Hmm, we had a Burroughs in high school. Actually, my oldest brother got to operate it--circa 1962. They retired it in favor of a NCR Century 200 in 1969. Interesting machine--it combined a mix of the really neat with some incredibly awful characteristics.
My senior year, I skipped advanced placement chemistry to take a data processing sourse on the beast. It used NEAT/3, the near english assembly translator. Actually, the assembly was a little odd, in that some commands in n3 would generate a bunch of machine code, while others a few instructions. They also had COBOL, but we never got too far with it. I'm happy to say I've never (successfully) compiled a program in COBOL...:-)
IIRC, the main memory was 32K of 9 bit stuff, but we had an extra refrigerator sized bay(!) that held an additional 64K of thin film memory. We had 4 disk drives, with platters about 12 to 14" in diameter. Maybe 3 platters per pack. Limited tape drives--the Burroughs was all tape. That guy used 8K of core.
The lousy bit on the NCR was the serious overloading of the processor by the assembler/compiler. Even with NEAT/3, it took over 5 minutes for it to compile and print a small program (we never got above 100 cards in that class.) The school data processing people were furious over the machine--NCR had a systems analyst on site for the better part of the school year, while they were trying to get the normal school programs running. (attendance and grades, mostly)
*Their* compiles took a lot longer.
We hung on to the Burroughs for an additional 6 months until the NCR got working right. I suspect that NCR made no money off of our school.
In the late '90s, I got to see just how much pocket calculators had become part of the culture. I was in an EE masters program, and it was understood that if you needed a calculator for a class, you had one. (Much different than when calcs were new in the early '70s, and the debate was over how to integrate them into classes and exams. Short answer: redo the exam questions in favor of getting the concepts right.)
In my work, we have a handful of managers who use laptop computers. The engineers and programmers almost always use desktop PCs or workstations (or both), and occasionally, a PDA like a Palm. Yes, some of the sales types and road-warrior programmers use laptops, but in my workplace, these are exceptions.
Bottom line for me, if laptops really fill a need for most of society, they'll get to be dirt cheap like calculators. OTOH, if they are a niche product, why spend the bucks on something of dubious value and risk an entire generation of kids to Carpal Tunnel?
Actually, the Ralph Bakshi film was all of the fellowship and about half of the two towers. IIRC, they ended the movie at the end of the battle of Helm's Deep.
Pity the second part never got finished, but I think it was for the usual reason--the first one didn't do all that well, and despite the process (half animation, half filmed stuff), wasn't all that cheap.
I have a soft spot for the movie; it was one of my more fun first dates. (*Not* a good date movie unless the date is a Tolkien fan, but I got lucky anyway....)
I'm fairly certain that the US information on Japanese war plans
In Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept he skewers the notion that we knew PH was going to be attacked and when. The most crucial part is that fact that the Japanese PURPLE code messages for the period had no information on the attack. Actually, the Japanese ambassador learned of the attack from the US secretary of state as he was delivering Japan's declaration of war.
The plans for the Pearl Harbor attack were developed in secret, and the Japanese Navy executed them extremely well, with complete radio silence.
Note that Admiral Kimmel (former CINCPAC) was trying to develop the "Roosevelt knew" theory to cover his own sorry tail. The US knew we were going to be attacked--somewhere. There was no solid evidence that Pearl was the target.
And yes, we did read the PURPLE declaration of war before the Ambassador delivered it, but there was no indication of the target. Japan had opened the Russian-Japan war in 190? with a surprise attack, and if the embassy had been able to decrypt and type up the message quickly enough, Pearl would have been attacked slightly after the message was delivered. As it was, the message was late, and it was a sneak attack. There's a moral to that story somewhere....
Best as I recall (I've got a book on Bletchley Park round here somewhere....) the std Enigma used 5 wheels, while the Naval one used 6. IIRC, the value of getting the submarine wasn't so much getting the Enigma, but getting a set of setting books. (The hassles of decrypting the Engima included: 1) figuring out which code wheels were used, in which slots. 2) determining the original position, 3) figuring out the plugboard arrangement. IIRC, this added a final set of substitution to the mess.)
