Yeah, my earliest memories are from about the age of two.
Strangely my internal clock always told me these early events happened when I was "about four". A couple of Thanksgivings ago I was relating some of my earlier memories to my father (my mother passed away in 1983, I'm 48 myself, my father 80), more or less amazing him at some of the events which he remembered, too.
And he remembered my age for some of these events a lot more accurately than me. "Oh, that was in 1956, you were only two!" etc etc.
And they weren't common things, and some had internal clues that should've clued me in that I was younger than four at the time. Also you'd think that the fact that I learned to read at age four would've made me realized that my memories from before I learned to read had to have happened at an age younger than four!
But I think learning to read was such a significant event that internally I pegged "being conscious, aware, and remembering" to the time when I learned that skill rather than when earlier events actually happened.
A major motivation was to improve gas mileage. By allowing for higher compression, more efficient engines gas mileage was improved by something like 30%.
Today gas is so cheap and our standard of living so high that most people aren't terribly concerned about the amount of money they spend on gasoline.
This wasn't true in the early days of the automobile and the significant boost in mileage and the corresponding lowering of the cost of operating a car was considered important. .
I'm also a Portland DSL customer and was able to keep Pacifier.com as my ISP. They provide service similar to what is described for spiretech. In my case I've got a static IP and, yes, a DNS name mapped to it so I can send out something less confusing to non-techies than an IP address.
It's been very reliable for me, even though my line barely qualified. I have to recycle my Cisco 675 occasionally in winter and twice (in three years) the techies in Colorado had to recycle the card down in the CO when I lost connectivity. There's an 800 number available that's answered by knowledgable people 24/7 and service has been excellent (again, I've only had to call twice in three years, so my experience is hardly a statistically valid dataset, but I don't mind that!)
On the other hand I've had friends who've had horrible experiences with PacBell's DSL service and another who gave up on Atlantic Bell after they missed over a dozen installation appointments !
So it's not technology that's the issue, IMO, it's the companies behind the technology.
Ironically everything about QWest *other* than their DSL service and tech support pretty much sucks...
If cable modems require no new infrastructure, then why did AT&T spend a bundle wiring my city with fiber two years ago?
Strictly speaking you're right, but in practice the infrastructure's overall bandwidth needs to be boosted greatly if your marketing efforts are successful in selling a large percentage of your customers on your broadband service.
Thus the huge investment in upgrading the bandwidth in my city. The feeds to individual houses are still copper coax but fiber's been spidered all over the city to fill those copper coax pipes.
QWest also invested fairly heavily in upgrading the quality of lines in my part of Portland, OR. But they're not really pushing DSL as agressively as before because my city lost its fight to force the cable companies to allow users to choose their own ISPs. Until the suit was one by the cable companies QWest faced no competition from the cable companies and pushed DSL hard to take advantage of the window.
Traditionally, controlled hunts have targetted bucks, which does little to control population (hint: deer are polygamous).
Biologists have argued for doe hunts for years, which many hunters resist. Fortunately biologists in some parts of the country, at least, have in recent years becoming somewhat successful in educating the hunting public about the need to reduce the number of does in the population in order to reduce the number of births and therefore the population. This can do a lot to increase the health of individual deer in areas where there are far too many of them.
"eco-wanks" for the most part aren't against hunting. Animal rights advocates are. Just as they're against removing exotic fauna that decimate native flora in National Parks (mountain goats in Olympic NP comes to mind) and various other sane acts supported by serious conservationists...
That article's very much out of date, as is stated in an addendum at the top and as is made clear in the later posts in the discussion of the piece.
I'm the OpenACS project manager so want to make sure that people understand that the piece (and much of the commentary) was accurate when written, but that it was written many moons ago. However, nowadays MySQL has the InnoBase backend which provides full transaction support, and has seen other major improvements.
Our project only supports Oracle and PostgreSQL, and I still feel MySQL is lacking in many areas, but it has improved greatly in the last couple of years.
Well, the earlier 18-bit models weren't marketed as mini-computers. Tney were marketed as Personal Computers, though:) For lab scientists...
