As I recall, Dave had to work a lot harder to disable HAL than simply walking up to him with a pair of pliers. So did Julie Christie with Proteus IV. Shit, look at how many times the Terminator has risen up from the dust. Computers definitely do not like to be killed.
Sorry Chuck; you were hoping for a hint of wisdom from a presumed community of expert programmers, but all you got was the collected typings of 999,999 monkeys. The quality of the responses should tell you all you need to know about what is wrong with most software, and why work like yours is desperately needed, even though it will not be widely appreciated.
You can see good examples of this effect in the Newegg user comments. Almost any decent 80GB drive will thousands of happy reviewers; Look at any of the newer 250+GB drives, and the odds of a quick failure can be as high as 50%.
I absolutely have to put in a bad word for TrendMicro's PcCillin, which I tried after being worn down by Norton Internet Security:
1) The software vendor sold my email address to the spammers; now I have all the sex and viagra that I could ever need.
2) PcCillin worked sort of OK for a while; then one of their updates made my system (Win2K Pro) unstable and it began to start rebooting into safe mode. This system had been up since 2000, running on its initial installation. I treasured it.
3) About 100 email messages to support go back and forth, with a new person each time wishing me a cheery hello. Unfortunately, not a one of them had bothered to read any of the copious emails or system dumps which had preceeded them. They always started with: "What seems to be the Problem?"
4) The support dudes want to update me to version 8, but that only runs on XP, so we try version 7.X (still works "OK" for Win2K).
5) This is a worse disaster and I begin to discover virus-like services on my machine which facilitate arbitrary code execution. I'm feeling very uneasy.
6) Version 7 installs and runs once, incorrectly. It refuses to reinstall, and is very vague about why. We try numerous times to uninstall the nonexistent remnants of Norton which are supposedly blocking it. No explanation is forthcoming for why it ran the first time. Hundreds of KB of carefully recorded log file and system error dumps apparently go unread.
7) Finally, one helpful chap asks if he can install a web utility to "Take over my machine, so he can look around". "It's completely harmless." Desperate, I agree.
8) No sooner than he has taken control, than we need to reboot. And - the boot block seems to be a goner. Nothing which we try will bring it back to life. After a few mumbled "It wasn't me, it wasn't me," I hear the sound of running feet getting fainter from the far side of the phone.
9) Next day, I receive the usual cheery how are you and what seems to be the problem? "You killed my computer is the problem," I respond. "That is very unlikely," he responds, "But we can refund your purchase price if you are dissatisfied, if you can send us your original receipt." Unsatisfied? Original receipt?
10) I tell them not to bother, to send my refund to the charity of their choice; that they need it more than I do. "We aren't able to do that" They reply, but if you'd like to contact sales,...
So, I "Upgraded" to XP and I'm back with Norton AntiVirus and Windows Defender and I have about 1/2 of the performance which I had under Win2K. If I turn off all of the auto-updates (Windows, Norton, Adobe), the annoyance level is not too bad. Now, if the mouse would stop hanging for long intervals, and if I could only drive a stake through the heart of Windows Messenger.
God, I wish that I was still running Acrobat/Distiller 3.2 and FrameMaker 3 and mFactory and Strata on a PowerTower Mac OS 7.5 once more. Even with only 500MB of RAM and a couple of 2GB SCSI disks, life was good.
I believe that these radar absorbing "paints", mostly containing ferrites, have been under development since WWII and use MIE scattering as their theoretical underpinning. I am puzzled that this is causing a buzz now, except that the work may not be classified and thus may be publically available. More interesting would be to know the bandwidth and Q of the paint and where the energy went after it had been "absorbed".
Years ago, Jerry Lettvin discovered bug detectors and blue detectors in frog ganglion cells. The blue detector was to aid the frog in escaping towards water, which presumably reflected the blue sky. (Never mind that the water color of most frog inhabited swamps is far from blue.) Assuming the evolutionary truth of this hypothesis, our own "green receptors" presumably assisted our predecessors in escaping by jumping into the trees.