One of the reasons the Enigma was cracked is that the Luftwaffe had terrible signals security. (This also got the Japanese, especially in the RED cipher.) The Luftwaffe used a set of weather ships in the Atlantic and sent the data encrypted. However, they used a common preamble to the messages, and if you had an idea of the weather in the area, you could guess the plaintext quickly. Knowing the plaintext makes getting the setting fairly easy, and that meant the Luftwaffe signals for the day were owned....
OTOH, the Navy was a lot more secure (paranoid) about security and didn't lapse into common preambles.
With respect to the Purple machine, I've got a book written by one of the guys who broke Purple. It's a bit short on technical detail, but the essense of how it was done is covered. It's _The Story of Magic_ by Frank B. Rowlett, ISBN 0-89412-273-8. It was released in 1998, and a bunch of the stuff in the book had been recently released by the NSA just prior to publication.
FWIW, they got a lot of use out of IBM Accounting machines. Takes me back a few (3, precisely) decades when we had one of those dinosaurs in my high school.
One of my co-workers has been telecommuting from Hawaii for the past few years. (We're in Silicon Valley.) The catch is he has to go to the Honolulu sales office to catch the T1 link (he does IC mask design for our department.) I suspect now that DSL is common he may go back home, though now he has kids.
He comes back to San Jose about every 6 to 12 weeks for a week.
FWIW, he gets a commuter pass from one of the airlines. He can travel an unlimited time per year (on standby) with restrictions on travel days. Generally, he's on the planes that'd be flying empty of tourists.
Have they perfected some way of creating bubbles of the exact same size every single time, and if so, how?
First, a reminder. Agilent was split from HP last year when the computer people wanted to get rid of the non-computing sectors. As a result, Agilent got a lot of information that HP uses, including the rather mature Inkjet technology. (I don't recall when it was first invented, but the original Thinkjet printer was introduced around 1983.)
Even though inkjet printers have evolved quite a bit over the years, the technology behind them is still the same: you have a small resistor on a thin film substrate, in a fluid medium. In the printheads, there's an orifice plate arranged so that a resistor is just below a hole. I don't know if this uses an orifice (suspect not), but assuming the fluid is well characterized, bubble control can be very tight.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Agilent's Labs, but have read a lot of information about the inkjets. I have built driver chips for inkjets.
How is the inkjet like bubble put in the optical channel? Are they using electrical signals there?
The inkjet technology that HP (and now Agilent) uses is a thermal-electric one. You heat the fluid medium with a small resistor. In the print heads, the resistors are spaced a ways behind the print head orifices. Dunno how these are done, but I'd guess they skipped the orifices. If you watch the power, you can have the bubbles collapse shortly after the power pulse is over.
Bottom line, the control for the switcher is electronic, but the signal path is all optical.
There are no life forms on any of those moons. This is incredibly stupid.
For the sake of argument, I'll assume that your second sentance was not intended to apply to the first.
In my reading, I've seen nowhere in the Bible where God said "You are unique--no other bacteria anywhere, not even on that Jovian moon." Gimmie a break, the last time I looked, the Bible was written a long time before people realized that Jupiter was more that a light in the sky and that there were worlds circling around it. Hell, at that time, people hadn't even seen Europa, nor the other major moons.
I'm going to skip any discussion on abortion--in a story about NASA, it's a wee bit offtopic....
Among word processors, I count: 1. FrameMaker - Hard to learn, but the most powerful. [snip]
I've used Frammaker under HPUX for several years. I guess you could call it a word processor, but it's not the kind of tool you haul out when you need to cut a nice looking letter.
In my experience, it's pretty good for taking text and putting it into a page format, but if I had to write another long document, I'd do what I did last time: write and edit the text in something else (even emacs...) and import it into Frame. IIRC, the last big documentation project, I used emacs as the editor and prettied it up in Frame. Then I exported it to HTML and went back to emacs to clean up the tables. Sigh.
OTOH, if you have a template and need to fill out a lot of data (for, say, a production specification), it's fantastic.
And, I'm the one person in our group who actually likes Frame. Most of my coworkers have a hate-hate relationship with it.
upchuck_hairball()/* ack, thttttpht!!! */ climb()/* extra priority for curtains */ knock_over_stuff() torment_dogs()
Re:Best ergonomic keyboard I've used... the MS one
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Ergonomic Keyboards
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· Score: 1
I have a Natural keyboard at work, and another one of the same model (Natural classic) at home. The work one has a bad left Alt key, so when I'm on the NT box and need to give the 3-finger salute (which is whenever I lock the keyboard, and whenever it crashes....:-), I get to use the RH one.
