Fuck the archivist. The tapes would have brought a decent return if they were just thrown on eBay and advertised as what they are (unread unknown NASA tapes.)
It might upset the archivist's apple cart, though. They probably have their own agenda and don't need pesky amateurs getting access to the tapes and potentially proving them wrong.
Also, SCSI ISA and PCI cards exist. Or we could wait for whatever supplants USB and hope that a SCSI adapter is made for it so we can sit at our Windows 12 or whatever machines and read the data.
For pete's sake. I hope some of you get the sarcasm I am implying.
The scrapper doesn't want people like you to have any access at all to the stuff in that basement. There's gold in there and that's all a scrapper is interested in.
Yes, there is no evidence when one does not look. I believe that a few dozen reels had labels; hundreds of reels had no labels, their contents unknown. If was a great leap of faith to assume that they were all Pioneer telemetry. Other missions? Software?
The 'smoking gun' here is that whatever was on the tapes was important enough that the engineer squirreled it away in his basement. Was he simply a hoarder? Did he pull tapes just so that he could someday bring up a 1/2" drive of his own, so he wanted some old scratch tape around to use on it?
Did the 'archivists' investigate this at all, or was this just a pesky situation interfering with whatever it was they wanted to be doing instead?
The war in Syria has never been about the human rights of Syrians. As is usually the case, it's about a gas pipeline that western energy companies want built across Syria, but that won't be built until a 'regime change' in the Syrian government can be accomplished.
Without us needing to drown it, of course. We're all adults, and when a bunch of adults are in a room and there's a baby present, it's not the normal thing for one or more of them to drown said baby. In fact, all the rest of the adults would put a stop to it.
Don't come crying when governments around the world start to crack down on Google, Facebook and Apple, who had been working closely with the US intelligence.
Speaking as an American, go for it governments. We all have due diligence as citizens of our various nations to keep a check on the globalist corporations.
It can form a pretty nice 'checks and balance' situation, if national governments actively scrutinize software vendors located outside their borders.
Historically, retirement is mandatory at the age 65 at IBM. That was baked into the IBM culture all the way back from the early 20th century.
My father retired at 55. Then he proceeded to collect his pension from IBM for more years than he worked. He was damned lucky and I'll never get anything similar. Few of us today will.
If it's nine track 2400 bpi 1/2" tapes, it isn't going to contain a 'video feed.' It only carries 2400 bits (or bytes) of data per inch. That means that big long tape doesn't contain a 'video feed.' NASA didn't do MPEG back then, and videotape at the time was helical scan and very resource intensive. A lot of date then (and now, obviously) just streams by.
Sadly, the last thing an electronic scrap dealer is going to do is contact somebody like the Computer History Museum. Scrappers want to rip the gold and it's all they are about. It's surprising this story even saw the light of day, because scrappers are pretty ruthless. They are the equivalent of construction workers who unearth archaeologically interesting materials. They, too, hate it when they find anything that slows them down from ripping in and building whatever they're being paid to build.
I am not a sympathizer with scrappers or construction workers who have this attitude, I'm just sadly aware of it.
I have a Netflix app that I downloaded from the Windows App Store that I use to watch Netflix content on my PC. Said App isn't available for every PC platform, sadly. It isn't even available to Windows 7 users. Perhaps that is the route that content providers should go down if they want to 'secure' their media content.
They should provide 'Apps' for all common popular platforms, including desktop Linux. Then people who want to be Netflix customers can choose or not to install a binary blob on their machine That is certainly better than forcing everyone to install a binary blob on every generic Browsers to do so.
Yeah, yeah, a handful of helpdesk drones here on Slashdot will chime in that it makes their job harder....
Laws just are. And people trying to second guess laws are usually just trying to rationalize breaking them.
All criminals try to rationalize their breaking of laws. That's just the deal. Rapists don't think they are doing anything wrong. Speeders don't either. People who jaywalk, etc.
I have a Xenix box right here in this room. It's an Altos 586, which is a five user 8086 Xenix box. It has five serial ports, each of which is attached to a dumb terminal for a user to make use of. It supports five users on an 8086 processor and 512K of RAM. It's also Microsoft Xenix, from before they spun off their Xenix division into what became SCO.
We are supposed to be using X Terminals to connect to our UNIX boxes. The X Terminal does all the graphics work and is connected to the UNIX box over the ethernet.
The graphics subsystem was outside the NT kernel until NT 4.0. NT 3.51 was as close to a good true multiuser operating system as Microsoft is likely to ever come.
I never use 'extended' coding because five years from now when I need to look back at the information saved with extended coding, the coding has changed and you get nonsense units. You get *cryptic-non-character* garbage that simply amounts to information loss. So I use a lower case 'u' for Micro, which everybody can interpret.
Sorry for being an ascii redneck. Years of experience has validated my attitude to me.
It sounds like they are saying that when Apple TV goes live with this new Amazon Prime, the Amazon Prime Video app on my android tablet will get nerfed or simply shitcanned. If and when that happens is when I'll decide if I want to continue with Amazon Prime. I definitely won't buy the Apple product to continue if that happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyways, the wikipedia entry should be good enough.
640K should be good enough....
Uh....
Hillary's White House Would be No Different From Trumps
Fuck the archivist. The tapes would have brought a decent return if they were just thrown on eBay and advertised as what they are (unread unknown NASA tapes.)
It might upset the archivist's apple cart, though. They probably have their own agenda and don't need pesky amateurs getting access to the tapes and potentially proving them wrong.