The PDP-1 was pretty huge and was the first general purpose computer sold in the US for under $100,000 (back when that figure was real money!). The 12-bit PDP-5 was the first sold under $40K and the PDP-8 the first under $20K.
The PDP-6 was older than the PDP-8 and was by no means a minicomputer, being a 36-bit predecessor to the PDP-10!
Anyway... the term minicomputer came into common usage because of the PDP-8. It was small enough to sit on a desktop and didn't need a rack in its basic configuration. The earlier models you mention, i.e. the 18-bit family PDP-1/4/7/9/15 and the PDP-8's immediate predecessor the PDP-5 were all required standard 19-inch racks.
The table top configuration was the distinction the PDP-8 brought to the market, though nearly all were sold in racks because you couldn't really expand the desktop version.
And the 68000 was simply a beefed-up rip-off of the PDP-11, extended to 32-bit addressing.
It didn't include the PC as a general purpose register because that was one of the design innovations in the PDP-11 that Gordon Bell/DEC patented...
Re:Didn't these things have selectable word sizes?
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Bringing Back the PDP8
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Speaking of front panels... the PDP-8's front panel was made of glass and the design was silk-screened on it by hand. The cabinet was a basic rack with plywood siding... though they originally offered a transparent plastic case, too - cool case mod for the mid-1960s, eh?:)
I still have the glass front panel from the PDP-8 that I worked on back in high school... I snatched it when it was scrapped. We owned a five-cabinet beauty, 12KW core, four DECtapes, a high-speed paper tape reader, an original Centronics dot-matrix 120 CPS printer, an RF08 head-per-track system disk (full cabinet of its own) and the first Tektronix storage-tube monitor with joystick that was four feet long and weighed a lot...
The PDP-8/S was the serial version of the PDP-8, and the model I learned programming on in high school (we couldn't afford one by ourselves, it was owned by a consortium and travelled between about a half-dozen schools).
The PDP-8/S took 36 microseconds to add two words. When I first got to play with a real, parallel PDP-8 (3 microsecond add time) I was in heaven. Man, that puppy seemed FAST!
Well, damned few people used DEC's FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-8, and it was hardly "natively a FORTRAN machine". The FORTRAN compiler was a pseudo-code compiler, and the reasons for this are easy to see if you study the PDP-8 instruction set for a few minutes.
The higher-level languages most frequently used on the PDP-8 were FOCAL and BASIC.
And the CDC 3000 series had 24 bits (4 6-bit characters) and the 6000 series had 60 (10 6-bit characters). CDC peripherals were sixbit, not 7-bit Ascii + parity.
Of course the PDP-8 came with a TTY 33 or KSR 35??? whatever the hell the heavier-duty TWX teletype machine was called. These were 8-bit.
TWX machines used 7-bit encoding with a parity bit that later was the basis for the standard Ascii/Ansi/ISO character sets we're all familiar with. I don't know if the standard was approved before or after Western Union deployed TWX machines (replacing the earlier 5-bit encoded Telex machines I believe? I'm not quite old enough to know for sure, TWX was in by the time I was in high school).
Anyway these 7-bit + parity teletype machines originally made for use on the TWX network were pretty ideal for a low-cost computer made by what at the time was a very small computer company. Rather than develop their own terminals ala IBM or CDC, Digital just bought TTY 33s as the console.
Despite the use of 7-bit Ascii using teletypes machines as consoles on the PDP-8 (and the 18-bit and 36 bit families as well), it was common to just use sixbit for many things. For instance OS/8 used six bit characters for file names - upper case only, six character file names and a two-character extension. But editors and many other applications allowed upper and lower case characters and packed 3 8 bit characters into 2 12-bit words...
The PDP-8 never ran anything remotely resembling Unix. The very first version of Unix ran on the PDP-1/7/9/15 18-bit family (a PDP-7 IIRC). The architecture of this family was similar in many respects to the PDP-8 and indeed preceeded the PDP-5/8 family. You can think of the PDP-8 as being scaled down from the earlier family's 18 bits to 12 bits. To make it cheaper, of course.
The original Unix-written-in-C ran on the PDP-11 (the PDP 1/7/9/15 family version was written in assembly, IIRC). The first BSD version of Unix was written for the VAX family...