The one at home is going strong, despite my tendency to eat my meals at the keyboard. I bought a PII machine last year and it came with the Elite keyboard. It's almost OK, but I don't much like the revised pageup/pagedown keys--I hit the insert toggle when intending to page. It's also a bit light for my taste.
On desk rodents, I've gone through several. Some people swear by the Glide trackpad. I swore at my MK I trackpad, and it's gathering dust. (I haven't tried the large one, but it was the hand position that bothered me.) I've been pretty happy with the Contour Mouse in extra large at work, and with a large at home. (couldn't find the XL at retail, and needed a mouse right away.) I get a better position from the Contour than anything else.
Someone at work has a joystick-looking pointer--it's a mouse, but with a handgrip at a natural angle. Looks fairly comfortable, but I've learned not to buy a pointer without playing with one.
Beyond equipment, there's technique. I strongly recommend the approach layed out by _The Hand Book_ by Stephanie Brown, isbn: 1-884388-01-9
BTW, for me, I did better with an instructor, a pianist who also ran into rsi problems. qwerty or piano, it's much the same problem....
As a further note, I've heard about some folks who went to a voice recognition system to ease the wrist strain. Yup, voice problems. Do one thing too much and it hurts, I guess.
Pete
Re:dogs are better than the internet :)
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LonelyNet
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· Score: 1
I used to hear that people had dogs so they'd meet more people. Around here, it's more like we know the dogs better than the owners. I'm on speaking terms with several dogs on the block (they bark at me until I call their names, then they shut up), but only a couple of neighbors. A little weird, but this is California.:-) BTW, my dogs have a better collection of sweaters than I do. OTOH, they need to preserve heat, and I don't....
the author notes that: "As much as I admire Perl, I would never recommend it to a beginner". I'm just not certain this is valid.
I've recently had to go through a bunch of old scripts written by people who were (at the time) pretty new to Perl. The simpler scripts were fine, but the more complicated they got, the more some real discipline would have helped the code.
I'm not advocating a B&D language like Pascal, but if it's a script that is important to our business operations, I turn on warnings and use strict. It's amazing how many local-looking variables were used as globals. Still, I'm happy to have Perl as my nth language. Hmm, good subject for a Slashpoll, "how many languages have you developed programs in?"
2. Tell those "wealthy organizations accostomed to getting their way" to take their "schedules" and shove them.
Hmm, that's the attitude that will keep MS in business, I think. I don't know what the answer is, but when I tell my customers (I develop IC test applications) what my schedule is, if they don't like it, I *can't* tell them to shove it.
Giving them the source code won't work either. They are coming to you for your expertise. If they want source code, there's lots of distributions.
What I can do is to politely, but firmly, tell them the facts, that I can develop so many lines of code a day, and if they want it faster, better, and cheaper, that two out of three is all they can get. If I tell them to get lost, they'll go to someone who says that 'faster, better and cheaper is fine', the customer will get ticked off at them when they fail, but meanwhile, I don't have a job with them. They won't come back to me, most likely. Maybe they'd give the OS another try, but it's not going to be business coming back to me.
BTW, another thing that will help Linux get ready for primetime is a more complete set of printed install documents. I'm doing a Readhat install at home, and while they want the netmask, the term is nowhere defined in any of their manuals (nor Oreilly's Systam Admin book). Picked it up from the web, but that's lame.
As the Internet enters its second era, it appears to be evolving into a series of distinctly separate, different continents and sub-continents. I think that distinctly is too strong a word. I suspect that the best categorization is psychological/socialogical, but since Soc 201 was way too many years ago, I'll give a quantum analogy: It's possible for a site (or a user's surfing habits) to appear in one or more categories at the same time, or to go from one category to the next with no apparent pattern. Similarly, I suspect, that like the heisenberg principle, if you try to pin down a definition, you'll not be able to. Thus you can get constructs like geekculture.com, where you get the techno/commerical/erotic realm all at once, but if you try to pin it down, you won't find it fitting any of these categories.
