The fact that NASA went to the moon in 1969 was interesting, exciting, and fun. I remember where I was that day. At the dentist, with a portable tv from home, and when we put it in back the trunk of our car, we smashed the rabbit-ears antenna that we forgot to fold down before we shut the trunk lid.
That said, the question isn't "was it cool?" or even "was it worth it?" It's "what if Apollo never happened?
Most of us agree that it was cool. Was the expenditure to get a man on the moon worth it? Let's say it cost 40 billion 1970 dollars, which is like 100 billion today dollars (that's not exact, but in the ballpark). Was it that much money's worth of cool? Hard to say, but that's not really important to the "what if" question. And I bet if Apollo were a new project today, it would cost a trillion dollars. Especially considering that it cost the USA 15 billion dollars to reroute 10 miles of highway under Boston.
People who are saying that we wouldn't have the internet or tang or teflon are mistaken, because the moon money might have been spent on other science projects. As it was, the space program was allied with the techno-military-industrial complex already, so other innovation would have happened even without a moonshot.
I'm not a moon landing hoax person, but I know enough about science to understand that the cost of doing stuff on the moon and especially on distant celestial bodies, because of the distances and the hostile environments, makes it all rather impractical. Doing stuff in weightlessness, sure. In geosynchronous earth orbit, sure. On the moon? Maybe. But sending people to Mars or Jupiter or Alpha Centauri is more of a sucker's bet.
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
It seems reasonable that debating moon travel 40 years after Apollo might be considered unexpected. What am I missing?
If the space program hadn't happened, that would be an outcome of events contrary to what was. The act of discussing it isn't ironic or contrary to anything, it's just a discussion. If the LA Lakers beat the Chicago Bulls in a basketball game with a last-second basket, and I say, "what if they missed that last shot," it's not ironic.
Someone asked for a use case (implying that there were none), I provided some suggestions. I don't think anyone is saying that this stuff is a broad-spectrum replacement for paper. But in cases where paper is used for short-term storage, it might be handy. Re soup-du-jour sign, not only a sign, but the daily specials that are inserted into a restaurant menu and then tossed at the end of the day. Or any list that needs to be reprinted daily.
The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about--a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.
Turgid? Tumescent? Priapism? Viagra? Engorgement? Sorry. You lose the right to call BS on anyone else.
Check your manufacturer, most of the reputable ones offer multi-year replacement guarantees on the bulbs. Although if you buy good ones originally you generally won't need to use those guarantees.
Unlike old style bulbs, CFLs are complex enough that quality matters. The ultra-cheap ones are really crap.
Check my manufacturer? Reputable ones? Replacement guarantees? Complex ones?
We are talking about light bulbs. I understand that CFLs are more energy-efficient than incandescents of comparable lumens. But they are a poor replacement in every other way. We are asking the world to waste more personal energy using CFLs than they waste on electrical energy using incandescents.
Fred Grampp was definitely there then, but I didn't know him either. I think he and Reeds were sometimes "partners in crime" (research colleagues). I think I remember him from the semi-annual BTL UNIX meetings (which were sort of like USENIX but internal). I had a handful of friends at Murray Hill, just not the ones hacking crypto. It might have been Peter Honeyman, who was either still there at the time or else he knew who was best to call. I don't remember who directed me to Reeds.
(At this time, salts & rainbow files were in the experimental stage).
UNIX/etc/passwd had salt before 1986, but early UNIX had passwords that were truncated at 8 characters and I think the salts were two plaintext bytes/12 bits (4096 combinations). The password file (included the encrypted salted password) was world-readable. I think systems use the same ideas these days, but with non-world-readable encrypted passwords, and bigger passwords and salts.
I worked with Bob Morris (rhm) at Bell Labs back around 1980. We were on a Bell Labs Navy contract, and Bob was on loan to the project from his usual research hacking. We were doing signal processing stuff, decoding sonar data. Anyway, I was a UNIX hacker kid (I was about 20 at the time) and he was a really sharp gadfly/rascal BTL CS research guy. We were colleagues and there was some friendly sniping back and forth between us.
