From Wikipedia: The country published about twice the number of papers on thorium as its nearest competitors, during each of the years from 2002 to 2006. The Indian nuclear establishment estimates that the country could produce 500 GWe for at least four centuries using just the country’s economically extractable thorium reserves.
My role in IT was to stop people buying hardware and software without thinking through how it would be used, how all the bits would integrate together and who would support it. I work in hospitals, and they are the worst so far. Clinical departments think it is a good idea to spend a pile of money on some piece of hardware or software, only to find they either can't use it, it is too complex for their staff to learn, it doesn't fit with anything else, it has a huge dependency on something they didn't buy and so on. Most of it ends up not ever being used - hence shelfware.
Buckling springs were a cost reduction over the ultimate keyboard design - which was Keyboard D and associated. Those were the "beam spring" keyboards that shipped with the IBM 3278, IBM 3279 and so on. Absolutely fantastic keyboards, wonderful touch, a near perfect force/displacement profile. They were quiet - so quiet, we had to put an electric clicker into the keyboards, software selectable so typists could hear the keystrokes.
I had one for years and years. I had an interface that supplied it with the +8.5v, +5vand -2.2v it needed, took its parallel output and mapped it to an ASCII symbol set. I had one wired to a 6809 Forth machine for a few years, but it fell into disrepair when the IBM PC arrived, and suddenly I had a C compiler to code with.
Well, it has saved the life of an old bit of kit from HP for me. I have an HP16500A logic analyser, that accepts analog acquisition cards as well. I bought one, only to find that the boot diskette for the machine didn't have the right code for the analog card. The code is all available online for download..
Of course, they are not regular diskettes - they run 77 tracks, not 80. A DOS utility called LIFUTIL is used to write diskettes in the correct format. Only runs on DOS or Windows up to Win95 - no WINE I am afraid. My Win95 machine has finally bitten the dust, so I had to boot Linux on an older machine with a diskette drive, hook it onto the network, create a DOS partition, install FreeDOS on it, push the files to write onto the diskette into the DOS partition, boot FreeDOS, run LIFUTIL to write the diskettes and try them out on the HP.
I had to have a little lie down when it all worked first time. I have to say, that being able to run a DOS program that writes diskettes in some unnatural format is a great test of compatibility, and I was delighted to find FreeDOS; needless to say I will retain a GRUB Boot record for it, just in case for the future.
Two events concerning vehicle deaths and trucks in the UK were when the driver of the truck was too busy looking at his phone and sending SMS that he failed to see the traffic stopping in front of him. One near Basingstoke - where the car in front was crushed so badly, it was squished into half its original length and height. Sadly, the occupant was killed instantly.
Already do that. I tell people that riding a motorcycle means driving for everyone else at the same time. I still have the odd hair-raising, bicycle clips* moment when some car driver (especially cab drivers - however much they like to think of themselves as experienced "knights-of-the-road" kind of drivers, they do some insane lane changes when the mood takes them)
Personally I am looking forward to the day when most other vehicles are driven by computers and not people. And you will prise my motorcycle from my cold, dead buttocks.
It would be somewhat easier to reverse a ban on CO2 emissions than it has been to reverse a surge in CO2 production. All I am saying that like every well-managed change in IT we do, we need to make sure that any experimental changes are reversible. Also, don't mistake early signs of success with overall success. Sometimes the unintended consequences take a little time to show themselves (think Dingo fences in Australia, Hanoi's Rat Tail problem)
Isn't this just IBMs iSeries reborn? That was / is a 64-bit address space that addresses physical memory and disk in one single-level storage. Granted, in the real world we don't often put 160TB into a machine, and the balance may be made up of spinning disks, but as far as the software is concerned it is the same, surely?
I was just watching Pearl Harbor - not a great film, but it brought back to me that the greatest threat to these people is the sheer force of American willpower. The Japanese military machine tugged at the tail of a sleeping tiger, and they lived to regret it.
