That's sound a great title for the next Star Trek movie. A convicted spammer gets sent to a penitentiary splant for spamming, and plots his revenge by using the subspace network to frame Reicher, who then has to prove his innocence by catching the spammer.
I really like using SCCS on UNIX systems, but when things get to the point where deductions are being made from the quarterly bonuses based on the number of lines modified, then it's time to go elsewhere.
SourceSafe on Windows wasn't too bad either. Shame it doesn't come free with Visual Studio. Instead we're using the tried and tested method of making incremental and full back-up copies on CD-ROM and magnetic tape.
Everytime I see an early 80s advertisement, I just want to laugh at the naivete. Is this presentism, or have modern ads really become that much more compelling?
I think modern adverts are much more serious; Back in the 80's everything was much more laid back and relaxed. I've got a collection of old Byte magazines from this time; For those adverts in color, the advertisers usually took the companies name literally (Eg. Smoke Signal Systems would have a company meeting with everyone looking as if they were having an 1850's fancy dress party). If that didn't work, then a beautiful woman in cocktail party dress was an alternative. Alternatively, using D&D characters (wizards, trolls) wouldn't be too bad either.
In the early days of the IBM PC and PC clones (1986), Microsoft supplied MS-BASIC which came free with MS-DOS.
This was at the same time as Borland came out with Turbo Pascal, so there really wasn't any incentive to learn MS-BASIC. Especially as computers were beginning to be networked to UNIX servers.
Re:Self Healing Minefield
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 1
I certainly agree with the following comments about the use of mines (and all other violent methods of solving political/territorial disputes).
I really believe that this technology (remotely-controlled platforms that can move into pre-programmed patterns) could have many more life-saving applications. Add lights and you could create emergency runways.
Self Healing Minefield
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
All you have to do now is replace these cones with mines, add some pattern recognising AI, and you have the Self Healing Minefield.
By just clicking on the link below, and entering your credit card details in the form provided, you too can get instant legal protection from a CAN-SPAM lawsuit. This is a one time only offer.
Click [here] if you do not wish to hear from any of our exclusive offers in the future.
I've always wondered why no-one has built a space station around a telecope/the Hubble telescope There would be justification for keeping the space station manned, and you'd have on-site technical support for the telescope.
Many watches DO do something different when you hold a button down - they enter a "set" mode (to input the starting position of a countdown timer, or to set the time). I suppose Casio's Databank watches do too.
A Casio data-bank Illuminator watch has the following four buttons on the sides. These have the following functionality:
In normal display mode:
Top-left button - press and hold-down to set mode
Bottom-left button - press to change mode
Bottom right - hold-down for long-time to clear recording
Top-right - press for backlight
In data-bank mode:
Top-left button - Enter and exit databank edit mode.
Bottom-right button - Exit databank edit mode.
Top-right button - Pressed and released quickly - changes current edit character to the preceding character. Pressed and held down, cycles through preceeding characters rapidly.
Bottom-right button - Pressed and released quickly - changes current edit character to the succeeding character. Pressed and held down, cycles through succeeding characters rapidly.
In set-current-time mode, both the top-right and bottom-right buttons have the same behavior as in edit-databank mode.
So Casio databank watches actively use the amount of time that a button is held down to determine the function of that button.
Just about every time-measuring device (cooker, alarm-clock, pedometer) makes uses of this functionality for setting the time.
I have always though moores law to be crap, I mean its just some marketing scan to force us to upgrade slowly...
I think it remains in use, because it keeps everyone (semiconductor fab plants, manufacturers, board designers) going at the same speed. If anyone falls behind current technology they make al oss. If they invest a considerable amount of money to develop a component that is over-engineered and can't work with anything else, they make a loss.
Look at the evolution of desktop/workstations. In order to support a windowed environment, you need a high-performance CPU (window overlap tests), high-speed bus, an accelerated high-resolution graphics card (rendering), and a decent monitor (small dot pitch, high refresh rate). None of these would be of much use until all of the others were in existance.
I always use reading slashdor or viewing a recording of one my favorite programs as a "reward" for completing some boring piece of homework/coursework.
In the UK, the telephone mobile operator "Orange" has a bright orange blimp with.. you guessed it, the word "ORANGE" on the side. Usually, it can be seen floating around major organised events. On one occasion this meant it was orbiting past our house. Looking out of the window, it would be there, look again, and it was gone, then it was back, then it was gone, then it was back, then it was gone. If there was anything that wanted to be a floating target, that was it.
