After all, why does a Flashlight app need the Abuse My Personal Contacts permission?
This is probably asking too much, or over thinking it, but I would have it fail gracefully and not let the app know, or feed it misinformation. For example "Abuse My Personal Contacts" should be able to lie and tell it I have no contacts OR lie and tell it my only personal contacts are "abuse@ftc.gov" or "spamreport@gmail" or purely randomized addresses or whatever.
You can fail "Abuse My Internet Access" by returning that the inet is down, but its just as funny to let it silently drop all traffic.
Really there's four options: 1) Tell it the user told it to F off, in which case the spam app will pester the user to re-enable, so its probably useless 2) Tell it the service is down (sorry, just bad luck we have no inet access right now, or the user has zero contacts in their book) in which case the app Might pester the user, so its less useful 3) Tell it the service is up and silently drop or randomize everything. This would probably work pretty well most of the time. Suuuuuure, app, you've just posted my score or result or whatever on FB or twitter or spammed all the email addresses in my contacts, yeah app you just trust me that it wasn't all just dropped without being sent 4) Let the app have its way with the user, do whatever it wants
If the free version doesn't have enough functionality that a typical user would keep it around
Thats going to be pretty arbitrary and require lots of human effort... maybe if "the law" was something like 90% of the source code functions in your app collection must be unique or something like that? This makes life easy on the mighty GOOG also, because that could be automated. There would be issues with series like "Age of Conquest" which is basically Risk(tm)(c)(rm) where you pay per map by purchasing another app, the only difference being the new map. So that would have to be re-engineered into one Age of Conquest app, with DLC for each map. Or more likely a free app and a tutorial demo map and paid DLC maps. Which would probably save a lot of memory, so its a good idea anyway.
That said I like demos and always download them first... if the demo doesn't work, no matter how cool the app is I'm not buying the paid version. Or if the demo is no good I don't buy the real app.
Maybe if they included infrastructure for all apps to have a free and pay version...
Oh Mighty GOOG, your lowly human followers beseech you to create an app store for windows much like your mighty holiness has created for your son, Android.
K thx bye (aka amen)
P.S. and osx and linux app stores too if its not too much trouble, your mighty holiness.
You would see slower times in the running events. Ask any runner, there is no better way to push yourself than to have someone to beat.
Maybe having 9 competitors simultaneously run the pole vault would improve ratings? The hammer throw would look like an ancient battlefield. Make all the synchronized swimmers go simultaneously? 20 guys jump off the diving board at the same time? Doesn't seem to be an issue for most of the events.
There are notorious examples of critical, heavily relied-upon collector sites that have disappeared upon their owners' demise, that were never mirrored anywhere.
I remember that happening to the CP/M site.
Please don't be harsh with bitsavers, archive.org, or other orgs and sites, like TUHS.org
Agreed those guys are awesome. If you want to call out individuals Jason Scott (now at archive.org) has archived a lot of stuff... I've donated a fair chunk of change to him over the years to keep on doing what he does... Some people donate money to the ballet, some to the orchestra, I think/.ers should send their "cultural donations" to those type of sites (Oh and the EFF too)
Hardware is insanely cheap these days, so if you really want a beowulf cluster,
Yeah I have a small 4 machine cluster in my basement, if something that small even counts as a cluster. What I want is a fully functional one small enough to fit in a lunchbox that'll run off practically a wall wart (well, thats asking alot, maybe a very large laptop charger...)
Of course, that kind of money may or may not be a bit overkill for a weekend project.
A lot longer than a weekend project in total, resulting in a pretty cheap per hour burn rate. I aim to keep my hobbies cheaper per hour than golf and dating, which is actually quite a lot of money.
Do you really think vlm is going to buy women's herpes medication?
