I forgot to explain, in the above post, that the dish being shown on the Death Star's equator in Larry's wireframe plans was not Larry's fault. The only thing he had available to use in constructing his sequence was some pre-production artwork, presumably by Ralph McQuarrie, which showed the dish on the equator. After Larry had completed his work and it was too late to go back and fix it, the dish was moved to its final position on the Death Star.
The machine was a PDP-11. It was a PDP-11/45 running a one-of-a-kind graphics OS, called GRASS, the Graphics Symbiosis System written by Tom DeFanti, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle). Tom's appointment then was to the Chemistry Dept.; the GRASS system was used primarily for molecular modeling. It drove an Evans & Sutherland Picture System, a giant $100,000 vector graphics engine worth five times what the PDP-11 was worth.
Larry's work pushed the system to its limits. His work was done at night, on the QT, with Tom's permission. This was done by giving Larry his own disk pack with a copy of the system on it. Larry's use of the system worked around all sorts of bugs in that relatively early version of GRASS. The film was made by pointing a (film) camera at the E&S screen, and running a macro which would render a frame, click the camera, render a frame, click the camera... While the PDP-11 system could in fact render the Death Star trench in real time, by the time you included all the little bits and frobs, the E&S took long enough to draw it that the display flickered. Hence the need to do frame-by-frame. Also, there was no frame-sync hardware in the system; the camera and display were connected only by the solenoid that tripped the camera shutter.
I played with that disk pack a year or two after the fact and it was a hoot to fly around the Death Star by hand. GRASS pioneered the interactive control of complex graphics, so all the position (and other) variables could trivially be tied to dials, etc. I was discouraged by one thing: the final version of the run had apparently been deleted from the disk. The only version I could find had the big "dish" directly on the equator of the Death Star, not at 45 degrees north latitude as in the film.
Years after that, I happened to talk to Larry Cuba by phone about something else, and asked him about that. He said the version I saw WAS the final version. Years after that, when I went to my "farewell to Star Wars viewing of Star Wars", I saw he was right. The plans shown to the rebels show the dish on the equator. Obviously the plans were fake. Those rebels were all dead men.
Which, of course, only means that when security and necessary accomplishment collide, you're the one who never finds out about it. Ever. There is no compromise.
Actually, CSNET was only nominally for computer science research departments. Actually they'd let pretty much anybody on who'd pay the freight. The research "hoop" was held rather low. We (at CSNET) had one company online which was a computer graphic rendering house using CSNET as a transit net between their offices in Canada and the U.S.: a pure Internet application.
CSNET's real purpose was to find out if it was possible to run an IP network at a profit. We did, if only just, and so various of our customers turned into today's Tier 1 providers.
As far as I'm concerned, today's Internet may have grown from NSFnet, but the NSF funded CSNET first, and CSNET was the first ISP. Really, the Internet grew from CSNET via NSFnet, in my book.
Incidentally, my monicker, "Mr. Protocol", comes from a column I wrote for twelve years in Server/Workstation Expert magazine, but he was really born in the online CSNET Forum, emailed monthly to the membership. His first incarnation was online, not print, and was rather more trenchant than the ink-stained wretch he later became...though the latter was far, far more profitable. Definitely fitting for an Internet character.
Sadly, the Netbook probably won't do. The entire line was discontinued. It was a gigantic PDA, so the OS it runs is an ancestor of the current Symbian, not Windows. I think Opera came out with a browser for it, but the point is, it doesn't run a current browser, or in fact any current software at all, so lots of things just won't work.
It's an abandoned platform restricted to ancient software.
Back In the Day, I wasted a lot of time (a lot of time) in a TinyMUD called DragonMUD. It's still up and running, FWIW, but the days of text-based VRs are long gone.
In DragonMUD I built a "quest" which required the player, in solving it, to learn a few words and grammar rules for ancient Egyptian, the language of the hieroglyphs. Everyone said it was one of the hardest quests in the game, and it ranked very, very highly among the players. It got academics interested in VR, and in fact DARPA poured $63 million into VR research in schools, all partly because of this quest, and one DARPA program manager who loved it.
