About forty years ago, it looked like Lockheed was going to go bankrupt. The stock fell from $60 to $3, which was below par (i.e. breaking up the company and selling off the assets would have recovered more money than the stock was selling for). The problem was that Lockheed wasn't just a defense contractor, it was the defense contractor, and during the height of the cold war, to boot. They couldn't be allowed to go bankrupt.
So the government bailed them out.
Then, some years later, there was a little problem at a generating plant owned by General Public Utilities (GPU). You might not have heard of GPU but you've heard of the plant: Three Mile Island. GPU stock took a hit, as you might imagine. In fact it looked like it might go broke. The problem was that it was a utility, which means it was a monopoly. If it went broke the lights went out over a fair stretch of countryside. That couldn't happen.
So the government bailed them out.
Now, my father saw both of those coming. He bought Lockheed stock at fire-sale prices because he knew that they couldn't be allowed to go broke. He cried because he couldn't afford more. He made out like a bandit.
When GPU started to go under, he bought all the GPU stock he could. And this time, he could afford more. He made out like a bandit. So well, in fact, that he assured himself a comfortable retirement. He's quite conservative, and told me ruefully, "I always preached the values of thrift and economy. Now I'm comfortable in my old age, but it isn't due to any of that. Hmph."
Then the Seattle public utility, through a boring series of blunders, started to go broke. They couldn't be allowed to go broke, for the same reasons that GPU couldn't and Lockheed couldn't.
So the government...said "Hey! Wait just a darn minute here!" And didn't bail them out.
And they went broke. And the lights stayed on.
Ditto when California started having rolling blackouts. Big raspberries from the Fed, because the Shrub knows California wouldn't vote for him if he was rolling out the red carpet in front of Jesus Christ for the Second Coming. Much stick-waving, stunningly bad contracting, and shouting, but the lights came back on and stayed that way.
And he did it using what must have been very nearly the last running copy of NLS, Doug Englebart's On-Line System. It was to support Jon and IANA that ISI kept a PDP-10 or a DEC-20 (I forget which) running for years past its reasonable end-of-life. I once researched early user-interface tools, and visited Jon. He was kind enough to demonstrate for me the chord keyboard that he used with his left hand while running the mouse with his right - remember, the mouse was invented for NLS.
I'm interested in hearing about how "Legal action got the feedback removed..." Could you give some details of how you did this? Who did you take action against? Ebay, or the other party?
Funnily enough, one famous instance of this was not only solved by technology, it was the spur to create that technology.
Back in the days where all telephone exchanges were run by humans, there was this town with two undertakers. No doubt the telecommies will correct any errors of fact I may make, but the basic situation was that THE telephone operator in town was related to one of the undertakers, and any time a call came in for either of them, she directed the call to her relative. The other undertaker never got any of his calls.
This situation caused the unlucky undertaker, name of Strowger, to invent the first fully automatic telephone exchange, known then and forever after as the Strowger switch. The bane of his existence was rendered redundant by technology, and he started getting his calls again. One wishes one were able to see the operator's face when she was told the unhappy news: "That guy you've been pimping all these years? He's just eliminated your job."
I believe this was the line of thinking when Motorola announced that they'de be burning up the Iridium satellite system by de-orbiting them.
I don't think so. I believe it was part of the agreement that gave them the orbital space that they de-orbit if they went out of business. That's because there's a huge (and growing) problem of space junk. 66 extra dead birds were not going to be allowed.
This de-orbiting requirement is common across all civilian satellites. It's just that no one ever came close to abandoning 66 satellites before, so it made the news.
My dad is a civil engineer, and used a slide rule daily in his design work. Therefore he made sure that I had a good one. He had other, much more exotic tools too, such as a polar planimeter. This is a wondrous device that lives in a felt-lined case. You put it together, set it on a drawing, and run a little wheel around a closed figure. From a dial, you read off the area of the figure. It's a mechanical integrator. It's gorgeous. He sold it when he retired. OW!
But I still have my Pickett. It's true that in order to use it, you have to place the decimal point yourself. In scientific calculations this isn't usually too hard, because you start with numbers between one and ten, and figure the exponents separately. The downside is that answers are inexact. You're lucky to be able to carry three significant figures, and you can't even do that if there are more than two or three steps in your calculation. Really, really serious people used very large slide rules with temperature compensation scales (!!!).
The family company had those brute electromechanical calculators with ten-by-ten fields of buttons. Every ten years or so they'd replace the current ones, so when I hit college, I got one of those as a hand-me-down. It must have been almost solid steel, and weighed about forty pounds. I never looked back. Finally I had something that wouldn't reduce a calculation to mush by the fifth step.
I think there is flakiness in the synchronization software. My own iPAQ (still running WinCE 3.0, as I assume yours is) got into a state where it would synchronize, but not completely. There was always one item left to synchronize after every sync was completed.
I called Compaq and they told me to brainwipe the unit and restore from backup. That did it.
I suspect you may have something sour in your desktop sync folder. If you can stand to do so, move all that stuff to one side, and resync to a clean directory. To be extra-bold, brainwipe your unit after backing it up so you're starting clean. See if that fixes things.
If it still craps out down to the flash monitor level, you have a bad unit. Otherwise you get to start the bloody detail work of gradually reintroducing your various pieces of user data until it craps out again. Blow the offending data into oblivion.
