While there were technical problems with the Florida ballot, to an outsider it seemed like the real problems were created by politics rather than lack of technology. It seemed like everyone involved in the process is either an elected official, or appointed on a partisan basis, from the county election officials to the supreme court judges. The idea of having elected officials actually *count* votes (as distinct from scrutineers, who are essential to a free and fair ballot) beggars belief.
It seems Americans as a group believe throwing money at technology can solve any problem. Sometimes it works spectacularly well. I doubt this is one of those times.
Sorry, but there were *plenty* of people *inside the Linux community* as well as out saying at the time that the valuations for RH and VA during their IPO's and immediately afterward were ludicrously high. This has nothing to do with the merits of the companies, which were and are real, but the fact that the hype surrounding them was never justified. Anybody who did an iota of research could have found that out.
Sorry, but anybody who paid the ridiculously high prices in the post-IPO environment and is now sitting on big losses has nobody to blame but themselves (and possibly their investment advisors).
As others have pointed out, this device probably drops the odd bit or two. While that's OK for a video recorder, it's certainly *not* OK for a backup device.
However, with the ridiculously low cost per bit, it might be acceptable to encode a large degree of redudundancy into the encoding to allow virtually any recording-process error.. . .;-)
This individual is posting a bunch of "informative" links that happen to be the first things google has returned on the topic. They have done that several times, if you check their user info. One wonders whether they are trying to boost their karma so that they are able to troll at +2 . . .
Are the Olympics becoming the center of all things evil?
The Olympics have been the center of quite a lot of less-than-savoury human behaviour over the years. Aside from the Berlin Olympics (everybody knows the story of Jesse Owens. What doesn't get told is the story of the two Jewish runners removed from the US 400 metre relay team at the order of the IOC president to mollify Hitler. While the athletes may have not liked the Nazis, the officials were playing right along), there is the systematic doping systems of the East Germans of the 1970's, the corruption and greed of the IOC itself, the ludicrous "shamateur" status of most of the athletes over the years, and so on. Andrew Jennings' books on the Olympic movement, tabloid in style they may be, are most enlightening.
I've read the article, and I've read all the comments, and I still haven't seen anyone guess a feasible design for a reactor/propulsion system using this stuff. Surely there's some nuclear physicists with the back of an envelope handy who'd care to enlighten me?:-)
Digital video editing is going to be the next great PC application, and can chew up as much CPU, memory and disk as we can feasibly throw at it for at least ten years. Remember, HDTV is coming, and filming in it quadruples (roughly) hardware requirements there and then.
And no, dedicated hardware isn't the be-all and end-all. Compression and decompression might be handled by special-purpose hardware, but special effects (fades, wipes, and the myriad effects that are used routinely on still images with programs like the GIMP) are going to be performed on general-purpose CPUs.
Tough decision to make, but I feel it is reasonable and valid to try to make the thing work (I'm steering clear of "practical").
Sure, it could be done, but getting it going again would be like taking the Wright Brothers Flyer out for a test run. It'd be great while it worked, but what happens when you break something - and with a tube computer you *would* get many failures.
If you really wanted a working tube computer, building a replica would be a far more responsible thing to do. At least that way the original would be left intact.
Anyway, what would be the point? We know exactly how the machine worked, we've got an emulator for it, it's preserved so if anyone wants to the the physical layout and engineering techniques available, it's all there, and most importantly real efforts to record the history of the machine have been made while many of the people that were involved in its use are still alive.
This page discusses the FSF view on free software, copyleft, and GPL. Software doesn't have to use the GPL to be deemed free by the FSF. BSD-style licensed software such as X, is explicitly mentioned as an example of non-GPL, non-copylefted free software.
#ifdef GENERAL_COMMENT
Too many arguments about software licensing are made in ignorance. If you're going to make a comment on RMS's position on anything, make sure you understand it. It's not hard. Think what you like about the man, he has a talent for expressing himself clearly, logically, and succinctly.
More reasons not to do restore it to working order:
It used approximately 30 kilowatts of electricity.
It wouldn't exactly meet current electrical safety standards
Restoring it to meet those standards would remove its authenticity
In any case, there is no need to physically restore it. Provided the details of the machine's instruction set and timing details are kept, an emulator can be (and I believe has been) written, so the programs that ran on it can be preserved far more effectively than say, old films or recordings.
In any case, if you're interested in the history of computers, Australia isn't such a bad place to visit these days. As well as CSIRAC in Melbourne, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has a piece of a Difference Engine. There's more to see than kangaroos, the Opera House, and the Barrier Reef:)
The Difference Engine was not a programmable computer in the modern sense of the word. This biography explains that the Analytical engine, which Babbage designed but never built, would have been a real programmable machine.
The bottom line, as usual, is money. The Alaskan Oil Pipeline was an incredible feat of engineering, but was built for money. Who's going to see the money in a Trans-Bering tunnel?
Precisely. If the benefits outweigh the costs (throwing non-economic factors such as environmental impacts, positive or negative, into costs and benefits) it's a possibility. If not, it should wait until the costs can be reduced to make it worthwhile. If that never happens, too bad.
