The author of the original article list seemed to have categorised the computers according to the level of application usage.
Some of these computers were really more suited to learning programming and computers than to do serious applications. How many computers could display 80 column text without requiring special drivers to be installed?
It would be interesting to have separate categories for 'learning technology', 'writing/playing games', 'business applications' than a single list.
The ZX81 and BBC Model B were definitely designed for the learning experience. The BBC actually ran a series teaching people about computers.
The Commodore 64, Atari 800, Amiga supported advanced graphics and audio, and were suited to playing/writing games.
The BBC Model B, TRS-80 lesser so.
The Apple II and Heathkit were more limited in terms of multimedia, but could support 80 column text natively.
The Palmpilot and Sony Vaio (both of which I own) did come a little later:)
Microsoft also announced that they had also placed a patent on look and feel of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). They pointed out that they had invested a large amount of money in order to provide the best end-user experience to all customers.
I know. I wish there were a better analogy to give hope. Unfortunately, our PM (Tony Blair) runs the country like he were a CEO of a major corporation, and has now decided that the UK can afford to lose 200,000 financial industry accountancy positions.
If this happens, what's to stop New York financial jobs moving to India.
This is on top of the call centre jobs, software support positions.
From the article I read, the proposal was to help business commuters get from an SF office to a LA office. Taking into account travelling to the nearest airport by taxi/train, checking-in, going through security, flying, picking up excess luggage, waiting in a taxi queue, then taking the taxi to the other office, the high-speed train would be faster, especially if the stations were in central downtown in all cities.
Caltrain do run an hourly (every 10 minutes at rush-hour) service from San Francisco to San Jose. But that takes around 3 hours, given a 3-5 minute stop at around 20 stations.
A month long pass cost around at most 60 dollars.
In the current context, what is to stop the lower wage countries also improving productivity by automating more?
Because the demand for textiles now is heading towards smaller order for more varied patterns that are in the shops for shorter periods of time. Automation helps the UK textiles companies, because they can produce a small order in a short amount of time. For an offshore company, the time delay due to customs, shipping, storage makes handling small order non-profitable.
While I was working in Silicon Valley, there was discussion and plans to implement a high-speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles via Sacramento.
The main obstacle to getting the proposal approved was getting planning permission from the planning desk of each little itty-bitty city along the way. Unfortunately, just about every city would only give permission if a train-station/stopping point was built within their boundaries. The accumulative effect of these demands was to stretch the proposed 90 minute journey to around 3 hours, which was longer than the 3 hour total shuttle flight by aeroplane the train was supposed to replace. The plans were shelved.
The situation we're in now (USA/UK/*) isn't too different from the textile industry during the start of the Industrial Revolution. Back then, it took two or more weavers to operate a single loom. British companies were soon being undercut by Indian weavers. However, the English companies managed to remain competitive by improving productivity through automation. The use of power looms (via the steam engine) and the Jacquard looms allowed factory owners to have one weaver operate two looms instead of having three or more weavers in constant attendance. Today, only one technician is required to supervise 20 Jacquard looms.
Going back to the computer industry, and the only way we (as programmers/engineers) can compete is by moving up a level and trying to automate as much of the design process as possible, using techniques such as expert systems, code generators, intelligent compilers etc...
It amazes me how thoroughly 1984's personal computer futurists missed the idea of an internet.
They didn't. An excellent book published in the UK during the early 80's was Anthony Hyman's "The Coming of the Chip". This book was published at the time when integrated circuits were becoming large enough to contain entire processors on a single chip. The book was split into 12 chapters, each of which dealt with different aspects of the revolution:
1. Introduction: The coming of the chip (Flat screens replace CRT's)
2. Development of the chip
3. Revolution in Communications (Definition of a 'wired society', where everyone has access to "wide-band" communications at home. Being able to print out documents at home).