I knew going into it that no one would touch it if it wasn't fun, so I created sweeping desert vistas, ancient gods, temples, tombs and (of course) hieroglyphs. Real Indiana Jone stuff. But the hook was that this was real ancient Egyptian you were puzzling out, not some made-up gamer's stew. People got a real charge out of it.
The quest is still online, actually, but no one goes there now. A modern replacement would have to take place in Second Life or the like, and would take far longer to build (and far greater skill!). Still, it would be quite something...
The Segway, not the most successful enterprise ever (but still selling a lot of 'em) only became really useful when they increased the effective range by a factor of 2.5 by replacing the nickel-metal hydride batteries on the first generation by a lithium-ion battery. They couldn't use lithium-ion to begin with because of exactly the problems cited herein...nothing like a rolling bomb to make your rep as a company.
They went with a battery made by Valence Technologies, which uses phosphate electrodes to produce a Li-ion battery which is not a firebomb in a plastic shell. The company, which has been having its own troubles, has a very effective video showing a military-grade Li-ion pack being shot up by a machine gun next to a Valence pack. The military pack turns into a thermal grenade-cum-jetpack, while the Valence pack just sits there and smokes. It doesn't exactly stay cool, but it doesn't burst into jets of flame either.
I worked down the hall from Willie Crowther when I was at BBN, and I asked him about why he wrote it ("I had some ideas on parsing response analysis I wanted to try"). I think I at least used to have a copy of the Fortran source code salted away on my account somewhere, though I'd probably have a problem laying my hands on it now. I just wasn't aware that anyone was looking for it.
One of the most gorgeous anime series ever made, "Aria" (two seasons, "Aria the Animation" and "Aria the Natural"), was based on exactly this concept: we terraformed Mars and overshot. It's now a water planet, whose name has been changed to Aqua. An ocean planet of island chains, each set of islands was colonized by a different culture. The animation is set in the city of Neo-Venezia, the original having sunk under the ocean of Earth ("Manhome") long before.
This story really startled me, because now it's actually sounding possible.
The year is 2303, and tourists are gliding in gondolas along the canals of Neo-Venezia, in the care of the undines...
Re:Wow, I feel old
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm even older. I've been doing UNIX since v5 in about 1974. And/etc means et cetera. I wasn't even aware people were back-forming revisionist interpretations. How odd.
This is the sort of thing that makes me distrust historical interpretation of stuff that actually matters.
I think Britain only moved to the metric system because the pain of staying with Imperial became too great, which in turn was due to the increasing integration of the British economy into that of the European Union. The U.S. isn't a member of any such overarching body (the U.N. is too loose to count). This means that politicians feel only mild pressure to adopt a metric standard. Yes, international trade and hardware parts replacement would be made much easier, and companies which deal in such would save a lot of money. However (and those who think companies rule everything about Congress would do well to take note), the day-to-day pain of their constituents in converting from Imperial to metric would far outweigh the benefits in the only place that counts for them: the ballot box. The senators and representatives which voted in the Federal income tax all lost out at the next election. To their credit, they knew they would. They did it anyway because it was necessary. That's political bravery.
Today's politicians see no need for that kind of bravery when it comes to metric conversion, so it's a complete non-starter here.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Oh dear back to the eighties. How about the seventies?
One of the first full-screen editors for UNIX, if not the first, was the ned/re/e editor written at The RAND Corporation in the mid-seventies. It was based on the work of Ned Irons at Yale. It had several salient features for the current discussion:
1) It was modeless.
2) It was a "white-space" editor. All the editors you folks know are character editors: you can't position the cursor beyond the end of a line without explicitly going into insert mode and inserting enough spaces or tabs to get over there. The RAND editor modeled an infinite sheet of paper, and let you put the cursor anywhere you damn please. If (and only if) you then typed printing characters there, it would insert the requisite amount of white space automatically. Character editors have always seemed much too restrictive to me.