Everyone at Bell Labs was sharp, but he was a an especially talented special expert on loan. Anyway, I was doing random UNIX hacking and I was also the sysadm for a couple of PDP-11s that we all timeshared for our UNIX hacking. This is a story that I've kept secret for 30 years.
This all was before the days of viruses, and the ARPANET existed, but not at Bell Labs. Occasionally hackers would break into other people's systems, usually just for fun.
We made heavy use of modems to send data all around (uucp, usenet, remote login, etc), so there was some concern about system intrusion, and as I said, this was a Navy contract (with Secret and Top Secret elements). We had lots of security in the buildings and labs (big locks, guards, rs232 wires in secured tubes, etc.). We had some secret/secured UNIX systems and some not.
On a whim, I had decided to install a little security hack on a couple of my non-secure UNIX systems - a nightly cron job that did a "find / -perm 04000 -uid 0 -ls" or whatever it was, to find all the suid root programs on the system, and write the list to a log file, and to diff yesterday's and today's, and make sure nothing changed. One Saturday morning, I logged into my system from home (as a sysadm, I had a "foreign exchange" phone in my bedroom that acted like the extension that was sitting in my office at work). I see an email from cron that said that/bin/login had changed overnight!
I was shocked, I called my boss and I started looking around the system to see what I could find (I was the admin and had root access). I found some suspicious files in Bob Morris's $HOME. He had some files encrypted with UNIX crypt, and one was exactly the size of the login.c source, and one was a bit bigger. I knew that UNIX crypt encoded files on a byte-for-byte basis, so this was very strange, but I didn't know how to crack crypt.
I had friends in BTL research, and I called one and they said to call Jim Reeds (I think) because he was a main BTL crypto guy, so I did. BTL was pretty big (at least 30k engineers) and the pure research folks (like Reeds, and Morris for that matter) were in an ivory tower, and didn't necessarily listen whenever Bell Labs development folks called them, especially 20-year-old kids like me. So I call Reeds and I tell him my story. I'm in this BTL department, we're doing a contract with the Navy, it looks like someone hacked my/bin/login, I have some encrypted files. He didn't sound too interested. I told him the files were in Bob Morris's $HOME. He said, "send the files right over here."
In a few hours, he'd decoded the files. I guess if you already have a crypt-cracker, it would be especially easy if you knew that one file was an existing login.c and the other was probably a small hack to it. So Bob had hacked/bin/login to save usernames and passwords in a file somewhere, I think xored with -1 or something. Nothing fancy. There were also uucp logs of his sending either the login.c or his password booty to some another Bell Labs research system (allegra, I think, for those who remember).
Bell Labs had many layers of management, and occasionally funny business would occur and the supervisors, department heads, directors, vps, etc would get together to pow-wow about what to do, and I think this was one of those cases. In the end, it resolved pretty quietly, and I don't know what the upshot was, but Bob stayed on our project and I think it was "no harm, no foul." I don't think I ever asked him "what the hell were you thinking?"
I think the Apple lawsuit is frivolous. But there are many large American companies with generic-sounding names.
For example, there is an aftermarket car air conditioning company called
Factory Air,
an electric utility called
National Grid, and a bedding company called
The Company Store.
How does the law deal with these cases of companies claiming common phrases as corporate identities?
Apparently you missed the comments back in December that noted the link to Al-Qaeda.
correct, i saw the article about a decent $10 watch and i didn't read the comments at that time. even with the comments, and even with the fact that al-qaeda uses casio watches as timers for bombs, that doesn't imply anything about people who buy casio watches. if you don't understand why, search wikipedia for "fallacy."
boingboing advocated
this watch
last december.
it wasn't until I bought one and googled for the product manual that I found out that it was an
al-qaeda favorite.
