Oh, thank you for your note. That takes me back. Control Data Corporation, summer 1980, San Jose, California. My first job out of college was CDC. So was I developing software for... CDC 6600 mainframes? (Or Cyber 171/172?) NOS operating system? PLATO learning network? Fortran Number Crunching? Yep, I'd trained on all that in college, I had my magtapes and punch cards...
But noOOoo, this was the very new microcomputer division, developing for the... Atari 800 8-bit computer. (The What?)
My job was not glamorous. I was doing QA for non-exciting programs (stock-market analysis!) written in Basic, which was a truly slow Basic. I'd start an analysis, go to lunch, come back, and see if it had finished.
You can imagine my thoughts about this computer.
One day I remember seeing a crowd around the new computer a few cubicles down. I walked down. A TV was on and... stars were whipping by... torpedos shot out... missed and kept going... what was that strange thing the guy was driving with, sort of an upright stick handle, like a transmission shifter? Then he shot again and zapped the other guy... explosion... sound effects... he pulled up a map of galaxy and hyperjumped to the next sector... it was much like Star Wars on a TV !
I can remember going back to my cubicle and dazedly thinking, "There's a whole new world out there... " and, after awhile, thinking... "This computer really wasn't designed to do stock market analysis, now was it?"
That event changed my career, my life, and I'm forever grateful.
Thanks for writing your post. I, too, get a little misty-eyed thinking about how far we've come just since I got out of college in 1980.
I understand this thread is about USB flash drives. But I had something so strange happen in a USB drive that took enough time to diagnose that I thought I'd put it into the "Someone mentioned that" knowledge base.
So, FYI:
On two different brand motherboards using current AMIBIOS, having a USB disk drive device plugged in hung the machine early in startup, early in BIOS boot. I can't be sure where exactly, but it hung after displaying the size of RAM, but before displaying the SATA & PATA disks it found, or letting me press DEL to get into the BIOS settings.
This is pretty disconcerting because this is so early in boot, you can't check much with software, and it can look like bad hardware. That's what I thought it was. I was replacing hardware items one at a time when I first spotted a USB hard disk cable that the owner hadn't told me about and unplugged it, and tried the computer. It then booted.
Then this happened to me five weeks later. So this has occurred on both Intel and nVidia 750 motherboards. There's nothing special or trick about the setups. The only difference was that a hard disk was connected via USB. Interestingly, the hard disk was -not- selected as a boot device -- I triple checked that as the obvious first time.
I would have to suspect that the onboard USB controller comes up in a state that hangs the processor when (probably not all) USB hard disk(s) are attached.
I would not be surprised at all if some USB flash drives did this, since whatever signal or event is causing this hasn't been tracked down.
If anyone has suggestions on where I could forward this info to where it could help people out, I'd be happy to.
-- thanks,
Where to learn about info warfare? While a fair degree of computer science skills is always good, you can start picking those up with an old PC, a Linux distro, and concentrated reading. If you want to be attacked, put your machine on the Internet.
I'm not nearly as concerned about attackers hitting civilian targets as them hitting effective military targets.
Example: "The Army Moves On Its Stomach" is a very old saying, but still true. Logistics is really important and the area probably the most computerized. I think an attacker would strike there first because of the damage it would do. If the troops can't get fed, there are no water trucks, can't get rounds, can't get artillery, no spare parts for tanks, planes, because the ordering systems are damaged, then the force comes off its wheels very quickly.
I think raising awareness throughout the logistics chain that these systems could be attacked, and have a method of reporting something suspicious, might be a very good idea. People who have been sending MRI's and sabot rounds to forward locations have a pretty good feel for when a new order should be due. If an order for "0" or "1023" comes in, and it's just wildly different, they should be encouraged to report it and check it. If no order comes in, report it and check it. There should never be a penalty for picking up a phone and reporting a suspicion.
One way to overcome a large number of attackers is simply to use a large number of people, doing their normal job, but checking up on things. People are smart about their jobs given a chance. The most frustration I see is people not being allowed to be smart because of their managers.
It seems to me that the military is going to need security in its logistical lines going all the way back to its suppliers to fight any extended war. A World-War-II effort with cyber warfare would be a different thing these days.
My question is simply: Are you going to have a "Who ya gonna call?" phone line to report suspected attacks immediately?
After the (very) rough rides during re-entry that the Soyuz return crafts have had, I'd have to suggest that Sergey take along a satellite phone and GPS tracker so he can phone in where they land.
Taking along a G-suit and training for 8-G's wouldn't be a bad idea, either; that's what the last crew got.
If I had the money I'd go in an instant. No question. I suspect this is one of those things that either you "get" or you just don't. But then, I got up very early in Mountain Time to watch the Gemini and Apollo launches, which were often early morning Florida time.
Space was the career and life I never got to have.
The high density Apple floppies (1.44, etc) can be moved back and forth between PC's and Apples.
The lower density Apple floppies used GCR recording, much like the Apple ][ floppies. Hell, in fact, it was exactly like the Apple floppies, except that the number of sectors per track varied. Apple sped up/slowed down the drive motor while doing disk I/O.
I found out you could read these disks on a standard PC 300 RPM drive with a custom disk controller of about five chips. No speed changing. The disk controller changed its disk I/O frequency. The product we sold to do this (and to run Mac software on the 68000 Atari ST platform) was called "Spectre GCR"), and yep, it would boot Apple floppies, or hard disks, right out of the box.
(This did not make Apple happy.)
The only significant bugs that showed up were noise from the switching power supply near the frequency of the outer tracks and impedance mismatch on the read-data line.
If I had to read Mac 400/800 floppies these days, I'd pick up a Mac on eBay with the "Super Woz Integrated Machine" that could read both formats, and bring the data over.
All of this taught me that Steve Wozniak was one smart, smart guy. His low chip, very elegant solution was wonderful to learn. Writing the formatter was a bitch, yes... but it was wonderful to learn.
One of the problems with the DMCA is that people learn so much about coding by looking at other people's coding. Same for hardware design. I learned a great deal about 68000 coding from Andy Hertzfeld's beautiful Macintosh coding. I learned a great deal about elegant hardware design from John Ridges, who is possibly the best overall hardware and software person I've ever met.
You're sort of tarring with too wide a brush there.
There used to be a number of viruses for Macs, during the 680x0 processor era. I know this because the Mac emulator I did also got hit by the same viruses, as well the 68000 and 030 Apple Mac machines I had.
What is somewhat amusing is a Mac emulator competitor over in Germany ("Aladin") wrote a virus that was designed to break programs if they were run on my emulator, but not on theirs. Because I made a mistake in how I handled one exception, the virus didn't trigger. Heh!
For example, Robert Woodhead, who co-wrote "Wizardry", wrote one of the anti-virus programs for that era Mac.