But Linux is very popular among technical college and university students. What will happen in another few years when tens of thousands of college students who have grown up on Linux go into the workforce.
Answer: not a dang thing.
This is exactly what people were saying 15 years ago about UNIX. "Ahah!" you say. "And they were right!"
Nah. UNIX took over because it became the Internet platform. In part this was due to the fact that it was the research platform of choice at the Universities and research institutes who were primarily responsible for building the Internet, but it wasn't because students everywhere were using UNIX. Students get a culture shock when they go to work, and businesses couldn't give a flying rat's ass what the students are used to.
UNIX took over because Bill Gates thought the whole Internet thing was a flash in the pan until it was too late.
The popularity of Linux in today's colleges and universities is not, by itself, going to give Linux more than a minor leg up in the commercial marketplace.
See my comment elsewhere in this thread for a more complete story on Dr. Smith's involvement in Stargate and the two Mummy movies, and the nature of the language you're hearing.
Goodness knows why I would bother responding to a Katz post. I certainly have no intention of refuting his review, because that would be a real exercise in futility. I might annoy the man by pointing out that Rachael Weisz's "older" character is not "Nefertiti", because the queen of the heretic king Akhenaten has no place in this movie. The character's name was "NefertiRi", who is someone else entirely. It's really annoying to read a dismissive review by someone who doesn't even bother to get the names right. And he complains about nonsense chants that aren't translated or explained. Well, well.
No, this missive's purpose is to point out that there was more going on here than a series of brief homages to Hollywood past. I wanted to comment on the script...
The language of the ancient Egyptians went through as many changes in the 3,000 years of Pharaonic history as English has done in the past 3,000 years. The "Pyramid Texts" didn't make any more sense to the Ptolemies than they do to us. Then after the Christians got done trashing the place, the language was lost. It didn't help any that although it was basically alphabetic, it threw in a bunch of extras, like a few ideographs, determinative signs, biliteral and triliteral signs, idioms, abbreviations, and so forth - enough to keep people guessing for a good long time. They also threw out all the vowels. Gardiner, in his still essential Middle Egyptian Grammar, theorizes that because the vowels shifted from one side of a consonant to the other as words changed case and aspect, the Egyptians regarded them as too "shifty."
Whatever the reason, the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian has been so problematic that for most of the history of modern Egyptology, nobody's even tried. One or two really hilarious horror movies, attempting some sort of legitimacy, have used the highly artificial modern academic pronunciation of ancient Egyptian, but even the most conscientious of moviemakers have never tried for the real thing.
Until a little number called Stargate came along.
The makers of that little summer sleeper approached Dr. Antonio Loprieno, then of UCLA, and asked him for help in rendering "real" middle Egyptian on the screen. Whether they knew it or not, they came to the right fellow. Working backward from Coptic, the lineal descendent of the ancient Egyptian language, modern linguists now have a pretty good handle on how the language was actually pronounced. All of about six people in the world can render spoken middle Egyptian in a reasonable hope of being somewhere near correct. Dr. Loprieno, now of the University of Basle, is one of them.
Dr. Loprieno was too busy to take on the job, being, lucky Egyptologist, actually employed at the time. There are more under- and unemployed Egyptologists than in just about any other specialty on the planet. However, he did have a recently graduated student, Dr. Stuart Smith, who was looking for work. It was a marriage made in purgatory.
Stargate shot mostly in Yuma, Arizona, a pleasure ground for desert seekers but a hellhole for movie companies. Dr. Smith took all of the considerable portion of the Stargate script that was to be in ancient Egyptian and rendered it, to the best of his considerable ability, in a form of archaized Coptic that approximates, as closely as we currently know, the spoken form of ancient Egyptian. The actors were very happy with this. Instead of some nonsense "gabble booble", they were speaking real lines. Of course, this also meant that Dr. Smith had to spend weeks in Yuma. They'd bring him out even for reshoots and pickups - a "half day's work" would turn into another week, he reported.
Stargate was a runaway sleeper success, and the makers of The Mummy knew a good thing when they heard it. Dr. Smith was brought on for that film as well, though there was not a lot of ancient Egyptian in that film.
With The Mummy Returns, we once again have a considerable percentage of the script in ancient Egyptian. What's notable in this film as in the original, is not that Arnold Vosloo is able to memorize this stuff and spit it back out as if he means it. To an Egyptologist's ear, the interesting part is to hear what Smith has done to revive this ancient language. As in Stargate, students of the language can actually pick up on the spoken lines and compare them with the subtitles. This includes Jon Katz's "nonsensical" chants, of course...which all make perfect sense. Really.
And the really, really interesting thing is Patricia Vasquez. Not only for the truly admirable body paint, but for the fact that she blows Arnold Vosloo out of the water in delivery, just as she did in the first movie.
She has a really good ancient Egyptian accent!
Of course the really interesting thing would be to check it out to see if Vosloo/Imhotep and Ankh-Sun-Amen are speaking, not Middle Egyptian, but Old Egyptian, in conformance with their period.
Actually, they did try to sell it. Some believe that that's why some nameless Congressional staffer took a wild hair and wrote IWS into some legislation. The original version of CVW contained proprietary 3rd-party code (sound familiar?) and required a license. When Mitre first opened it up, they distributed binaries and generated a license key for CVW free upon request.