LOL No thats not going to sell to me. Thats the weird part, that either they think I'm in the target market, or most of the people who own a roku streaming box and watch revision3 shows are in the target market. I don't know which is unspeakably weirder. Either the mighty GOOG (or someone) knows a lot more about my sex life than I apparently do, or "the ben heck show" despite superficially being for nerdy guys who never get laid is primarily watched by herpes infested groupies. Other than the herpes thing, maybe I should start a tech videocast? Perhaps I insulted the Mighty GOOG to receive his holy judgment? Perhaps a burnt offering of internet troll would sate the Mighty GOOG? I've got the propane barbeque... wherever could I find some Internet Troll to grill? Hmm
For the top, I wear something with buttons and usually lines up and down it. It's sort of a technician look or architect.
Yeah yeah whatever we can keep telling ourselves that. More realistically I wear vertical lines because they're "slimming".
I'm shocked no one has suggested other corporation shirts. That's popular where I live and work. My DEXCS vendor gave me a nice tee shirt. Our SONET vendor gave me a nice shirt. I've got firewall company shirts, "partner" company shirts, seemingly all of the RBOCs IXCs and LECS including the now out of business ones, both major router vendors, Hurricane Electric gave me a nice shirt when I maxed out/completed their ipv6 tutorial thingy back in ye olde 00's decade, donno if they still do that. The most prized are the "I'm and old timer and you're not" shirts such as companies that have been dead for a decade. I had a chance (but missed it) to get a "ma bell is a cheap mother" tee shirt. Back when I got my CCNA and CCNP over a decade ago (LONG since lapsed) I got shirts for those "achievements" too. If you've been in the biz long enough, and you're not too hard on clothing, you can probably have your vendors dress you for free. And it doesn't look too bad. On the other hand, oh boy is it awkward to walk into a meeting with the Cisco sales team wearing a Juniper tee shirt, or "accidentally" wear a competitors logo on company picture day or ID badge picture day.
I think MS does own the patent on poor tech commercials
There's prior art.
Are you old enough to remember Intel's bollywood act done in an imaginary chip fab cleanroom, where suddenly they shut down the line and hundreds of people break out into a disco dance routine?
Are you old enough to remember the Coleco Adam computer ads from the home computing bubble? One line summary: "What a rainy day; its seems little johnny turned out to be a Fing idiot... I know what'll fix it, we'll buy him a Adam computer!"
And, no, on my honor as a 5 digit/. UID holder I am not making this shite up. If I was a video guy I'd post youtube links... probably to rickrolls... maybe you're better off...
They even got their ad campaign freely detailed on Slashdot and by all those different critics. Can't be more successful than that.
If the ads were any good we'd see Samsung ads that look just like it.
I still haven't seen the ads... mythtv dvr with auto commercial detection and autoskipping, adblocker on the web browser, don't watch sports, haven't watched live TV in years, don't buy newspapers or magazines (although I get a couple "journal" type mags)... What's apple's plan to push their message to a guy like me who has buckets of cash and no ad viewing habit? Oh, I see, get their ads discussed on/. damn you apple damn you that worked pretty well.
The only ads I've seen a couple years are the ford sync / etc / ads inserted inline on twit and revision3. However, recently when I watch revision3 shows on my roku the first thing is womens herpes medications WTF is up with that. Are all ads that poorly targeted out in the real (aka unblocked/unskipped) world? Like are sporting event commercials all romance novel publicity spots, etc?
Now, I just need 6 more for an 8 node beowulf cluster;-)
I also have "make a R-pi cluster" on my list. More for training and experimentation under ultra-portable and sorta low power conditions than any thruput goal. Also I'll be honest for the cool hack value. Whats killing it is memory. I would love a $50 model that has a gig (or dare I ask for more?) on board.
The normal way to implement this (a la Google) is to get your mobile phone number
Which would require each customer to maintain mobile phone service. I've read comments to other articles claiming that mobile phone service is still a luxury, not a necessity.