3) It was ridiculously easy to learn. RAND had terminal reconfigured with hot-wired number pads and special keycaps, so instead of numbers, the pad had PICK, PUT, CLOSE, OPEN, and suchlike keys. Secretaries with no computer experience could start using it on these terminals in about a half an hour.
Berkeley distributed "vi" much more widely than RAND distributed "e", although RAND did have a public-domain distribution that included both "e" and MH. However, it never caught on. I still use "e" for my day-to-day editing, though of course the special keycaps are ancient history.
Well, according (again) to the lawyer who wrote the article, there was a well-recognized method by which Spamhaus could have responded to the suit by saying "You don't have jurisdiction." They didn't do that. They responded by saying, in effect, "Please transfer jurisdiction to federal court." Closely followed by, "Oh well, never mind! Get lost."
Of course the federal court doesn't have jurisdiction over a U.K. company that doesn't do business in the U.S. But the judge does have jurisdiction over ICANN, and can grant the plaintiff relief that way. The fact that this would be a startlingly bad idea from several perspectives no longer really enters into it.
Something like this was bound to happen someday. In fact it'll happen again and again until either a) the DNS fractures, or b) all semblances of Internet governance go sovereign. The U.S. government has already said they'll do what they can to prevent (b) from happening, by insisting that ICANN belongs to the Dept. of commerce, forever and amen.
According to the article by the John Marshall Law School lawyer, the problem is not that Spamhaus ignored the initial TRO. The problem is that they didn't. They appeared in state court and asked that the case be moved to Federal Court, which it was. By doing so, they implicitly agreed that the Federal Court had jurisdiction.
Then they claimed it didn't.
I can't think of anything more likely to P.O. a judge than to ask to get into his courtroom, then call him a buffoon.
In the end, as the article says, ICANN may be forced to pull 'spamhaus.org', but ISPs that use it are savvy enough to move to using 'spamhaus.or.uk' or something similar, outside the court's control. But the individuals affected by the order may be unable to set foot in the U.S. for the rest of their lives, even to change planes.
Sadly, I doubt that changing to a new encryption method will work: it is highly unlikely that this product is decrypting encrypted BitTorrent packets. It is almost certain that it detects BitTorrent packets by size, number and frequency. If you have 600 open TCP connections, which are constantly shifting, and all of your inbound packets are the same size, then these are BitTorrent packets.
And, in the end, the ISP doesn't care if they're BitTorrent packets or not. If you're filling your inbound pipe for days on end, then throttling whatever it is that you're doing is a good thing, from their perspective.
When your schedule agrees with the power company's
on
Store Your Own Juice
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's nice when your own schedule coincides with the power company's.
I'm a customer of the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power. They don't advertise the fact very widely but they have a three-tier time-sensitive rate structure for residences, which is optional. I signed up for it. They came out, replaced my electro-mechanical power meter with a computerized model, and I was off and running.
No one's home during the day. That's key. From 1-5pm my electric rate is about double what it is from 8pm-10am. But since no one's home then, I make out like a bandit. My electric bill fell by one-third while everyone else's was going up.
If your place is empty during the day you should see if you have such a rate where you live. No need for power-storing file cabinets if so.
Of course they're not pulling the tools. There would be no point. They're about to abandon open source entirely, overnight, and switch to Microsoft Windows as an operating system. It will just solve SO MANY problems for them.
No joke and no lie! It says so right here, in John C. Dvorak's column. And he's never wrong.
...Danny O'Brien from NTK says that before the days of Dilbert, Futurama, User Friendly and Slashdot, the market for geek humor was dangerously under-served.
But not unserved. There was all that stuff I was churning out...
One of the best columns I ever wrote, and certainly one of the most fun to write, I wrote inside the Alvin. Not, I hasten to add, at the bottom of the ocean. It was in drydock down at Scripps Institute in San Diego at the time. I learned a lot about all sorts of things on that trip, including things like the esoteric outer reaches of battery charging, when you've got tons and tons of lead and acid to charge.