Opening it up to an open-source level required rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Quite an effort. I hope they get the SourceForge site fixed. It'd be a crying shame if the whole effort just went *poof*.
Telecollaboration needs more than just one tool. You need to make use of a range of cooperating tools in order to provide effective telecollaboration. Videoconferencing is only one piece, and arguably the least useful one. You need:
Document sharing
Real-time communication
Long-term communication
Audio and video are good, but only on an "it-would-be-nice" basis. Mitre Corp. produced just such a tool, failed in the marketplace, and opensourced the result. It's available as Collaborative Virtual Workspaces.
Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my ken, that site is totally broken at the moment. If the site ever gets fixed, give it a try.
The U.S. Government, being more than somewhat peeved at Mitre for some reason, decided everyone should be using InfoWorkSpace, IWS, by good old General Dynamics. Snappy little Act of Congress there: if you like their money, then you are informed you love IWS. IWS represents a collection of similar tools, but unlike CVW, they're not really bound together, and don't interoperate. Still, it's a pretty good system if you can stand to use it.
When designing defense electronics, there was allways this nagging about having a second source for as much components as possible. This was to achieve project safety for long term project.
Some readers may be old enough to remember why this was so. Many moons ago, Lockheed owned a huge percentage of the entire defense industry. Much of our national defense depended upon Lockheed products. Then Lockheed tanked. Stock used to be 60, went down to 3.
In a normal marketplace Lockeed would eventually have been forced into bankruptcy. However, since the country couldn't possibly allow this to happen, they were bailed out - the first big corporate bailout in American history, but not the last. Those investors smart enough to have spotted this (my father among them) made out like bandits.
Now, having learned this lesson, the DoD insists that everything in every defense project be documented out the wazoo so that the contract can be moved to another company. This isn't actually practical in most cases, but at least it forces a lot of documentation to actually get created.:-)
This attitude has spread to the commercial world, leading to such things as source code escrow. The companies which are now pushing for software rental will, of course, fight such escrow requirements as vigorously as the rest of us fought key escrow, and probably more viciously too, so don't expect source code (or software key!) escrow to be adopted quickly or universally.
Remember, the same things we hate about encryption key escrow can be applied by them as arguments against software key escrow.
"Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach," said... I forget who. It wasn't Ken Thompson, though. It was another member of the lab staff. Anyone remember who it was?
The thing about the GPL is that you don't give up any rights to your own code. The teacher has the right to release the class's code under any license the school will let him get away with.
However, unless you signed something, you own your own code, and the fact that it's been released under the GPL by someone else doesn't mean that you can't release it yourself under any license you choose.
Of course, if it was developed on the school's equipment they may claim rights to it.
The iPAQ seems to be unavailable except on eBay, not a viable source of supply for any corporate research effort. This leaves the development of the iPAQ as a wireless platform in the hands of a) individuals wealthy enough and bold enough to get supply from eBay, and b) corporations with backdoor purchasing agreements with Compaq.
Neither of these seem like good options for an open-source platform. I fear we'll have to look elsewhere for the "killer platform" for wireless Linux.
A friend of mine has had great success with his variant. He's a) an oenophile, renting space in a commercial wine cellar, b) a UNIX guru since the year zip, with major chops, and c) a complete leftist. Not in the ultraviolet with the likes of RMS, but not likely to support John Ashcroft, either.
At one point in the past, though, he had registered Republican, because he wanted to vote in the primary of a local election against some real tool. This got him on mailing lists.
One day some completely offensive right-wing organization using just such a list sent him a piece of junk mail. NRA, Pat Robertson, something like this.
Now, this fellow, having environmental concerns, had been carefully peeling the lead foil from his wine bottles, as he opened them, flattening the foil into a sheet, and keeping the sheets in a stack in a desk drawer till he could dispose of the lead safely. In a moment of inspiration, he pulled one or two of them out, put them into the postage-paid reply envelope, and sent it in. There are upper limits on the weight that postage-paid reply mail will accept, but two or three sheets of lead foil isn't over that limit, and makes what he called a very nice "negative contribution."
Guess what? These boys only care that you replied. A hot prospect! He got more mail. He sent more lead back. He got lots more mail. He sent lots more lead back (he had quite a stash built up).
The day he told me this story, he'd received his Republican National Committee card in the mail. He was preparing to make a good big dense-metal negative contribution of a reasonable size in the postage-paid contribution envelope they provided.
I'm fond of retrocomputing. I'll admit that up front. I'm getting old enough to be nostalgic about things like COMND JSYS and a UNIX shell that doesn't have shell variables.
But then a thought struck me. I worked at The RAND Corporation during the days when it still had a technology program (they assassinated it in favor of policy analysis). They had a DECSYSTEM 2060, used primarily for INTERLISP work. The 36-bit architecture never caught fire at RAND the way it did elsewhere. At ISI in Marina del Rey, for example, they had the world's most photogenic machine room: it had a view over the marina that was to die for, and they also had about ten PDP-10s lined up facing each other. They sold a lot of access to movie companies who needed a really sexy machine room, I hear.
