicate with a small number of other components. Such restrictions can be enforced strongly, and everywhere throughout the system. That makes breakage much more a local event, with limited damage.
The problems is caused by a buffer overflow error in the program, which allows arbitrary code execution
IMHO this is the real problem behind today's security problems on popular platforms: the quick progression from [simple programming error] to [malicious code can do whatever it wants].
Perhaps a better solution would be to move to microkernel-based operating systems. These have a natural tendency to confine breakage to a small area. In contrast to popular systems, that behave more like a water balloon. Microkernels may have had a bad reputation in the past (slow performance), but nowadays that is neither true (see L4 for example), or relevant anymore (with GHz. machines being the norm). Reliable & secure software is what matters now.
They're working hard on it. But after a coffee break, it was discovered that some person(s) unknown pried the 'H' key from all Slashdot editor's keyboards. Stay tuned...
My father called the hospital the other day and gave them his name, and they asked "Is your social security number XXX-XX-XXXX?"
You mean that if you call that hospital and pretend to be person X (known to have have been in there sometime), the hospital will happily give you the SSN that's recorded for person X ? Over the phone, with no further checks or guarantee(s) on the identity of the caller?
Not that SSN's are well protected anyway, but if the above is true you should definitely take it up with higher management of that hospital (to adjust procedures / staff education etc. hospital-wide), because that's a serious privacy leak. If same thing still works after, say, a couple of months from then, I'd even consider reporting that hospital to whatever government body you can find that has the power to 'punish' hospitals for things like this. If any such government body exists, that is;-(
Most medical records today aren't things that patients get
From what I've seen myself, and heard from family members etc. that appears to be the default - to keep patient, and medical data on that patient, in separate places. But why ??? Can anyone from the medical profession enlighten us what's wrong with patients studying their own X-rays, reviewing lists of drugs to be used in the course of a (planned) operation, or re-reading a diagnosis? And I'm talking totally separate from the issue of how much influence a patient should have on these things. Is medical data only interesting to doctors etc., but not for patients themselves? Are well-informed patients a nuisance, or what? What do medical professionals think of this?
MS is taking the position that patients should be able to see their own records, and even correct their own medical records. (But with digital signatures to keep track of who is updating the record.
Even more than privacy, that should be the focus for medical records: an audit trail. You start with an empty record, and for every little bit of data that gets added, edited, removed, and even accessed there is a hard, unforgeable proof of who did it. What doctor added that X-ray pic, which nurse looked at what medication was prescribed to you earlier, etc. etc. Perhaps with an automatic notification policy? Patients' record updated -> update notification sent to patient.
An unforgeable ID for anyone accessing that record would be minimum requirement. And stiff penalties for abuse. Shared passwords, terminals accessible by multiple people (and perhaps out of sight) would be unacceptable by definition.
The military will be saying "You can have my Firewire when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." They have the bigger guns, so I think they'll win any argument.
You mean a market niche just opened up for USB-powered Hellfire missiles? Count me in! Or should I order one of these ?
You understand that PIO/DMA transfer modes only meaningful for Parallel ATA devices?
That's the meaning in traditional sense. But you can also use this distinction in a wider sense:
PIO: The CPU has to manage / monitor / do every little step in the process.
DMA: The CPU sets parameters, give a start signal, and then just waits (ehm, can do something else in the meanwhile), while dedicated hardware does all the boring work, like tranfer individual bytes / words of data to main memory. When ready, the CPU gets a signal (for example: an interrupt) that the transfer is complete. This may be used to describe many hardware-supported tasks, not just IDE harddisk controllers.
How much of an advantage this is, depends on how complex the initial parameter setup is, how much of the work is done by hardware vs. CPU, transfer speed, how large transferred blocks are, how often transfer occur, etc. etc. Besides overall speed, a big advantage is that the CPU can do other things (like decode a video stream, respond to keyboard / mouse input) while a tranfer continues in the background. This allows a system to feel much more responsive.
You state that USB controllers use DMA, parents says not. I don't know which is true. Perhaps there is DMA support for USB controllers, but the packets are small enough and flowing at a high enough rate that it feels like the CPU is doing all the work?