4. The electronic office (Outsourcing of back-room processing work across the world).
5. Robots at work
6. The shape of shopping to come (Automated inventory control).
7. Machines for living in (The wired home).
8. The cashless society (Electronic money and remote transactions)
9. Cure by chip? (Expert systems for medical diagnosis)
10. Under surveillance (The dangers of permanent storage of financial transactions and CCTV system data).
11. The computerised classroom (Multimedia systems for education)
12. Into the 21st century
"Early in the twenty-first century:
To see the news you switch on the screen. Newspapers ceased printing as paper and distribution become too expensive. Besides, news coverage on the electronic newspaper is so much better. You do not have to wait for newstime, as on the ordinary television; it is called up at will on the optical fibre video link. News, still comes from "The Times", "The Guardian", "The Mirror", "The Sun" and also from news centres, which succeeded the old newspapers when paper was replaced by electronic news."
Some of today's most sophisticated special effects utilize shading techniques. The use of transparency, surface detail, shadows, texture and reflections are more of an art than a science. Although it is difficult to imagine how these techniques will one day be simplified, it is almost certain that they will. Perhaps LSI chips (large scale integration -- the technique used to make microprocessors) will be developed that apply shading algorithms to user-generated scenes.
Wow. One page every few minutes. And users complain because their laser printer takes 20-30 seconds to warm up...
Back in the 80's, when all we had was the Atari dot matrix printer, our neighbors once asked about the strange noise they kept hearing in the early evenings and on the weekends (we lived in terraced housing). Every time a listing or screen dump was printed out, they thought we were using some kind of machine to strip the wallpaper off the walls.
Oh yes, that makes sense... just like the time one of our technicians left a box of back-up CD-ROMs on top of a unused heater, and his assistant switched it on to heat up the room.
Even if the people were to cut the wires as close to the patch panel as possible, wouldn't this be the corporate equivalent of the gradual degraduation of teleomeres?
Eventually, after a building had four or five companies the cables would be so short as to make it impossible to repair the wiring.
Surely it would be more cost effective to have standard connectors (RJ45's or whatever) rather than individually tied down cables?
As Charlie Brown would say: "Good grief!". The speaker system is supposed to play white-noise in order to reduce the noise in the office - not add to it.
I personally,think it would have been a wise business decision to set up a campus someplace like rural Utah or Oregon. If present trends continue, it appears likely Sun will eventually move operations to India or China.
I seem to remember at one point a lot of the "high tech" jobs were in fact just in final assembly.
That was true. Many of the semi-conductor companies moved their manufacturing plants abroad due to the bad reputation that the chip fabrication plants had gained. This also matched the goal of bringing employment to the unemployed manufacturing workers in the area. But with the competition from India for these jobs, the planners are being forced to look higher in the food chain, the R&D positions.
Scotland also does have a software engineering industry (oil industry in Aberdeen, financial in Edinburgh, some Arts in Glasgow and Dundee). Edinburgh has a small non-financial software industry. But the problem (with Edinburgh at least) is that companies can't match US salaries even though house prices in areas with good schools match Bay Area prices. I used to work for a network software company in Edinburgh. There was a constant churn of senior engineers who kept leaving for the US. The management in this company got so fed up, that in the end they decided to only recruit senior staff from outside the company. Eventually the company was bought out by the Shiva Corporation, which in turn was bought out by Intel.
Even now, the top salaries for a senior software engineer in Scotland is around 30K pounds (45K US dollars), while an entry-level graduate salary is 20K (35K US dollars). A house in Edinburgh is around 250K pounds (350K dollars). Even an one bedroom modern apartment costs around 120K pounds (180K dollars). Old fashioned victorian apartments with large bedrooms are even more desirable (250K pounds), especially by the buy-to-rent-out-to-student market). Housing is cheaper in the space between Edinburgh and Glasgow, but employees need a car to get around. This is a major disadvantage for graduates who prefer to live in urban areas where public transport is available. So a company could either be located in Silicon Glen, and find it difficult to recruit graduates, or be located in Edinburgh and find it difficult to keep senior staff.
Other problems are that many British companies don't offer their employees the choice of a technical career path, pension schemes are owned by the companies (there's no real 401K plan in the UK), and that many graduates are only attracted to study for a Computer Science degree in order to work in London's financial industry.