Now, RAND did a lot of solid research on that 2060. That work was moved to Xerox Dolphins, which weren't nearly as fast, and on which INTERLISP ran much more slowly than it did on the 2060. Eventually that work petered out. There was an effort to port INTERLISP to the VAX, including writing new VAX microcode, but that effort was never completed (this wasn't at RAND, btw).
With the change in machine architecture, from PDP-10 to SPARC and PC, came a shift in research focus. Actually, at RAND, which was the first commercial UNIX licensee, those efforts were carried out in parallel. It was astonishing to note that there was essentially zip in the way of cross-fertilization between RAND's 36-bit world and RAND's PDP-11 and Sun worlds. There was an intelligent assistant AI type thing built on the UNIX system, RITA, the RAND Intelligent Terminal Agent, but that was only because that work was done before the 2060 arrived, I'm pretty sure.
So the question is, now that the 36-bit world is available again in emulation (sort of, if a decent PDP-10/20 emulator ever sees the light of day), could computer science benefit from any of that old work picking up again? I mean, the address space limits are essentially gone. I'm not certain but I'll bet that on a decently fast PC, the emulators would allow programs to run rather faster than they did on a 2060. INTERLISP suddenly becomes viable again.
Is there any point to doing this? Is any of the work that was starved off by the death of that architecture worth reviving?
KCET, the PBS station here in El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, was flying high at the time Cosmos was made. This big, fancy production was supposed to be their crowning achievement and make them all a boodle of money, or rather, make back the boodle they'd spent producing it and a bunch of other expensive stuff.
It cratered in.
The disaster was so great that, combined with the other losses, it drove the station into near-bankruptcy. Everyone running it was replaced and the new regime turned it into a standard, fiscally responsible PBS station, i.e., everything was subordinated to begging and pleading for membership subscriptions. Paradoxically, that's when I allowed my membership to expire. Although they have always claimed that they show things "complete and uncut", they started dropping off introductory material from at least one program and replacing it with begging and pleading.
Several years later the station finally managed to claw its way out of the hole.
Hey! The Secret Life of Machines was hosted by Tim Hunkin, one of Britains' great eccentric geniuses. He proceeded to do a stint as eccentric-in-residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Ladies and gentlemen, remember that this poster is a tutor, not a parent. The decisions about how much time to throw a basketball around the court and how much time to spend on studying metaphysics are not in this guy's hands, although he probably has some input.
I suggest the best we can do for him is to answer his damn question. I have my own answers to this, based on a 30-year perspective in the field.
Work on several things at once. Familiarize him with several different operating systems. How many you can do depends on the financial resources of the family. I don't know what those are: it may be all they can do to hire a tutor, or they may be super-rich. Without making good/bad judgements, show him Windows, MacOs, BeOS, and at least two flavors of UNIX, probably Linux and FreeBSD. Make clear the difference between window manager look'n'feel (twm vs. Enlightenment vs. KDE) and the underlying window system, as well as the difference between the window system and the underlying OS, when there is a difference.
For more straight-up academic study, C is the Fortran of today. But also throw in Knuth's volumes on The Art of Computer Programming, and shore up the academic underpinnings where he shows weakness reading Knuth. For academic purposes I'd show him C and Lisp, then, together, Java and Smalltalk (use the Squeak implementation), to give a perspective on OO concepts.
For academic study of operating systems, you couldn't do better than to use the reprinted edition of John Lyons's commentary on UNIX. You can let the kid play with the system covered in those listings by running a PDP-11 simulator and the V6 UNIX that are now available. This eliminates all of the latter-day cruft and exposes the bare bones. This is what you want to study if you want to know how an OS works. Networking is a whole separate thing which you may not want to cover right away. Andy Tanenbaum's book is still probably the best all-round introduction to that.
The color receptors in the eye are not monochromatic, that is, they don't react to just one frequency of light. Instead, they react in a curve, with a peak at the frequency of greatest sensitivity of that particular color receptor. What goes into the visual channel, then, is the output from each kind of receptor. Their curves overlap, so all three of them would react (at very different levels) to a monochromatic light.
Now, let's say we have four monochromatic light sources, one at the peak frequency of each of the receptors in "Mrs. M's" eyes. To further simplify matters, let's pretend that a "normal" eye's color receptors have peaks at the same frequencies of three of Mrs. M's four receptor types. Call them R, G, B and Q, where Q is the color receptor that the normal eye doesn't have.
Shine equal intensities of R, G, and B into the normal person's eye. The three color receptors will respond with a particular color, probably white. Now, add in color Q, and at the same time, decrease R, G and B so that the response from each of the normal receptors for R, G, and B remains the same. The normal person will see no difference. They can't, we've made sure of that: their color receptors are putting out just the levels they did before.
Now, shine these two different combinations into Mrs. M's eyes. She'll see two VERY different colors. Her R, G and B receptors will be putting out the same levels in both cases, but her Q receptor will jump way up on the second combination. Result: the "white" light suddenly looks Q-colored. What color that actually corresponds to in normal vision depends on where the peak of the Q receptors lies in the spectrum. Could be aqua, cyan, anything.
Slashdot Mirror
About forty years ago, it looked like Lockheed was going to go bankrupt. The stock fell from $60 to $3, which was below par (i.e. breaking up the company and selling off the assets would have recovered more money than the stock was selling for). The problem was that Lockheed wasn't just a defense contractor, it was the defense contractor, and during the height of the cold war, to boot. They couldn't be allowed to go bankrupt.