Free google voice account, configured to forward incoming texts to email. Not a theoretical approach, I actually do this. I don't use texts much (well, really, at all). Go to the Mighty GOOG voice, click on the typical GOOG weird torx-like "settings" button, select "settings", select "voicemail and texts", select checkbox third from the bottom labeled "Text Forwarding: Forward text messages to my email"
Each text I get used to cost me 25 cents (including reams of spam), so I obviously disabled texts on my phone completely.
When was the last time you saw anyone talk about old IBM
LOL every collector / enthusiast / re-enactor / whatever we are has a certain date they don't go before and often pretend nothing existed before then.
If you're willing to go before the mid 80s, the IBM mainframe guys are at least as much into their mainframes as the apple collectors are into their apples.
If you love computers, you owe Apple *everything*.
I think you owe the original '360 developer team. The 1960s IBM 360 mainframe development team, not the xbox 360.
Unless the reg was the starting gun is supposed to be behind the runners at the start, so rather than make a big case of how they screwed up administering the test, a little pencil whipping is better overall for the fleet...
Also at least in the army, some officers have a sense of humor. CO was probably laughing too hard not to pass him. For example we had to weigh in and do the idiotic BMI thing, so all us weightlifters failed the BMI test and had to be weighed in (again) and taped by an officer to document our waiver that we're actually muscular instead of fat. Anyone else in the US army in the 90s can verify this story and the idiocy of the policy. So one of the fatter clowns snuck a helium balloon into the weigh in (still not sure how) and right before weigh in, inhaled, saluted, and told the LT he was certain he would pass this time, in the usual helium donald duck voice. LT laughed so much that he just signed us all off rather than waste time with all the formal tape and calculate BS.
Somehow there still exists at least one human being in 2012 who still hasn't played with housepets and lasers. I would assume guide dogs behave similarly, or could be trained.
I suggest electrical stimuli - 240v should suffice
Better be DC or high freq AC (like a tesla coil) because an AC waveform has a longer wavelength than the kind of measurements they're already complaining about.
For example a anal probe activated at a voltage zero crossing would take around 5 ms to reach peak voltage at 50 hz, but the americans would whine because they're used to 60Hz which only takes 4ms to reach peak voltage. And the other competitors would whine because the 220 volt probe would reach the 110 volt level that the americans train with in only about 2 ms, whereas they're used to waiting until a voltage maximum at 5ms to react. As you can see even low frequency RF aka "power electronics" is all rather complicated. This is before power factor correction, where athletes with inductive or capacitive digestive systems would lead/lag and the nervous system is inherently current mode logic anyway (or is it? Some MD or bio guy needs to weigh in) (hmm, digestive system is shaped inductively all curly and stuff, but digestion is all about capacity aka a capacitive reactance... anyone other than space alien abductors got a smith chart plot of a human digestive system based on probe data?)
In 2012 it doesn't seem impossible to put a speaker+light in all the starting blocks.
In 2012 it doesn't seem impossible to put an individual timing gate on each lane so sub millisecond differences in sound propagation don't matter, yet they'll be running "about the same time" close enough to meet the olympic goal of pointless dramatic theatrics.
Maybe someday we'll have "mass produced electronics"...
You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you.
Use the right tool for the job, in this case imperial. We're talking about feet in an olympic article about running and feet, so use feet to measure. Not millionths of the distance from Paris to the north pole or wavelengths of cesium or WTF arbitrary measurement a metre is. Use feet. Yes, it would be dumb to use human feet to measure an interplanetary space probe, but this is totally appropriate.
Sound travels at 5 secs/mile as anybody who's survived a thunderstorm and counted miles away by fives knows. In other words one second = 1000 feet or sound takes about "a thousandth" to go a foot. The article is babbling about measuring run times to ten thousandths of a second, and sounds takes one thousandth to go a foot, so it doesn't take a genius engineer or physicist to figure if you want tenths accuracy you need to position the speakers the same distance from the ears with tenth of a foot accuracy, or "about an inch". Which the olympic fools still aren't doing correctly, as near as I can tell.