They also plan to introduce multicolour fluorescent pet fish, including red, purple and blue.
It would be interesting to see where the gene is being added. If it were in the right place (skin development) then you could have stripy glow-in-the-dark fish.
Here's a theory...
Some evidence suggests that there's a link between global climate (ocean temperatures) and solar sunspot activity. This is known to affect floods and thus crop production. If you've got a population busy harvesting crops, then they're less likely to be motivated to start wars. Unemployment and poverty have been the major factors involved in starting wars.
I wouldn't want to get into a discussion on whether UFO's exist or whether our ancestors had access to Stargate type mining equipment, but after reading this book, I always wondered whether the aircraft he proposed would actually be aerodynamic or not (hemisphere on top of a inverted cone with four propellors at 90 degrees apart. Each propellor system was actually mounted on top of a wheel with a couple of robot arms at each side. This was supposed to be fueled by a nuclear powered
pebble reactor (thus the robot arms).
A couple more from The Register...
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 1
You could probably get equally good results with plain hill-climbing. Turn on all the optimizations. Then turn them off one at a time and see if things get better. Repeat until no improvement is observed.
It is known that some optimisations can disable others. For example, "merge frequently called functions with parent" will penalise "store frequently used variables in registers" or "give priority to inner-most loop variables in registers". You could certainly build on the research in this article. What are the best types of optimisations for different types of algorithm (B-tree traversal, matrix-vector mathematics, text-editing). Does compiling different modules of an application provide improved performance over compiling all modules with the same set of flags?
Slashdot Mirror
The author of the original article list seemed to have categorised the computers according to the level of application usage.
:)
Some of these computers were really more suited to learning programming and computers than to do serious applications. How many computers could display 80 column text without requiring special drivers to be installed?
It would be interesting to have separate categories for 'learning technology', 'writing/playing games', 'business applications' than a single list.
The ZX81 and BBC Model B were definitely designed for the learning experience. The BBC actually ran a series teaching people about computers.
The Commodore 64, Atari 800, Amiga supported advanced graphics and audio, and were suited to playing/writing games.
The BBC Model B, TRS-80 lesser so. The Apple II and Heathkit were more limited in terms of multimedia, but could support 80 column text natively.
The Palmpilot and Sony Vaio (both of which I own) did come a little later
Microsoft also announced that they had also placed a patent on look and feel of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). They pointed out that they had invested a large amount of money in order to provide the best end-user experience to all customers.
I know. I wish there were a better analogy to give hope. Unfortunately, our PM (Tony Blair) runs the country like he were a CEO of a major corporation, and has now decided that the UK can afford to lose 200,000 financial industry accountancy positions.
If this happens, what's to stop New York financial jobs moving to India.
This is on top of the call centre jobs, software support positions.
From the article I read, the proposal was to help business commuters get from an SF office to a LA office. Taking into account travelling to the nearest airport by taxi/train, checking-in, going through security, flying, picking up excess luggage, waiting in a taxi queue, then taking the taxi to the other office, the high-speed train would be faster, especially if the stations were in central downtown in all cities. Caltrain do run an hourly (every 10 minutes at rush-hour) service from San Francisco to San Jose. But that takes around 3 hours, given a 3-5 minute stop at around 20 stations. A month long pass cost around at most 60 dollars.
In the current context, what is to stop the lower wage countries also improving productivity by automating more?
Because the demand for textiles now is heading towards smaller order for more varied patterns that are in the shops for shorter periods of time. Automation helps the UK textiles companies, because they can produce a small order in a short amount of time. For an offshore company, the time delay due to customs, shipping, storage makes handling small order non-profitable.
While I was working in Silicon Valley, there was discussion and plans to implement a high-speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles via Sacramento.
The main obstacle to getting the proposal approved was getting planning permission from the planning desk of each little itty-bitty city along the way. Unfortunately, just about every city would only give permission if a train-station/stopping point was built within their boundaries. The accumulative effect of these demands was to stretch the proposed 90 minute journey to around 3 hours, which was longer than the 3 hour total shuttle flight by aeroplane the train was supposed to replace. The plans were shelved.