I used to read SF stories from the 50's - we used to go to down to the second-hand bookstores/jumble-sales and buy up stacks of books real cheap. If I had the time, I'd build an online website listing these stories, characters and plots so they wouldn't be forgotten. Also because, I'm trying to track down a few stories I remember reading at high school.
One of the best applications for this chip is a programmable Graphics card.
Back in the early 1990's Texas Instrument introduced the TMS34082, which was a vector coprocessor for the TMS34020 2D graphics processor (A 60 MhZ GPU). One of the features of this coprocessor was that it allowed users to add create their own instructions using the existing set of instructions.
With a bit of custom reprogramming, such a card (
I used a Hercules Graphics Station Card) could support double-buffered 24-bit framebuffers with 4-bit overlay and software Z-buffer.
At this time Windows 3.1 only supported 16-bit framebuffers and Intel CPU's were running at 25 Mhz. If TI had upgrading the clock rate at the same rate as Intel CPU's, it would be clocking out at around 8 GHz today.
The interface software even came with a flight simulator demo which used Quake style BSP tree's (bounding spheres/planes), with all the scene updating/rendering being performed by the graphics processor. The only use for the 80x86 CPU was as an input processor.
Re:Takes me back a bit
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I remember that "expose'" where they made D&D out to be some big satanic training session because (gasp!) there were demons and devils listed in the Field Folio. And then some shooter someplace had a DMG in his backpack or something like that...
And some student would decide to top themselves, because they'd lost their best D&D character. At least that became the plot of one of the detective series that my parents watched.
Of course these days, students top themselves for no reason at all by making themselves sick from binge drinking.
Back when I were little, some creative artistic design student designed to create a sonic sculpture in our local park. Essentially, this consisted of a large metal pole with a number of loudspeakers/air-horns attached. Each of these was activated a large jump-switch hidden by green canvas designed to blend in with the rest of the park. To "explore" this system, kids just had to run around and jump onto these switches. Needless to say this wasn't popular with the neighboring residents.
I can quite believe that. Even in a small city (3 miles radius) there are around 1500 streets. For London (around 20 miles radius), there are over 40000 streets, of which a good many are one streets. This doesn't include all the points on each path (hotels, train stations, offices) and the timing patterns of each set of traffic lights. A taxi driver exam requires that the driver demonstrate that he knows the most efficient routes between 200 pairs of unique destinations.
This happened in our first computer labs. They were actually converted chemistry rooms - everything was removed except the slatted glass windows which meant one side of the room was colder than the other. In the beginning, the machines were identical (monitors, keyboards, base-units.
From time to time the technicians would swap machines around, and nobody really noticed. Users really preferred to sit at the front of the labs next to the door so they could reach the printers quickly. As a consequence the bad keyboards (sticky keys), used to get bubble sorted to the back of the lab. These were eventually replaced with the quietkey keyboards.
The most popular machines were those that were closest to the radiators, at the front of the room and quietkey keyboards. The most unpopular machines were those that were closest to the windows and/or had bad keyboards.
I once attended an interview in Oxford. The Taxi driver that took me back to the train station acutally worked in the computer support department, but became a Taxi driver after finding the job too stressful (days of stringing cables all across campus and having frantic students constantly calling for help).
At the moment, fitness clubs are one of the biggest growth markets in the UK, especially the multi-purpose centres (swimming-pool/jacuzzi,weights, cardio-vascular equipment, tanning-rooms, restaurant/bar,beauty-salon. Unlike the USA or Canada, we don't have a fitness club in every subdivision/suburb, yet alone any open 24-hours. The only limitation to growth is the lack of space. Membership of such clubs is typically 60 pounds/month. There was such a shortage of trainers, that many clubs were offering to train staff themselves, rather than require a sports degree.
Consider yourself lucky that you are employed and that you are in a creative position, which many people could only dream about.
Just about any IT job is going to have some stress; contractors worry about finding the next contract, project managers worry about meeting deadlines and retaining their staff, Software engineers worry about the company staying afloat, keep their skills up to date and whether or not they're going to be bumped out of the way to make for one of the directors friends.
Slashdot Mirror
That's sound a great title for the next Star Trek movie. A convicted spammer gets sent to a penitentiary splant for spamming, and plots his revenge by using the subspace network to frame Reicher, who then has to prove his innocence by catching the spammer.