Nowadays things are quite different, with rather old 680x0 Macs, PPC Macs, and Intel Macs, and such running operating systems that have some significant differences at the lowest levels. For example, there was no hardware memory protection between processes for years in the older Macs. I'll bet OSX has it.
I think you will find in general in the PC market that while there are some sophisticated viruses around, that a great deal of them are written by "bored Bulgarians on the dole who don't have anything else to do", quoting an old pal. Taking someone else's virus, filing off their handle, and hex-editing in a new handle is big excitement in those circles. You tend to see the same stupid code "written" by fifty people.
Lot of those people are low to medium-talents. I can distinctly recall a magazine interview with a "major virus writer" talking about his use of Visual Basic. Umm, yeah, let's link in those libraries...
Most of the very talented people I know would not write a virus simply because they have a hands-on good idea of the horror it causes, just as a doctor would not willingly make a city full of patients sicken by tampering with a vaccine. Lot of people on Slashdot have had to deal with the aftereffects of viruses.
The reason this Cisco guy John Stewart is such a horses's butt (in my opinion) are several fold:
(1) Who is Cisco to be talking? I have seen the "what to do" manual in case of problems for Cisco routers. It was about 2.5 inches thick. One bug per page. In almost all cases the cure was "power off, reboot the router". Most of the bugs appeared to be bad pointer problems (out of RAM). Hire some Bulgarians, John.
(2) Nice for John to be talking when his company's routers are the way that viruses get transmitted across the Internet. Even a pathetic level of scanning could pick some off. Well, with the programming skill shown in (1), it may not be possible for Cisco.
(3) Nice for John to be yapping when his routers are how spam gets flooded through the net like an elephant with diarrhea. Again, a luzer level of scanning could help with it. Where is John? Oh, he's at a conference, in Australia. Drink some Fosters and start making sense, John.
(4) Good of John to be right at the wheel while the Chinese sold fake routers to the US Military, and there is only one reason the Chinese would do that, and it's military.
In my opinion the entire "Security" division should have been fired, immediately, for that one.
The main thing that is stupid about John's comments, though, is that he's saying that levees, sandbags and pumps are useless when floods hit -- but often, and especially if they're applied intelligently -- they are really quite useful.
Hmmmmmm. What sort of processors are run on modern satellites? Are they clocked down to keep down heat which has to be radiated off without all that convenient air to dump the heat into?
Not to mention all the fun with cosmic rays, etc.
(I'm being lazy by not looking on Wikipedia, of course.)
It's worth a couple minutes looking over the trailer for this. All the hair on my arms is standing up, and I forgot to breathe there for awhile. WOW!!!
>>Oh, please. If you want a tank, you go to Germany and ask for one. The Tiger was unmatched in WWII. >Is that why Germany won the war? Oh wait, they didn't;)
Of course, you are correct; the combined pressure of the industrial engines of the US and USSR eventually overpowered Germany.
>The Tiger might have been superior to the T-34 in a straight up comparison of armor/weaponry but the T-34 was a better overall tank. It was easier to produce, easier to maintain, easier to repair and generally more reliable. It also completely outclassed every single German tank when it was first introduced -- not a small feat considering the fact that it was the Germans who largely came up with the concept of armored warfare to begin with!
Well, we don't happen to agree on this, but I do see your points and they are valid. On the other hand, the Military Channel agrees with me on its "Top 10 Tanks". In it, various British, American, and French tank crewman from World War II were asked what tank they'd pick to be in if they had a choice, and they all said, "Tiger".
>For all the grief that the Russians get for under-engineering the Germans in WW2 managed to do the exact opposite -- they over-engineered everything. Their designs for everything from tanks to field artillery tended to be more complicated than the equivalent Soviet/Allied designs. As a result their equipment was much more liable to breakdown and was harder to repair when it did. This was especially true for their tanks.
This is correct. The Germans over-engineered the Tiger. However, that usually resulted in a relatively small part of the tank being deadlined at any time, not the entire tank. Again, we don't have to agree here, but I think you have valid points.
>> The Russians were, however, silly enough to make fleets of T-34's and T-60's and T-72's. All that treasure poured into making crap. Did you miss the Gulf War or something?
>Did you miss World War Two or something? Those T-34s won the war for the Soviet Union. They were a great surprise to the Wehrmacht and practically invincible during the first few months of the war -- the German ground formations typically lacked the weapons to defeat their armor head-on. Had they been available in larger numbers at the outset it's likely that the history of the Eastern Front would have turned out quite differently.
Umm umm umm, so many factors at the Eastern Front, difficult for me to say. Stalingrad alone was on a feather's balance for months.
>>Thousands were carved into scrap in a hundred hours. Their crews could not wait to get away from them, because they were (rightly) considered to be deathtraps.
>Yes, because it's not like the Coalition had any other advantages, like total Air Supremacy, better training, night vision/IR equipment or anything like that.
You're correct, within a certain narrow vision.
But these things are not my point.
And the history of the USSR, and the cyclic history of Russia, leaves me utterly saddened. I fear it is sliding into the depths again, with "Polonium-210" being Putin's not-too-subtle hint that he'll reach out and touch you even in England if you complain too much. With a half-life of 138 days, it's pretty damn obvious it was "state-sponsored".
However, my reply, which you *haven't* answered, is that the USSR system wastes the most important capital of all, which is not RBMK reactors, T-34 tanks, R-36/SS-18 nuclear missiles, or R-73 (AA-11) air to air missiles.
The most important capital is people.
The USSR system wastes *people*. Over and over, in my original reply, I said that the Soviet way was, "We can always get more people using cheap, unskilled labor!".
Or as Stalin said, "The death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million people is a statistic." Stalin would know; he killed so many Ukranians that we don't know within a million how many died, but it's well over ten million. Stalin is directly
You said,
"That's not entirely fair. They've had their fair share of avoidable disasters due to flawed designs (*cough* Chernobyl *cough*) but they've also built some really impressive shit."
*sigh* They were impressive at making shit, that's for sure.
Chernobyl was just one example of Soviet Nuclear's paradigm: "We Don't Give A Damn About Our People". The depressing, unromantic fact was that a lot of decisions in the USSR were made on the basis of "people are replaceable, with some unskilled labor". So... why bother with containment domes? And why use skilled labor and build up a force of people that can run reactors that are inherently unstable at certain power levels? If someone smart complains, kill them.
From end to end the former USSR is a massive pollution mess. Use Google Earth and look at the Barents Sea and the Sov shipyards. Lord. After dumping who-knows-how-many reactor cores overboard, now they've got buildings filled with many reactor cores falling apart, and draining, of course, into the Barents Sea.
The USSR always killed off the intelligent people, always kept secrets (the Chernobyl reactor operators did not know the instabilities of that design!), and in 70 years, from 1920 to 1991, polluted a vast country so badly that there may not be enough money in the entire world to clean up the mess. When you don't care about people as individuals, pollution is irrelevant. It's cheaper to replace the people! When you keep secrets about what's buried, you get criticality accidents. We know about two bad ones. Hell, there are entire large dams and water diversion projects just to slow down the spread of long-term radioactives.