On the distinction between DeCSS and Doubleclick. Irrelevant. He did it without permission. (I can just as well argue that DoubleClick is done for a "benign" cause).
Last time I looked, it was made awfully clear that DeCSS was currently used so that people could view DVDs that *they* had paid for. (I know, come the day everyone has T3s in every room and DVDroms are dirt cheap, it might possibly facilitate copying. Bah.)
Let's try extending this logic a wee bit. I buy a book from BigConglomerate.com. Somewhere inside the shrink wrap (evil in books, of itself) is a license agreement that says I can only read the book if I fit it into a special bookstand, available from Filth&Greed and others.
Well, I don't want to read the book using a bookstand, I want to read it in the john and the bookstand won't fit. So, I modify the book so I can take it into the john and read away. *This* should get me in trouble?
Now, let's look at the Doubleclick issue. Some 4 years ago, they said with all piousness that they would not track users with individual information. Even now, the first few paragraphs of the privacy policy says that.
Now, it's changed. While Doubleclick doesn't track, its (quietly purchased) subsidiary lets them put the tracking data together. Now, where is my agreement with Doubleclick where I gave them a right to track me in exchange for the privilege of looking at fancy GIFs for stuff? Funny, I can't see any.
So, IMNSHO, the DeCSS issue is that of making a tool so that I can use data *I* paid for. With Doubleclick, it's an issue of preventing them from using data about me that they *haven't* paid for.
BTW, if the woman had signed up with one of the 'free pc' outfits that make it part of the agreement that she could be tracked, I'd consider a fool, but the company is in the right.
Ummmm, the steam engine wasn't even a curiosity by 1800, damn near everyone had seen one doing practical work by then. Cugnot had even built his tractor.
Well, stationary steam engines were in existance by 1800, but steam boats were not in commercial existance before the early 1800s. (Fulton had the first viable steam boat business, but some other guy (Fitch) was earlier. He went broke though.
OTOH, the steam locomotive was a creature of the 19th century. IIRC (I'm reading Asimov's history of science and discovery, but am still in the 181x's) it was invented circa 1830.
By the 1840s, steam power was at about the peak of its technology. Some other inventions, such as the Corliss steam engine (rather complex, but about as efficient a piston powered steam engine as you can get) and flash steam (no boiler, just add enough water to make enough steam for your application) came later, but all the heavy work was done.
If all you want is not to have cookies be set, you could sybolic link your cookie file to/dev/null.
Well, if I were on a linux box, yep, but this thing is on Windoze. BTW, I tried re-logging and couldn't get back into Slashdot. Evidently, there is some odd reformatting in a cookie file that really does prevent you from effectively editing it.
So, for the MK II attempt, I let Slashdot set a cookie, then reset permissions to read only. It looks like a cookie will be set (if you let it), but it's only active for the length of the session.
As is my habit, I'll keep manually refusing cookies for the while. I've found very few sites where a long term cookie really needed to be set. I stopped doing business with Amazon, so that's another cookie not needed.....
What's the best way to block them from knowing who you are without going through an anonymizing site?
I'm trying something right now that should/might help. First, I edited the *DO_NOT_EDIT* cookies file that Netscape puts in my directory. Then, I set permissions to read-only.
I tried a couple of sites with cookie warning enabled. Even let doubleclick try to set a cookie. It (IIRC) lets cookies run during a Netscape session, but it cannot write the file.
This wasn't my idea--read it somewhere else, but never got around to trying it. We'll see if any complications arise. At least, I got back into Slashdot....
Speaking from experience, it gets really old after a while. Never got the current version to make it past the proxies at work, but if 2.0 really does work, I might set up a couple of work boxen to crunch. Preferably, without the gui.
OTOH, if Nitrozac@home ran under X, I'd be there in a heartbeat.:-)
Even if there are 100,000,000 people using the client, what good does that do if there aren't enough telescopes
The setiathome FAQ covers most of it, but the short story is they are getting data in 2.5MHz wide chunks. To keep a work unit small enough so that a reasonably powered machine will do the job, they filter the data so that a workunit comprises 107 seconds of data, in a band a bit over 9kHz wide.
So, for every hour they are running ar Arecibo, they can get over 8600 work units. That helps a bit, too.
One other thing I've seen (I've been on since they went with the release) is that a lot of people sign up, process a few units and lose interest.