Right, OS/8 gave you full control over the machine so you could write multi-user applications.
Re:I loved the PDP-8 but I'm not convinced...
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Bringing Back the PDP8
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If C is "high-level assembly language," then the PDP-11 is "a computer that directly implements C."
Actually it's fair to say that C was developed as a "high level assembly language" for the PDP-11, in other words you've got it slightly backwards. The postfix "++" and prefix "--" operators correspond to the PDP-11's autoindexing mode and when applied to a dereferenced pointer map directly to "(Rn)++" (once the pointer's been moved to a register.
I doubt C would have these constructs if the PDP-11 didn't provide the corresponding register mode.
As far as the PDP-8 being perhaps the most core-efficient design ever, speaking as someone who once developed system software for the PDP-8 and afterwards compilers for the PDP-11, yes, I'd say you're right.
As long as you could fit program and data into 4096 12 bits words, that is. If your program could fit into 4096 12 bit words accessing data in the remaining 28KW was relatively easy due to the semantics of the CDF instruction. But once your code itself outgrew the first 4096 words things got bad in a hurry, because cross-bank subroutine calls using the CIF instruction were fairly expensive.
Gordon Bell designed both the PDP-8 and the PDP-11, and they were designed with different goals in mind. The PDP-8 was designed to be programmed in assembly code - the page and memory bank addressing structure made the development of efficient compilers impossible (it's not an accident that no system programming language like C was never implemented for the PDP-8 architecture).
The PDP-11, on the other hand, was the first minicomputer designed with the compiler writer in mind. The instruction set was very easy to generate code for, much easier than for many mainframe machines that in those days still often had a single accumulator and some auxillary special-purpose registers. The PDP-11's clean, general-purpose register design and (relatively) orthogonal instruction set made compiler writers like myself almost faint in anticipitory pleasure when the design was first announced.
While Gordon Bell designed the PDP-8 and PDP-11, the original engineering plans for the PDP-8 are signed by DeCastro, who did the implementation. He submitted a rival design for DEC's 16 bit minicomputer that was no where near as clean or compiler-writer-friendly as Bell's PDP-11 design.
When the PDP-11 design was chosen, DeCastro left and started Data General, and his 16-bit design became the oft-loathed Nova.
CDC's 12-bit PIC design was much inferior to the PDP-8's, IMO... the PDP-8 still serves as a great example of minimalist design in an era where each bit of the accumulator was implemented by a double-width card (each BIT, thirteen of these cards in all, 12 for the accumulator bits and one for the overflow LINK bit).
OS/8 was a single user system. I wrote a multi-user kernel that ran multiple copies of OS/8 customized to hook into device drivers supported by my kernel. It supported virtual paging using a hardware hack first suggested by Richard Lary (the author of OS/8). We ran four or five users on a 32KW 8/E with a couple of RK05 drives.
We never distributed it because paging performance without the hardware hack was very bad (every CDF instruction needed to be trapped and mapped in software) and the hardware hack was only developed for the 8/E and piggy-backed on one of the system boards destructively (i.e. once modified your 8/E wouldn't run without our hardware).
But it was used internally by the company I developed it for until about ten years ago.
Oregon and Washington have concentrated on improving service between Portland and Seattle. It's double tracked the entire distance these days with one track approved for higher speeds (the faster Amtrak train does Portland to Seattle in about 3.5 hours, compared to the 4.5 hours required by the older, slower Amtrak train).
The problem going south from Portland is that there's just a single track with sidings for much of the route, which means Amtrak trains routinely find themselves stuck behind freight trains. On-time performance on the route south of Portland is abysmal for this reason.
We may find money and motivation to improve service from Portland to our state capital at Salem (about 45 miles south) but there's not much hope of significant improvements south to the California border any time soon. It would be extremely expensive and the potential traffic is far, far lower than that on the Portland to Seattle route (the faster trains on this route are frequently full).
Of course it's also true that Grand Goulee has no fish passage provsions and diminished salmon habitat in the area drained by the Columbia River by roughly 50%...
Given the fact that potential positive effects have been thought about and publicized makes me certain you're trolling.