The Soviet nuclear submarine program is the largest human radiation experiment ever. Harrison Ford movies or not, those crews took heavy doses even on routine voyages. Who cares? They can always get a new crew next year.
You said, "The T-34 [wikipedia.org] was arguably the best tank of WW2."
Oh, please. If you want a tank, you go to Germany and ask for one. The Tiger was unmatched in WWII.
The Russians were, however, silly enough to make fleets of T-34's and T-60's and T-72's. All that treasure poured into making crap. Did you miss the Gulf War or something? Thousands were carved into scrap in a hundred hours. Their crews could not wait to get away from them, because they were (rightly) considered to be deathtraps.
You said, "The R-36 (SS-18) [wikipedia.org] ICBM was superior to any American missile (including the vaunted Peacekeeper) in many areas -- survivability, throw-weight, etc, etc."
Hmm. The SS-18 had to be able to lift 8800 kg, which is the weight of a 20 megaton nuclear warhead. Because it's fission-fusion-fission, it has an extremely heavy "blanket" of U-238 surrounding the physics package and whatnot. The U-238 can be fissioned by very hot neutrons coming off the fusion reaction. Half the yield of a big multi-megaton device is from fissioning U-238. Now... why was 20 MT necessary? (In contrast, the US only set off 15 MT once, and that was an accident.)
The USSR went to around 60 MT with a 100 MT design in the early 1960's. The USSR thought that popping several of these in high orbit over the US would cause EMP effects and be a great first strike weapon.
They went to 20 MT as a standard weapon ( !!! )because the USSR could not figure out how to get a missile to come down closer than "somewhere on the side of the barn", so to speak, so they heavily over-targeted anything they really wanted to clobber, and they used incredible overkill megatonnage.
The US did not do 20MT warheads because US missiles were far more precise. The US does not kill off its intelligent people, and the hyperaccurate targeting system was a product of that. The US chose ~~350 KT (not MT) weapons, and retired all the 20MT stuff in the early 1960's.
Here's an important fact: Weapons effects fall off as the cube root of distance, not the square. Thi
Project Orion was and is the only plan I've seen with a prayer of getting to a percentage of c and making it to Alpha Centauri within a lifetime. The usual irrational fears about radiation and nuclear weapons will probably prevent it, though. Space is full of enough radiation that it just doesn't matter in reality, and at least we'd get some use out of all of those expensive plutonium pits that cost so bloody much to make.
Bet it would get dusted off in a real hurry if we had an asteroid on a collision course.
You know, George Dyson's book on Project Orion is a terrific resource on this, since Freeman Dyson, his dad, took a year to help the project:
I have this book and it has a number of details that are quite interesting. Recommended.
Something quite surprising I found while just looking up this book today is apparently the History Channel is doing a show on Project Orion as part of "History Undercover".
As for radioactive matter being scattered over the Earth's surface during a launch accident, isn't this more of an engineering problem to build containers that don't split open under X accelerations? This worry keeps coming up from the antinuke people and it never happens. Ye gods, the SNAP power supply on the LEM had them in a lather.
Pound for pound nuclear fuel is a million times more powerful than any chemical fuel. I'm a little sick of the antinuke people tying our hands and forcing us into our current era of global warming. Thanks a lot.
I am quite annoyed at the incredible sloppiness at the IEEE site.
I quote from their site thus:
"Hellman has set up a Web site related to his nuclear deterrence work. From there you can download the Bent article. You can also view a statement signed by Richard L. Garwin, who came up with the design for the first hydrogen bomb;..."
Where IEEE dreamed this... whopper... up is beyond me, especially now that most of the classification barriers are down and the truth is widely known. This goes into the "bonehead" mistake bin.
First hydrogen bomb was the Teller-Ulam design, who share the patent, tested Nov 1, 1952, yield 10.4 MT, codename 'Mike'. The history of that design is pretty well known (for example, see Rhodes, 'Dark Sun'). Things were very stuck around 1950. The 'Classical' H-bomb design did not work according to computer simulation.
So things sat in 1950.
Then, suddenly, something new: Stan Ulam pointed an new idea out to Teller, and Teller came up with another idea, and it was a *staged* approach, "technically sweet" (as Oppy put it).
Mar 9, 1951, a paper with the first half was published (quite classified). Within a month, Teller thought of the second critical part. (Rhodes, pp. 776). Suddenly everyone thought there was a legitimate chance. There was high activity work leading to a full scale test in late 1952. It worked.
Now, where is 'Inventor Garwin'? He is not even in the index of Rhodes' book. (!!)
But from fas.org, looking up Garwin, I see:
"He received the B.S. in Physics from Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, in 1947, and the Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1949." and "After three years on the faculty of the University of Chicago, he joined IBM Corporation in 1952,..."
Ahh, I see. He got his Ph.D. in Physics, presumably while secretly helping Los Alamos, and joined the U of Chicago, where he sneaked ideas to Stanislav Ulam and Edward Teller across the desk, as it were, you know, down the hall, a mere thousand miles away.
I've usually found that on nearly anything, when they can't get the basics right, there are serious flaws in the rest. And yes -- there are serious flaws, as to be expected.
Quick example: tritium. United States weapons are designed to use tritium as a booster in the primary stage. The trouble is, tritium is radioactive, and has a 12 year half-life. It goes bad quickly, in other words. Try to fire a nuke whose tritium has been sitting around for, oh, 24 years (two half lives), and you may get yourself a fizzle yield. This is called "embarrassing", especially if you didn't get a warranty on that nuke from Nukes 'R 'Us.
At Pantex, in near Amarillo, TX, where we are disassembling nukes to keep up with treaty obligations, the last I read was that we were tearing down 3 warheads to gather enough tritium to refill 1. This means there are, well, boneyards full of nukes that... just don't work, but somehow get counted as active... if they make the report more scary.
I generally find that people who are trying to scare a new "We're All Gonna Die In 20 Years" movement up never think of the tedious reality of these things.
I'm an older guy.
I remember the scare tactics.
1970's: Overpopulation.
1980's: Nuclear War (and Nuclear Winter)
1990's: The Ozone Layer
Incredibly, we're all still alive.
I have seen this game before and I think I can tell you what it's all about. Someone's trying to start up another "We're all gonna die in 20 years" movement.
Right now is the time to hammer a wooden stake through its heart.
Frankly:
Bullshit!
The thesis is stupid. "Deterrence is dangerous"? Look around. We're all still alive despite the most psychotic leadership imaginable in charge of tens of thousands of nuclear
"The word "gates" has almost the same meaning in quantum computing as in the classical computing..."
Does this mean we're already stuck with Vista as the operating system for quantum computers?