The magazine in which the column appeared was offered the opportunity to take Mr. P. on a dive, an opportunity which he would have accepted in a New York minute (hey, after all, he went for a boat ride on Grand Prismatic Spring: 160 degrees and no life jackets - what would be the point?), but as the trip would have cost the magazine the entire budget for publishing an issue, Mr. P. stayed sadly dry.
Alvin was an envelope-pusher from day one. The two halves of the titanium sphere that was the crew compartment were held together by one of the hardest titanium welding jobs ever done. The "penetrators" that carried the electronic wiring through the hull were always a concern. The inside of the sphere was unheated, so it "sweated" for the whole 12-hour dive. The pilot would check things out by wiping some of the "sweat" off the seam of a penetrator, if it looked like a "lot" of water, and would taste it for salt. Salt would have been a very, very bad sign.
Alvin did have an emergency ascent capability. Explosive bolts would shear the sphere clear of the boat-shaped outer chassis which contained the ballast, batteries and engines, allowing the sphere, a giant bubble, to race to the surface. The conning tower, though, was permanently attached, which meant that the sphere would spiral vigorously during the entire ascent, which would take twenty minutes or so. It was expected that the crew, under the best of circumstances, would be violently ill by the time they reached the surface, but they'd be alive.
This capability was never used, thank heavens.
Mr. Protocol wishes to thank Tom T. Tengdin for that golden opportunity.
Yeah, you're right! I must've stolen the story from that site! (Not.) But perhaps it'd be a better site to follow tech news on. Few enough people read it that it doesn't take the target site down like/. does. Seriously. That's a good consideration. (And Engadget is indeed a good site.)
Somebody did demo one of these (hydrogen fuel cell) at the "Segfest" in Florida where the Centaur was announced (/. story rejected). It filled a cargo bag, but it did work. The batteries being by far the bulkiest part of the IT package, Segway would go for fuel cells in a big way if they could figure out a way to prevent them from going Hindenburg.
Segway's the company, IT is the product. I said "IT" to differentiate it from the Centaur. Yeah, it sounded just a bit over-precise to me too, I admit it, but I couldn't think of any better way to express the fact that this isn't the two-wheel thingy and still be journalistically concise.
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot to explain, in the above post, that the dish being shown on the Death Star's equator in Larry's wireframe plans was not Larry's fault. The only thing he had available to use in constructing his sequence was some pre-production artwork, presumably by Ralph McQuarrie, which showed the dish on the equator. After Larry had completed his work and it was too late to go back and fix it, the dish was moved to its final position on the Death Star.
The machine was a PDP-11. It was a PDP-11/45 running a one-of-a-kind graphics OS, called GRASS, the Graphics Symbiosis System written by Tom DeFanti, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle). Tom's appointment then was to the Chemistry Dept.; the GRASS system was used primarily for molecular modeling. It drove an Evans & Sutherland Picture System, a giant $100,000 vector graphics engine worth five times what the PDP-11 was worth.
Larry's work pushed the system to its limits. His work was done at night, on the QT, with Tom's permission. This was done by giving Larry his own disk pack with a copy of the system on it. Larry's use of the system worked around all sorts of bugs in that relatively early version of GRASS. The film was made by pointing a (film) camera at the E&S screen, and running a macro which would render a frame, click the camera, render a frame, click the camera... While the PDP-11 system could in fact render the Death Star trench in real time, by the time you included all the little bits and frobs, the E&S took long enough to draw it that the display flickered. Hence the need to do frame-by-frame. Also, there was no frame-sync hardware in the system; the camera and display were connected only by the solenoid that tripped the camera shutter.
I played with that disk pack a year or two after the fact and it was a hoot to fly around the Death Star by hand. GRASS pioneered the interactive control of complex graphics, so all the position (and other) variables could trivially be tied to dials, etc. I was discouraged by one thing: the final version of the run had apparently been deleted from the disk. The only version I could find had the big "dish" directly on the equator of the Death Star, not at 45 degrees north latitude as in the film.
Years after that, I happened to talk to Larry Cuba by phone about something else, and asked him about that. He said the version I saw WAS the final version. Years after that, when I went to my "farewell to Star Wars viewing of Star Wars", I saw he was right. The plans shown to the rebels show the dish on the equator. Obviously the plans were fake. Those rebels were all dead men.