Anyone knows how this is any different from (or better than) using a regular CCD and adaptive optics?
From the article I linked: "Curved electro-optical detectors will enable the development of new optical design configurations that can be smaller than conventional flat-field designs, thereby benefiting many aerospace applications." In other words, with curved detectors, you can use lighter, simpler optics. because they don't have to adapt to (correct for) a flat sensor surface.
I don't know what happened to fractals (in landscape image generation). I remember the "the Genesis effect" from back before the turn of the century. There's a wikipedia artcile on factal landscapes, but I don't know what's up with that these days.
This person is generating nice repeating patterns (like pleated curtains) with random alterations, using a small number of small image files and a small amount of computation to generate random numbers which guide the placement of those image files. Doing this with fractals would require computation that is orders of magnitude more costly.
Ya me too, cycling sine wave frequencies with different odd/prime values in x and y to generate wobble patterns. I probably learned about this idea when I was a kid playing with a Spirograph. I still like this tiling hack though.
I'm a hacker, over 50. If your uncle is 53, he got his undergraduate degree roundabout 1980. By 1980, C was already in full bloom, and UNIX had been around for 10 years and was becoming widespread in academia. By 1985, while he was still young, personal computing was rampant, with a choice of Apple, Sun, Microsoft, and many other flavors like Apollo, PERQ, SGI, Symbolics/LMI, etc. The choice of commercial OS technologies was much richer then than it is today. If he's still using Fortran 66 or 77 (there was no Fortran 70), it's because he hasn't progressed since those days. I don't pretend to be right on top of all the latest software technologies and fads, because I keep busy with other things, but I see no reason why even an old nerd can't use a modern Linux (or Apple or Win) PC with a language like C and/or a scripting language like Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl etc. And if your uncle is telling you to loop instead of recurse, you should refer him to Jon Bentley's "Writing Efficient Programs" (1982), where he said that you must measure before you optimize. Just blindly saying that you should use arrays as stacks is silly.
Slashdot Mirror
How will I decide whether I want a right ARM or a left ARM? If they are ambidextrous, will it matter?
That said, the question isn't "was it cool?" or even "was it worth it?" It's "what if Apollo never happened?
Most of us agree that it was cool. Was the expenditure to get a man on the moon worth it? Let's say it cost 40 billion 1970 dollars, which is like 100 billion today dollars (that's not exact, but in the ballpark). Was it that much money's worth of cool? Hard to say, but that's not really important to the "what if" question. And I bet if Apollo were a new project today, it would cost a trillion dollars. Especially considering that it cost the USA 15 billion dollars to reroute 10 miles of highway under Boston.
People who are saying that we wouldn't have the internet or tang or teflon are mistaken, because the moon money might have been spent on other science projects. As it was, the space program was allied with the techno-military-industrial complex already, so other innovation would have happened even without a moonshot.
I'm not a moon landing hoax person, but I know enough about science to understand that the cost of doing stuff on the moon and especially on distant celestial bodies, because of the distances and the hostile environments, makes it all rather impractical. Doing stuff in weightlessness, sure. In geosynchronous earth orbit, sure. On the moon? Maybe. But sending people to Mars or Jupiter or Alpha Centauri is more of a sucker's bet.
When I look at Dictionary.com I find this for irony:
5. an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.
It seems reasonable that debating moon travel 40 years after Apollo might be considered unexpected. What am I missing?
If the space program hadn't happened, that would be an outcome of events contrary to what was. The act of discussing it isn't ironic or contrary to anything, it's just a discussion. If the LA Lakers beat the Chicago Bulls in a basketball game with a last-second basket, and I say, "what if they missed that last shot," it's not ironic.
http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory.lhtml
Good-night, salty prince.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/229401282
Do you think they meant the Google+ identity service?
it should have been pretty easy to find, after all, a diamond that large should be all sparkly.