Or do we need (64 x 3) "192-bit Vista", sure to ship before, oh, let's see, 2020?
I appreciate Bruce's attempt to predict when the X-Box's encryption (4096-bit) will be cracked. But a looksee at history shows that events happen in a funny, nearly fractal manner. Perhaps the series "Connections" would be a better description of how tech has spun up.
Here's a "predict the future" example:
The late 1938's brought research into the incredibly odd element uranium... and the even odder result it gave when bombarded by slow neutrons. Why did it give big energy spikes when hit with slow neutrons? What the hell?
January 1939 at the Princeton Physics Club came the news of what had been found, which stunned everyone. And Leo Szilard has long realized what neutrons meant. He decided that Einstein was the fella to send a letter to President Roosevelt about this stuff to get it moving. The famous letter was sent, August 2, 1939, but the action took longer to start (the U.S. Government being a constant).
The Manhattan Project ran into stuff so weird that it almost didn't work out. Who knew all the surprises that were waiting in a completely new technology?
Talk in open papers pretty much disappeared.
Who would have honestly predicted a working bomb in 6 years? And nuclear power for a submarine not far later?
Now I'm going to go with what tends to happen, which is that:
The world is much weirder (and sometimes, dumber) than any fiction.
So I think that using Moore's Law -- a transistor count -- is automatically excluded. I think we need to be careful about being too conservative in estimates.
We should assume that the government has had quantum computers with many qubits, but for reasons relating to "only buy Windows" paperwork, can't use them for cracking codes. I assume Vista SP1 has been a disaster for quantum machines. Probably the network software doesn't work, either.
The first qubit machines will be running Linux as soon as the multiple virtual machine kernel blocking problems are solved.
Where *did* I put that link to buy up an old Titan II missile shelter?
Dammit, every time I have a computer crash, I lose more than the operating system; I lose a zillion small, fun, interesting, and could-be-useful-if-I-meet-Summer-Glau links.
Looks like it was universal warming, not just global warming.
How could we have known that broadcasting rock'n'roll out into space would heat everything up? Now space and time have stretched, Jupiter and Saturn are going to turn into stars, real estate on Mars has quadrupled in price and its triggered a crisis on "Earth-based-mortgages".
Truly amazing, but nothing compared to an average day at SCO court.
I appreciate you quoting yourself to reply to commentary, but this is Slashdot, where any and all commentary does happen, some spinning off sort of fractally, needing no reply.
You do realize that about the first thing that happens with any new technology is that a respected graybeard concludes it won't really amount to much. I say this affectionately; I look forward to your article.
The major malfunction with these predictions is that new breakthroughs just can't be predicted, or scheduled. Genius happens when it happens. I've often wondered if the graybeard-pronouncement is a part of the new discovery process.
Of course, it's possible to prevent discovery. For example, if the Lord had used Microsoft Vista, he'd *still* be creating the Universe. 7 eons is quite familiar to this Vista user.
I suppose banning the sale of thermonuclear weapons on eBay is next . . .
*sigh*
One by one, our freedoms are being whittled away.
For now, though, I can still list:
eBay #127467:
One W-87 warhead, good condition. May 1987 production. Canned sealed secondary. A few moving 'dings' on the casing. Nominal yield is 300 kilotons; [use the enriched U-235 sleeve (see eBay #127468) if you want 475 kilotons.]
The RV (re-entry vehicle) is in good condition as well, with that nifty carbon-fabric nose, a new contact sensor, a carbon phenolic heatshield, and a vintage S-band antenna!
Comes with a color 235 page manual, and is select-fusable for high, medium, or low altitude airburst, surface proximity airburst, or surface contact burst. Has usual category-F PAL; play "guess the combo" with your friends!
This is truly the item for the Cold War collector. Not some recycled 50 Megaton Russian junk that's been sold around twenty countries or a huge Mark 28 that you have to keep in the garage. This is a new production gadget in its original colors! Comes with original cardboard packing!
Just the thing for the collector! Looks great over the fireplace!
You want to be very precise and point out that plutonium-238 (not -239, the weapons material) is used solely as a heat source, to drive in effect a reverse Peltier-junction electrical source.
Unfortunately, many people reflexively twitch when they hear the word "plutonium". You know... "plutonium... BAAAAAD!!". A small quantity of plutonium is a respectable coffee boiler.
Wasn't that in that episode of the original Star Trek... something Spock came up with at the last moment? (Not to mention the episode with that odd cat, the movie III, TNG's last episode all over the place...)
And, of course, in black holes since, what, 14 billion years ago...
This amazes me, but I love letting astronomy continue to amaze me...
Consider that to receive a one-minute burst of gamma rays from a source about 100,000 light years away, there must now be a sphere of gamma rays moving outwards, radius 100,000 light years, circumference about 630,000 light years, with a depth of one light minute, call it 10 million miles deep. What incredible power.
I'd have to know the numbers from the observing satellites to even guess, but I wonder how many systems just received a sterilizing dose of gamma?
(And this goes on all the time?!?)
Thanks,
Dave Small
"And in a universe filled with wonders, Mankind invented boredom" -- Terry Pratchett
My opinion is that Guitar Hero is a pretty poor imitation of Jimmy Hotz' work (especially the Hotz Box). The problem with GH is that you can't go anywhere with the notes that inspiration might give you; on the Hotz box, you can. Doing simple things takes genius.
Actually, over at Emulators, Inc. [ www.emulators.com ] there have been "Soft Mac" emulators which run quite nicely on the x86 processor for many years. It's been a matter of emulating 68000 opcodes in x86. Now that x86 runs at speeds that weren't anticipated (4 Ghz?!?), the emulator is really quite snappy.
If you want a G3 emulator, it's not that difficult to write; it's incredibly dull and takes endless error checking, though.
M [STOP: YOU HAVE PRESSED A KEY, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD] y personal opinion is that Vista is so very annoying that I don' [STOP: YOU HAVE ENTERED AN APOSTROPHE, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD] t HAVE *any* plans to "upgrade" to it. [STOP: YOU HAVE ENTERED A COMPLETE SENTENCE, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD]
[STOP: YOU HAVE STARTED A NEW PARAGRAPH, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD.]
I know a bunch of people who have *not* upgraded to Vista after trying to use it for a little while. Good Lord, who was the idiot that spread the "Display" controls all over the place in the "Control Panel"? [STOP: YOU'RE CALLING MICROSOFT PEOPLE "IDIOTS", SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTATOR'S PASSWORD.]
[STOP: YOU HAVE MOVED THE MOUSE. YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD.]
[STOP: YOU HAVE PUT A CD or DVD INTO THE MACHINE. YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD **AND** YOU HAVE TO PUT UP WITH ALL THE DRM CRAP.]
