Slashdot Mirror


User: VAXcat

VAXcat's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
698
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 698

  1. Re:Yeah, well on Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes · · Score: 1

    Please - enough of this rancor! I'm positive that we can run all these negative comments to ground!

  2. Re:Could be good.... on Joss Whedon Back on TV · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Sounds like Aphrodite IX, a comic book from a few years back.

  3. Re:Now here's where the hope comes in on Colbert Ballot Bid Shot Down · · Score: 1

    I was skimming your entry and read it as "two sides of the same con"...makes just as much sense, nicht wahr?

  4. Re:Testing before testing. on Robotic Cannon Loses Control, Kills 9 · · Score: 1

    Reminds me of a discussion panel at a long ago DECUS conference. Two of the most famous system programmers in the DEC world (Ralph Stamerjohn and Roger Bismuth) were discussing real time programming using RSX on PDP-11s (the hot setup for that sort of thing at the time). An audience member asked how do you handle arrogant young programmers who didn't understand the importance of adequate testing and software quality for software that controls things like robots. Stamerjohn answered "Take them out and shoot them". The crowd laughed, but he probably wasn't joking. Roger replied that, when confronted with such a young snot, he would ask the fellow if he was sure his code had been sufficiently debugged for production use. If the guy said it was, he would then order him to stand in the production cell with the robot it was controlling while it ran. Seeing as to how these robots they were working with were large, fast powerful enough to take your head clean off if they went wild due to a software problem, they would then realise that perhaps a little more testing was in order.

  5. Re:Makes sense on Geek and Gadgets Set Cross-US Speed Record · · Score: 1

    Maybe so....and I wonder if they could be accused of Conspiracy, the penalties for which are often more serious than for the crime involved. Or maybe the federales could come after them for interstate flight to avoid prosecution. I can't beleive that the authorities will just give up - they can always trump up something to come after you on.

  6. VAXcat on Scientists Deliver 'God' Via A Helmet · · Score: 1

    Great news! The sooner we understand the "god illusion" mechanism, the sooner we can get started on designing a treatment sepcific for it! A new era of truth and reason! No more people making crazed decisions because "god" told them to to do irrational things!

  7. Re:I dare them to go further. on James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables · · Score: 5, Funny

    that reminds me of a chat I had with some of these hard core audiophioles. This particular set of morons were of the tube amplifier sub-species. They were discussing how a great source for hard to find small signal tubes was older tube based Tektronix oscilloscopes. As an admirer and collector of old Tektronix gear, I was a little distressed to hear this sort of talk...so I sez to them, that this is now a good idea, since the jagged sawtooth sweep waves used in oscilloscopes would permanently etch the cathodes of the tubes in the scope, and thus render them useless for the smooth sound the stereophiles were looking for. Since this sort of twisted reasoning was right in line with the rest of their delusions, they bought it hook line and sinker, and abandoned their Tektronix wrecking strategy

  8. Re:I am going to take a guess on Rocket-Powered 21-Foot Long X-Wing Actually Flies · · Score: 1

    Hey I went to school with Jek Porkins (aka Bill Hootkins), in Dallas. He was quite the wild character...

  9. Re:Mildot Master on Know How To Use a Slide Rule? · · Score: 1

    And the best thing about the E-6B - it has instructions for its use printed on it. Damn handy to have in front of you while the D.E. is breathing down your neck....

  10. Re:smokin something on Heinlein Archives Put Online · · Score: 1

    ...plus, Job: A Comedy of Justice, is really really bad! One of his worst works, and I say this as a lifelong devoted RAH fan. This (along with "I Will Fear No Weevils") is one of the RAH books I have only read once...and just barely made it through.

  11. Re:Hmmm on The Hard Science of Making Videogames · · Score: 1

    My name is Legion, for we are many.

  12. Re:Statanic Verses is always an airline favorite.. on U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read · · Score: 4, Funny

    Heck, about a year ago, I was coming back from a trip to San Francisco. My wife and I were waiting in the departure lounge for our plane. She went off to the bathroom and to look in the shops. I got bored just sitting there. I'm a student pilot, so I dug out my big red Gleim "How to Fly a Plane" book, and my ham band handheld radio, with headset. I tuned into the ground control traffic, hoping to get some experience with a big airport's procedures, and commenced reading my book. When my wife came back, she looked shocked, and asked me if I knew what I looked like. She told me to get that radio off and put that book away before the TSA sees you and things you're a terrorist. I hadda laugh...

  13. Re:I smell something... on Man Arrested for Refusing to Show Drivers License · · Score: 2, Informative

    The guy was arrested for failure to kneel at the zipper of a cop, which is illegal in any jurisdiction in the States. Cops can arrest you for any reason, or no reason at all. The city/state will always back them to the hilt, because if they don't the cops get petulant and stop writing traffic tickets, a revenue that the city government can't afford to lose. The game is rigged, and only in the grossest abuses of power, that are too glaring to cover up can anyone do anything about it...best thing to do - avoid cops and try not to look interesting or unusual..cops hate things that aren't normal and don't have the same values and beliefs that they do...

