(I still fondly remember working for years with this odd but elegant 36-bit machine.)
At different sites over the years I saw many PDP systems supporting 60 or so concurrent users on character cell terminals with better response times than modern GUI workstations. That was with a couple of MB of RAM and a few Mhz of clock.
Yeah I have read about the Hapgood maps, including one book which counts them as evidence that aliens gave prehistoric humans a ride in a polar orbiting space craft.
Your reference talks about 400BC but Steve Franklins post talks about 4000BC. Thats a big difference. For what it is worth I think Piri Reis did the surveying job in the 1600s. The story about basing the maps on older data was an attempt to hide their movements in the southern hemisphere.
I just don't believe it could have been done more than a couple of thousand years ago. The Antarctic ocean is a nasty bit of water.
As for the ice, well maybe the surveyors left it out. The Antarctic coast is free of ice in the summer anyway.
This brings back a controversy from almost pre-internet times. The UK Government had a database of something which may have become damaging in the long term. It might have been data on cancer cases near nuclear power plants, or something along those lines. The Government announced that the database would be deleted because it was too expensive to store. It might have been a hundred meg or so. People were offering the relevant government agency free DAT tapes so save the life of the data. Of course, storage was never the issue.
I used to work at a VMS site. We got invited around to some microsoft presentation in the mid 1990s. I asked about the versioning file system in VMS: why didn't it get implemented in NT? They didn't have an answer for that.
For me, having a version number automatically built into file names was a major usability difference between VMS and other operating systems. Its a shame that microsoft didn't implement something similar.
Git is certainly interesting, but I doubt half the people who use it really understand how it works. Maybe if it was started in less a dire situation it could have been more user friendly.
Within OSS there were these cascading projects. With Arch close to the beginning. Along the way different things are tried and the DSCM field is refined. I think git is a step along the way.
This is off the top of my head, but I think the wear on the road goes up with the cube of the weight.
The most common rule is that erosion is proportional to the fourth power of axle load. I like to crank that one out when truck advocates tell me not to ride my bicycle.
The problem with heavy loads on narrow country roads is that you can use a truck with lots of axles, but then turning becomes an issue. Makes me wonder if there is a market for something like a giant centipede. It could have 10 or 20 hydraulically actuated legs. Only one leg would move at a time. It could step right over a low fence and deliver heavy components directly to a construction site in the middle of a field.
I think the problem here is the last couple of km to the site of the turbines. You are only going to transport the gear once so you don't want to install more infrastructure.
A good middle ground might be to build a temporary gravel road to the site. Gravel is used for the road which transports the space shuttle to the pad. It gets messed up and regraded after every job.
When I worked on road systems we installed simple IR light interruption height sensors before bridges. The sensor triggers a warning sign so the driver knows they are over height. Of course some drivers have this idea that the warnings are always set a metre too low. Most of our low bridges have sacrificial steel beams fitted before the bridge. That way the expensive concrete doesn't get hit.
At the end of the day the truck driver should know how high their load is.
Kaczynski was irrational because his chosen response (like that of other terrorists) had zero chance of working. He was just a vandal, like somebody who smashes windows to hit out at imagined "rich people".
Most people know a thing or two. Some people know their way around weapons systems but most people don't. Most people are sane and rational but a few people are not. The unabomber wasn't rational but fortunately he was a mathematician, not a rail signalling engineer or an air traffic controller.
I don't believe that Al Qaida could weasel their way into the control systems for missiles, unless they come across somebody smart enough and crazy enough to be of value to them. I don't believe there is any systematic reason why this could not happen, it is just very unlikely.
At the moment it is much easier for the terrorists to work with the tools they know.
Researching Kaczynski for this post has got me thinking. With his background he could have gone into a field where he gained access to some critical systems. Lots of secure areas employ mathematicians. But then he might not have had the time and resources to develop his nutty ideas. He had to withdraw somewhat to do that. Was the Jack D Ripper character a realistic possibility? Or would a maniac have been unable to rise to a position of responsibility?
I'll take one of your openmoko phones off your hands if you're offering.
Back on topic, having to re-build the OS because you forgot to stop the cron job would be an almighty PITA.
I am looking at placing an order soon. Please reply to my journal if you are still interested.
Hi davetv. I am using my journal to keep track of people interested in the phones. It looks like I have enough interest to go ahead so if you are still interested please reply there.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, real Daleks don't climb stairs, they just level the building.
All you have to do is wait then. The acetylene will do that for you.
WHY THE FUCK ARE TWO HOUR TELECONFERENCES SCHEDULED AT 2PM
Far better than having them at 8 PM to fit in with working hours on the other side of the world.
(I still fondly remember working for years with this odd but elegant 36-bit machine.)
At different sites over the years I saw many PDP systems supporting 60 or so concurrent users on character cell terminals with better response times than modern GUI workstations. That was with a couple of MB of RAM and a few Mhz of clock.
The Matrix was derivative, but more from Neuromancer I think.