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Oh, thank you for your note. That takes me back. Control Data Corporation, summer 1980, San Jose, California. My first job out of college was CDC. So was I developing software for
But noOOoo, this was the very new microcomputer division, developing for the
My job was not glamorous. I was doing QA for non-exciting programs (stock-market analysis!) written in Basic, which was a truly slow Basic. I'd start an analysis, go to lunch, come back, and see if it had finished.
You can imagine my thoughts about this computer.
One day I remember seeing a crowd around the new computer a few cubicles down. I walked down. A TV was on and
I can remember going back to my cubicle and dazedly thinking, "There's a whole new world out there... " and, after awhile, thinking
That event changed my career, my life, and I'm forever grateful.
Thanks for writing your post. I, too, get a little misty-eyed thinking about how far we've come just since I got out of college in 1980.
Thank you,
David Small
former columnist,
Creative Computing
I understand this thread is about USB flash drives. But I had something so strange happen in a USB drive that took enough time to diagnose that I thought I'd put it into the "Someone mentioned that" knowledge base.
So, FYI:
On two different brand motherboards using current AMIBIOS, having a USB disk drive device plugged in hung the machine early in startup, early in BIOS boot. I can't be sure where exactly, but it hung after displaying the size of RAM, but before displaying the SATA & PATA disks it found, or letting me press DEL to get into the BIOS settings.
This is pretty disconcerting because this is so early in boot, you can't check much with software, and it can look like bad hardware. That's what I thought it was. I was replacing hardware items one at a time when I first spotted a USB hard disk cable that the owner hadn't told me about and unplugged it, and tried the computer. It then booted.
Then this happened to me five weeks later. So this has occurred on both Intel and nVidia 750 motherboards. There's nothing special or trick about the setups. The only difference was that a hard disk was connected via USB. Interestingly, the hard disk was -not- selected as a boot device -- I triple checked that as the obvious first time.
I would have to suspect that the onboard USB controller comes up in a state that hangs the processor when (probably not all) USB hard disk(s) are attached.
I would not be surprised at all if some USB flash drives did this, since whatever signal or event is causing this hasn't been tracked down.
If anyone has suggestions on where I could forward this info to where it could help people out, I'd be happy to.
-- thanks,
David Small
Where to learn about info warfare? While a fair degree of computer science skills is always good, you can start picking those up with an old PC, a Linux distro, and concentrated reading. If you want to be attacked, put your machine on the Internet.
I'm not nearly as concerned about attackers hitting civilian targets as them hitting effective military targets.
Example: "The Army Moves On Its Stomach" is a very old saying, but still true. Logistics is really important and the area probably the most computerized. I think an attacker would strike there first because of the damage it would do. If the troops can't get fed, there are no water trucks, can't get rounds, can't get artillery, no spare parts for tanks, planes, because the ordering systems are damaged, then the force comes off its wheels very quickly.
I think raising awareness throughout the logistics chain that these systems could be attacked, and have a method of reporting something suspicious, might be a very good idea. People who have been sending MRI's and sabot rounds to forward locations have a pretty good feel for when a new order should be due. If an order for "0" or "1023" comes in, and it's just wildly different, they should be encouraged to report it and check it. If no order comes in, report it and check it. There should never be a penalty for picking up a phone and reporting a suspicion.
One way to overcome a large number of attackers is simply to use a large number of people, doing their normal job, but checking up on things. People are smart about their jobs given a chance. The most frustration I see is people not being allowed to be smart because of their managers.
It seems to me that the military is going to need security in its logistical lines going all the way back to its suppliers to fight any extended war. A World-War-II effort with cyber warfare would be a different thing these days.
My question is simply: Are you going to have a "Who ya gonna call?" phone line to report suspected attacks immediately?
Thanks,
David Small
After the (very) rough rides during re-entry that the Soyuz return crafts have had, I'd have to suggest that Sergey take along a satellite phone and GPS tracker so he can phone in where they land.
Taking along a G-suit and training for 8-G's wouldn't be a bad idea, either; that's what the last crew got.
If I had the money I'd go in an instant. No question. I suspect this is one of those things that either you "get" or you just don't. But then, I got up very early in Mountain Time to watch the Gemini and Apollo launches, which were often early morning Florida time.
Space was the career and life I never got to have.
Congratulations to Sergey and Godspeed.
David M. Small
The high density Apple floppies (1.44, etc) can be moved back and forth between PC's and Apples.
The lower density Apple floppies used GCR recording, much like the Apple ][ floppies. Hell, in fact, it was exactly like the Apple floppies, except that the number of sectors per track varied. Apple sped up/slowed down the drive motor while doing disk I/O.
I found out you could read these disks on a standard PC 300 RPM drive with a custom disk controller of about five chips. No speed changing. The disk controller changed its disk I/O frequency. The product we sold to do this (and to run Mac software on the 68000 Atari ST platform) was called "Spectre GCR"), and yep, it would boot Apple floppies, or hard disks, right out of the box.
(This did not make Apple happy.)
The only significant bugs that showed up were noise from the switching power supply near the frequency of the outer tracks and impedance mismatch on the read-data line.
If I had to read Mac 400/800 floppies these days, I'd pick up a Mac on eBay with the "Super Woz Integrated Machine" that could read both formats, and bring the data over.
All of this taught me that Steve Wozniak was one smart, smart guy. His low chip, very elegant solution was wonderful to learn. Writing the formatter was a bitch, yes
One of the problems with the DMCA is that people learn so much about coding by looking at other people's coding. Same for hardware design. I learned a great deal about 68000 coding from Andy Hertzfeld's beautiful Macintosh coding. I learned a great deal about elegant hardware design from John Ridges, who is possibly the best overall hardware and software person I've ever met.
Thanks,
David Small
You're sort of tarring with too wide a brush there.
There used to be a number of viruses for Macs, during the 680x0 processor era. I know this because the Mac emulator I did also got hit by the same viruses, as well the 68000 and 030 Apple Mac machines I had.
What is somewhat amusing is a Mac emulator competitor over in Germany ("Aladin") wrote a virus that was designed to break programs if they were run on my emulator, but not on theirs. Because I made a mistake in how I handled one exception, the virus didn't trigger. Heh!
For example, Robert Woodhead, who co-wrote "Wizardry", wrote one of the anti-virus programs for that era Mac.
Nowadays things are quite different, with rather old 680x0 Macs, PPC Macs, and Intel Macs, and such running operating systems that have some significant differences at the lowest levels. For example, there was no hardware memory protection between processes for years in the older Macs. I'll bet OSX has it.
I think you will find in general in the PC market that while there are some sophisticated viruses around, that a great deal of them are written by "bored Bulgarians on the dole who don't have anything else to do", quoting an old pal. Taking someone else's virus, filing off their handle, and hex-editing in a new handle is big excitement in those circles. You tend to see the same stupid code "written" by fifty people.
Lot of those people are low to medium-talents. I can distinctly recall a magazine interview with a "major virus writer" talking about his use of Visual Basic. Umm, yeah, let's link in those libraries...