Its all idiocy for show anyway. They have to start at the same instant because in ye olden days they didn't have computer measurements, so they determined the winner by who passed the line first. They should just run individually now and use chrono gates much like at a gun range. Yes yes, I know its motivational to run together and "compete" while running but these are adults not five year olds, so they can be expected to run "really fast all the time" even if not in a pack or herd. I'm sure the steroids will ensure a proper competitive attitude and outlook on life.
There is no "free" other than locals within maybe 10 miles or so, and there might not be any locals within 10 miles, so... The main problem I see is in your first line "Sussex (England)". The density of historical re-enactors or classic enthusiasts or whatever you want to call us, is pretty light on the ground in England, despite the cluster of people that hang around Bletchley Park.
If you were my neighbor, I'd take the VAX off your hands, sounds like fun to play with, I would even pay you a bit or buy you and your family a nice dinner, but there's that little "Sussex (England)" problem stopping us... Lets just say neither of us probably want to pay for the shipping required to guarantee it'll arrive in one working piece across the pond and halfway across the continent. Unless you've actually recent done transcontinental shipping of electronics, you have no idea what you're in for. Lets just say that properly shipping the vax to the other side of the planet might be "around a nice car payment"... for a start... for something that might not work when it arrives and is wired for 220. Its a non starter, sorry.
Also your stuff isn't old enough to be taken seriously by the serious collectors. The guy who owns a DEC straight-8 might have the resources to grab your terminals but a 500 series VT? Not old enough to be "interesting" yet.
Also as for the orange wall bitsavers and archive.org have killed doc collecting as a research and operational tool. All that's left is for doc collectors is collecting for the sake of collecting, and historically interesting trophies like my collection of yellowing PDP-8 semi-promotional material manuals. So unless bitsavers wants to scan your personal copy, or there is a rare undocumented manual stuck in between the binders or whatever, just recycle it. The pdf's are better than the paper originals in most regards. My ipad has probably spent most of its life on a hourly basis displaying pages from the DEC TOPS-10 software notebooks series (we all have our dirty little secrets I guess)
LOL noobs always think "power" is "processor frequency".
"power" is defined by what you do with the computer not the rate that an arbitrary flipflip in the logic can be toggled.
I can run a 1960s mid size corporation data center inside my desktop as an emulator. Very interesting, lots to learn about design. The supposedly much more advanced desktop can... merely run minesweeper or maybe solitaire. Booooring.
Another knee slapper is when someone claims their iphone has "100 times" the "power" of the computer that sent men to the moon (as if there was only one computer involved, LOL). OK well, 100 times the power would seem to imply you'll be landing on Pluto pretty soon with your much more powerful iphone, so write me when you get there. Oh, you say all your iphone can do is play Angry Birds. Oh, well, thats not quite so powerful and impressive anymore, is it?
The ratio is not nearly that big. Maybe 10% to 20% less. Blows the minds of my coastie and Chicago friends. Depends on what field you're in, I suppose.
Note this fact doesn't help the argument much, but it does explain why I have absolutely no interest in moving. I'd only need a 200% pay raise to maintain the same standard of living.... oh thanks GOOG for that generous offer of 20% more, but I'm not even going to bother talking to your recruiter for that little... I'm not moving into a cardboard box under the overpass just to work for you, LOL.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, why does a Flashlight app need the Abuse My Personal Contacts permission?
This is probably asking too much, or over thinking it, but I would have it fail gracefully and not let the app know, or feed it misinformation.
For example "Abuse My Personal Contacts" should be able to lie and tell it I have no contacts OR lie and tell it my only personal contacts are "abuse@ftc.gov" or "spamreport@gmail" or purely randomized addresses or whatever.
You can fail "Abuse My Internet Access" by returning that the inet is down, but its just as funny to let it silently drop all traffic.