  14. A decent OS... on Virtual Containerization · · Score: 1

    If we were using an OS with decent memory protection and scheduling (VMS, among others), there would be no need to use an extra layer of software to run more than one task on one box. Back in the day, I supported several hundred users on each individual machine in a VAX cluster, doing everything from large finite element analyses, CAD for large engineering projects, large Oracle database activities, prgram development in several languages, word processing and office automation, and accounting and financial work large and small, all without the need to virtualize and give everyone a copy of an OS, with the attendant waste of memory and CPU that entails. People excited to be using virtualization to accomplish the same thing don't realize how absurd (however satisfactory it may be, given Windows) that solution is.

  15. Re:Quit it on Testing Einstein's 'Spooky Action at a Distance' · · Score: 1

    Eisntein said that the "god" he believed in, was the orderly set of processes that make up the universe (not his exact words, I don't remember the quote exactly). In other words, not a War God of Israel, or a Thing with Three Souls. In another statement, he said words to the effect that he believed in a god like the one described by Spinoza, one that is intrinsic in the processes of Nature, and not a personal god at all.

  16. Exciting "news" on MIT Team Designs a New, Sleek, Skintight Spacesuit · · Score: 1

    This design is exciting news. It was even more exciting when I read about this sort of design before...in 1968, in one of John W. Campbell's editirials in the science fiction magazine "Analog".

  17. Re:If you want to..... on 800 Break-ins at Dept. of Homeland Security · · Score: 1

    I dunno - Homeland sounds a little to close to Fatherland for my comfort.

  18. Re:The BEST one..... on Hilarious Antique IT Advertisements · · Score: 1

    There was another Wang TV ad that was hysterical. It showed an IBM executive sitting in his office. Out the window, we see the Wang helicopter gunship closing in for the kill. Probably couldn't do a commercial like that now - it wouild be deemed "terroristic".

  19. Large deal... on MIT Wirelessly Powers a Lightbulb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hell, back in the 60s, I had a monstrous WWII surplus transmitter, a BC-610 by name. This thing was the size of a large washing machine, and had vacuum tubes in it the size of your head. It would produce a vertiable torrent of RF. As a young ham operator, I was a little sketchy on the principles and practice of proper antenna load and impedance matching, so the whole feedline was radiating, and causing standing waves in all of the house wiring...in my house and the houses around ours. Enough power was intercepted by house wiring that the incandescent bulbs in light fixtures would glow dimly when I was on the air...even though they were turned off. You could hear my voice on telephones for approximately 10 houses radius, since non-linearities in the old phones were enough of a rectifier to do AM detection on the signal the phoen wiring picked up. Fluorescent tubes in my house & my immediate neighbours would light with a strange plasma looking pattern, caused by the structure of the standing waves present. And forget watching TV or listening to the radio in the neighborhood - my voice was heard on radios louder than the program material, and TV pictures were obliterated by a dancing pattern of hum bars. Enough complaining got back to my parents that I could only operate late late late at night....anyway, you can see why I am not that impressed with the concept of wireless power transmission...I did it in person over 40 years ago...

  20. Re:What are they? on A Mighty Number Falls · · Score: 4, Funny

    I know them, but I can't tell you, since they are also copyrighted AACS keys...

  21. Re:How the hell... on Surprise Arrest For Online Scientology Critic · · Score: 2, Funny

    This misrepresentation of Scientology is unconscionable! And I will not tolerate such lies being spread about it! You should be ashamed of spreading such malicious misinformation! Everybody knows that it was DC-9's that did the interstellar flying, not 747's! The two look completely different!

  22. First place I saw all this previous art... on Breakpoints have now been patented · · Score: 1

    The T-bit trap in the Program Status Word of the PDP-11 familty of computers...in 1972.

  23. I'd very much prefer... on Ashes of Doohan Sent Into Space · · Score: 1

    A story announicng that Braga and Berman's ashes had been sent into space...

  24. Re:what were you saying about efficiency? on Despite Aging Design, x86 Still in Charge · · Score: 1

    Clearly, you see what you are most familiar with as most efficient. Your hair shirted devotion to Bug Endian is unshakeable. I do not agree that little endian is more bug prone, or that corner cases are harder or more pernicious than in Bug Endinia - I assert, it's the clearly the other way around.

  25. Re:what were you saying about efficiency? on Despite Aging Design, x86 Still in Charge · · Score: 1

    Pshew...don't have time to refute all of these wild, hair shirted assertions, but I'll speak on a couple of 'em... Macro-32 and VMS support a rich selection of descriptors, for most all data types, arrays included. Actually, their use instead of null terinated strngs and C style arrays are the single biggest contributor to the reliability and securty designed and built into VMS...there is an almost total absence of buffer overflow problems in VMS. Not sure what you mean about plus or minus 128...I agree you have to know what your data represents, and if you want to do arithmetic on a byte (or word, or longword, or even octaword for that matter), you have to be cognizant of the sign...again, for example, the VAX includes a rich set of unsigned arithmetic and comparison operators just for such occasions, as well as the appropriate sign extensions on moves into registers. My experience does not match yours. I do not find that little endian causes errors. I'll assert that the confusion caused by programmers puzzling over where the significant digits are and what order they are in, and what data type and size they are dealing with on bug endian machines causes a heckuva lot more problems. I'm thinking, you are half right - little endian doesn't produce programs that seem to work, it produces programs that work, effortlessly in comparison