Most of the very talented people I know would not write a virus simply because they have a hands-on good idea of the horror it causes, just as a doctor would not willingly make a city full of patients sicken by tampering with a vaccine. Lot of people on Slashdot have had to deal with the aftereffects of viruses.
The reason this Cisco guy John Stewart is such a horses's butt (in my opinion) are several fold:
(1) Who is Cisco to be talking? I have seen the "what to do" manual in case of problems for Cisco routers. It was about 2.5 inches thick. One bug per page. In almost all cases the cure was "power off, reboot the router". Most of the bugs appeared to be bad pointer problems (out of RAM). Hire some Bulgarians, John.
(2) Nice for John to be talking when his company's routers are the way that viruses get transmitted across the Internet. Even a pathetic level of scanning could pick some off. Well, with the programming skill shown in (1), it may not be possible for Cisco.
(3) Nice for John to be yapping when his routers are how spam gets flooded through the net like an elephant with diarrhea. Again, a luzer level of scanning could help with it. Where is John? Oh, he's at a conference, in Australia. Drink some Fosters and start making sense, John.
(4) Good of John to be right at the wheel while the Chinese sold fake routers to the US Military, and there is only one reason the Chinese would do that, and it's military.
In my opinion the entire "Security" division should have been fired, immediately, for that one.
The main thing that is stupid about John's comments, though, is that he's saying that levees, sandbags and pumps are useless when floods hit -- but often, and especially if they're applied intelligently -- they are really quite useful.
Thanks,
Dave Small
Hmmmmmm. What sort of processors are run on modern satellites? Are they clocked down to keep down heat which has to be radiated off without all that convenient air to dump the heat into?
Not to mention all the fun with cosmic rays, etc.
(I'm being lazy by not looking on Wikipedia, of course.)
-- David
It's worth a couple minutes looking over the trailer for this. All the hair on my arms is standing up, and I forgot to breathe there for awhile. WOW!!!
-- Dave Small
>>Oh, please. If you want a tank, you go to Germany and ask for one. The Tiger was unmatched in WWII.
>Is that why Germany won the war? Oh wait, they didn't
Of course, you are correct; the combined pressure of the industrial engines of the US and USSR eventually overpowered Germany.
>The Tiger might have been superior to the T-34 in a straight up comparison of armor/weaponry but the T-34 was a better overall tank. It was easier to produce, easier to maintain, easier to repair and generally more reliable. It also completely outclassed every single German tank when it was first introduced -- not a small feat considering the fact that it was the Germans who largely came up with the concept of armored warfare to begin with!
Well, we don't happen to agree on this, but I do see your points and they are valid. On the other hand, the Military Channel agrees with me on its "Top 10 Tanks". In it, various British, American, and French tank crewman from World War II were asked what tank they'd pick to be in if they had a choice, and they all said, "Tiger".
>For all the grief that the Russians get for under-engineering the Germans in WW2 managed to do the exact opposite -- they over-engineered everything. Their designs for everything from tanks to field artillery tended to be more complicated than the equivalent Soviet/Allied designs. As a result their equipment was much more liable to breakdown and was harder to repair when it did. This was especially true for their tanks.
This is correct. The Germans over-engineered the Tiger. However, that usually resulted in a relatively small part of the tank being deadlined at any time, not the entire tank. Again, we don't have to agree here, but I think you have valid points.
>> The Russians were, however, silly enough to make fleets of T-34's and T-60's and T-72's. All that treasure poured into making crap. Did you miss the Gulf War or something?
>Did you miss World War Two or something? Those T-34s won the war for the Soviet Union. They were a great surprise to the Wehrmacht and practically invincible during the first few months of the war -- the German ground formations typically lacked the weapons to defeat their armor head-on. Had they been available in larger numbers at the outset it's likely that the history of the Eastern Front would have turned out quite differently.
Umm umm umm, so many factors at the Eastern Front, difficult for me to say. Stalingrad alone was on a feather's balance for months.
>>Thousands were carved into scrap in a hundred hours. Their crews could not wait to get away from them, because they were (rightly) considered to be deathtraps.
>Yes, because it's not like the Coalition had any other advantages, like total Air Supremacy, better training, night vision/IR equipment or anything like that.
You're correct, within a certain narrow vision.
But these things are not my point.
And the history of the USSR, and the cyclic history of Russia, leaves me utterly saddened. I fear it is sliding into the depths again, with "Polonium-210" being Putin's not-too-subtle hint that he'll reach out and touch you even in England if you complain too much. With a half-life of 138 days, it's pretty damn obvious it was "state-sponsored".
However, my reply, which you *haven't* answered, is that the USSR system wastes the most important capital of all, which is not RBMK reactors, T-34 tanks, R-36/SS-18 nuclear missiles, or R-73 (AA-11) air to air missiles.
The most important capital is people.
The USSR system wastes *people*. Over and over, in my original reply, I said that the Soviet way was, "We can always get more people using cheap, unskilled labor!".
Or as Stalin said, "The death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million people is a statistic." Stalin would know; he killed so many Ukranians that we don't know within a million how many died, but it's well over ten million. Stalin is directly
You said,
... why was 20 MT necessary? (In contrast, the US only set off 15 MT once, and that was an accident.)
"That's not entirely fair. They've had their fair share of avoidable disasters due to flawed designs (*cough* Chernobyl *cough*) but they've also built some really impressive shit."
*sigh*
They were impressive at making shit, that's for sure.
Chernobyl was just one example of Soviet Nuclear's paradigm: "We Don't Give A Damn About Our People". The depressing, unromantic fact was that a lot of decisions in the USSR were made on the basis of "people are replaceable, with some unskilled labor". So... why bother with containment domes? And why use skilled labor and build up a force of people that can run reactors that are inherently unstable at certain power levels? If someone smart complains, kill them.
From end to end the former USSR is a massive pollution mess. Use Google Earth and look at the Barents Sea and the Sov shipyards. Lord. After dumping who-knows-how-many reactor cores overboard, now they've got buildings filled with many reactor cores falling apart, and draining, of course, into the Barents Sea.
The USSR always killed off the intelligent people, always kept secrets (the Chernobyl reactor operators did not know the instabilities of that design!), and in 70 years, from 1920 to 1991, polluted a vast country so badly that there may not be enough money in the entire world to clean up the mess. When you don't care about people as individuals, pollution is irrelevant.
It's cheaper to replace the people! When you keep secrets about what's buried, you get criticality accidents. We know about two bad ones. Hell, there are entire large dams and water diversion projects just to slow down the spread of long-term radioactives.
The Soviet nuclear submarine program is the largest human radiation experiment ever. Harrison Ford movies or not, those crews took heavy doses even on routine voyages. Who cares? They can always get a new crew next year.
You said,
"The T-34 [wikipedia.org] was arguably the best tank of WW2."