The situation we're in now (USA/UK/*) isn't too different from the textile industry during the start of the Industrial Revolution. Back then, it took two or more weavers to operate a single loom. British companies were soon being undercut by Indian weavers. However, the English companies managed to remain competitive by improving productivity through automation. The use of power looms (via the steam engine) and the Jacquard looms allowed factory owners to have one weaver operate two looms instead of having three or more weavers in constant attendance. Today, only one technician is required to supervise 20 Jacquard looms.
Going back to the computer industry, and the only way we (as programmers/engineers) can compete is by moving up a level and trying to automate as much of the design process as possible, using techniques such as expert systems, code generators, intelligent compilers etc...
It amazes me how thoroughly 1984's personal computer futurists missed the idea of an internet.
They didn't. An excellent book published in the UK during the early 80's was Anthony Hyman's "The Coming of the Chip". This book was published at the time when integrated circuits were becoming large enough to contain entire processors on a single chip. The book was split into 12 chapters, each of which dealt with different aspects of the revolution:
1. Introduction: The coming of the chip (Flat screens replace CRT's)
2. Development of the chip
3. Revolution in Communications (Definition of a 'wired society', where everyone has access to "wide-band" communications at home. Being able to print out documents at home).
4. The electronic office (Outsourcing of back-room processing work across the world).
5. Robots at work
6. The shape of shopping to come (Automated inventory control).
7. Machines for living in (The wired home).
8. The cashless society (Electronic money and remote transactions)
9. Cure by chip? (Expert systems for medical diagnosis)
10. Under surveillance (The dangers of permanent storage of financial transactions and CCTV system data).
11. The computerised classroom (Multimedia systems for education)
12. Into the 21st century
"Early in the twenty-first century:
To see the news you switch on the screen. Newspapers ceased printing as paper and distribution become too expensive. Besides, news coverage on the electronic newspaper is so much better. You do not have to wait for newstime, as on the ordinary television; it is called up at will on the optical fibre video link. News, still comes from "The Times", "The Guardian", "The Mirror", "The Sun" and also from news centres, which succeeded the old newspapers when paper was replaced by electronic news."
Here's another prediction for the future that came true:
From Computer Animation Primer (published 1984):
By David Fox and Mitchell Waite
Some of today's most sophisticated special effects utilize shading techniques. The use of transparency, surface detail, shadows, texture and reflections are more of an art than a science. Although it is difficult to imagine how these techniques will one day be simplified, it is almost certain that they will. Perhaps LSI chips (large scale integration -- the technique used to make microprocessors) will be developed that apply shading algorithms to user-generated scenes.
Wow. One page every few minutes. And users complain because their laser printer takes 20-30 seconds to warm up...
Back in the 80's, when all we had was the Atari dot matrix printer, our neighbors once asked about the strange noise they kept hearing in the early evenings and on the weekends (we lived in terraced housing). Every time a listing or screen dump was printed out, they thought we were using some kind of machine to strip the wallpaper off the walls.
I was once told by my college neighbours that some girls wear wedding rings as a way to politely turn down unwanted advances. It doesn't hurt to ask :)
Oh yes, that makes sense ... just like the time one of our technicians left a box of back-up CD-ROMs on top of a unused heater, and his assistant switched it on to heat up the room.
For someone who plays multiplayer games a lot, how about:
Commander/Grunt
For someone more cultured, how about:
Lord/Butler
Mistress/Maid
Out of curiousity, what is the shiny aluminium object near the centre of the frame? To me, it looks like a trip-wire grenade.
Even if the people were to cut the wires as close to the patch panel as possible, wouldn't this be the corporate equivalent of the gradual degraduation of teleomeres?
Eventually, after a building had four or five companies the cables would be so short as to make it impossible to repair the wiring.
Surely it would be more cost effective to have standard connectors (RJ45's or whatever) rather than individually tied down cables?
As Charlie Brown would say: "Good grief!". The speaker system is supposed to play white-noise in order to reduce the noise in the office - not add to it.