Well, America, it is time to hit back at those that seek to disrupt our way of life through these attacks. We are seeing just the beginning of this new warfare, but we need to hark back to the spirit that was awoken in us in 1941, and we need to hit them back 100 times over for every strike on us. We owe it to the Free World.
Another vote for FORTRAN. One of my sixth form friends had a father that worked at Cambridge University. We had some time on their IBM 1130, and our little club of three friends would write simple bits of code, bang them onto punch cards and watched the output tumble off the line printer.
ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) is deployed on UK roads. Between 25 and 40 MILLION license plates are read every day, locating a vehicle on 270,000 miles of roads. The police retain plates for 2 years, and of course they capture every plate that passes by.
That means that 70% of journeys are recorded. Stick that data together with facial recognition.. you know where everyone has been for the last two years.
If you add mobile phone data, GPS data from Google to that, sheesh I could tell you where were with a high degree of certainty, and of course therefore who you met with, what your circle of friends looks like.
Add to that social media, IP addresses.. how on earth do we stop being devoured by the technology?
What limits its usefulness in real time is that humans can't process the data.
Add AI.
Scary thing is, there are no gaps now - no new technology that needs inventing. It's all here, right now.
I have to say that the decline started a long time ago. This is simply another symptom of a dying culture; it's a death throe. There is no technology issue that forces this change; there is no business, or cultural, or teamworking imperative. It's an attempt at controlling something that looks a lot like leakage. The view from the top, as IBM implodes must seem like someone is shoplifting all of the spare hours, taking all of the passion for the product line, the productivity and creativity away and they must get control back! What they have failed to realise is it's just the force of entropy; they've been shot through by Time's arrow. The only solutions are to re-invent or die.
. I don't recall Louis V Gerstner worrying about remote working. I *do* remember him going crazy about having hundreds of Vice Presidents, none of whom could give him an elevator pitch on any subject of their choosing without having someone prepare a slide deck for them.
Maybe it is time to let go, retire and go repair motorcycles or support local communities by starting up a Hackerspace or something.
I've been watching the development of AI recently, reflecting on all of the work we did in the 70s on Machine Intelligence and Perception, or in the 80s on Expert Systems, and ruing the day that all of that expertise was kind of lost; we seem to now be benefiting from the march of technology to provide huge resources for computation that are built into Brute Force solutions for Deep Mind kind of AI, and we have lost the focus on what makes an intelligently coded algorithm.
I have it already on my own phone; it's a requirement that I change my security settings so that the entire phone is factory reset if the passcode is entered incorrectly a set number of times. I also need to change my PIN regularly, and to register the device with a central authentication server; AND the internal and SD card storage are both encrypted. The requirements came from my desire not to have another work phone to access my NHS emails, but to use my own handset. Since the NHS are so cautious about any unauthorised person having access to patient information, it is entirely understandable. It's inconvenient having to change my PIN or passphrase with the regularity they demand, and when I get a new handset it's a pain to re-register my device - but convenience is always an enemy to security.
My mother turned 90 this week, and she reads the Daily Mail, and the Mail on Sunday with fervour. I swear she is keeping the Post Office going in her village posting clippings from the Mail to me, highlighted in yellow marker around articles telling me why the NHS is in the state it is, how the Liverpool Care Pathway was invented by GPs colluding with unscrupulous relatives to knock pensioners off their mortal coils, how migrants from Eastern Europe are coming here to shoplift and have free dental care..
She is 90 years old, and I can forgive her sucking all this garbage in and believing it, but it is really just as well the Wikipedia has implemented a spam filter.
I have a particular delivery company that puts packages IN the recycling bin. Not always the brightest move, especially on Mondays when the bin collection happens.
Slashdot Mirror
From Wikipedia: The country published about twice the number of papers on thorium as its nearest competitors, during each of the years from 2002 to 2006. The Indian nuclear establishment estimates that the country could produce 500 GWe for at least four centuries using just the country’s economically extractable thorium reserves.
Are we sure that the NSA weren't involved in the development of the software involved, and haven't installed a killswitch of their own?