Oh, please. If you want a tank, you go to Germany and ask for one. The Tiger was unmatched in WWII.
The Russians were, however, silly enough to make fleets of T-34's and T-60's and T-72's. All that treasure poured into making crap. Did you miss the Gulf War or something? Thousands were carved into scrap in a hundred hours. Their crews could not wait to get away from them, because they were (rightly) considered to be deathtraps.
You said,
"The R-36 (SS-18) [wikipedia.org] ICBM was superior to any American missile (including the vaunted Peacekeeper) in many areas -- survivability, throw-weight, etc, etc."
Hmm. The SS-18 had to be able to lift 8800 kg, which is the weight of a 20 megaton nuclear warhead. Because it's fission-fusion-fission, it has an extremely heavy "blanket" of U-238 surrounding the physics package and whatnot. The U-238 can be fissioned by very hot neutrons coming off the fusion reaction. Half the yield of a big multi-megaton device is from fissioning U-238.
Now
The USSR went to around 60 MT with a 100 MT design in the early 1960's. The USSR thought that popping several of these in high orbit over the US would cause EMP effects and be a great first strike weapon.
They went to 20 MT as a standard weapon ( !!! )because the USSR could not figure out how to get a missile to come down closer than "somewhere on the side of the barn", so to speak, so they heavily over-targeted anything they really wanted to clobber, and they used incredible overkill megatonnage.
The US did not do 20MT warheads because US missiles were far more precise. The US does not kill off its intelligent people, and the hyperaccurate targeting system was a product of that. The US chose ~~350 KT (not MT) weapons, and retired all the 20MT stuff in the early 1960's.
Here's an important fact: Weapons effects fall off as the cube root of distance, not the square. Thi
Given the radiation from "Our Mr. Sun" in daytime, aren't we designing for underground facilities on the Moon anyway?
Three to six feet of dirt stops quite a bit of gamma . . .
-- Dave
Project Orion was and is the only plan I've seen with a prayer of getting to a percentage of c and making it to Alpha Centauri within a lifetime. The usual irrational fears about radiation and nuclear weapons will probably prevent it, though. Space is full of enough radiation that it just doesn't matter in reality, and at least we'd get some use out of all of those expensive plutonium pits that cost so bloody much to make.
Bet it would get dusted off in a real hurry if we had an asteroid on a collision course.
You know, George Dyson's book on Project Orion is a terrific resource on this, since Freeman Dyson, his dad, took a year to help the project:
http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/B000FUTQFU/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208146708&sr=8-1
I have this book and it has a number of details that are quite interesting. Recommended.
Something quite surprising I found while just looking up this book today is apparently the History Channel is doing a show on Project Orion as part of "History Undercover".
As for radioactive matter being scattered over the Earth's surface during a launch accident, isn't this more of an engineering problem to build containers that don't split open under X accelerations? This worry keeps coming up from the antinuke people and it never happens. Ye gods, the SNAP power supply on the LEM had them in a lather.
Pound for pound nuclear fuel is a million times more powerful than any chemical fuel. I'm a little sick of the antinuke people tying our hands and forcing us into our current era of global warming. Thanks a lot.
-- Dave
I am quite annoyed at the incredible sloppiness at the IEEE site.
I quote from their site thus:
"Hellman has set up a Web site related to his nuclear deterrence work. From there you can download the Bent article. You can also view a statement signed by Richard L. Garwin, who came up with the design for the first hydrogen bomb;..."
Where IEEE dreamed this
First hydrogen bomb was the Teller-Ulam design, who share the patent, tested Nov 1, 1952, yield 10.4 MT, codename 'Mike'. The history of that design is pretty well known (for example, see Rhodes, 'Dark Sun'). Things were very stuck around 1950. The 'Classical' H-bomb design did not work according to computer simulation. So things sat in 1950.
Then, suddenly, something new: Stan Ulam pointed an new idea out to Teller, and Teller came up with another idea, and it was a *staged* approach, "technically sweet" (as Oppy put it). Mar 9, 1951, a paper with the first half was published (quite classified). Within a month, Teller thought of the second critical part. (Rhodes, pp. 776). Suddenly everyone thought there was a legitimate chance. There was high activity work leading to a full scale test in late 1952. It worked.
Now, where is 'Inventor Garwin'? He is not even in the index of Rhodes' book. (!!)
But from fas.org, looking up Garwin, I see: "He received the B.S. in Physics from Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, in 1947, and the Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1949." and "After three years on the faculty of the University of Chicago, he joined IBM Corporation in 1952,
Ahh, I see. He got his Ph.D. in Physics, presumably while secretly helping Los Alamos, and joined the U of Chicago, where he sneaked ideas to Stanislav Ulam and Edward Teller across the desk, as it were, you know, down the hall, a mere thousand miles away.
I've usually found that on nearly anything, when they can't get the basics right, there are serious flaws in the rest. And yes -- there are serious flaws, as to be expected.
Quick example: tritium. United States weapons are designed to use tritium as a booster in the primary stage. The trouble is, tritium is radioactive, and has a 12 year half-life. It goes bad quickly, in other words. Try to fire a nuke whose tritium has been sitting around for, oh, 24 years (two half lives), and you may get yourself a fizzle yield. This is called "embarrassing", especially if you didn't get a warranty on that nuke from Nukes 'R 'Us.
At Pantex, in near Amarillo, TX, where we are disassembling nukes to keep up with treaty obligations, the last I read was that we were tearing down 3 warheads to gather enough tritium to refill 1. This means there are, well, boneyards full of nukes that
I generally find that people who are trying to scare a new "We're All Gonna Die In 20 Years" movement up never think of the tedious reality of these things.
I'm an older guy.
I remember the scare tactics.
1970's: Overpopulation.
1980's: Nuclear War (and Nuclear Winter)
1990's: The Ozone Layer
Incredibly, we're all still alive.
I have seen this game before and I think I can tell you what it's all about. Someone's trying to start up another "We're all gonna die in 20 years" movement.
Right now is the time to hammer a wooden stake through its heart.
Frankly:
Bullshit!
The thesis is stupid. "Deterrence is dangerous"? Look around. We're all still alive despite the most psychotic leadership imaginable in charge of tens of thousands of nuclear
"The word "gates" has almost the same meaning in quantum computing as in the classical computing..." Does this mean we're already stuck with Vista as the operating system for quantum computers? Or do we need (64 x 3) "192-bit Vista", sure to ship before, oh, let's see, 2020?
Events happen at strange speeds.
... and the even odder result it gave when bombarded by slow neutrons. Why did it give big energy spikes when hit with slow neutrons? What the hell?
That's the difficulty with predicting them.
I appreciate Bruce's attempt to predict when the X-Box's encryption (4096-bit) will be cracked. But a looksee at history shows that events happen in a funny, nearly fractal manner. Perhaps the series "Connections" would be a better description of how tech has spun up.