That to remove the 'memory wall', main memory and CPU will have to be integrated.
I mean, look at general-purpose computing systems past & present: there is a somewhat constant relation between CPU speed and memory size. Ever seen a 1 MHz. system with a GB. RAM? Ever seen a GHz. CPU coupled with a single KB. of RAM? Why not? Because with very few exceptions, heavier compute loads also require more memory space.
Just like the line between GPU and CPU is slowly blurring, it's just obvious that the parts with the most intensive communication, should be the parts closest together. Instead of doubling nummber of cores from 8 to 16, why not use those extra transistors to stack main memory directly on top of the CPU core(s)? Main memory would then be split up in little sections, with each section on top of a particular CPU core. I read sometime that semiconductor processes that are suitable for CPU's, aren't that good for memory chips (and vice versa) - don't know if that's true but if so, let the engineers figure that out.
Ofcourse things are different with supercomputers. If you have a 1000 'processing units', where each PU would consist of say, 32 cores and some GB's RAM on a single die, that would create a memory wall between 'local' and 'remote' memory. The on-die section of main memory would be accessible at near CPU speed, main memory that is part of other PU's would be 'remote', and slow. Hey wait, sounds like a compute cluster of some kind... (so scientists already know how to deal with it).
Perhaps the trick would be to make access to memory found on one of the other PU's transparent, so that programming-wise there's no visible distinction between 'local' and 'remote' memory. With some intelligent routing to migrate blocks of data closer towards the core(s) that access it? Maybe that could be done in hardware, maybe that's better done on a software level. Either way: the technology isn't the problem, it's an architectural / software problem.
Are you sure that was 9" ? I've got a box of 8" floppies at home. This format is predecessor of the 5 1/4" format most people will remember, and it looks remarkably similar (also size) to what is described in the article as a 9" floppy.
Not saying 9" floppies don't exist, but that would make it seem this was some kind of prototype format, not anything in popular use. The all-knowing Wikipedia doesn't mention 9" floppy disks at all, only 8". Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it wouldn't surprise me if the 9" in the article is a typo/mistake, and should read 8". Do you know of a reference for that 9" format in conjunction with the Honeywell TDC4500 you mention above? Say, a scan of an old specsheet or something?
And yes, they're very 'floppy'. Similar to 5 1/4" floppies, and the large size makes them flex further. Stick a few A4's in a large envelope, and you get a similar feel.
.. the truth is (and I speak from personal experience) that when on occasion you get those 8 bits or whatever out their box and fire them up you realise that actually , well, they're a bit rubbish really and computers today really are so much better.
I have to respectfully disagree. Let's just make a comparison, shall we? Let's call [some old 8-bitter of your choice] the oldie, and [your average today's home PC] the newbie:
Performance: no contest, the newbie wins bigtime.
Power efficiency / green computing: this is not so clear cut as you may think. In terms of performance per watt, the newbie wins. But overal: many oldies are in the 10~20 Watt range, running full tilt or not. The videocard in my PC alone uses more than that, and it's a passively cooled one. When doing nothing, most newbies will pass the 100 Watt mark easily. And in full use, 300+ W is nothing special. Sure, there exist small / low-power shoebox sized PC's, but that's not what Joe sixpack has on his desk. We'll give the newbie a 1/2 point in case it's a laptop. Noise: the newbie usually produces a variety of HD/fan noises, ranging from barely audible to annoying. The oldie: silent (a step better than very, very quiet). So the newbie is more efficient, but the oldie has a smaller overall footprint.
Size: newbie has chunky PC case, and separate keyboard. Oldies: mostly keyboard-size case with all the main electronics integrated.
Programmer friendly? Newbie: go to website, download development tools, install, start reading, construct 'hello world' app in editor or IDE, compile, execute produced binary. Oldie: switch machine on, type command, hit "Enter", see result. Include line number, and your first program is a fact.
Boot time: many oldies do it within 1~3 seconds. Newbie: replace 'seconds' with 'minutes'.
Build quality: many oldies still work 20, 25 years after purchase. With some heavy use years at the start. Newbie: often breaks down even before its economic lifespan has passed. Not seldom within, or shortly after warranty expires. Ridiculous, if you ask me.