Really there's four options:
1) Tell it the user told it to F off, in which case the spam app will pester the user to re-enable, so its probably useless
2) Tell it the service is down (sorry, just bad luck we have no inet access right now, or the user has zero contacts in their book) in which case the app Might pester the user, so its less useful
3) Tell it the service is up and silently drop or randomize everything. This would probably work pretty well most of the time. Suuuuuure, app, you've just posted my score or result or whatever on FB or twitter or spammed all the email addresses in my contacts, yeah app you just trust me that it wasn't all just dropped without being sent
4) Let the app have its way with the user, do whatever it wants
If the free version doesn't have enough functionality that a typical user would keep it around
Thats going to be pretty arbitrary and require lots of human effort... maybe if "the law" was something like 90% of the source code functions in your app collection must be unique or something like that? This makes life easy on the mighty GOOG also, because that could be automated. There would be issues with series like "Age of Conquest" which is basically Risk(tm)(c)(rm) where you pay per map by purchasing another app, the only difference being the new map. So that would have to be re-engineered into one Age of Conquest app, with DLC for each map. Or more likely a free app and a tutorial demo map and paid DLC maps. Which would probably save a lot of memory, so its a good idea anyway.
That said I like demos and always download them first... if the demo doesn't work, no matter how cool the app is I'm not buying the paid version. Or if the demo is no good I don't buy the real app.
Maybe if they included infrastructure for all apps to have a free and pay version...
Oh Mighty GOOG, your lowly human followers beseech you to create an app store for windows much like your mighty holiness has created for your son, Android.
K thx bye (aka amen)
P.S. and osx and linux app stores too if its not too much trouble, your mighty holiness.
You would see slower times in the running events. Ask any runner, there is no better way to push yourself than to have someone to beat.
Maybe having 9 competitors simultaneously run the pole vault would improve ratings? The hammer throw would look like an ancient battlefield. Make all the synchronized swimmers go simultaneously? 20 guys jump off the diving board at the same time? Doesn't seem to be an issue for most of the events.
Are you on a council to figure out how to make the Olympics more boring?
LOL apparently I'm an amateur compared to the current council members.
There are notorious examples of critical, heavily relied-upon collector sites that have disappeared upon their owners' demise, that were never mirrored anywhere.
I remember that happening to the CP/M site.
Please don't be harsh with bitsavers, archive.org, or other orgs and sites, like TUHS.org
Agreed those guys are awesome. If you want to call out individuals Jason Scott (now at archive.org) has archived a lot of stuff ... I've donated a fair chunk of change to him over the years to keep on doing what he does... Some people donate money to the ballet, some to the orchestra, I think /.ers should send their "cultural donations" to those type of sites (Oh and the EFF too)
Hardware is insanely cheap these days, so if you really want a beowulf cluster,
Yeah I have a small 4 machine cluster in my basement, if something that small even counts as a cluster. What I want is a fully functional one small enough to fit in a lunchbox that'll run off practically a wall wart (well, thats asking alot, maybe a very large laptop charger...)
Of course, that kind of money may or may not be a bit overkill for a weekend project.
A lot longer than a weekend project in total, resulting in a pretty cheap per hour burn rate. I aim to keep my hobbies cheaper per hour than golf and dating, which is actually quite a lot of money.
Do you really think vlm is going to buy women's herpes medication?
LOL No thats not going to sell to me. Thats the weird part, that either they think I'm in the target market, or most of the people who own a roku streaming box and watch revision3 shows are in the target market. I don't know which is unspeakably weirder. Either the mighty GOOG (or someone) knows a lot more about my sex life than I apparently do, or "the ben heck show" despite superficially being for nerdy guys who never get laid is primarily watched by herpes infested groupies. Other than the herpes thing, maybe I should start a tech videocast? Perhaps I insulted the Mighty GOOG to receive his holy judgment? Perhaps a burnt offering of internet troll would sate the Mighty GOOG? I've got the propane barbeque... wherever could I find some Internet Troll to grill? Hmm
For the top, I wear something with buttons and usually lines up and down it. It's sort of a technician look or architect.