Here's a "predict the future" example:
The late 1938's brought research into the incredibly odd element uranium
January 1939 at the Princeton Physics Club came the news of what had been found, which stunned everyone. And Leo Szilard has long realized what neutrons meant. He decided that Einstein was the fella to send a letter to President Roosevelt about this stuff to get it moving. The famous letter was sent, August 2, 1939, but the action took longer to start (the U.S. Government being a constant).
The Manhattan Project ran into stuff so weird that it almost didn't work out. Who knew all the surprises that were waiting in a completely new technology?
Talk in open papers pretty much disappeared.
Who would have honestly predicted a working bomb in 6 years? And nuclear power for a submarine not far later?
Now I'm going to go with what tends to happen, which is that:
The world is much weirder (and sometimes, dumber) than any fiction.
So I think that using Moore's Law -- a transistor count -- is automatically excluded. I think we need to be careful about being too conservative in estimates.
We should assume that the government has had quantum computers with many qubits, but for reasons relating to "only buy Windows" paperwork, can't use them for cracking codes. I assume Vista SP1 has been a disaster for quantum machines. Probably the network software doesn't work, either.
The first qubit machines will be running Linux as soon as the multiple virtual machine kernel blocking problems are solved.
Enjoy.
-- Dave
Where *did* I put that link to buy up an old Titan II missile shelter?
Dammit, every time I have a computer crash, I lose more than the operating system; I lose a zillion small, fun, interesting, and could-be-useful-if-I-meet-Summer-Glau links.
I just hate crashes.
mutter, mutter, mutter.
Looks like it was universal warming, not just global warming.
How could we have known that broadcasting rock'n'roll out into space would heat everything up? Now space and time have stretched, Jupiter and Saturn are going to turn into stars, real estate on Mars has quadrupled in price and its triggered a crisis on "Earth-based-mortgages".
Truly amazing, but nothing compared to an average day at SCO court.
Cheers!
Dave
Thank you for commenting, Scott.
I appreciate you quoting yourself to reply to commentary, but this is Slashdot, where any and all commentary does happen, some spinning off sort of fractally, needing no reply.
You do realize that about the first thing that happens with any new technology is that a respected graybeard concludes it won't really amount to much. I say this affectionately; I look forward to your article.
The major malfunction with these predictions is that new breakthroughs just can't be predicted, or scheduled. Genius happens when it happens. I've often wondered if the graybeard-pronouncement is a part of the new discovery process.
Of course, it's possible to prevent discovery. For example, if the Lord had used Microsoft Vista, he'd *still* be creating the Universe. 7 eons is quite familiar to this Vista user.
Thanks,
Dave
I suppose banning the sale of thermonuclear weapons on eBay is next . . .
*sigh*
One by one, our freedoms are being whittled away.
For now, though, I can still list:
eBay #127467:
One W-87 warhead, good condition. May 1987 production. Canned sealed secondary. A few moving 'dings' on the casing. Nominal yield is 300 kilotons; [use the enriched U-235 sleeve (see eBay #127468) if you want 475 kilotons.]
The RV (re-entry vehicle) is in good condition as well, with that nifty carbon-fabric nose, a new contact sensor, a carbon phenolic heatshield, and a vintage S-band antenna!
Comes with a color 235 page manual, and is select-fusable for high, medium, or low altitude
airburst, surface proximity airburst, or surface contact burst. Has usual category-F PAL; play "guess the combo" with your friends!
This is truly the item for the Cold War collector. Not some recycled 50 Megaton Russian junk that's been sold around twenty countries or a huge Mark 28 that you have to keep in the garage. This is a new production gadget in its original colors! Comes with original cardboard packing!
Just the thing for the collector! Looks great over the fireplace!
thanks,
Dave
You want to be very precise and point out that plutonium-238 (not -239, the weapons material) is used solely as a heat source, to drive in effect a reverse Peltier-junction electrical source.
... "plutonium ... BAAAAAD!!". A small quantity of plutonium is a respectable coffee boiler.
Unfortunately, many people reflexively twitch when they hear the word "plutonium". You know
Time Warping?
... something Spock came up with at the last moment? (Not to mention the episode with that odd cat, the movie III, TNG's last episode all over the place...)
...
Wasn't that in that episode of the original Star Trek
And, of course, in black holes since, what, 14 billion years ago
*grin*
Dave Small
This amazes me, but I love letting astronomy continue to amaze me ...
Consider that to receive a one-minute burst of gamma rays from a source about 100,000 light years away, there must now be a sphere of gamma rays moving outwards, radius 100,000 light years, circumference about 630,000 light years, with a depth of one light minute, call it 10 million miles deep. What incredible power.
I'd have to know the numbers from the observing satellites to even guess, but I wonder how many systems just received a sterilizing dose of gamma?
(And this goes on all the time?!?)
Thanks,
Dave Small
"And in a universe filled with wonders, Mankind invented boredom" -- Terry Pratchett
My opinion is that Guitar Hero is a pretty poor imitation of Jimmy Hotz' work (especially the Hotz Box). The problem with GH is that you can't go anywhere with the notes that inspiration might give you; on the Hotz box, you can. Doing simple things takes genius.
Check it yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f30XAK7p_k
Dave Small
Actually, over at Emulators, Inc. [ www.emulators.com ] there have been "Soft Mac" emulators which run quite nicely on the x86 processor for many years. It's been a matter of emulating 68000 opcodes in x86. Now that x86 runs at speeds that weren't anticipated (4 Ghz?!?), the emulator is really quite snappy.
If you want a G3 emulator, it's not that difficult to write; it's incredibly dull and takes endless error checking, though.
No, I don't work for Emulators, Inc.
Thanks,
Dave Small
M [STOP: YOU HAVE PRESSED A KEY, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD] y personal opinion is that Vista is so very annoying that I don' [STOP: YOU HAVE ENTERED AN APOSTROPHE, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD] t HAVE *any* plans to "upgrade" to it. [STOP: YOU HAVE ENTERED A COMPLETE SENTENCE, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD]
[STOP: YOU HAVE STARTED A NEW PARAGRAPH, SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD.]
I know a bunch of people who have *not* upgraded to Vista after trying to use it for a little while. Good Lord, who was the idiot that spread the "Display" controls all over the place in the "Control Panel"? [STOP: YOU'RE CALLING MICROSOFT PEOPLE "IDIOTS", SO YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTATOR'S PASSWORD.]
[STOP: YOU HAVE MOVED THE MOUSE. YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD.]
[STOP: YOU HAVE PUT A CD or DVD INTO THE MACHINE. YOU MUST ENTER THE ADMINISTRATOR'S PASSWORD **AND** YOU HAVE TO PUT UP WITH ALL THE DRM CRAP.]
[STOP! GO WITH XP-PRO or LINUX!]
Thanks,
Dave Small