Which, of course, only means that when security and necessary accomplishment collide, you're the one who never finds out about it. Ever. There is no compromise.
Actually, CSNET was only nominally for computer science research departments. Actually they'd let pretty much anybody on who'd pay the freight. The research "hoop" was held rather low. We (at CSNET) had one company online which was a computer graphic rendering house using CSNET as a transit net between their offices in Canada and the U.S.: a pure Internet application.
CSNET's real purpose was to find out if it was possible to run an IP network at a profit. We did, if only just, and so various of our customers turned into today's Tier 1 providers.
As far as I'm concerned, today's Internet may have grown from NSFnet, but the NSF funded CSNET first, and CSNET was the first ISP. Really, the Internet grew from CSNET via NSFnet, in my book.
Incidentally, my monicker, "Mr. Protocol", comes from a column I wrote for twelve years in Server/Workstation Expert magazine, but he was really born in the online CSNET Forum, emailed monthly to the membership. His first incarnation was online, not print, and was rather more trenchant than the ink-stained wretch he later became...though the latter was far, far more profitable. Definitely fitting for an Internet character.
Sadly, the Netbook probably won't do. The entire line was discontinued. It was a gigantic PDA, so the OS it runs is an ancestor of the current Symbian, not Windows. I think Opera came out with a browser for it, but the point is, it doesn't run a current browser, or in fact any current software at all, so lots of things just won't work.
It's an abandoned platform restricted to ancient software.
OTOH it is neat. It's even leather-bound!
Back In the Day, I wasted a lot of time (a lot of time) in a TinyMUD called DragonMUD. It's still up and running, FWIW, but the days of text-based VRs are long gone.
In DragonMUD I built a "quest" which required the player, in solving it, to learn a few words and grammar rules for ancient Egyptian, the language of the hieroglyphs. Everyone said it was one of the hardest quests in the game, and it ranked very, very highly among the players. It got academics interested in VR, and in fact DARPA poured $63 million into VR research in schools, all partly because of this quest, and one DARPA program manager who loved it.
I knew going into it that no one would touch it if it wasn't fun, so I created sweeping desert vistas, ancient gods, temples, tombs and (of course) hieroglyphs. Real Indiana Jone stuff. But the hook was that this was real ancient Egyptian you were puzzling out, not some made-up gamer's stew. People got a real charge out of it.
The quest is still online, actually, but no one goes there now. A modern replacement would have to take place in Second Life or the like, and would take far longer to build (and far greater skill!). Still, it would be quite something...
The Segway, not the most successful enterprise ever (but still selling a lot of 'em) only became really useful when they increased the effective range by a factor of 2.5 by replacing the nickel-metal hydride batteries on the first generation by a lithium-ion battery. They couldn't use lithium-ion to begin with because of exactly the problems cited herein...nothing like a rolling bomb to make your rep as a company.
They went with a battery made by Valence Technologies, which uses phosphate electrodes to produce a Li-ion battery which is not a firebomb in a plastic shell. The company, which has been having its own troubles, has a very effective video showing a military-grade Li-ion pack being shot up by a machine gun next to a Valence pack. The military pack turns into a thermal grenade-cum-jetpack, while the Valence pack just sits there and smokes. It doesn't exactly stay cool, but it doesn't burst into jets of flame either.
This story mildly creeps me out.
I worked down the hall from Willie Crowther when I was at BBN, and I asked him about why he wrote it ("I had some ideas on parsing response analysis I wanted to try"). I think I at least used to have a copy of the Fortran source code salted away on my account somewhere, though I'd probably have a problem laying my hands on it now. I just wasn't aware that anyone was looking for it.
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, anyone?
One of the most gorgeous anime series ever made, "Aria" (two seasons, "Aria the Animation" and "Aria the Natural"), was based on exactly this concept: we terraformed Mars and overshot. It's now a water planet, whose name has been changed to Aqua. An ocean planet of island chains, each set of islands was colonized by a different culture. The animation is set in the city of Neo-Venezia, the original having sunk under the ocean of Earth ("Manhome") long before.