So the government bailed them out.
Then, some years later, there was a little problem at a generating plant owned by General Public Utilities (GPU). You might not have heard of GPU but you've heard of the plant: Three Mile Island. GPU stock took a hit, as you might imagine. In fact it looked like it might go broke. The problem was that it was a utility, which means it was a monopoly. If it went broke the lights went out over a fair stretch of countryside. That couldn't happen.
So the government bailed them out.
Now, my father saw both of those coming. He bought Lockheed stock at fire-sale prices because he knew that they couldn't be allowed to go broke. He cried because he couldn't afford more. He made out like a bandit.
When GPU started to go under, he bought all the GPU stock he could. And this time, he could afford more. He made out like a bandit. So well, in fact, that he assured himself a comfortable retirement. He's quite conservative, and told me ruefully, "I always preached the values of thrift and economy. Now I'm comfortable in my old age, but it isn't due to any of that. Hmph."
Then the Seattle public utility, through a boring series of blunders, started to go broke. They couldn't be allowed to go broke, for the same reasons that GPU couldn't and Lockheed couldn't.
So the government...said "Hey! Wait just a darn minute here!" And didn't bail them out.
And they went broke. And the lights stayed on.
Ditto when California started having rolling blackouts. Big raspberries from the Fed, because the Shrub knows California wouldn't vote for him if he was rolling out the red carpet in front of Jesus Christ for the Second Coming. Much stick-waving, stunningly bad contracting, and shouting, but the lights came back on and stayed that way.
The days of government bailouts are over.
And he did it using what must have been very nearly the last running copy of NLS, Doug Englebart's On-Line System. It was to support Jon and IANA that ISI kept a PDP-10 or a DEC-20 (I forget which) running for years past its reasonable end-of-life. I once researched early user-interface tools, and visited Jon. He was kind enough to demonstrate for me the chord keyboard that he used with his left hand while running the mouse with his right - remember, the mouse was invented for NLS.
That's what kept the numbers flowing.
This year for Christmas I got:
1) An iBook.
2) A kidney stone.
*sigh*
I'm interested in hearing about how "Legal action got the feedback removed..." Could you give some details of how you did this? Who did you take action against? Ebay, or the other party?
Funnily enough, one famous instance of this was not only solved by technology, it was the spur to create that technology.
Back in the days where all telephone exchanges were run by humans, there was this town with two undertakers. No doubt the telecommies will correct any errors of fact I may make, but the basic situation was that THE telephone operator in town was related to one of the undertakers, and any time a call came in for either of them, she directed the call to her relative. The other undertaker never got any of his calls.
This situation caused the unlucky undertaker, name of Strowger, to invent the first fully automatic telephone exchange, known then and forever after as the Strowger switch. The bane of his existence was rendered redundant by technology, and he started getting his calls again. One wishes one were able to see the operator's face when she was told the unhappy news: "That guy you've been pimping all these years? He's just eliminated your job."
I believe this was the line of thinking when Motorola announced that they'de be burning up the Iridium satellite system by de-orbiting them.
I don't think so. I believe it was part of the agreement that gave them the orbital space that they de-orbit if they went out of business. That's because there's a huge (and growing) problem of space junk. 66 extra dead birds were not going to be allowed.
This de-orbiting requirement is common across all civilian satellites. It's just that no one ever came close to abandoning 66 satellites before, so it made the news.
My dad is a civil engineer, and used a slide rule daily in his design work. Therefore he made sure that I had a good one. He had other, much more exotic tools too, such as a polar planimeter. This is a wondrous device that lives in a felt-lined case. You put it together, set it on a drawing, and run a little wheel around a closed figure. From a dial, you read off the area of the figure. It's a mechanical integrator. It's gorgeous. He sold it when he retired. OW!
But I still have my Pickett. It's true that in order to use it, you have to place the decimal point yourself. In scientific calculations this isn't usually too hard, because you start with numbers between one and ten, and figure the exponents separately. The downside is that answers are inexact. You're lucky to be able to carry three significant figures, and you can't even do that if there are more than two or three steps in your calculation. Really, really serious people used very large slide rules with temperature compensation scales (!!!).
The family company had those brute electromechanical calculators with ten-by-ten fields of buttons. Every ten years or so they'd replace the current ones, so when I hit college, I got one of those as a hand-me-down. It must have been almost solid steel, and weighed about forty pounds. I never looked back. Finally I had something that wouldn't reduce a calculation to mush by the fifth step.
I think there is flakiness in the synchronization software. My own iPAQ (still running WinCE 3.0, as I assume yours is) got into a state where it would synchronize, but not completely. There was always one item left to synchronize after every sync was completed.
I called Compaq and they told me to brainwipe the unit and restore from backup. That did it.
I suspect you may have something sour in your desktop sync folder. If you can stand to do so, move all that stuff to one side, and resync to a clean directory. To be extra-bold, brainwipe your unit after backing it up so you're starting clean. See if that fixes things.
If it still craps out down to the flash monitor level, you have a bad unit. Otherwise you get to start the bloody detail work of gradually reintroducing your various pieces of user data until it craps out again. Blow the offending data into oblivion.