Software maintenance - newbie: must be constantly updated, and sometimes re-installed just to keep doing what it did before. Most users need at least a firewall, virus-scanner and spyware remover to keep everything in shape. Oldie: there isn't any. Operating sits in ROM, can't be modified, hacked or corrupted by normal users. OS re-install aren't needed - ever. Usually 1 or 2 bugs in the OS are known, but you may need years to find one yourself. Apps come on tape, disk or cartridge. Play tape, insert disk or cartridge, wait, play. How much easier / simpler do you want it? Okay, I'll give the newbie a 1/4 point here because it lets you click on fancy icons.;-)
Conclusion: the newbie has raw power, and can do lots of wonderful things that the oldie just can't touch. But: most of that capacity goes to waste. And: the newbies are built as throw-away items. Your oldie of choice hasn't got that raw power, but in terms of 'fun per MHz', it has any computer that came after it beat. EASILY.
... they generate buildings and clumps of grass and trees? And the textures on dirt have random mess on them to make less uniform and more believable? Something like that? (..) Are there screenshots of this?
Just for kicks: a nice example came out of the demoscene a few years back: kkrieger
I'd call it a 'proof of concept' 3D shooter. Nothing challenging, just a few levels you can easily walk through. Nothing exceptional on the graphics side. Runs on Windows like so many games.
But: a true HW-accelerated 3D shooter. Has enemies that jump / try to hurt you if you let 'em. A few big spaces to walk around in and admire the artwork on the walls. And all of this packed in an amazing 97,280 bytes! Hell, each screenshot on that site is already half that!
All your software is managed an upgraded using a single GUI interface, some distros can even do major version upgrade with a few mouse clicks - try upgrading from XP to Vista that way!
Ehm.. FYI: to do a mayor OS upgrade with just a few mouse clicks, works just fine, even in Windows. The only difference is with Windows, those few mouse clicks are a hell-uv-a-lot moreexpensive.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but take note there are 2 issues here:
yes, the news is available for free elsewhere so why pay?
There are some good reasons:
Personally I think just as big an obstacle for paid content on the web is a good payment system. You'd be talking very small amounts per use, and it would have to be secure, easy, reliable and available everywhere. PayPay isn't it (has some restrictions on use, eg. use for porn sites isn't allowed), credit cards are no good (not everybody has one, filling out credit card details for each use is too much hassle, subject to fraud) and other systems are supported on just a few sites. It's just too clumsy to use a different procedure on every paysite.
With an easy, universal micro-payment system in place, paid content on the web would be much more feasible.
Well a confusing headline... 1st thought is "bacteria convert radioactive into non-radioactive?!?". Ofcourse not. 2nd thought was they concentrate the stuff into a form that can easily be separated from other materials - nope. It's about turning the stuff into something that doesn't go anywhere besides where it's already at. Similar in purpose to melting radioactive material into a block of glass-like material.
which can then be separated mechanically ("settle to the bottom of a lake") from the environment.
Maybe I'm misreading the article, but where does it say about cleanup? All I'm reading is improving a way to keep the stuff from polluting a larger area.
If factory-set default passwords were used to gain access to the systems and use them, what exactly did they 'hack' ?
That would seem like a typical case of unauthorized use of a system to me, but hardly qualify as 'hacking'. When legal charges are to be brought, use a correct description of the crime, will you?
"Your honor, there was a gaping hole where the door used to be! I didn't even have to touch the doorknob!"
"I don't care! Since a computer system was involved, you broke into the place, understood?"
Is there a law prohibiting me from taking pictures of the insides of ATMs or armored cars?
Dunno about the US, but where I live there are only laws that say you can't (without permission) open up an ATM machine in order to take pictures of the insides. So technically, opening an ATM machine for that purpose would be illegal. But once opened up, taking pictures of the insides should be OK.
Is there a law prohibiting me from taking pictures of the insides of ATMs or armored cars?
Dunno about the US, but where I live there are only laws that say you can't (without permission) open up an ATM machine in order to take pictures of the insides. So technically, opening an ATM machine for that purpose would be illegal. But once opened up, taking pictures of the insides should be OK.