> what is a grue?
I smelled a wumpus once, then I got out of there fast.
Yeah I have read about the Hapgood maps, including one book which counts them as evidence that aliens gave prehistoric humans a ride in a polar orbiting space craft.
Your reference talks about 400BC but Steve Franklins post talks about 4000BC. Thats a big difference. For what it is worth I think Piri Reis did the surveying job in the 1600s. The story about basing the maps on older data was an attempt to hide their movements in the southern hemisphere.
I just don't believe it could have been done more than a couple of thousand years ago. The Antarctic ocean is a nasty bit of water.
As for the ice, well maybe the surveyors left it out. The Antarctic coast is free of ice in the summer anyway.
Hard to see how anybody could have mapped Antarctica 6000 years ago.
This brings back a controversy from almost pre-internet times. The UK Government had a database of something which may have become damaging in the long term. It might have been data on cancer cases near nuclear power plants, or something along those lines. The Government announced that the database would be deleted because it was too expensive to store. It might have been a hundred meg or so. People were offering the relevant government agency free DAT tapes so save the life of the data. Of course, storage was never the issue.
So to stop a DDoS attack on a server, they remove any and all access to that server?
How else would you do it?
Maybe the law requires documentation, at least, to be in the local language?
I used to work at a VMS site. We got invited around to some microsoft presentation in the mid 1990s. I asked about the versioning file system in VMS: why didn't it get implemented in NT? They didn't have an answer for that.
For me, having a version number automatically built into file names was a major usability difference between VMS and other operating systems. Its a shame that microsoft didn't implement something similar.
Git is certainly interesting, but I doubt half the people who use it really understand how it works. Maybe if it was started in less a dire situation it could have been more user friendly.
Thats where Mercurial comes in.
Within OSS there were these cascading projects. With Arch close to the beginning. Along the way different things are tried and the DSCM field is refined. I think git is a step along the way.
The only people I know who use them set every single message they send to "most important". As if that is going to make them pay attention to them...
This is off the top of my head, but I think the wear on the road goes up with the cube of the weight.
The most common rule is that erosion is proportional to the fourth power of axle load. I like to crank that one out when truck advocates tell me not to ride my bicycle.
The problem with heavy loads on narrow country roads is that you can use a truck with lots of axles, but then turning becomes an issue. Makes me wonder if there is a market for something like a giant centipede. It could have 10 or 20 hydraulically actuated legs. Only one leg would move at a time. It could step right over a low fence and deliver heavy components directly to a construction site in the middle of a field.
I think the problem here is the last couple of km to the site of the turbines. You are only going to transport the gear once so you don't want to install more infrastructure.
A good middle ground might be to build a temporary gravel road to the site. Gravel is used for the road which transports the space shuttle to the pad. It gets messed up and regraded after every job.
When I worked on road systems we installed simple IR light interruption height sensors before bridges. The sensor triggers a warning sign so the driver knows they are over height. Of course some drivers have this idea that the warnings are always set a metre too low. Most of our low bridges have sacrificial steel beams fitted before the bridge. That way the expensive concrete doesn't get hit.
At the end of the day the truck driver should know how high their load is.
Kaczynski was irrational because his chosen response (like that of other terrorists) had zero chance of working. He was just a vandal, like somebody who smashes windows to hit out at imagined "rich people".
Most people know a thing or two. Some people know their way around weapons systems but most people don't. Most people are sane and rational but a few people are not. The unabomber wasn't rational but fortunately he was a mathematician, not a rail signalling engineer or an air traffic controller.
I don't believe that Al Qaida could weasel their way into the control systems for missiles, unless they come across somebody smart enough and crazy enough to be of value to them. I don't believe there is any systematic reason why this could not happen, it is just very unlikely.
At the moment it is much easier for the terrorists to work with the tools they know.
Researching Kaczynski for this post has got me thinking. With his background he could have gone into a field where he gained access to some critical systems. Lots of secure areas employ mathematicians. But then he might not have had the time and resources to develop his nutty ideas. He had to withdraw somewhat to do that. Was the Jack D Ripper character a realistic possibility? Or would a maniac have been unable to rise to a position of responsibility?
I'll take one of your openmoko phones off your hands if you're offering. Back on topic, having to re-build the OS because you forgot to stop the cron job would be an almighty PITA.
I am looking at placing an order soon. Please reply to my journal if you are still interested.
Hi davetv. I am using my journal to keep track of people interested in the phones. It looks like I have enough interest to go ahead so if you are still interested please reply there.
Regards,
The police have to protect the people he might harm.
So compression means two things now? Damn kids. I could compress my family photos by taking them again with a crap old camera.
So a 100 kilobyte photo would be squeezed to about 20 kilobyte before being sent over the phoneline... a mere 3 seconds
Come again on that? You want to compress a compressed image by a factor of five?
At this rate they should just acquire their own oil producing country.
The style sheet has been that way for months. You would think that somebody would have noticed.