Clementine works for me - even has some visualisations, and plays FLAC files.
My role in IT was to stop people buying hardware and software without thinking through how it would be used, how all the bits would integrate together and who would support it. I work in hospitals, and they are the worst so far. Clinical departments think it is a good idea to spend a pile of money on some piece of hardware or software, only to find they either can't use it, it is too complex for their staff to learn, it doesn't fit with anything else, it has a huge dependency on something they didn't buy and so on. Most of it ends up not ever being used - hence shelfware.
.. I would be delighted!
Buckling springs were a cost reduction over the ultimate keyboard design - which was Keyboard D and associated. Those were the "beam spring" keyboards that shipped with the IBM 3278, IBM 3279 and so on. Absolutely fantastic keyboards, wonderful touch, a near perfect force/displacement profile. They were quiet - so quiet, we had to put an electric clicker into the keyboards, software selectable so typists could hear the keystrokes.
I had one for years and years. I had an interface that supplied it with the +8.5v, +5vand -2.2v it needed, took its parallel output and mapped it to an ASCII symbol set. I had one wired to a 6809 Forth machine for a few years, but it fell into disrepair when the IBM PC arrived, and suddenly I had a C compiler to code with.
Well, it has saved the life of an old bit of kit from HP for me. I have an HP16500A logic analyser, that accepts analog acquisition cards as well. I bought one, only to find that the boot diskette for the machine didn't have the right code for the analog card. The code is all available online for download ..
Of course, they are not regular diskettes - they run 77 tracks, not 80. A DOS utility called LIFUTIL is used to write diskettes in the correct format. Only runs on DOS or Windows up to Win95 - no WINE I am afraid. My Win95 machine has finally bitten the dust, so I had to boot Linux on an older machine with a diskette drive, hook it onto the network, create a DOS partition, install FreeDOS on it, push the files to write onto the diskette into the DOS partition, boot FreeDOS, run LIFUTIL to write the diskettes and try them out on the HP.
I had to have a little lie down when it all worked first time. I have to say, that being able to run a DOS program that writes diskettes in some unnatural format is a great test of compatibility, and I was delighted to find FreeDOS; needless to say I will retain a GRUB Boot record for it, just in case for the future.
It could be worse. This could be 4chan ..
Two events concerning vehicle deaths and trucks in the UK were when the driver of the truck was too busy looking at his phone and sending SMS that he failed to see the traffic stopping in front of him. One near Basingstoke - where the car in front was crushed so badly, it was squished into half its original length and height. Sadly, the occupant was killed instantly.
Already do that. I tell people that riding a motorcycle means driving for everyone else at the same time. I still have the odd hair-raising, bicycle clips* moment when some car driver (especially cab drivers - however much they like to think of themselves as experienced "knights-of-the-road" kind of drivers, they do some insane lane changes when the mood takes them)
Personally I am looking forward to the day when most other vehicles are driven by computers and not people. And you will prise my motorcycle from my cold, dead buttocks.
* as in the old joke
It would be somewhat easier to reverse a ban on CO2 emissions than it has been to reverse a surge in CO2 production. All I am saying that like every well-managed change in IT we do, we need to make sure that any experimental changes are reversible. Also, don't mistake early signs of success with overall success. Sometimes the unintended consequences take a little time to show themselves (think Dingo fences in Australia, Hanoi's Rat Tail problem)
Please don't trust that you understand all of the ways this might go wrong. Ensure that every change can be backed out before you make it.
If only there were some way of coping with numbers greater than 32 bits long on a 32 bit engine.
If it were AIX it would have recommended a swap space 2.5x physical memory ..
Isn't this just IBMs iSeries reborn? That was / is a 64-bit address space that addresses physical memory and disk in one single-level storage. Granted, in the real world we don't often put 160TB into a machine, and the balance may be made up of spinning disks, but as far as the software is concerned it is the same, surely?
I was just watching Pearl Harbor - not a great film, but it brought back to me that the greatest threat to these people is the sheer force of American willpower. The Japanese military machine tugged at the tail of a sleeping tiger, and they lived to regret it.