For what it's worth, I've processed a bit over 335 units. This is on a single box, because I couldn't get through the proxies at work. Even so, I'm running in the 97th percentile.
Hint: With a Windoze box, the screen saver chews up a lot of resources. On Win98, I let it run in the background without (usually) writing to the screen. This speeds up processing about 3X. (It takes about 11 to 12 hours on a 350MHz PII in background, 39 hours on the screen. I never finished a workunit on my 486 box....)
Re:High School sci-fi curriculum
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Childhood's End
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· Score: 1
The guy is a genuine genius. One of the things that troubles me most about him and Asimov, though, is that all their books have characters using papers, reading books and newspapers, checking files, etc. Funny that electronic data escaped them.
I think that 2001 did a good job, considering the technology of when it was written. As best as I can recall, 2001 came out in 1968, simultaneously with the movie. Back then, my high school was just getting to replacing a Burroughs computer with 4 tape drives and 8K worth of RAM for a newer machine with 98K worth of RAM and two 5M hard disks. Each machine would fill a large living room. The 'newspad' on the space craft was a pretty fair approximation of a notebook.
Both ACC and Isaac Asimov did a lot of their work when Moore's law had not been conceived, more likely, the observations it was based on could not have been made, much less stated. When Childhood's End was written, the transistor was 4 to 5 years old, and the first pocket transistor radio had not been invented. Trying to extrapolate a future is pretty tough.
In one of Heinlein's books, he has an essay on the nature of progress. He makes the point (mostly valid, IMHO) that technological progress is largely exponential. (The model seems to fall down when politics/government come into play.) Given that thesis, it's easy to see why novels written about the year 2000 from several years back seem horribly dated. Still, when they get it right, it's a lot of fun.
My favorite example of prediction is also one of Heinlein's, The Door into Summer I think it dates back to 1956, but is set briefly in both 1970 and 2000. I first read it in the late '60s, and it was clear that the inventions the hero had done were well beyond the state of the art for 1970. Interestingly enough, I think Heinlein got 2000 down a lot better, at least technically. (His concept of a largely electromechanical drafting machine is pretty dated, but the robots universally present in industry was pretty solid.)
BTW, in college, we read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Slaughterhouse Five was on my own time.
Re:Fountains was indeed interesting
on
Childhood's End
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· Score: 1
I wonder if it was this concept (in particular, the test of unspooling the filament from a spacecraft in LEO)
Hmm, it's been a few years, but about the time Fountains came out, there was a lot of discussion in the L5 group about using similar fibers as a means to get to orbit. I suspect that both ACC and NASA got the idea from the same sources...
So if no one reads that group, no one will know that the exploit exists, and the problem will go away!
Don't suppose that may have been why WebTv blocked Net4TV as a 'spammer' on Monday? Funny how the spam block got deleted 20 minutes after the lawyers got into it..
"We control the vertical. We control the horizontal....."
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, we had a Burroughs in high school. Actually, my oldest brother got to operate it--circa 1962. They retired it in favor of a NCR Century 200 in 1969. Interesting machine--it combined a mix of the really neat with some incredibly awful characteristics.
:-)
My senior year, I skipped advanced placement chemistry to take a data processing sourse on the beast. It used NEAT/3, the near english assembly translator. Actually, the assembly was a little odd, in that some commands in n3 would generate a bunch of machine code, while others a few instructions. They also had COBOL, but we never got too far with it. I'm happy to say I've never (successfully) compiled a program in COBOL...
IIRC, the main memory was 32K of 9 bit stuff, but we had an extra refrigerator sized bay(!) that held an additional 64K of thin film memory. We had 4 disk drives, with platters about 12 to 14" in diameter. Maybe 3 platters per pack. Limited tape drives--the Burroughs was all tape. That guy used 8K of core.
The lousy bit on the NCR was the serious overloading of the processor by the assembler/compiler. Even with NEAT/3, it took over 5 minutes for it to compile and print a small program (we never got above 100 cards in that class.) The school data processing people were furious over the machine--NCR had a systems analyst on site for the better part of the school year, while they were trying to get the normal school programs running. (attendance and grades, mostly)
*Their* compiles took a lot longer.
We hung on to the Burroughs for an additional 6 months until the NCR got working right. I suspect that NCR made no money off of our school.