The big issue is one of uncertainty in terms of changes in local weather patterns. The breadbasket of North America might become the cactus center of the world - or it might not.
It is the uncertain outcome of the experiment we're running on the planet that leads many to suggest that we proceed as cautiously as possible... by slowing down the pace as much as is practical.
You know... I spend a portion of each fall working out of a small backpacking tent (no cabin) on top of a mountain in cougar habitat (crew spot them every few years, we see track and scat in our worksites at least once a year).
And I like it.
No, of course I don't want to live the rest of my life in a tent, I'd be deprived of the opportunity of watching Slashdot posters demostrate their ignorance of basic principles of ecology and biology if I did.
But don't knock someone for saying that they're a bit jealous of those pioneers who populated the West.
The honest answer is simple... you don't get to define the word "natural" according to your whims. When I write for publication, editors expect me to use words as defined in accepted dictionaries. And dictionaries are nothing more than the product of people paid to figure out the consensus opinion as to the meaning of various words.
If you would rather say "unmolested by humans" than "natural", people will understand you just fine.
If you choose to use the word "natural" in its accepted dictionary sense, people will also understand you just fine.
But to claim that we must reject evolutionary theory if we're to use the word "natural" in its dictionary sense is going a bit far...
They're identifying low-hanging fruit. Note that they state that the 17% of the land in question can be conserved with minimum impact on existing human uses or structures.
Now let's say that they spend the money (that could be spent conserving that 17% mentioned above) to accurately map a bunch of roads. This would make their maps and conclusions more accurate.
But would it help them in their goal of planning and prioritizing their conservation efforts?
The reality is that road use does imply human use and attempts to conserve in road corridors are far more likely to impact existing human uses or structures than attempts to conserve currently unused snippets of habitat.
For their purposes the accuracy is adequate. They make caveat after caveat about the granularity of the data, the inadequacy of the data, etc. They're practically shouting "don't use this data or our maps if you expect a great deal of accuracy" but also "this is good enough for our needs, i.e. planning and prioritization".
That's all they claim.
Now the CNN article doesn't do a particularly good job of summarizing this but it's not the fault of the folks who wrote the paper...
Who else cares more about land and conservation and capping pollution than an owner of the property?
How many public parks and public nature areas do you see needing a continuous clean up effort to keep them free of litter?
Uhhh... I take it you've never been on a ranch with 100 years of broken farm machinery occupying an acre or so of land near the barns and storage sheds, eh?
Myth number one of the anti-conservation movement: private land is better cared for from a a conservation perspective than our National Forests, Parks, or rangeland.
Forgotten fact number one: the Taylor Act was passed at the request of ranchers themselves (if you don't know what it is or why it's important, look it up).
So your "feral horses" graze on it.... what negative effect does that have on the land?
Actually, much less than the grazing of cattle, though they compete with cattle and ranchers are among those who'd like to see them eliminated from public land.
However... they also compete with pronghorn. They do modify the plant ecology of those areas in which they graze as their graze patterns, preferred veg, etc differs from native grazers such as pronghorn.
Note that the report doesn't say "human impact is bad". What the report says is that "we can get more bang for our conservation buck by identifying those lands which are least impacted by humans and concentrating our efforts there." It's not saying "grazing by feral horses or cows is intrinsically bad." It's saying "it's easier to attain conservation goals by concentrating on ungrazed rather than grazed habitat." Except it says it more broadly, of course, they're looking at human impact as a whole, not just narrowly at particular types of impact.
So, for instance, if your goal is to conserve native sage-steppe habitat you're better off focusing on places like the (now protected) Hanford Reach. This was minimally impacted for the past several decades due to all stock and other ag use being kicked off in favor of our nuclear weapons program. The nuke infrastructure only occupied a very small area of the reserve due to safety concerns.
A dollar spent there will be better used than many dollars spent on trying to fix up some grazed-to-hell patch of sage/greasewood that's lost all of its native bunchgrasses.
Nothing if that was the real point of the study but its not and you know it!
No, I don't know that it isn't. In fact I have no reason to suspect they're being dishonest. I've worked in conservation organizations for about twenty years, and the study makes perfect sense when measured against their stated reason for making it: prioritization of effort.