Yeah yeah whatever we can keep telling ourselves that. More realistically I wear vertical lines because they're "slimming".
I'm shocked no one has suggested other corporation shirts. That's popular where I live and work. My DEXCS vendor gave me a nice tee shirt. Our SONET vendor gave me a nice shirt. I've got firewall company shirts, "partner" company shirts, seemingly all of the RBOCs IXCs and LECS including the now out of business ones, both major router vendors, Hurricane Electric gave me a nice shirt when I maxed out/completed their ipv6 tutorial thingy back in ye olde 00's decade, donno if they still do that. The most prized are the "I'm and old timer and you're not" shirts such as companies that have been dead for a decade. I had a chance (but missed it) to get a "ma bell is a cheap mother" tee shirt. Back when I got my CCNA and CCNP over a decade ago (LONG since lapsed) I got shirts for those "achievements" too. If you've been in the biz long enough, and you're not too hard on clothing, you can probably have your vendors dress you for free. And it doesn't look too bad. On the other hand, oh boy is it awkward to walk into a meeting with the Cisco sales team wearing a Juniper tee shirt, or "accidentally" wear a competitors logo on company picture day or ID badge picture day.
I am so going to start dressing like a male porn star...For straight films of course!!! I know you sick bastards would think otherwise..
Well, at least the goatse guy doesn't need cargo pants to carry his cellphone. Or tablet.
I think MS does own the patent on poor tech commercials
There's prior art.
Are you old enough to remember Intel's bollywood act done in an imaginary chip fab cleanroom, where suddenly they shut down the line and hundreds of people break out into a disco dance routine?
Are you old enough to remember the Coleco Adam computer ads from the home computing bubble? One line summary: "What a rainy day; its seems little johnny turned out to be a Fing idiot ... I know what'll fix it, we'll buy him a Adam computer!"
And, no, on my honor as a 5 digit /. UID holder I am not making this shite up. If I was a video guy I'd post youtube links... probably to rickrolls... maybe you're better off...
They even got their ad campaign freely detailed on Slashdot and by all those different critics. Can't be more successful than that.
If the ads were any good we'd see Samsung ads that look just like it.
I still haven't seen the ads... mythtv dvr with auto commercial detection and autoskipping, adblocker on the web browser, don't watch sports, haven't watched live TV in years, don't buy newspapers or magazines (although I get a couple "journal" type mags)... What's apple's plan to push their message to a guy like me who has buckets of cash and no ad viewing habit? Oh, I see, get their ads discussed on /. damn you apple damn you that worked pretty well.
The only ads I've seen a couple years are the ford sync / etc / ads inserted inline on twit and revision3. However, recently when I watch revision3 shows on my roku the first thing is womens herpes medications WTF is up with that. Are all ads that poorly targeted out in the real (aka unblocked/unskipped) world? Like are sporting event commercials all romance novel publicity spots, etc?
Now, I just need 6 more for an 8 node beowulf cluster ;-)
I also have "make a R-pi cluster" on my list. More for training and experimentation under ultra-portable and sorta low power conditions than any thruput goal. Also I'll be honest for the cool hack value. Whats killing it is memory. I would love a $50 model that has a gig (or dare I ask for more?) on board.
The normal way to implement this (a la Google) is to get your mobile phone number
Which would require each customer to maintain mobile phone service. I've read comments to other articles claiming that mobile phone service is still a luxury, not a necessity.