In the late '90s, I got to see just how much pocket calculators had become part of the culture. I was in an EE masters program, and it was understood that if you needed a calculator for a class, you had one. (Much different than when calcs were new in the early '70s, and the debate was over how to integrate them into classes and exams. Short answer: redo the exam questions in favor of getting the concepts right.)
In my work, we have a handful of managers who use laptop computers. The engineers and programmers almost always use desktop PCs or workstations (or both), and occasionally, a PDA like a Palm. Yes, some of the sales types and road-warrior programmers use laptops, but in my workplace, these are exceptions.
Bottom line for me, if laptops really fill a need for most of society, they'll get to be dirt cheap like calculators. OTOH, if they are a niche product, why spend the bucks on something of dubious value and risk an entire generation of kids to Carpal Tunnel?
Actually, the Ralph Bakshi film was all of the fellowship and about half of the two towers. IIRC, they ended the movie at the end of the battle of Helm's Deep.
Pity the second part never got finished, but I think it was for the usual reason--the first one didn't do all that well, and despite the process (half animation, half filmed stuff), wasn't all that cheap.
I have a soft spot for the movie; it was one of my more fun first dates. (*Not* a good date movie unless the date is a Tolkien fan, but I got lucky anyway....)
In Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept he skewers the notion that we knew PH was going to be attacked and when. The most crucial part is that fact that the Japanese PURPLE code messages for the period had no information on the attack. Actually, the Japanese ambassador learned of the attack from the US secretary of state as he was delivering Japan's declaration of war.
The plans for the Pearl Harbor attack were developed in secret, and the Japanese Navy executed them extremely well, with complete radio silence.
Note that Admiral Kimmel (former CINCPAC) was trying to develop the "Roosevelt knew" theory to cover his own sorry tail. The US knew we were going to be attacked--somewhere. There was no solid evidence that Pearl was the target.
And yes, we did read the PURPLE declaration of war before the Ambassador delivered it, but there was no indication of the target. Japan had opened the Russian-Japan war in 190? with a surprise attack, and if the embassy had been able to decrypt and type up the message quickly enough, Pearl would have been attacked slightly after the message was delivered. As it was, the message was late, and it was a sneak attack. There's a moral to that story somewhere....
Best as I recall (I've got a book on Bletchley Park round here somewhere....) the std Enigma used 5 wheels, while the Naval one used 6. IIRC, the value of getting the submarine wasn't so much getting the Enigma, but getting a set of setting books. (The hassles of decrypting the Engima included: 1) figuring out which code wheels were used, in which slots. 2) determining the original position, 3) figuring out the plugboard arrangement. IIRC, this added a final set of substitution to the mess.)
One of the reasons the Enigma was cracked is that the Luftwaffe had terrible signals security. (This also got the Japanese, especially in the RED cipher.) The Luftwaffe used a set of weather ships in the Atlantic and sent the data encrypted. However, they used a common preamble to the messages, and if you had an idea of the weather in the area, you could guess the plaintext quickly. Knowing the plaintext makes getting the setting fairly easy, and that meant the Luftwaffe signals for the day were owned....
OTOH, the Navy was a lot more secure (paranoid) about security and didn't lapse into common preambles.
With respect to the Purple machine, I've got a book written by one of the guys who broke Purple. It's a bit short on technical detail, but the essense of how it was done is covered. It's
_The Story of Magic_ by Frank B. Rowlett, ISBN 0-89412-273-8. It was released in 1998, and a bunch of the stuff in the book had been recently released by the NSA just prior to publication.
FWIW, they got a lot of use out of IBM Accounting machines. Takes me back a few (3, precisely) decades when we had one of those dinosaurs in my high school.
One of my co-workers has been telecommuting from Hawaii for the past few years. (We're in Silicon Valley.) The catch is he has to go to the Honolulu sales office to catch the T1 link (he does IC mask design for our department.) I suspect now that DSL is common he may go back home, though now he has kids.
He comes back to San Jose about every 6 to 12 weeks for a week.
FWIW, he gets a commuter pass from one of the airlines. He can travel an unlimited time per year (on standby) with restrictions on travel days. Generally, he's on the planes that'd be flying empty of tourists.