This is typical of how conservation organizations work, whether or not you want to believe it. Conservation organizations tend to be heavy in biologists.
For instance the board I served on had the a retired head of the USFW Region One, the retired USFW refuge manager for the states of California and Nevada, and the person who managed the endangered species for the entire country under the Carter Administration.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, my earliest memories are from about the age of two.
Strangely my internal clock always told me these early events happened when I was "about four". A couple of Thanksgivings ago I was relating some of my earlier memories to my father (my mother passed away in 1983, I'm 48 myself, my father 80), more or less amazing him at some of the events which he remembered, too.
And he remembered my age for some of these events a lot more accurately than me. "Oh, that was in 1956, you were only two!" etc etc.
And they weren't common things, and some had internal clues that should've clued me in that I was younger than four at the time. Also you'd think that the fact that I learned to read at age four would've made me realized that my memories from before I learned to read had to have happened at an age younger than four!
But I think learning to read was such a significant event that internally I pegged "being conscious, aware, and remembering" to the time when I learned that skill rather than when earlier events actually happened.
A major motivation was to improve gas mileage. By allowing for higher compression, more efficient engines gas mileage was improved by something like 30%.
Today gas is so cheap and our standard of living so high that most people aren't terribly concerned about the amount of money they spend on gasoline.
This wasn't true in the early days of the automobile and the significant boost in mileage and the corresponding lowering of the cost of operating a car was considered important.
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I'm also a Portland DSL customer and was able to keep Pacifier.com as my ISP. They provide service similar to what is described for spiretech. In my case I've got a static IP and, yes, a DNS name mapped to it so I can send out something less confusing to non-techies than an IP address.
...
It's been very reliable for me, even though my line barely qualified. I have to recycle my Cisco 675 occasionally in winter and twice (in three years) the techies in Colorado had to recycle the card down in the CO when I lost connectivity. There's an 800 number available that's answered by knowledgable people 24/7 and service has been excellent (again, I've only had to call twice in three years, so my experience is hardly a statistically valid dataset, but I don't mind that!)
On the other hand I've had friends who've had horrible experiences with PacBell's DSL service and another who gave up on Atlantic Bell after they missed over a dozen installation appointments !
So it's not technology that's the issue, IMO, it's the companies behind the technology.
Ironically everything about QWest *other* than their DSL service and tech support pretty much sucks
If cable modems require no new infrastructure, then why did AT&T spend a bundle wiring my city with fiber two years ago?
Strictly speaking you're right, but in practice the infrastructure's overall bandwidth needs to be boosted greatly if your marketing efforts are successful in selling a large percentage of your customers on your broadband service.
Thus the huge investment in upgrading the bandwidth in my city. The feeds to individual houses are still copper coax but fiber's been spidered all over the city to fill those copper coax pipes.
QWest also invested fairly heavily in upgrading the quality of lines in my part of Portland, OR. But they're not really pushing DSL as agressively as before because my city lost its fight to force the cable companies to allow users to choose their own ISPs. Until the suit was one by the cable companies QWest faced no competition from the cable companies and pushed DSL hard to take advantage of the window.
Traditionally, controlled hunts have targetted bucks, which does little to control population (hint: deer are polygamous).
Biologists have argued for doe hunts for years, which many hunters resist. Fortunately biologists in some parts of the country, at least, have in recent years becoming somewhat successful in educating the hunting public about the need to reduce the number of does in the population in order to reduce the number of births and therefore the population. This can do a lot to increase the health of individual deer in areas where there are far too many of them.
"eco-wanks" for the most part aren't against hunting. Animal rights advocates are. Just as they're against removing exotic fauna that decimate native flora in National Parks (mountain goats in Olympic NP comes to mind) and various other sane acts supported by serious conservationists ...
That article's very much out of date, as is stated in an addendum at the top and as is made clear in the later posts in the discussion of the piece.
...
I'm the OpenACS project manager so want to make sure that people understand that the piece (and much of the commentary) was accurate when written, but that it was written many moons ago. However, nowadays MySQL has the InnoBase backend which provides full transaction support, and has seen other major improvements.