Also, SCSI ISA and PCI cards exist. Or we could wait for whatever supplants USB and hope that a SCSI adapter is made for it so we can sit at our Windows 12 or whatever machines and read the data.
For pete's sake. I hope some of you get the sarcasm I am implying.
The scrapper doesn't want people like you to have any access at all to the stuff in that basement. There's gold in there and that's all a scrapper is interested in.
Yes, there is no evidence when one does not look. I believe that a few dozen reels had labels; hundreds of reels had no labels, their contents unknown. If was a great leap of faith to assume that they were all Pioneer telemetry. Other missions? Software?
The 'smoking gun' here is that whatever was on the tapes was important enough that the engineer squirreled it away in his basement. Was he simply a hoarder? Did he pull tapes just so that he could someday bring up a 1/2" drive of his own, so he wanted some old scratch tape around to use on it?
Did the 'archivists' investigate this at all, or was this just a pesky situation interfering with whatever it was they wanted to be doing instead?
The war in Syria has never been about the human rights of Syrians. As is usually the case, it's about a gas pipeline that western energy companies want built across Syria, but that won't be built until a 'regime change' in the Syrian government can be accomplished.
It's good to find somebody on here who likely agrees that the government should be weak enough that we can drown it in the bathtub.
Without us needing to drown it, of course. We're all adults, and when a bunch of adults are in a room and there's a baby present, it's not the normal thing for one or more of them to drown said baby. In fact, all the rest of the adults would put a stop to it.
That's how the phrase is meant.
Don't come crying when governments around the world start to crack down on Google, Facebook and Apple, who had been working closely with the US intelligence.
Speaking as an American, go for it governments. We all have due diligence as citizens of our various nations to keep a check on the globalist corporations.
It can form a pretty nice 'checks and balance' situation, if national governments actively scrutinize software vendors located outside their borders.
Historically, retirement is mandatory at the age 65 at IBM. That was baked into the IBM culture all the way back from the early 20th century.
My father retired at 55. Then he proceeded to collect his pension from IBM for more years than he worked. He was damned lucky and I'll never get anything similar. Few of us today will.
If it's nine track 2400 bpi 1/2" tapes, it isn't going to contain a 'video feed.' It only carries 2400 bits (or bytes) of data per inch. That means that big long tape doesn't contain a 'video feed.' NASA didn't do MPEG back then, and videotape at the time was helical scan and very resource intensive. A lot of date then (and now, obviously) just streams by.
Sadly, the last thing an electronic scrap dealer is going to do is contact somebody like the Computer History Museum. Scrappers want to rip the gold and it's all they are about. It's surprising this story even saw the light of day, because scrappers are pretty ruthless. They are the equivalent of construction workers who unearth archaeologically interesting materials. They, too, hate it when they find anything that slows them down from ripping in and building whatever they're being paid to build.
I am not a sympathizer with scrappers or construction workers who have this attitude, I'm just sadly aware of it.
As long as that always remains an option.
Poplar is hardwood. Why not a 2x4x8 of maple or walnut?
Obviously the pine will be much lower cost. Shipping would be the same, of course.
They can move to the shithole cities like the other bitter people have.
I have a Netflix app that I downloaded from the Windows App Store that I use to watch Netflix content on my PC. Said App isn't available for every PC platform, sadly. It isn't even available to Windows 7 users. Perhaps that is the route that content providers should go down if they want to 'secure' their media content.
They should provide 'Apps' for all common popular platforms, including desktop Linux. Then people who want to be Netflix customers can choose or not to install a binary blob on their machine That is certainly better than forcing everyone to install a binary blob on every generic Browsers to do so.
Yeah, yeah, a handful of helpdesk drones here on Slashdot will chime in that it makes their job harder....
Laws just are. And people trying to second guess laws are usually just trying to rationalize breaking them.
All criminals try to rationalize their breaking of laws. That's just the deal. Rapists don't think they are doing anything wrong. Speeders don't either. People who jaywalk, etc.
Hopefully the plugin mechanism used for EME will still allow me to plug in NoScript or it's analog.
I have a Xenix box right here in this room. It's an Altos 586, which is a five user 8086 Xenix box. It has five serial ports, each of which is attached to a dumb terminal for a user to make use of. It supports five users on an 8086 processor and 512K of RAM. It's also Microsoft Xenix, from before they spun off their Xenix division into what became SCO.
Don't be a PC dork. We don't care that you have an ATX motherboard, nor are we interested in what brand of processor you use.
We are supposed to be using X Terminals to connect to our UNIX boxes. The X Terminal does all the graphics work and is connected to the UNIX box over the ethernet.
The graphics subsystem was outside the NT kernel until NT 4.0. NT 3.51 was as close to a good true multiuser operating system as Microsoft is likely to ever come.
I never use 'extended' coding because five years from now when I need to look back at the information saved with extended coding, the coding has changed and you get nonsense units. You get *cryptic-non-character* garbage that simply amounts to information loss. So I use a lower case 'u' for Micro, which everybody can interpret.
Sorry for being an ascii redneck. Years of experience has validated my attitude to me.
I got trolled really bad on a BBS back in about 1990.
It sounds like they are saying that when Apple TV goes live with this new Amazon Prime, the Amazon Prime Video app on my android tablet will get nerfed or simply shitcanned. If and when that happens is when I'll decide if I want to continue with Amazon Prime. I definitely won't buy the Apple product to continue if that happens.