More and more people now have broadband net access, which is more than fast enough to support decent (though not studio-quality) videoconferencing. The computer power to do real-time compression and decompression is also available. Webcams are cheap as dirt and acceptable quality.
Essentially all the components of videophones have been assembled, all that we need is to agree on some standards and wrap it up in an easy-to-use package and we'd be there.
One question that hasn't been answered is whether people actually *want* videophones. Given that the components described above have been around for at least 2 years now, and there hasn't been an explosion in their use, perhaps not.
I have a friend who works in in a part-IT, part statistics job in a major metropolitan hospital. Her view is that hospitals could be made *much* more efficient if doctors stuck to being doctors and let managers (who are competant to use IT to organise things) manage. However, in hospitals, doctors are gods, and outside their field of specialisation quite ignorant ones.
The situation may be different in the US, but considering that the US spends about twice the proportion of its GDP on health for about the same life expectancy I doubt it.
The mercury compiler remains GPL, and the core Mercury developers remain strongly committed to it (I know most of them, and their leader was perhaps the first person to really introduce me to the philosophy of Free Software). Yes, they are making Mercury run under.NET. The C backend still works better than ever, and I have friends working to port it to other VM's most assuredly not controlled by Microsoft. Another friend of mine wrote a CORBA binding for Mercury, so your IPC options are certainly not restricted to.NET.
As far as real effects on everyday life are concerned, the development of the contraceptive pill must go close to the most sigificant development of the post 1950's era. In one stroke, it made women's control of their own fertility easy, safe, and cheap and forever divorced sex from procreation. The social effects of this are still being felt around the world.
Unfortunately, the thing is/.'ed, so I can't read the documentation myself, but judging from the submission the guy's English isn't exactly great. He might be claiming that Pliant is the best compromise between flexibility and execution speed he's seen. It might well be the best language he's ever seen to meet *his* particular requirements. This is a fairly common belief amongst language designers, and it's usually true;)
The Mercury programming language is another interesting example of a programming language. The Mercury group's goals were to build a logic programming language suitable for large conventional programming projects. Therefore, they required it to have execution speed comparable to conventional imperative language, strong typing, full support for I/O without going outside the logical framework, a module system, amongst others. Not surprisingly, they claim that their project so far supports *their* goals better than any other language, and they are probably right too!
It's difficult, but not impossible, to design languages that meet your requirements better than existing ones. Languages become widely used when your goals match the needs of a sufficiently large group of programmers significantly better than their current language.
A LOT of the early beatles stuff was bubblegum 2-minute melodies that became mega-popular, like Britney Spears today.
That's true, but even their early bubblegum stuff was far more musically complex and innovative than much of the other pop music of the time. Have a listen to the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night", or even the ending of "Please Please Me", their very first nationwide hit. Then go and do some research to find the other big-selling songs of the time. Contrast and compare.
Back in the deep dark recesses of the 1980's, I grew up hacking a little C64 BASIC, but through the late 80's and early 1990's PC's made the barrier to doing "cool stuff" gradually higher and higher. There is a view on Slashdot and elsewhere that that this high barrier of background knowledge that you need to produce useful, interesting programs discourages "larval stage" hackers.
So what did you start on? Visual Basic? Batch files? Visual C++? Or did you start programming only after you installed Linux?
Re:What about hang overs?
on
Beer In Space
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· Score: 1
IIRC, "space sickness" is a very common condition amongst many astronauts. I believe they have bags to catch the results . . .
I think the way to do it next time is to finish "hard metrication" (fasterners, connectors, etc.) first.
Yep, that's an excellent way of going about it, because they affect a much smaller proportion of the population, and impact international trade disproportionately.
Has anyone calculated how much metrication would save in the long term, once the transition costs were dealt with?
The most advamced computers on the Manhattan Project ran on punched cards.
It's my understanding that the A-bombs (dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were designed without the use of any computers at all. It was the H-bombs that required the use of computers.
WRT what China (or Iraq) could do with a supercomputer, there's still the issue of computer-aided cryptanalysis. Being able to read the other guy's messages gives you a huge military advantage, and you sometimes need a supercomputer to do it in a reasonable time.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems Americans as a group believe throwing money at technology can solve any problem. Sometimes it works spectacularly well. I doubt this is one of those times.
Sorry, but anybody who paid the ridiculously high prices in the post-IPO environment and is now sitting on big losses has nobody to blame but themselves (and possibly their investment advisors).
Java support being about the only thing keeping me using NS4.x. . .
However, with the ridiculously low cost per bit, it might be acceptable to encode a large degree of redudundancy into the encoding to allow virtually any recording-process error .. . . ;-)
This individual is posting a bunch of "informative" links that happen to be the first things google has returned on the topic. They have done that several times, if you check their user info. One wonders whether they are trying to boost their karma so that they are able to troll at +2 . . .