Our project only supports Oracle and PostgreSQL, and I still feel MySQL is lacking in many areas, but it has improved greatly in the last couple of years.
So has PostgreSQL, of course! We love it
Well, the earlier 18-bit models weren't marketed as mini-computers. Tney were marketed as Personal Computers, though :) For lab scientists ...
... the term minicomputer came into common usage because of the PDP-8. It was small enough to sit on a desktop and didn't need a rack in its basic configuration. The earlier models you mention, i.e. the 18-bit family PDP-1/4/7/9/15 and the PDP-8's immediate predecessor the PDP-5 were all required standard 19-inch racks.
The PDP-1 was pretty huge and was the first general purpose computer sold in the US for under $100,000 (back when that figure was real money!). The 12-bit PDP-5 was the first sold under $40K and the PDP-8 the first under $20K.
The PDP-6 was older than the PDP-8 and was by no means a minicomputer, being a 36-bit predecessor to the PDP-10!
Anyway
The table top configuration was the distinction the PDP-8 brought to the market, though nearly all were sold in racks because you couldn't really expand the desktop version.
And the 68000 was simply a beefed-up rip-off of the PDP-11, extended to 32-bit addressing.
...
It didn't include the PC as a general purpose register because that was one of the design innovations in the PDP-11 that Gordon Bell/DEC patented
Speaking of front panels ... the PDP-8's front panel was made of glass and the design was silk-screened on it by hand. The cabinet was a basic rack with plywood siding ... though they originally offered a transparent plastic case, too - cool case mod for the mid-1960s, eh? :)
... I snatched it when it was scrapped. We owned a five-cabinet beauty, 12KW core, four DECtapes, a high-speed paper tape reader, an original Centronics dot-matrix 120 CPS printer, an RF08 head-per-track system disk (full cabinet of its own) and the first Tektronix storage-tube monitor with joystick that was four feet long and weighed a lot ...
I still have the glass front panel from the PDP-8 that I worked on back in high school
The PDP-8/S was the serial version of the PDP-8, and the model I learned programming on in high school (we couldn't afford one by ourselves, it was owned by a consortium and travelled between about a half-dozen schools).
The PDP-8/S took 36 microseconds to add two words. When I first got to play with a real, parallel PDP-8 (3 microsecond add time) I was in heaven. Man, that puppy seemed FAST!
Well, damned few people used DEC's FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-8, and it was hardly "natively a FORTRAN machine". The FORTRAN compiler was a pseudo-code compiler, and the reasons for this are easy to see if you study the PDP-8 instruction set for a few minutes.
The higher-level languages most frequently used on the PDP-8 were FOCAL and BASIC.
And the CDC 3000 series had 24 bits (4 6-bit characters) and the 6000 series had 60 (10 6-bit characters). CDC peripherals were sixbit, not 7-bit Ascii + parity.
...
Of course the PDP-8 came with a TTY 33 or KSR 35??? whatever the hell the heavier-duty TWX teletype machine was called. These were 8-bit.
TWX machines used 7-bit encoding with a parity bit that later was the basis for the standard Ascii/Ansi/ISO character sets we're all familiar with. I don't know if the standard was approved before or after Western Union deployed TWX machines (replacing the earlier 5-bit encoded Telex machines I believe? I'm not quite old enough to know for sure, TWX was in by the time I was in high school).
Anyway these 7-bit + parity teletype machines originally made for use on the TWX network were pretty ideal for a low-cost computer made by what at the time was a very small computer company. Rather than develop their own terminals ala IBM or CDC, Digital just bought TTY 33s as the console.
Despite the use of 7-bit Ascii using teletypes machines as consoles on the PDP-8 (and the 18-bit and 36 bit families as well), it was common to just use sixbit for many things. For instance OS/8 used six bit characters for file names - upper case only, six character file names and a two-character extension. But editors and many other applications allowed upper and lower case characters and packed 3 8 bit characters into 2 12-bit words
OK, you're corrected :)
...
The PDP-8 never ran anything remotely resembling Unix. The very first version of Unix ran on the PDP-1/7/9/15 18-bit family (a PDP-7 IIRC). The architecture of this family was similar in many respects to the PDP-8 and indeed preceeded the PDP-5/8 family. You can think of the PDP-8 as being scaled down from the earlier family's 18 bits to 12 bits. To make it cheaper, of course.