This story really startled me, because now it's actually sounding possible.
The year is 2303, and tourists are gliding in gondolas along the canals of Neo-Venezia, in the care of the undines...
I'm even older. I've been doing UNIX since v5 in about 1974. And /etc means et cetera. I wasn't even aware people were back-forming revisionist interpretations. How odd.
This is the sort of thing that makes me distrust historical interpretation of stuff that actually matters.
I think Britain only moved to the metric system because the pain of staying with Imperial became too great, which in turn was due to the increasing integration of the British economy into that of the European Union. The U.S. isn't a member of any such overarching body (the U.N. is too loose to count). This means that politicians feel only mild pressure to adopt a metric standard. Yes, international trade and hardware parts replacement would be made much easier, and companies which deal in such would save a lot of money. However (and those who think companies rule everything about Congress would do well to take note), the day-to-day pain of their constituents in converting from Imperial to metric would far outweigh the benefits in the only place that counts for them: the ballot box. The senators and representatives which voted in the Federal income tax all lost out at the next election. To their credit, they knew they would. They did it anyway because it was necessary. That's political bravery.
Today's politicians see no need for that kind of bravery when it comes to metric conversion, so it's a complete non-starter here.
One of the first full-screen editors for UNIX, if not the first, was the ned/re/e editor written at The RAND Corporation in the mid-seventies. It was based on the work of Ned Irons at Yale. It had several salient features for the current discussion:
1) It was modeless.
2) It was a "white-space" editor. All the editors you folks know are character editors: you can't position the cursor beyond the end of a line without explicitly going into insert mode and inserting enough spaces or tabs to get over there. The RAND editor modeled an infinite sheet of paper, and let you put the cursor anywhere you damn please. If (and only if) you then typed printing characters there, it would insert the requisite amount of white space automatically. Character editors have always seemed much too restrictive to me.
3) It was ridiculously easy to learn. RAND had terminal reconfigured with hot-wired number pads and special keycaps, so instead of numbers, the pad had PICK, PUT, CLOSE, OPEN, and suchlike keys. Secretaries with no computer experience could start using it on these terminals in about a half an hour.
Berkeley distributed "vi" much more widely than RAND distributed "e", although RAND did have a public-domain distribution that included both "e" and MH. However, it never caught on. I still use "e" for my day-to-day editing, though of course the special keycaps are ancient history.
Well, according (again) to the lawyer who wrote the article, there was a well-recognized method by which Spamhaus could have responded to the suit by saying "You don't have jurisdiction." They didn't do that. They responded by saying, in effect, "Please transfer jurisdiction to federal court." Closely followed by, "Oh well, never mind! Get lost."
Of course the federal court doesn't have jurisdiction over a U.K. company that doesn't do business in the U.S. But the judge does have jurisdiction over ICANN, and can grant the plaintiff relief that way. The fact that this would be a startlingly bad idea from several perspectives no longer really enters into it.
Something like this was bound to happen someday. In fact it'll happen again and again until either a) the DNS fractures, or b) all semblances of Internet governance go sovereign. The U.S. government has already said they'll do what they can to prevent (b) from happening, by insisting that ICANN belongs to the Dept. of commerce, forever and amen.
That leaves (a).
Ready, folks?
According to the article by the John Marshall Law School lawyer, the problem is not that Spamhaus ignored the initial TRO. The problem is that they didn't. They appeared in state court and asked that the case be moved to Federal Court, which it was. By doing so, they implicitly agreed that the Federal Court had jurisdiction.
Then they claimed it didn't.
I can't think of anything more likely to P.O. a judge than to ask to get into his courtroom, then call him a buffoon.
In the end, as the article says, ICANN may be forced to pull 'spamhaus.org', but ISPs that use it are savvy enough to move to using 'spamhaus.or.uk' or something similar, outside the court's control. But the individuals affected by the order may be unable to set foot in the U.S. for the rest of their lives, even to change planes.