Well, America, it is time to hit back at those that seek to disrupt our way of life through these attacks. We are seeing just the beginning of this new warfare, but we need to hark back to the spirit that was awoken in us in 1941, and we need to hit them back 100 times over for every strike on us. We owe it to the Free World.
Of course transistors rely on quantum mechanical behaviour to work themselves, so even a classical computer is in essence a quantum mechanical one.
Another vote for FORTRAN. One of my sixth form friends had a father that worked at Cambridge University. We had some time on their IBM 1130, and our little club of three friends would write simple bits of code, bang them onto punch cards and watched the output tumble off the line printer.
ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) is deployed on UK roads. Between 25 and 40 MILLION license plates are read every day, locating a vehicle on 270,000 miles of roads. The police retain plates for 2 years, and of course they capture every plate that passes by.
.. you know where everyone has been for the last two years.
.. how on earth do we stop being devoured by the technology?
That means that 70% of journeys are recorded. Stick that data together with facial recognition
If you add mobile phone data, GPS data from Google to that, sheesh I could tell you where were with a high degree of certainty, and of course therefore who you met with, what your circle of friends looks like.
Add to that social media, IP addresses
What limits its usefulness in real time is that humans can't process the data.
Add AI.
Scary thing is, there are no gaps now - no new technology that needs inventing. It's all here, right now.
I have to say that the decline started a long time ago. This is simply another symptom of a dying culture; it's a death throe. There is no technology issue that forces this change; there is no business, or cultural, or teamworking imperative. It's an attempt at controlling something that looks a lot like leakage. The view from the top, as IBM implodes must seem like someone is shoplifting all of the spare hours, taking all of the passion for the product line, the productivity and creativity away and they must get control back! What they have failed to realise is it's just the force of entropy; they've been shot through by Time's arrow. The only solutions are to re-invent or die.
. I don't recall Louis V Gerstner worrying about remote working. I *do* remember him going crazy about having hundreds of Vice Presidents, none of whom could give him an elevator pitch on any subject of their choosing without having someone prepare a slide deck for them.
Maybe it is time to let go, retire and go repair motorcycles or support local communities by starting up a Hackerspace or something.
I've been watching the development of AI recently, reflecting on all of the work we did in the 70s on Machine Intelligence and Perception, or in the 80s on Expert Systems, and ruing the day that all of that expertise was kind of lost; we seem to now be benefiting from the march of technology to provide huge resources for computation that are built into Brute Force solutions for Deep Mind kind of AI, and we have lost the focus on what makes an intelligently coded algorithm.
Forgetting a password will land you in jail for two years in the UK, thanks to the RIPA legislation. No ifs, ands or buts.
I have it already on my own phone; it's a requirement that I change my security settings so that the entire phone is factory reset if the passcode is entered incorrectly a set number of times. I also need to change my PIN regularly, and to register the device with a central authentication server; AND the internal and SD card storage are both encrypted. The requirements came from my desire not to have another work phone to access my NHS emails, but to use my own handset. Since the NHS are so cautious about any unauthorised person having access to patient information, it is entirely understandable. It's inconvenient having to change my PIN or passphrase with the regularity they demand, and when I get a new handset it's a pain to re-register my device - but convenience is always an enemy to security.
My mother turned 90 this week, and she reads the Daily Mail, and the Mail on Sunday with fervour. I swear she is keeping the Post Office going in her village posting clippings from the Mail to me, highlighted in yellow marker around articles telling me why the NHS is in the state it is, how the Liverpool Care Pathway was invented by GPs colluding with unscrupulous relatives to knock pensioners off their mortal coils, how migrants from Eastern Europe are coming here to shoplift and have free dental care ..
She is 90 years old, and I can forgive her sucking all this garbage in and believing it, but it is really just as well the Wikipedia has implemented a spam filter.
I have a particular delivery company that puts packages IN the recycling bin. Not always the brightest move, especially on Mondays when the bin collection happens.