The Olympics have been the center of quite a lot of less-than-savoury human behaviour over the years. Aside from the Berlin Olympics (everybody knows the story of Jesse Owens. What doesn't get told is the story of the two Jewish runners removed from the US 400 metre relay team at the order of the IOC president to mollify Hitler. While the athletes may have not liked the Nazis, the officials were playing right along), there is the systematic doping systems of the East Germans of the 1970's, the corruption and greed of the IOC itself, the ludicrous "shamateur" status of most of the athletes over the years, and so on. Andrew Jennings' books on the Olympic movement, tabloid in style they may be, are most enlightening.
I've read the article, and I've read all the comments, and I still haven't seen anyone guess a feasible design for a reactor/propulsion system using this stuff. Surely there's some nuclear physicists with the back of an envelope handy who'd care to enlighten me? :-)
And no, dedicated hardware isn't the be-all and end-all. Compression and decompression might be handled by special-purpose hardware, but special effects (fades, wipes, and the myriad effects that are used routinely on still images with programs like the GIMP) are going to be performed on general-purpose CPUs.
Sure, it could be done, but getting it going again would be like taking the Wright Brothers Flyer out for a test run. It'd be great while it worked, but what happens when you break something - and with a tube computer you *would* get many failures.
If you really wanted a working tube computer, building a replica would be a far more responsible thing to do. At least that way the original would be left intact.
Anyway, what would be the point? We know exactly how the machine worked, we've got an emulator for it, it's preserved so if anyone wants to the the physical layout and engineering techniques available, it's all there, and most importantly real efforts to record the history of the machine have been made while many of the people that were involved in its use are still alive.
#ifdef GENERAL_COMMENT
Too many arguments about software licensing are made in ignorance. If you're going to make a comment on RMS's position on anything, make sure you understand it. It's not hard. Think what you like about the man, he has a talent for expressing himself clearly, logically, and succinctly.
#endif
In any case, if you're interested in the history of computers, Australia isn't such a bad place to visit these days. As well as CSIRAC in Melbourne, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has a piece of a Difference Engine. There's more to see than kangaroos, the Opera House, and the Barrier Reef :)
The Difference Engine was not a programmable computer in the modern sense of the word. This biography explains that the Analytical engine, which Babbage designed but never built, would have been a real programmable machine.
(for those who haven't heard this piece of musical genius, you don't want to, and neither does RMS, I'd imagine).
Precisely. If the benefits outweigh the costs (throwing non-economic factors such as environmental impacts, positive or negative, into costs and benefits) it's a possibility. If not, it should wait until the costs can be reduced to make it worthwhile. If that never happens, too bad.
As distinct from just one buggy spacecraft :)
Essentially all the components of videophones have been assembled, all that we need is to agree on some standards and wrap it up in an easy-to-use package and we'd be there.
One question that hasn't been answered is whether people actually *want* videophones. Given that the components described above have been around for at least 2 years now, and there hasn't been an explosion in their use, perhaps not.
The situation may be different in the US, but considering that the US spends about twice the proportion of its GDP on health for about the same life expectancy I doubt it.
The mercury compiler remains GPL, and the core Mercury developers remain strongly committed to it (I know most of them, and their leader was perhaps the first person to really introduce me to the philosophy of Free Software). Yes, they are making Mercury run under .NET. The C backend still works better than ever, and I have friends working to port it to other VM's most assuredly not controlled by Microsoft. Another friend of mine wrote a CORBA binding for Mercury, so your IPC options are certainly not restricted to .NET.
As far as real effects on everyday life are concerned, the development of the contraceptive pill must go close to the most sigificant development of the post 1950's era. In one stroke, it made women's control of their own fertility easy, safe, and cheap and forever divorced sex from procreation. The social effects of this are still being felt around the world.
The Mercury programming language is another interesting example of a programming language. The Mercury group's goals were to build a logic programming language suitable for large conventional programming projects. Therefore, they required it to have execution speed comparable to conventional imperative language, strong typing, full support for I/O without going outside the logical framework, a module system, amongst others. Not surprisingly, they claim that their project so far supports *their* goals better than any other language, and they are probably right too!
It's difficult, but not impossible, to design languages that meet your requirements better than existing ones. Languages become widely used when your goals match the needs of a sufficiently large group of programmers significantly better than their current language.
That's true, but even their early bubblegum stuff was far more musically complex and innovative than much of the other pop music of the time. Have a listen to the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night", or even the ending of "Please Please Me", their very first nationwide hit. Then go and do some research to find the other big-selling songs of the time. Contrast and compare.
So what did you start on? Visual Basic? Batch files? Visual C++? Or did you start programming only after you installed Linux?
IIRC, "space sickness" is a very common condition amongst many astronauts. I believe they have bags to catch the results . . .
Yep, that's an excellent way of going about it, because they affect a much smaller proportion of the population, and impact international trade disproportionately.
Has anyone calculated how much metrication would save in the long term, once the transition costs were dealt with?
It's my understanding that the A-bombs (dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were designed without the use of any computers at all. It was the H-bombs that required the use of computers.
WRT what China (or Iraq) could do with a supercomputer, there's still the issue of computer-aided cryptanalysis. Being able to read the other guy's messages gives you a huge military advantage, and you sometimes need a supercomputer to do it in a reasonable time.