A medium with capacity as much as 0.0000000000146 LOC - a significant advance over storage on audio tape!
People who claim we can't influence climate should be locked up in a garage with a running engine.
Make it a big enough, fully sealed greenhouse, and watch them put plant seeds in the ground in a hurry :-)
Funny how since the beginning of history, groups of people have been claiming that the world is going to end. And it keeps not happening.
That holds true whatever we do. If mankind would turn this planet into a radioactive, toxic wasteland that's uninhabitable for humans or animals, we might just succeed in making ourselves extinct (like the dinosaurs). Given enough time, environmental conditions would change/improve and other lifeforms would rule the planet. 'Mother earth' will be fine regardless.
But perhaps it's better to look at climate change as a simple cost problem. Raised CO2 levels might cause higher global temperatures, sea level rise, more often occuring weather extremes, droughts, crop losses etc. And from that: property damage, hunger disasters, armed conflicts and so on. The total of all these effects could be a huge price to pay, if ignored.
The problem is 2-fold:
So is there an optimum, and how to determine it? Simple answer: perhaps, but impossible to calculate, or enforce. All you can do is make educated guesses, and stay on the safe side.
But IMHO there's nothing wrong with doing that as much as possible. If you build a new house or office building, make it as energy-efficient as reasonably possible (using existing tech or innovate along the way). If you buy a new car, make the fuel-efficiency among your top priorities, regardless of current fuel prices. If you have to route traffic trough an existing forest, build eco-friendly railroad first, before putting down a 5-line highway.
And what's optimal then? My guess is somewhere between 'going overboard' and 'relaxed, gradual, pro-active measures'. To be decided by improving ways to calculate total, real costs, and charging those parties causing them.
How is a microkernel going to protect against a phenomenon that happens completely within userland?
The problems is caused by a buffer overflow error in the program, which allows arbitrary code execution
IMHO this is the real problem behind today's security problems on popular platforms: the quick progression from [simple programming error] to [malicious code can do whatever it wants].
Perhaps a better solution would be to move to microkernel-based operating systems. These have a natural tendency to confine breakage to a small area. In contrast to popular systems, that behave more like a water balloon. Microkernels may have had a bad reputation in the past (slow performance), but nowadays that is neither true (see L4 for example), or relevant anymore (with GHz. machines being the norm). Reliable & secure software is what matters now.
can someone please summarize?
Court: intertubes = phonebook
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Wiki quote)
They're working hard on it. But after a coffee break, it was discovered that some person(s) unknown pried the 'H' key from all Slashdot editor's keyboards. Stay tuned...
My father called the hospital the other day and gave them his name, and they asked "Is your social security number XXX-XX-XXXX?"
You mean that if you call that hospital and pretend to be person X (known to have have been in there sometime), the hospital will happily give you the SSN that's recorded for person X ? Over the phone, with no further checks or guarantee(s) on the identity of the caller?
Not that SSN's are well protected anyway, but if the above is true you should definitely take it up with higher management of that hospital (to adjust procedures / staff education etc. hospital-wide), because that's a serious privacy leak. If same thing still works after, say, a couple of months from then, I'd even consider reporting that hospital to whatever government body you can find that has the power to 'punish' hospitals for things like this. If any such government body exists, that is ;-(
Most medical records today aren't things that patients get
From what I've seen myself, and heard from family members etc. that appears to be the default - to keep patient, and medical data on that patient, in separate places. But why ??? Can anyone from the medical profession enlighten us what's wrong with patients studying their own X-rays, reviewing lists of drugs to be used in the course of a (planned) operation, or re-reading a diagnosis? And I'm talking totally separate from the issue of how much influence a patient should have on these things. Is medical data only interesting to doctors etc., but not for patients themselves? Are well-informed patients a nuisance, or what? What do medical professionals think of this?
MS is taking the position that patients should be able to see their own records, and even correct their own medical records. (But with digital signatures to keep track of who is updating the record.