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My cat keeps my keyboard (and my mouse) both clean and warm.
As I recall, Dave had to work a lot harder to disable HAL than simply walking up to him with a pair of pliers. So did Julie Christie with Proteus IV. Shit, look at how many times the Terminator has risen up from the dust. Computers definitely do not like to be killed.
Sorry Chuck; you were hoping for a hint of wisdom from a presumed community of expert programmers, but all you got was the collected typings of 999,999 monkeys. The quality of the responses should tell you all you need to know about what is wrong with most software, and why work like yours is desperately needed, even though it will not be widely appreciated.
You can see good examples of this effect in the Newegg user comments. Almost any decent 80GB drive will thousands of happy reviewers; Look at any of the newer 250+GB drives, and the odds of a quick failure can be as high as 50%.
1) The software vendor sold my email address to the spammers; now I have all the sex and viagra that I could ever need.
2) PcCillin worked sort of OK for a while; then one of their updates made my system (Win2K Pro) unstable and it began to start rebooting into safe mode. This system had been up since 2000, running on its initial installation. I treasured it.
3) About 100 email messages to support go back and forth, with a new person each time wishing me a cheery hello. Unfortunately, not a one of them had bothered to read any of the copious emails or system dumps which had preceeded them. They always started with: "What seems to be the Problem?"
4) The support dudes want to update me to version 8, but that only runs on XP, so we try version 7.X (still works "OK" for Win2K).
5) This is a worse disaster and I begin to discover virus-like services on my machine which facilitate arbitrary code execution. I'm feeling very uneasy.
6) Version 7 installs and runs once, incorrectly. It refuses to reinstall, and is very vague about why. We try numerous times to uninstall the nonexistent remnants of Norton which are supposedly blocking it. No explanation is forthcoming for why it ran the first time. Hundreds of KB of carefully recorded log file and system error dumps apparently go unread.
7) Finally, one helpful chap asks if he can install a web utility to "Take over my machine, so he can look around". "It's completely harmless." Desperate, I agree.
8) No sooner than he has taken control, than we need to reboot. And - the boot block seems to be a goner. Nothing which we try will bring it back to life. After a few mumbled "It wasn't me, it wasn't me," I hear the sound of running feet getting fainter from the far side of the phone.
9) Next day, I receive the usual cheery how are you and what seems to be the problem? "You killed my computer is the problem," I respond. "That is very unlikely," he responds, "But we can refund your purchase price if you are dissatisfied, if you can send us your original receipt." Unsatisfied? Original receipt?
10) I tell them not to bother, to send my refund to the charity of their choice; that they need it more than I do. "We aren't able to do that" They reply, but if you'd like to contact sales, ...
So, I "Upgraded" to XP and I'm back with Norton AntiVirus and Windows Defender and I have about 1/2 of the performance which I had under Win2K. If I turn off all of the auto-updates (Windows, Norton, Adobe), the annoyance level is not too bad. Now, if the mouse would stop hanging for long intervals, and if I could only drive a stake through the heart of Windows Messenger.
God, I wish that I was still running Acrobat/Distiller 3.2 and FrameMaker 3 and mFactory and Strata on a PowerTower Mac OS 7.5 once more. Even with only 500MB of RAM and a couple of 2GB SCSI disks, life was good.
I believe that these radar absorbing "paints", mostly containing ferrites, have been under development since WWII and use MIE scattering as their theoretical underpinning. I am puzzled that this is causing a buzz now, except that the work may not be classified and thus may be publically available. More interesting would be to know the bandwidth and Q of the paint and where the energy went after it had been "absorbed".
Years ago, Jerry Lettvin discovered bug detectors and blue detectors in frog ganglion cells. The blue detector was to aid the frog in escaping towards water, which presumably reflected the blue sky. (Never mind that the water color of most frog inhabited swamps is far from blue.) Assuming the evolutionary truth of this hypothesis, our own "green receptors" presumably assisted our predecessors in escaping by jumping into the trees.
> Anyone know where I can find a non-PDF version of this paper?
Yes, but you'll need AJAX to read it.