Free google voice account, configured to forward incoming texts to email. Not a theoretical approach, I actually do this. I don't use texts much (well, really, at all). Go to the Mighty GOOG voice, click on the typical GOOG weird torx-like "settings" button, select "settings", select "voicemail and texts", select checkbox third from the bottom labeled "Text Forwarding: Forward text messages to my email"
Each text I get used to cost me 25 cents (including reams of spam), so I obviously disabled texts on my phone completely.
When was the last time you saw anyone talk about old IBM
LOL every collector / enthusiast / re-enactor / whatever we are has a certain date they don't go before and often pretend nothing existed before then.
If you're willing to go before the mid 80s, the IBM mainframe guys are at least as much into their mainframes as the apple collectors are into their apples.
If you love computers, you owe Apple *everything*.
I think you owe the original '360 developer team. The 1960s IBM 360 mainframe development team, not the xbox 360.
So I'm calling bullshit.
Unless the reg was the starting gun is supposed to be behind the runners at the start, so rather than make a big case of how they screwed up administering the test, a little pencil whipping is better overall for the fleet...
Also at least in the army, some officers have a sense of humor. CO was probably laughing too hard not to pass him. For example we had to weigh in and do the idiotic BMI thing, so all us weightlifters failed the BMI test and had to be weighed in (again) and taped by an officer to document our waiver that we're actually muscular instead of fat. Anyone else in the US army in the 90s can verify this story and the idiocy of the policy. So one of the fatter clowns snuck a helium balloon into the weigh in (still not sure how) and right before weigh in, inhaled, saluted, and told the LT he was certain he would pass this time, in the usual helium donald duck voice. LT laughed so much that he just signed us all off rather than waste time with all the formal tape and calculate BS.
What about the blind?
Somehow there still exists at least one human being in 2012 who still hasn't played with housepets and lasers. I would assume guide dogs behave similarly, or could be trained.
I suggest electrical stimuli - 240v should suffice
Better be DC or high freq AC (like a tesla coil) because an AC waveform has a longer wavelength than the kind of measurements they're already complaining about.
For example a anal probe activated at a voltage zero crossing would take around 5 ms to reach peak voltage at 50 hz, but the americans would whine because they're used to 60Hz which only takes 4ms to reach peak voltage. And the other competitors would whine because the 220 volt probe would reach the 110 volt level that the americans train with in only about 2 ms, whereas they're used to waiting until a voltage maximum at 5ms to react. As you can see even low frequency RF aka "power electronics" is all rather complicated. This is before power factor correction, where athletes with inductive or capacitive digestive systems would lead/lag and the nervous system is inherently current mode logic anyway (or is it? Some MD or bio guy needs to weigh in) (hmm, digestive system is shaped inductively all curly and stuff, but digestion is all about capacity aka a capacitive reactance... anyone other than space alien abductors got a smith chart plot of a human digestive system based on probe data?)
In 2012 it doesn't seem impossible to put a speaker+light in all the starting blocks.
In 2012 it doesn't seem impossible to put an individual timing gate on each lane so sub millisecond differences in sound propagation don't matter, yet they'll be running "about the same time" close enough to meet the olympic goal of pointless dramatic theatrics.
Maybe someday we'll have "mass produced electronics"...
You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you.
Use the right tool for the job, in this case imperial. We're talking about feet in an olympic article about running and feet, so use feet to measure. Not millionths of the distance from Paris to the north pole or wavelengths of cesium or WTF arbitrary measurement a metre is. Use feet. Yes, it would be dumb to use human feet to measure an interplanetary space probe, but this is totally appropriate.
Sound travels at 5 secs/mile as anybody who's survived a thunderstorm and counted miles away by fives knows. In other words one second = 1000 feet or sound takes about "a thousandth" to go a foot. The article is babbling about measuring run times to ten thousandths of a second, and sounds takes one thousandth to go a foot, so it doesn't take a genius engineer or physicist to figure if you want tenths accuracy you need to position the speakers the same distance from the ears with tenth of a foot accuracy, or "about an inch". Which the olympic fools still aren't doing correctly, as near as I can tell.