The original Unix-written-in-C ran on the PDP-11 (the PDP 1/7/9/15 family version was written in assembly, IIRC). The first BSD version of Unix was written for the VAX family
Right, OS/8 gave you full control over the machine so you could write multi-user applications.
If C is "high-level assembly language," then the PDP-11 is "a computer that directly implements C."
... the PDP-8 still serves as a great example of minimalist design in an era where each bit of the accumulator was implemented by a double-width card (each BIT, thirteen of these cards in all, 12 for the accumulator bits and one for the overflow LINK bit).
Actually it's fair to say that C was developed as a "high level assembly language" for the PDP-11, in other words you've got it slightly backwards. The postfix "++" and prefix "--" operators correspond to the PDP-11's autoindexing mode and when applied to a dereferenced pointer map directly to "(Rn)++" (once the pointer's been moved to a register.
I doubt C would have these constructs if the PDP-11 didn't provide the corresponding register mode.
As far as the PDP-8 being perhaps the most core-efficient design ever, speaking as someone who once developed system software for the PDP-8 and afterwards compilers for the PDP-11, yes, I'd say you're right.
As long as you could fit program and data into 4096 12 bits words, that is. If your program could fit into 4096 12 bit words accessing data in the remaining 28KW was relatively easy due to the semantics of the CDF instruction. But once your code itself outgrew the first 4096 words things got bad in a hurry, because cross-bank subroutine calls using the CIF instruction were fairly expensive.
Gordon Bell designed both the PDP-8 and the PDP-11, and they were designed with different goals in mind. The PDP-8 was designed to be programmed in assembly code - the page and memory bank addressing structure made the development of efficient compilers impossible (it's not an accident that no system programming language like C was never implemented for the PDP-8 architecture).
The PDP-11, on the other hand, was the first minicomputer designed with the compiler writer in mind. The instruction set was very easy to generate code for, much easier than for many mainframe machines that in those days still often had a single accumulator and some auxillary special-purpose registers. The PDP-11's clean, general-purpose register design and (relatively) orthogonal instruction set made compiler writers like myself almost faint in anticipitory pleasure when the design was first announced.
While Gordon Bell designed the PDP-8 and PDP-11, the original engineering plans for the PDP-8 are signed by DeCastro, who did the implementation. He submitted a rival design for DEC's 16 bit minicomputer that was no where near as clean or compiler-writer-friendly as Bell's PDP-11 design.
When the PDP-11 design was chosen, DeCastro left and started Data General, and his 16-bit design became the oft-loathed Nova.
CDC's 12-bit PIC design was much inferior to the PDP-8's, IMO
OS/8 was a single user system. I wrote a multi-user kernel that ran multiple copies of OS/8 customized to hook into device drivers supported by my kernel. It supported virtual paging using a hardware hack first suggested by Richard Lary (the author of OS/8). We ran four or five users on a 32KW 8/E with a couple of RK05 drives.
We never distributed it because paging performance without the hardware hack was very bad (every CDF instruction needed to be trapped and mapped in software) and the hardware hack was only developed for the 8/E and piggy-backed on one of the system boards destructively (i.e. once modified your 8/E wouldn't run without our hardware).
But it was used internally by the company I developed it for until about ten years ago.
Oregon and Washington have concentrated on improving service between Portland and Seattle. It's double tracked the entire distance these days with one track approved for higher speeds (the faster Amtrak train does Portland to Seattle in about 3.5 hours, compared to the 4.5 hours required by the older, slower Amtrak train).
The problem going south from Portland is that there's just a single track with sidings for much of the route, which means Amtrak trains routinely find themselves stuck behind freight trains. On-time performance on the route south of Portland is abysmal for this reason.
We may find money and motivation to improve service from Portland to our state capital at Salem (about 45 miles south) but there's not much hope of significant improvements south to the California border any time soon. It would be extremely expensive and the potential traffic is far, far lower than that on the Portland to Seattle route (the faster trains on this route are frequently full).