Someone asked for a use case (implying that there were none), I provided some suggestions. I don't think anyone is saying that this stuff is a broad-spectrum replacement for paper. But in cases where paper is used for short-term storage, it might be handy. Re soup-du-jour sign, not only a sign, but the daily specials that are inserted into a restaurant menu and then tossed at the end of the day. Or any list that needs to be reprinted daily.
visitor badges, entry tickets, soup-du-jour sign, etc.
Turgid? Tumescent? Priapism? Viagra? Engorgement? Sorry. You lose the right to call BS on anyone else.
I don't mean to be flippant, but I think we'll know that Hurd is growing up when http://gnu.org/ runs on it.
Check my manufacturer? Reputable ones? Replacement guarantees? Complex ones?
Disposal guidelines? Mercury? Ballast? Warm-up? Flicker?
We are talking about light bulbs. I understand that CFLs are more energy-efficient than incandescents of comparable lumens. But they are a poor replacement in every other way. We are asking the world to waste more personal energy using CFLs than they waste on electrical energy using incandescents.
Fred Grampp was definitely there then, but I didn't know him either. I think he and Reeds were sometimes "partners in crime" (research colleagues). I think I remember him from the semi-annual BTL UNIX meetings (which were sort of like USENIX but internal). I had a handful of friends at Murray Hill, just not the ones hacking crypto. It might have been Peter Honeyman, who was either still there at the time or else he knew who was best to call. I don't remember who directed me to Reeds.
UNIX /etc/passwd had salt before 1986, but early UNIX had passwords that were truncated at 8 characters and I think the salts were two plaintext bytes/12 bits (4096 combinations). The password file (included the encrypted salted password) was world-readable. I think systems use the same ideas these days, but with non-world-readable encrypted passwords, and bigger passwords and salts.
I worked with Bob Morris (rhm) at Bell Labs back around 1980. We were on a Bell Labs Navy contract, and Bob was on loan to the project from his usual research hacking. We were doing signal processing stuff, decoding sonar data. Anyway, I was a UNIX hacker kid (I was about 20 at the time) and he was a really sharp gadfly/rascal BTL CS research guy. We were colleagues and there was some friendly sniping back and forth between us.
/bin/login had changed overnight!
/bin/login, I have some encrypted files. He didn't sound too interested. I told him the files were in Bob Morris's $HOME. He said, "send the files right over here."
/bin/login to save usernames and passwords in a file somewhere, I think xored with -1 or something. Nothing fancy. There were also uucp logs of his sending either the login.c or his password booty to some another Bell Labs research system (allegra, I think, for those who remember).
Everyone at Bell Labs was sharp, but he was a an especially talented special expert on loan. Anyway, I was doing random UNIX hacking and I was also the sysadm for a couple of PDP-11s that we all timeshared for our UNIX hacking. This is a story that I've kept secret for 30 years.
This all was before the days of viruses, and the ARPANET existed, but not at Bell Labs. Occasionally hackers would break into other people's systems, usually just for fun.
We made heavy use of modems to send data all around (uucp, usenet, remote login, etc), so there was some concern about system intrusion, and as I said, this was a Navy contract (with Secret and Top Secret elements). We had lots of security in the buildings and labs (big locks, guards, rs232 wires in secured tubes, etc.). We had some secret/secured UNIX systems and some not.
On a whim, I had decided to install a little security hack on a couple of my non-secure UNIX systems - a nightly cron job that did a "find / -perm 04000 -uid 0 -ls" or whatever it was, to find all the suid root programs on the system, and write the list to a log file, and to diff yesterday's and today's, and make sure nothing changed. One Saturday morning, I logged into my system from home (as a sysadm, I had a "foreign exchange" phone in my bedroom that acted like the extension that was sitting in my office at work). I see an email from cron that said that
I was shocked, I called my boss and I started looking around the system to see what I could find (I was the admin and had root access). I found some suspicious files in Bob Morris's $HOME. He had some files encrypted with UNIX crypt, and one was exactly the size of the login.c source, and one was a bit bigger. I knew that UNIX crypt encoded files on a byte-for-byte basis, so this was very strange, but I didn't know how to crack crypt.