Sadly, I doubt that changing to a new encryption method will work: it is highly unlikely that this product is decrypting encrypted BitTorrent packets. It is almost certain that it detects BitTorrent packets by size, number and frequency. If you have 600 open TCP connections, which are constantly shifting, and all of your inbound packets are the same size, then these are BitTorrent packets.
And, in the end, the ISP doesn't care if they're BitTorrent packets or not. If you're filling your inbound pipe for days on end, then throttling whatever it is that you're doing is a good thing, from their perspective.
It's nice when your own schedule coincides with the power company's.
I'm a customer of the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power. They don't advertise the fact very widely but they have a three-tier time-sensitive rate structure for residences, which is optional. I signed up for it. They came out, replaced my electro-mechanical power meter with a computerized model, and I was off and running.
No one's home during the day. That's key. From 1-5pm my electric rate is about double what it is from 8pm-10am. But since no one's home then, I make out like a bandit. My electric bill fell by one-third while everyone else's was going up.
If your place is empty during the day you should see if you have such a rate where you live. No need for power-storing file cabinets if so.
Of course they're not pulling the tools. There would be no point. They're about to abandon open source entirely, overnight, and switch to Microsoft Windows as an operating system. It will just solve SO MANY problems for them.
No joke and no lie! It says so right here, in John C. Dvorak's column. And he's never wrong.
Is he?
But not unserved. There was all that stuff I was churning out...
One of the best columns I ever wrote, and certainly one of the most fun to write, I wrote inside the Alvin. Not, I hasten to add, at the bottom of the ocean. It was in drydock down at Scripps Institute in San Diego at the time. I learned a lot about all sorts of things on that trip, including things like the esoteric outer reaches of battery charging, when you've got tons and tons of lead and acid to charge.
The magazine in which the column appeared was offered the opportunity to take Mr. P. on a dive, an opportunity which he would have accepted in a New York minute (hey, after all, he went for a boat ride on Grand Prismatic Spring: 160 degrees and no life jackets - what would be the point?), but as the trip would have cost the magazine the entire budget for publishing an issue, Mr. P. stayed sadly dry.
Alvin was an envelope-pusher from day one. The two halves of the titanium sphere that was the crew compartment were held together by one of the hardest titanium welding jobs ever done. The "penetrators" that carried the electronic wiring through the hull were always a concern. The inside of the sphere was unheated, so it "sweated" for the whole 12-hour dive. The pilot would check things out by wiping some of the "sweat" off the seam of a penetrator, if it looked like a "lot" of water, and would taste it for salt. Salt would have been a very, very bad sign.
Alvin did have an emergency ascent capability. Explosive bolts would shear the sphere clear of the boat-shaped outer chassis which contained the ballast, batteries and engines, allowing the sphere, a giant bubble, to race to the surface. The conning tower, though, was permanently attached, which meant that the sphere would spiral vigorously during the entire ascent, which would take twenty minutes or so. It was expected that the crew, under the best of circumstances, would be violently ill by the time they reached the surface, but they'd be alive.
This capability was never used, thank heavens.
Mr. Protocol wishes to thank Tom T. Tengdin for that golden opportunity.
Quite right. I'm wrong again.
Yeah, you're right! I must've stolen the story from that site! (Not.) But perhaps it'd be a better site to follow tech news on. Few enough people read it that it doesn't take the target site down like /. does. Seriously. That's a good consideration. (And Engadget is indeed a good site.)
Somebody did demo one of these (hydrogen fuel cell) at the "Segfest" in Florida where the Centaur was announced (/. story rejected). It filled a cargo bag, but it did work. The batteries being by far the bulkiest part of the IT package, Segway would go for fuel cells in a big way if they could figure out a way to prevent them from going Hindenburg.
Segway's the company, IT is the product. I said "IT" to differentiate it from the Centaur. Yeah, it sounded just a bit over-precise to me too, I admit it, but I couldn't think of any better way to express the fact that this isn't the two-wheel thingy and still be journalistically concise.
A few Segway fanatics do still say "IT", FWIW.
Right you are.