I really like using SCCS on UNIX systems, but when things get to the point where deductions are being made from the quarterly bonuses based on the number of lines modified, then it's time to go elsewhere.
SourceSafe on Windows wasn't too bad either. Shame it doesn't come free with Visual Studio. Instead we're using the tried and tested method of making incremental and full back-up copies on CD-ROM and magnetic tape.
You insensitive clod! I have my hair cut like that and wear a brown suit!
Everytime I see an early 80s advertisement, I just want to laugh at the naivete. Is this presentism, or have modern ads really become that much more compelling?
I think modern adverts are much more serious; Back in the 80's everything was much more laid back and relaxed. I've got a collection of old Byte magazines from this time; For those adverts in color, the advertisers usually took the companies name literally (Eg. Smoke Signal Systems would have a company meeting with everyone looking as if they were having an 1850's fancy dress party). If that didn't work, then a beautiful woman in cocktail party dress was an alternative. Alternatively, using D&D characters (wizards, trolls) wouldn't be too bad either.
A good retro web page is TheOldComputer.Com
In the early days of the IBM PC and PC clones (1986), Microsoft supplied MS-BASIC which came free with MS-DOS.
This was at the same time as Borland came out with Turbo Pascal, so there really wasn't any incentive to learn MS-BASIC. Especially as computers were beginning to be networked to UNIX servers.
I like the way many users have visualised the current state of affairs:
Tactical Map
SCO's current position
Relationship with IBM
I certainly agree with the following comments about the use of mines (and all other violent methods of solving political/territorial disputes).
I really believe that this technology (remotely-controlled platforms that can move into pre-programmed patterns) could have many more life-saving applications. Add lights and you could create emergency runways.
All you have to do now is replace these cones with mines, add some pattern recognising AI, and you have the Self Healing Minefield.
By just clicking on the link below, and entering your credit card details in the form provided, you too can get instant legal protection from a CAN-SPAM lawsuit. This is a one time only offer.
Click [here] if you do not wish to hear from any of our exclusive offers in the future.
I've always wondered why no-one has built a space station around a telecope/the Hubble telescope There would be justification for keeping the space station manned, and you'd have on-site technical support for the telescope.
Many watches DO do something different when you hold a button down - they enter a "set" mode (to input the starting position of a countdown timer, or to set the time). I suppose Casio's Databank watches do too.
A Casio data-bank Illuminator watch has the following four buttons on the sides. These have the following functionality:
In normal display mode:
Top-left button - press and hold-down to set mode
Bottom-left button - press to change mode
Bottom right - hold-down for long-time to clear recording
Top-right - press for backlight
In data-bank mode:
Top-left button - Enter and exit databank edit mode.
Bottom-right button - Exit databank edit mode.
Top-right button - Pressed and released quickly - changes current edit character to the preceding character. Pressed and held down, cycles through preceeding characters rapidly.
Bottom-right button - Pressed and released quickly - changes current edit character to the succeeding character. Pressed and held down, cycles through succeeding characters rapidly.
In set-current-time mode, both the top-right and bottom-right buttons have the same behavior as in edit-databank mode.
So Casio databank watches actively use the amount of time that a button is held down to determine the function of that button.
Just about every time-measuring device (cooker, alarm-clock, pedometer) makes uses of this functionality for setting the time.
I have always though moores law to be crap, I mean its just some marketing scan to force us to upgrade slowly...
I think it remains in use, because it keeps everyone (semiconductor fab plants, manufacturers, board designers) going at the same speed. If anyone falls behind current technology they make al oss. If they invest a considerable amount of money to develop a component that is over-engineered and can't work with anything else, they make a loss.
Look at the evolution of desktop/workstations. In order to support a windowed environment, you need a high-performance CPU (window overlap tests), high-speed bus, an accelerated high-resolution graphics card (rendering), and a decent monitor (small dot pitch, high refresh rate). None of these would be of much use until all of the others were in existance.
I always use reading slashdor or viewing a recording of one my favorite programs as a "reward" for completing some boring piece of homework/coursework.
In the UK, the telephone mobile operator "Orange" has a bright orange blimp with .. you guessed it, the word "ORANGE" on the side. Usually, it can be seen floating around major organised events. On one occasion this meant it was orbiting past our house. Looking out of the window, it would be there, look again, and it was gone, then it was back, then it was gone, then it was back, then it was gone. If there was anything that wanted to be a floating target, that was it.