I had friends in BTL research, and I called one and they said to call Jim Reeds (I think) because he was a main BTL crypto guy, so I did. BTL was pretty big (at least 30k engineers) and the pure research folks (like Reeds, and Morris for that matter) were in an ivory tower, and didn't necessarily listen whenever Bell Labs development folks called them, especially 20-year-old kids like me. So I call Reeds and I tell him my story. I'm in this BTL department, we're doing a contract with the Navy, it looks like someone hacked my
In a few hours, he'd decoded the files. I guess if you already have a crypt-cracker, it would be especially easy if you knew that one file was an existing login.c and the other was probably a small hack to it. So Bob had hacked
Bell Labs had many layers of management, and occasionally funny business would occur and the supervisors, department heads, directors, vps, etc would get together to pow-wow about what to do, and I think this was one of those cases. In the end, it resolved pretty quietly, and I don't know what the upshot was, but Bob stayed on our project and I think it was "no harm, no foul." I don't think I ever asked him "what the hell were you thinking?"
Wh
I think the Apple lawsuit is frivolous. But there are many large American companies with generic-sounding names. For example, there is an aftermarket car air conditioning company called Factory Air, an electric utility called National Grid, and a bedding company called The Company Store. How does the law deal with these cases of companies claiming common phrases as corporate identities?
here's a price history graph of the book http://camelcamelcamel.com/Making-Fly-Genetics-Animal-Design/product/0632030488
Apparently you missed the comments back in December that noted the link to Al-Qaeda.
correct, i saw the article about a decent $10 watch and i didn't read the comments at that time. even with the comments, and even with the fact that al-qaeda uses casio watches as timers for bombs, that doesn't imply anything about people who buy casio watches. if you don't understand why, search wikipedia for "fallacy."
boingboing advocated this watch last december. it wasn't until I bought one and googled for the product manual that I found out that it was an al-qaeda favorite.
From the article I linked: "Curved electro-optical detectors will enable the development of new optical design configurations that can be smaller than conventional flat-field designs, thereby benefiting many aerospace applications." In other words, with curved detectors, you can use lighter, simpler optics. because they don't have to adapt to (correct for) a flat sensor surface.
http://www.ptbmagazine.com/content/040103_ora.html
I don't know what happened to fractals (in landscape image generation). I remember the "the Genesis effect" from back before the turn of the century. There's a wikipedia artcile on factal landscapes, but I don't know what's up with that these days.
This person is generating nice repeating patterns (like pleated curtains) with random alterations, using a small number of small image files and a small amount of computation to generate random numbers which guide the placement of those image files. Doing this with fractals would require computation that is orders of magnitude more costly.
Ya me too, cycling sine wave frequencies with different odd/prime values in x and y to generate wobble patterns. I probably learned about this idea when I was a kid playing with a Spirograph. I still like this tiling hack though.
I'm a hacker, over 50. If your uncle is 53, he got his undergraduate degree roundabout 1980. By 1980, C was already in full bloom, and UNIX had been around for 10 years and was becoming widespread in academia. By 1985, while he was still young, personal computing was rampant, with a choice of Apple, Sun, Microsoft, and many other flavors like Apollo, PERQ, SGI, Symbolics/LMI, etc. The choice of commercial OS technologies was much richer then than it is today. If he's still using Fortran 66 or 77 (there was no Fortran 70), it's because he hasn't progressed since those days. I don't pretend to be right on top of all the latest software technologies and fads, because I keep busy with other things, but I see no reason why even an old nerd can't use a modern Linux (or Apple or Win) PC with a language like C and/or a scripting language like Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl etc. And if your uncle is telling you to loop instead of recurse, you should refer him to Jon Bentley's "Writing Efficient Programs" (1982), where he said that you must measure before you optimize. Just blindly saying that you should use arrays as stacks is silly.