But Linux is very popular among technical college and university students. What will happen in another few years when tens of thousands of college students who have grown up on Linux go into the workforce.
Answer: not a dang thing.
This is exactly what people were saying 15 years ago about UNIX. "Ahah!" you say. "And they were right!"
Nah. UNIX took over because it became the Internet platform. In part this was due to the fact that it was the research platform of choice at the Universities and research institutes who were primarily responsible for building the Internet, but it wasn't because students everywhere were using UNIX. Students get a culture shock when they go to work, and businesses couldn't give a flying rat's ass what the students are used to.
UNIX took over because Bill Gates thought the whole Internet thing was a flash in the pan until it was too late.
The popularity of Linux in today's colleges and universities is not, by itself, going to give Linux more than a minor leg up in the commercial marketplace.
Anybody know the title (and author) of the short story where FNORD first appeared?
I wondered where all this came from (imputing that Loprieno is not a linguist, etc.).
Then I saw the University of Chicago return address.
See my comment elsewhere in this thread for a more complete story on Dr. Smith's involvement in Stargate and the two Mummy movies, and the nature of the language you're hearing.
Goodness knows why I would bother responding to a Katz post. I certainly have no intention of refuting his review, because that would be a real exercise in futility. I might annoy the man by pointing out that Rachael Weisz's "older" character is not "Nefertiti", because the queen of the heretic king Akhenaten has no place in this movie. The character's name was "NefertiRi", who is someone else entirely. It's really annoying to read a dismissive review by someone who doesn't even bother to get the names right. And he complains about nonsense chants that aren't translated or explained. Well, well.
No, this missive's purpose is to point out that there was more going on here than a series of brief homages to Hollywood past. I wanted to comment on the script...
The language of the ancient Egyptians went through as many changes in the 3,000 years of Pharaonic history as English has done in the past 3,000 years. The "Pyramid Texts" didn't make any more sense to the Ptolemies than they do to us. Then after the Christians got done trashing the place, the language was lost. It didn't help any that although it was basically alphabetic, it threw in a bunch of extras, like a few ideographs, determinative signs, biliteral and triliteral signs, idioms, abbreviations, and so forth - enough to keep people guessing for a good long time. They also threw out all the vowels. Gardiner, in his still essential Middle Egyptian Grammar, theorizes that because the vowels shifted from one side of a consonant to the other as words changed case and aspect, the Egyptians regarded them as too "shifty."
Whatever the reason, the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian has been so problematic that for most of the history of modern Egyptology, nobody's even tried. One or two really hilarious horror movies, attempting some sort of legitimacy, have used the highly artificial modern academic pronunciation of ancient Egyptian, but even the most conscientious of moviemakers have never tried for the real thing.
Until a little number called Stargate came along.
The makers of that little summer sleeper approached Dr. Antonio Loprieno, then of UCLA, and asked him for help in rendering "real" middle Egyptian on the screen. Whether they knew it or not, they came to the right fellow. Working backward from Coptic, the lineal descendent of the ancient Egyptian language, modern linguists now have a pretty good handle on how the language was actually pronounced. All of about six people in the world can render spoken middle Egyptian in a reasonable hope of being somewhere near correct. Dr. Loprieno, now of the University of Basle, is one of them.
Dr. Loprieno was too busy to take on the job, being, lucky Egyptologist, actually employed at the time. There are more under- and unemployed Egyptologists than in just about any other specialty on the planet. However, he did have a recently graduated student, Dr. Stuart Smith, who was looking for work. It was a marriage made in purgatory.
Stargate shot mostly in Yuma, Arizona, a pleasure ground for desert seekers but a hellhole for movie companies. Dr. Smith took all of the considerable portion of the Stargate script that was to be in ancient Egyptian and rendered it, to the best of his considerable ability, in a form of archaized Coptic that approximates, as closely as we currently know, the spoken form of ancient Egyptian. The actors were very happy with this. Instead of some nonsense "gabble booble", they were speaking real lines. Of course, this also meant that Dr. Smith had to spend weeks in Yuma. They'd bring him out even for reshoots and pickups - a "half day's work" would turn into another week, he reported.
Stargate was a runaway sleeper success, and the makers of The Mummy knew a good thing when they heard it. Dr. Smith was brought on for that film as well, though there was not a lot of ancient Egyptian in that film.
With The Mummy Returns, we once again have a considerable percentage of the script in ancient Egyptian. What's notable in this film as in the original, is not that Arnold Vosloo is able to memorize this stuff and spit it back out as if he means it. To an Egyptologist's ear, the interesting part is to hear what Smith has done to revive this ancient language. As in Stargate, students of the language can actually pick up on the spoken lines and compare them with the subtitles. This includes Jon Katz's "nonsensical" chants, of course...which all make perfect sense. Really.
And the really, really interesting thing is Patricia Vasquez. Not only for the truly admirable body paint, but for the fact that she blows Arnold Vosloo out of the water in delivery, just as she did in the first movie.
She has a really good ancient Egyptian accent!
Of course the really interesting thing would be to check it out to see if Vosloo/Imhotep and Ankh-Sun-Amen are speaking, not Middle Egyptian, but Old Egyptian, in conformance with their period.
Any takers?