Even more than privacy, that should be the focus for medical records: an audit trail. You start with an empty record, and for every little bit of data that gets added, edited, removed, and even accessed there is a hard, unforgeable proof of who did it. What doctor added that X-ray pic, which nurse looked at what medication was prescribed to you earlier, etc. etc. Perhaps with an automatic notification policy? Patients' record updated -> update notification sent to patient.
An unforgeable ID for anyone accessing that record would be minimum requirement. And stiff penalties for abuse. Shared passwords, terminals accessible by multiple people (and perhaps out of sight) would be unacceptable by definition.
The military will be saying "You can have my Firewire when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." They have the bigger guns, so I think they'll win any argument.
You mean a market niche just opened up for USB-powered Hellfire missiles? Count me in! Or should I order one of these ?
You understand that PIO/DMA transfer modes only meaningful for Parallel ATA devices?
That's the meaning in traditional sense. But you can also use this distinction in a wider sense:
How much of an advantage this is, depends on how complex the initial parameter setup is, how much of the work is done by hardware vs. CPU, transfer speed, how large transferred blocks are, how often transfer occur, etc. etc. Besides overall speed, a big advantage is that the CPU can do other things (like decode a video stream, respond to keyboard / mouse input) while a tranfer continues in the background. This allows a system to feel much more responsive.
You state that USB controllers use DMA, parents says not. I don't know which is true. Perhaps there is DMA support for USB controllers, but the packets are small enough and flowing at a high enough rate that it feels like the CPU is doing all the work?
That to remove the 'memory wall', main memory and CPU will have to be integrated.
I mean, look at general-purpose computing systems past & present: there is a somewhat constant relation between CPU speed and memory size. Ever seen a 1 MHz. system with a GB. RAM? Ever seen a GHz. CPU coupled with a single KB. of RAM? Why not? Because with very few exceptions, heavier compute loads also require more memory space.
Just like the line between GPU and CPU is slowly blurring, it's just obvious that the parts with the most intensive communication, should be the parts closest together. Instead of doubling nummber of cores from 8 to 16, why not use those extra transistors to stack main memory directly on top of the CPU core(s)? Main memory would then be split up in little sections, with each section on top of a particular CPU core. I read sometime that semiconductor processes that are suitable for CPU's, aren't that good for memory chips (and vice versa) - don't know if that's true but if so, let the engineers figure that out.
Ofcourse things are different with supercomputers. If you have a 1000 'processing units', where each PU would consist of say, 32 cores and some GB's RAM on a single die, that would create a memory wall between 'local' and 'remote' memory. The on-die section of main memory would be accessible at near CPU speed, main memory that is part of other PU's would be 'remote', and slow. Hey wait, sounds like a compute cluster of some kind... (so scientists already know how to deal with it).
Perhaps the trick would be to make access to memory found on one of the other PU's transparent, so that programming-wise there's no visible distinction between 'local' and 'remote' memory. With some intelligent routing to migrate blocks of data closer towards the core(s) that access it? Maybe that could be done in hardware, maybe that's better done on a software level. Either way: the technology isn't the problem, it's an architectural / software problem.
Absolutely it's a continuum, and whatever you name current state is a matter of definition. Some common ones:
Alive > coding in your basement > mostly dead > near dead > dead > zombie > SCO
Are you sure that was 9" ? I've got a box of 8" floppies at home. This format is predecessor of the 5 1/4" format most people will remember, and it looks remarkably similar (also size) to what is described in the article as a 9" floppy.
Not saying 9" floppies don't exist, but that would make it seem this was some kind of prototype format, not anything in popular use. The all-knowing Wikipedia doesn't mention 9" floppy disks at all, only 8". Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it wouldn't surprise me if the 9" in the article is a typo/mistake, and should read 8". Do you know of a reference for that 9" format in conjunction with the Honeywell TDC4500 you mention above? Say, a scan of an old specsheet or something?
And yes, they're very 'floppy'. Similar to 5 1/4" floppies, and the large size makes them flex further. Stick a few A4's in a large envelope, and you get a similar feel.
.. the truth is (and I speak from personal experience) that when on occasion you get those 8 bits or whatever out their box and fire them up you realise that actually , well, they're a bit rubbish really and computers today really are so much better.