I used to read SF stories from the 50's - we used to go to down to the second-hand bookstores/jumble-sales and buy up stacks of books real cheap. If I had the time, I'd build an online website listing these stories, characters and plots so they wouldn't be forgotten. Also because, I'm trying to track down a few stories I remember reading at high school.
One of the best applications for this chip is a programmable Graphics card.
Back in the early 1990's Texas Instrument introduced the TMS34082, which was a vector coprocessor for the TMS34020 2D graphics processor (A 60 MhZ GPU). One of the features of this coprocessor was that it allowed users to add create their own instructions using the existing set of instructions.
With a bit of custom reprogramming, such a card ( I used a Hercules Graphics Station Card) could support double-buffered 24-bit framebuffers with 4-bit overlay and software Z-buffer. At this time Windows 3.1 only supported 16-bit framebuffers and Intel CPU's were running at 25 Mhz. If TI had upgrading the clock rate at the same rate as Intel CPU's, it would be clocking out at around 8 GHz today.
The interface software even came with a flight simulator demo which used Quake style BSP tree's (bounding spheres/planes), with all the scene updating/rendering being performed by the graphics processor. The only use for the 80x86 CPU was as an input processor.
I remember that "expose'" where they made D&D out to be some big satanic training session because (gasp!) there were demons and devils listed in the Field Folio. And then some shooter someplace had a DMG in his backpack or something like that...
And some student would decide to top themselves, because they'd lost their best D&D character. At least that became the plot of one of the detective series that my parents watched.
Of course these days, students top themselves for no reason at all by making themselves sick from binge drinking.
Back when I were little, some creative artistic design student designed to create a sonic sculpture in our local park. Essentially, this consisted of a large metal pole with a number of loudspeakers/air-horns attached. Each of these was activated a large jump-switch hidden by green canvas designed to blend in with the rest of the park. To "explore" this system, kids just had to run around and jump onto these switches. Needless to say this wasn't popular with the neighboring residents.
You obviously need a mouse wookie
I can quite believe that. Even in a small city (3 miles radius) there are around 1500 streets. For London (around 20 miles radius), there are over 40000 streets, of which a good many are one streets. This doesn't include all the points on each path (hotels, train stations, offices) and the timing patterns of each set of traffic lights. A taxi driver exam requires that the driver demonstrate that he knows the most efficient routes between 200 pairs of unique destinations.
This happened in our first computer labs. They were actually converted chemistry rooms - everything was removed except the slatted glass windows which meant one side of the room was colder than the other. In the beginning, the machines were identical (monitors, keyboards, base-units.
From time to time the technicians would swap machines around, and nobody really noticed. Users really preferred to sit at the front of the labs next to the door so they could reach the printers quickly. As a consequence the bad keyboards (sticky keys), used to get bubble sorted to the back of the lab. These were eventually replaced with the quietkey keyboards.
The most popular machines were those that were closest to the radiators, at the front of the room and quietkey keyboards. The most unpopular machines were those that were closest to the windows and/or had bad keyboards.
I once attended an interview in Oxford. The Taxi driver that took me back to the train station acutally worked in the computer support department, but became a Taxi driver after finding the job too stressful (days of stringing cables all across campus and having frantic students constantly calling for help).
At the moment, fitness clubs are one of the biggest growth markets in the UK, especially the multi-purpose centres (swimming-pool/jacuzzi,weights, cardio-vascular equipment, tanning-rooms, restaurant/bar,beauty-salon. Unlike the USA or Canada, we don't have a fitness club in every subdivision/suburb, yet alone any open 24-hours. The only limitation to growth is the lack of space. Membership of such clubs is typically 60 pounds/month. There was such a shortage of trainers, that many clubs were offering to train staff themselves, rather than require a sports degree.
You never had an ice-cream van in your neighborhood?
Just my perspective, but:
Consider yourself lucky that you are employed and that you are in a creative position, which many people could only dream about.
Just about any IT job is going to have some stress; contractors worry about finding the next contract, project managers worry about meeting deadlines and retaining their staff, Software engineers worry about the company staying afloat, keep their skills up to date and whether or not they're going to be bumped out of the way to make for one of the directors friends.