Its all idiocy for show anyway. They have to start at the same instant because in ye olden days they didn't have computer measurements, so they determined the winner by who passed the line first. They should just run individually now and use chrono gates much like at a gun range. Yes yes, I know its motivational to run together and "compete" while running but these are adults not five year olds, so they can be expected to run "really fast all the time" even if not in a pack or herd. I'm sure the steroids will ensure a proper competitive attitude and outlook on life.
Did you talk to the classiccmp mailing list folks?
http://www.classiccmp.org/lists.html
when I offered it all for free.
There is no "free" other than locals within maybe 10 miles or so, and there might not be any locals within 10 miles, so... The main problem I see is in your first line "Sussex (England)". The density of historical re-enactors or classic enthusiasts or whatever you want to call us, is pretty light on the ground in England, despite the cluster of people that hang around Bletchley Park.
If you were my neighbor, I'd take the VAX off your hands, sounds like fun to play with, I would even pay you a bit or buy you and your family a nice dinner, but there's that little "Sussex (England)" problem stopping us... Lets just say neither of us probably want to pay for the shipping required to guarantee it'll arrive in one working piece across the pond and halfway across the continent. Unless you've actually recent done transcontinental shipping of electronics, you have no idea what you're in for. Lets just say that properly shipping the vax to the other side of the planet might be "around a nice car payment"... for a start... for something that might not work when it arrives and is wired for 220. Its a non starter, sorry.
Also your stuff isn't old enough to be taken seriously by the serious collectors. The guy who owns a DEC straight-8 might have the resources to grab your terminals but a 500 series VT? Not old enough to be "interesting" yet.
Also as for the orange wall bitsavers and archive.org have killed doc collecting as a research and operational tool. All that's left is for doc collectors is collecting for the sake of collecting, and historically interesting trophies like my collection of yellowing PDP-8 semi-promotional material manuals. So unless bitsavers wants to scan your personal copy, or there is a rare undocumented manual stuck in between the binders or whatever, just recycle it. The pdf's are better than the paper originals in most regards. My ipad has probably spent most of its life on a hourly basis displaying pages from the DEC TOPS-10 software notebooks series (we all have our dirty little secrets I guess)
LOL noobs always think "power" is "processor frequency".
"power" is defined by what you do with the computer not the rate that an arbitrary flipflip in the logic can be toggled.
I can run a 1960s mid size corporation data center inside my desktop as an emulator. Very interesting, lots to learn about design. The supposedly much more advanced desktop can ... merely run minesweeper or maybe solitaire. Booooring.
Another knee slapper is when someone claims their iphone has "100 times" the "power" of the computer that sent men to the moon (as if there was only one computer involved, LOL). OK well, 100 times the power would seem to imply you'll be landing on Pluto pretty soon with your much more powerful iphone, so write me when you get there. Oh, you say all your iphone can do is play Angry Birds. Oh, well, thats not quite so powerful and impressive anymore, is it?
>It appears that is EXACTLY what the MarsOne organization has in mind
Isn't that the weirdest thing you've ever seen? If tax payers pay for it, its closed. If a private company pays for it, its open.
There is a live telemety during the landing
Where? In mission control? URL or it didn't happen.
And I'm not interested in a CGI simulation of what might happen in the future if all goes well, I mean real telemetry.
Finally telemetry is more than a altitude scale. I want the scientific data as it arrives.
and pay your employees half
The ratio is not nearly that big. Maybe 10% to 20% less. Blows the minds of my coastie and Chicago friends. Depends on what field you're in, I suppose.
Note this fact doesn't help the argument much, but it does explain why I have absolutely no interest in moving. I'd only need a 200% pay raise to maintain the same standard of living.... oh thanks GOOG for that generous offer of 20% more, but I'm not even going to bother talking to your recruiter for that little... I'm not moving into a cardboard box under the overpass just to work for you, LOL.