I have to respectfully disagree. Let's just make a comparison, shall we? Let's call [some old 8-bitter of your choice] the oldie, and [your average today's home PC] the newbie:
Performance: no contest, the newbie wins bigtime.
Power efficiency / green computing: this is not so clear cut as you may think. In terms of performance per watt, the newbie wins. But overal: many oldies are in the 10~20 Watt range, running full tilt or not. The videocard in my PC alone uses more than that, and it's a passively cooled one. When doing nothing, most newbies will pass the 100 Watt mark easily. And in full use, 300+ W is nothing special. Sure, there exist small / low-power shoebox sized PC's, but that's not what Joe sixpack has on his desk. We'll give the newbie a 1/2 point in case it's a laptop. Noise: the newbie usually produces a variety of HD/fan noises, ranging from barely audible to annoying. The oldie: silent (a step better than very, very quiet). So the newbie is more efficient, but the oldie has a smaller overall footprint.
Size: newbie has chunky PC case, and separate keyboard. Oldies: mostly keyboard-size case with all the main electronics integrated.
Programmer friendly? Newbie: go to website, download development tools, install, start reading, construct 'hello world' app in editor or IDE, compile, execute produced binary. Oldie: switch machine on, type command, hit "Enter", see result. Include line number, and your first program is a fact.
Boot time: many oldies do it within 1~3 seconds. Newbie: replace 'seconds' with 'minutes'.
Build quality: many oldies still work 20, 25 years after purchase. With some heavy use years at the start. Newbie: often breaks down even before its economic lifespan has passed. Not seldom within, or shortly after warranty expires. Ridiculous, if you ask me.
Software maintenance - newbie: must be constantly updated, and sometimes re-installed just to keep doing what it did before. Most users need at least a firewall, virus-scanner and spyware remover to keep everything in shape. Oldie: there isn't any. Operating sits in ROM, can't be modified, hacked or corrupted by normal users. OS re-install aren't needed - ever. Usually 1 or 2 bugs in the OS are known, but you may need years to find one yourself. Apps come on tape, disk or cartridge. Play tape, insert disk or cartridge, wait, play. How much easier / simpler do you want it? Okay, I'll give the newbie a 1/4 point here because it lets you click on fancy icons. ;-)
Conclusion: the newbie has raw power, and can do lots of wonderful things that the oldie just can't touch. But: most of that capacity goes to waste. And: the newbies are built as throw-away items. Your oldie of choice hasn't got that raw power, but in terms of 'fun per MHz', it has any computer that came after it beat. EASILY.
... they generate buildings and clumps of grass and trees? And the textures on dirt have random mess on them to make less uniform and more believable? Something like that? (..) Are there screenshots of this?
Just for kicks: a nice example came out of the demoscene a few years back: kkrieger
I'd call it a 'proof of concept' 3D shooter. Nothing challenging, just a few levels you can easily walk through. Nothing exceptional on the graphics side. Runs on Windows like so many games.
But: a true HW-accelerated 3D shooter. Has enemies that jump / try to hurt you if you let 'em. A few big spaces to walk around in and admire the artwork on the walls. And all of this packed in an amazing 97,280 bytes! Hell, each screenshot on that site is already half that!
With space you have no internet (i.e. road) and TTLs are too high to use the same technology we use here.
You might think so, but it *has* been shown to work. I mean, don't tell me you never heard of the pigeon protocol?
CLANWARS_PUBLIC#1 LAVAPIT-BIG UDP 56
LOL-GIBBERISHED OH!NOSHIT_ctf UDP 68
PLAYTIME.DOT.UK DM_HOLYGROUNDS UDP 254
FRAGFEST_REDPLANET DM_HELLHOLE UDP 2,139,442
Ping of 2 MILLION? WTF ?!?
All your software is managed an upgraded using a single GUI interface, some distros can even do major version upgrade with a few mouse clicks - try upgrading from XP to Vista that way!
Ehm.. FYI: to do a mayor OS upgrade with just a few mouse clicks, works just fine, even in Windows. The only difference is with Windows, those few mouse clicks are a hell-uv-a-lot more expensive.