Actually, they did try to sell it. Some believe that that's why some nameless Congressional staffer took a wild hair and wrote IWS into some legislation. The original version of CVW contained proprietary 3rd-party code (sound familiar?) and required a license. When Mitre first opened it up, they distributed binaries and generated a license key for CVW free upon request.
Opening it up to an open-source level required rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Quite an effort. I hope they get the SourceForge site fixed. It'd be a crying shame if the whole effort just went *poof*.
Telecollaboration needs more than just one tool. You need to make use of a range of cooperating tools in order to provide effective telecollaboration. Videoconferencing is only one piece, and arguably the least useful one. You need:
Document sharing
Real-time communication
Long-term communication
Audio and video are good, but only on an "it-would-be-nice" basis. Mitre Corp. produced just such a tool, failed in the marketplace, and opensourced the result. It's available as Collaborative Virtual Workspaces.
Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my ken, that site is totally broken at the moment. If the site ever gets fixed, give it a try.
The U.S. Government, being more than somewhat peeved at Mitre for some reason, decided everyone should be using InfoWorkSpace, IWS, by good old General Dynamics. Snappy little Act of Congress there: if you like their money, then you are informed you love IWS. IWS represents a collection of similar tools, but unlike CVW, they're not really bound together, and don't interoperate. Still, it's a pretty good system if you can stand to use it.
When designing defense electronics, there was allways this nagging about having a second source for as much components as possible. This was to achieve project safety for long term project.
:-)
Some readers may be old enough to remember why this was so. Many moons ago, Lockheed owned a huge percentage of the entire defense industry. Much of our national defense depended upon Lockheed products. Then Lockheed tanked. Stock used to be 60, went down to 3.
In a normal marketplace Lockeed would eventually have been forced into bankruptcy. However, since the country couldn't possibly allow this to happen, they were bailed out - the first big corporate bailout in American history, but not the last. Those investors smart enough to have spotted this (my father among them) made out like bandits.
Now, having learned this lesson, the DoD insists that everything in every defense project be documented out the wazoo so that the contract can be moved to another company. This isn't actually practical in most cases, but at least it forces a lot of documentation to actually get created.
This attitude has spread to the commercial world, leading to such things as source code escrow. The companies which are now pushing for software rental will, of course, fight such escrow requirements as vigorously as the rest of us fought key escrow, and probably more viciously too, so don't expect source code (or software key!) escrow to be adopted quickly or universally.
Remember, the same things we hate about encryption key escrow can be applied by them as arguments against software key escrow.
"Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach," said ... I forget who. It wasn't Ken Thompson, though. It was another member of the lab staff. Anyone remember who it was?
The thing about the GPL is that you don't give up any rights to your own code. The teacher has the right to release the class's code under any license the school will let him get away with.
However, unless you signed something, you own your own code, and the fact that it's been released under the GPL by someone else doesn't mean that you can't release it yourself under any license you choose.
Of course, if it was developed on the school's equipment they may claim rights to it.
The iPAQ seems to be unavailable except on eBay, not a viable source of supply for any corporate research effort. This leaves the development of the iPAQ as a wireless platform in the hands of a) individuals wealthy enough and bold enough to get supply from eBay, and b) corporations with backdoor purchasing agreements with Compaq.
Neither of these seem like good options for an open-source platform. I fear we'll have to look elsewhere for the "killer platform" for wireless Linux.
A friend of mine has had great success with his variant. He's a) an oenophile, renting space in a commercial wine cellar, b) a UNIX guru since the year zip, with major chops, and c) a complete leftist. Not in the ultraviolet with the likes of RMS, but not likely to support John Ashcroft, either.
At one point in the past, though, he had registered Republican, because he wanted to vote in the primary of a local election against some real tool. This got him on mailing lists.
One day some completely offensive right-wing organization using just such a list sent him a piece of junk mail. NRA, Pat Robertson, something like this.
Now, this fellow, having environmental concerns, had been carefully peeling the lead foil from his wine bottles, as he opened them, flattening the foil into a sheet, and keeping the sheets in a stack in a desk drawer till he could dispose of the lead safely. In a moment of inspiration, he pulled one or two of them out, put them into the postage-paid reply envelope, and sent it in. There are upper limits on the weight that postage-paid reply mail will accept, but two or three sheets of lead foil isn't over that limit, and makes what he called a very nice "negative contribution."
Guess what? These boys only care that you replied. A hot prospect! He got more mail. He sent more lead back. He got lots more mail. He sent lots more lead back (he had quite a stash built up).
The day he told me this story, he'd received his Republican National Committee card in the mail. He was preparing to make a good big dense-metal negative contribution of a reasonable size in the postage-paid contribution envelope they provided.
I'm fond of retrocomputing. I'll admit that up front. I'm getting old enough to be nostalgic about things like COMND JSYS and a UNIX shell that doesn't have shell variables.
But then a thought struck me. I worked at The RAND Corporation during the days when it still had a technology program (they assassinated it in favor of policy analysis). They had a DECSYSTEM 2060, used primarily for INTERLISP work. The 36-bit architecture never caught fire at RAND the way it did elsewhere. At ISI in Marina del Rey, for example, they had the world's most photogenic machine room: it had a view over the marina that was to die for, and they also had about ten PDP-10s lined up facing each other. They sold a lot of access to movie companies who needed a really sexy machine room, I hear.