Of course it's also true that Grand Goulee has no fish passage provsions and diminished salmon habitat in the area drained by the Columbia River by roughly 50% ...
Just one word: tanstaafl
Given the fact that potential positive effects have been thought about and publicized makes me certain you're trolling.
... by slowing down the pace as much as is practical.
The big issue is one of uncertainty in terms of changes in local weather patterns. The breadbasket of North America might become the cactus center of the world - or it might not.
It is the uncertain outcome of the experiment we're running on the planet that leads many to suggest that we proceed as cautiously as possible
You know ... I spend a portion of each fall working out of a small backpacking tent (no cabin) on top of a mountain in cougar habitat (crew spot them every few years, we see track and scat in our worksites at least once a year).
And I like it.
No, of course I don't want to live the rest of my life in a tent, I'd be deprived of the opportunity of watching Slashdot posters demostrate their ignorance of basic principles of ecology and biology if I did.
But don't knock someone for saying that they're a bit jealous of those pioneers who populated the West.
The honest answer is simple ... you don't get to define the word "natural" according to your whims. When I write for publication, editors expect me to use words as defined in accepted dictionaries. And dictionaries are nothing more than the product of people paid to figure out the consensus opinion as to the meaning of various words.
...
If you would rather say "unmolested by humans" than "natural", people will understand you just fine.
If you choose to use the word "natural" in its accepted dictionary sense, people will also understand you just fine.
But to claim that we must reject evolutionary theory if we're to use the word "natural" in its dictionary sense is going a bit far
They're identifying low-hanging fruit. Note that they state that the 17% of the land in question can be conserved with minimum impact on existing human uses or structures.
...
Now let's say that they spend the money (that could be spent conserving that 17% mentioned above) to accurately map a bunch of roads. This would make their maps and conclusions more accurate.
But would it help them in their goal of planning and prioritizing their conservation efforts?
The reality is that road use does imply human use and attempts to conserve in road corridors are far more likely to impact existing human uses or structures than attempts to conserve currently unused snippets of habitat.
For their purposes the accuracy is adequate. They make caveat after caveat about the granularity of the data, the inadequacy of the data, etc. They're practically shouting "don't use this data or our maps if you expect a great deal of accuracy" but also "this is good enough for our needs, i.e. planning and prioritization".
That's all they claim.
Now the CNN article doesn't do a particularly good job of summarizing this but it's not the fault of the folks who wrote the paper
Uhhh
Myth number one of the anti-conservation movement: private land is better cared for from a a conservation perspective than our National Forests, Parks, or rangeland.
Forgotten fact number one: the Taylor Act was passed at the request of ranchers themselves (if you don't know what it is or why it's important, look it up).
Actually, much less than the grazing of cattle, though they compete with cattle and ranchers are among those who'd like to see them eliminated from public land.
However
Note that the report doesn't say "human impact is bad". What the report says is that "we can get more bang for our conservation buck by identifying those lands which are least impacted by humans and concentrating our efforts there." It's not saying "grazing by feral horses or cows is intrinsically bad." It's saying "it's easier to attain conservation goals by concentrating on ungrazed rather than grazed habitat." Except it says it more broadly, of course, they're looking at human impact as a whole, not just narrowly at particular types of impact.
So, for instance, if your goal is to conserve native sage-steppe habitat you're better off focusing on places like the (now protected) Hanford Reach. This was minimally impacted for the past several decades due to all stock and other ag use being kicked off in favor of our nuclear weapons program. The nuke infrastructure only occupied a very small area of the reserve due to safety concerns.
A dollar spent there will be better used than many dollars spent on trying to fix up some grazed-to-hell patch of sage/greasewood that's lost all of its native bunchgrasses.
No, I don't know that it isn't. In fact I have no reason to suspect they're being dishonest. I've worked in conservation organizations for about twenty years, and the study makes perfect sense when measured against their stated reason for making it: prioritization of effort.
This is typical of how conservation organizations work, whether or not you want to believe it. Conservation organizations tend to be heavy in biologists.
For instance the board I served on had the a retired head of the USFW Region One, the retired USFW refuge manager for the states of California and Nevada, and the person who managed the endangered species for the entire country under the Carter Administration.
That's fairly typical, actually.