The next logical step in this sequence of events is that employees don't even leave their cars and just have a drive-in office.
I personally,think it would have been a wise business decision to set up a campus someplace like rural Utah or Oregon. If present trends continue, it appears likely Sun will eventually move operations to India or China.
Sun do have a campus in Colorado
I seem to remember at one point a lot of the "high tech" jobs were in fact just in final assembly.
That was true. Many of the semi-conductor companies moved their manufacturing plants abroad due to the bad reputation that the chip fabrication plants had gained. This also matched the goal of bringing employment to the unemployed manufacturing workers in the area. But with the competition from India for these jobs, the planners are being forced to look higher in the food chain, the R&D positions.
Scotland also does have a software engineering industry (oil industry in Aberdeen, financial in Edinburgh, some Arts in Glasgow and Dundee). Edinburgh has a small non-financial software industry. But the problem (with Edinburgh at least) is that companies can't match US salaries even though house prices in areas with good schools match Bay Area prices. I used to work for a network software company in Edinburgh. There was a constant churn of senior engineers who kept leaving for the US. The management in this company got so fed up, that in the end they decided to only recruit senior staff from outside the company. Eventually the company was bought out by the Shiva Corporation, which in turn was bought out by Intel.
Even now, the top salaries for a senior software engineer in Scotland is around 30K pounds (45K US dollars), while an entry-level graduate salary is 20K (35K US dollars). A house in Edinburgh is around 250K pounds (350K dollars). Even an one bedroom modern apartment costs around 120K pounds (180K dollars). Old fashioned victorian apartments with large bedrooms are even more desirable (250K pounds), especially by the buy-to-rent-out-to-student market). Housing is cheaper in the space between Edinburgh and Glasgow, but employees need a car to get around. This is a major disadvantage for graduates who prefer to live in urban areas where public transport is available. So a company could either be located in Silicon Glen, and find it difficult to recruit graduates, or be located in Edinburgh and find it difficult to keep senior staff.
Other problems are that many British companies don't offer their employees the choice of a technical career path, pension schemes are owned by the companies (there's no real 401K plan in the UK), and that many graduates are only attracted to study for a Computer Science degree in order to work in London's financial industry.
According to one of the articles:
They also plan to introduce multicolour fluorescent pet fish, including red, purple and blue.
It would be interesting to see where the gene is being added. If it were in the right place (skin development) then you could have stripy glow-in-the-dark fish.
Here's a theory... Some evidence suggests that there's a link between global climate (ocean temperatures) and solar sunspot activity. This is known to affect floods and thus crop production. If you've got a population busy harvesting crops, then they're less likely to be motivated to start wars. Unemployment and poverty have been the major factors involved in starting wars.
Didn't Eric Von Daniken propose something similar in his book "Chariots of the Gods"?
I wouldn't want to get into a discussion on whether UFO's exist or whether our ancestors had access to Stargate type mining equipment, but after reading this book, I always wondered whether the aircraft he proposed would actually be aerodynamic or not (hemisphere on top of a inverted cone with four propellors at 90 degrees apart. Each propellor system was actually mounted on top of a wheel with a couple of robot arms at each side. This was supposed to be fueled by a nuclear powered pebble reactor (thus the robot arms).
The Register has another couple of articles that have recently been published: SCO is prepared to stump Novell's SuSE deal
SCO admits: Linux Jihad is destroying our business
You could probably get equally good results with plain hill-climbing. Turn on all the optimizations. Then turn them off one at a time and see if things get better. Repeat until no improvement is observed.
It is known that some optimisations can disable others. For example, "merge frequently called functions with parent" will penalise "store frequently used variables in registers" or "give priority to inner-most loop variables in registers". You could certainly build on the research in this article. What are the best types of optimisations for different types of algorithm (B-tree traversal, matrix-vector mathematics, text-editing). Does compiling different modules of an application provide improved performance over compiling all modules with the same set of flags?
You're right ... I forgot about that. Been awhile since I went down those tunnels.