Now, RAND did a lot of solid research on that 2060. That work was moved to Xerox Dolphins, which weren't nearly as fast, and on which INTERLISP ran much more slowly than it did on the 2060. Eventually that work petered out. There was an effort to port INTERLISP to the VAX, including writing new VAX microcode, but that effort was never completed (this wasn't at RAND, btw).
With the change in machine architecture, from PDP-10 to SPARC and PC, came a shift in research focus. Actually, at RAND, which was the first commercial UNIX licensee, those efforts were carried out in parallel. It was astonishing to note that there was essentially zip in the way of cross-fertilization between RAND's 36-bit world and RAND's PDP-11 and Sun worlds. There was an intelligent assistant AI type thing built on the UNIX system, RITA, the RAND Intelligent Terminal Agent, but that was only because that work was done before the 2060 arrived, I'm pretty sure.
So the question is, now that the 36-bit world is available again in emulation (sort of, if a decent PDP-10/20 emulator ever sees the light of day), could computer science benefit from any of that old work picking up again? I mean, the address space limits are essentially gone. I'm not certain but I'll bet that on a decently fast PC, the emulators would allow programs to run rather faster than they did on a 2060. INTERLISP suddenly becomes viable again.
Is there any point to doing this? Is any of the work that was starved off by the death of that architecture worth reviving?
KCET, the PBS station here in El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, was flying high at the time Cosmos was made. This big, fancy production was supposed to be their crowning achievement and make them all a boodle of money, or rather, make back the boodle they'd spent producing it and a bunch of other expensive stuff.
It cratered in.
The disaster was so great that, combined with the other losses, it drove the station into near-bankruptcy. Everyone running it was replaced and the new regime turned it into a standard, fiscally responsible PBS station, i.e., everything was subordinated to begging and pleading for membership subscriptions. Paradoxically, that's when I allowed my membership to expire. Although they have always claimed that they show things "complete and uncut", they started dropping off introductory material from at least one program and replacing it with begging and pleading.
Several years later the station finally managed to claw its way out of the hole.
I'm still not a member.
No one around KCET mentions Cosmos any more.
Hey! The Secret Life of Machines was hosted by Tim Hunkin, one of Britains' great eccentric geniuses. He proceeded to do a stint as eccentric-in-residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Ladies and gentlemen, remember that this poster is a tutor, not a parent. The decisions about how much time to throw a basketball around the court and how much time to spend on studying metaphysics are not in this guy's hands, although he probably has some input.
I suggest the best we can do for him is to answer his damn question. I have my own answers to this, based on a 30-year perspective in the field.
Work on several things at once. Familiarize him with several different operating systems. How many you can do depends on the financial resources of the family. I don't know what those are: it may be all they can do to hire a tutor, or they may be super-rich. Without making good/bad judgements, show him Windows, MacOs, BeOS, and at least two flavors of UNIX, probably Linux and FreeBSD. Make clear the difference between window manager look'n'feel (twm vs. Enlightenment vs. KDE) and the underlying window system, as well as the difference between the window system and the underlying OS, when there is a difference.
For more straight-up academic study, C is the Fortran of today. But also throw in Knuth's volumes on The Art of Computer Programming, and shore up the academic underpinnings where he shows weakness reading Knuth. For academic purposes I'd show him C and Lisp, then, together, Java and Smalltalk (use the Squeak implementation), to give a perspective on OO concepts.
For academic study of operating systems, you couldn't do better than to use the reprinted edition of John Lyons's commentary on UNIX. You can let the kid play with the system covered in those listings by running a PDP-11 simulator and the V6 UNIX that are now available. This eliminates all of the latter-day cruft and exposes the bare bones. This is what you want to study if you want to know how an OS works. Networking is a whole separate thing which you may not want to cover right away. Andy Tanenbaum's book is still probably the best all-round introduction to that.
Yes. This is exactly right. Consider it this way:
The color receptors in the eye are not monochromatic, that is, they don't react to just one frequency of light. Instead, they react in a curve, with a peak at the frequency of greatest sensitivity of that particular color receptor. What goes into the visual channel, then, is the output from each kind of receptor. Their curves overlap, so all three of them would react (at very different levels) to a monochromatic light.
Now, let's say we have four monochromatic light sources, one at the peak frequency of each of the receptors in "Mrs. M's" eyes. To further simplify matters, let's pretend that a "normal" eye's color receptors have peaks at the same frequencies of three of Mrs. M's four receptor types. Call them R, G, B and Q, where Q is the color receptor that the normal eye doesn't have.
Shine equal intensities of R, G, and B into the normal person's eye. The three color receptors will respond with a particular color, probably white. Now, add in color Q, and at the same time, decrease R, G and B so that the response from each of the normal receptors for R, G, and B remains the same. The normal person will see no difference. They can't, we've made sure of that: their color receptors are putting out just the levels they did before.
Now, shine these two different combinations into Mrs. M's eyes. She'll see two VERY different colors. Her R, G and B receptors will be putting out the same levels in both cases, but her Q receptor will jump way up on the second combination. Result: the "white" light suddenly looks Q-colored. What color that actually corresponds to in normal vision depends on where the peak of the Q receptors lies in the spectrum. Could be aqua, cyan, anything.