First, a reminder. Agilent was split from HP last year when the computer people wanted to get rid of the non-computing sectors. As a result, Agilent got a lot of information that HP uses, including the rather mature Inkjet technology. (I don't recall when it was first invented, but the original Thinkjet printer was introduced around 1983.)
Even though inkjet printers have evolved quite a bit over the years, the technology behind them is still the same: you have a small resistor on a thin film substrate, in a fluid medium. In the printheads, there's an orifice plate arranged so that a resistor is just below a hole. I don't know if this uses an orifice (suspect not), but assuming the fluid is well characterized, bubble control can be very tight.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Agilent's Labs, but have read a lot of information about the inkjets. I have built driver chips for inkjets.
The inkjet technology that HP (and now Agilent) uses is a thermal-electric one. You heat the fluid medium with a small resistor. In the print heads, the resistors are spaced a ways behind the print head orifices. Dunno how these are done, but I'd guess they skipped the orifices. If you watch the power, you can have the bubbles collapse shortly after the power pulse is over.
Bottom line, the control for the switcher is electronic, but the signal path is all optical.
For the sake of argument, I'll assume that your second sentance was not intended to apply to the first.
In my reading, I've seen nowhere in the Bible where God said "You are unique--no other bacteria anywhere, not even on that Jovian moon." Gimmie a break, the last time I looked, the Bible was written a long time before people realized that Jupiter was more that a light in the sky and that there were worlds circling around it. Hell, at that time, people hadn't even seen Europa, nor the other major moons.
I'm going to skip any discussion on abortion--in a story about NASA, it's a wee bit offtopic....
I've used Frammaker under HPUX for several years. I guess you could call it a word processor, but it's not the kind of tool you haul out when you need to cut a nice looking letter.
In my experience, it's pretty good for taking text and putting it into a page format, but if I had to write another long document, I'd do what I did last time: write and edit the text in something else (even emacs...) and import it into Frame. IIRC, the last big documentation project, I used emacs as the editor and prettied it up in Frame. Then I exported it to HTML and went back to emacs to clean up the tables. Sigh.
OTOH, if you have a template and need to fill out a lot of data (for, say, a production specification), it's fantastic.
And, I'm the one person in our group who actually likes Frame. Most of my coworkers have a hate-hate relationship with it.
Some more necessary calls:
/* ack, thttttpht!!! */ /* extra priority for curtains */
upchuck_hairball()
climb()
knock_over_stuff()
torment_dogs()
I have a Natural keyboard at work, and another one of the same model (Natural classic) at home. The work one has a bad left Alt key, so when I'm on the NT box and need to give the 3-finger salute (which is whenever I lock the keyboard, and whenever it crashes.... :-), I get to use the RH one.
The one at home is going strong, despite my tendency to eat my meals at the keyboard. I bought a PII machine last year and it came with the Elite keyboard. It's almost OK, but I don't much like the revised pageup/pagedown keys--I hit the insert toggle when intending to page. It's also a bit light for my taste.
On desk rodents, I've gone through several. Some people swear by the Glide trackpad. I swore at my MK I trackpad, and it's gathering dust. (I haven't tried the large one, but it was the hand position that bothered me.) I've been pretty happy with the Contour Mouse in extra large at work, and with a large at home. (couldn't find the XL at retail, and needed a mouse right away.) I get a better position from the Contour than anything else.
Someone at work has a joystick-looking pointer--it's a mouse, but with a handgrip at a natural angle. Looks fairly comfortable, but I've learned not to buy a pointer without playing with one.
Beyond equipment, there's technique. I strongly recommend the approach layed out by _The Hand Book_ by Stephanie Brown, isbn: 1-884388-01-9
BTW, for me, I did better with an instructor, a pianist who also ran into rsi problems. qwerty or piano, it's much the same problem....
As a further note, I've heard about some folks who went to a voice recognition system to ease the wrist strain. Yup, voice problems. Do one thing too much and it hurts, I guess.
Pete
I used to hear that people had dogs so they'd meet more people. :-)
Around here, it's more like we know the dogs better than the owners. I'm on speaking terms with several dogs on the block (they bark at me until I call their names, then they shut up), but only a couple of neighbors. A little weird, but this is California.
BTW, my dogs have a better collection of sweaters than I do. OTOH, they need to preserve heat, and I don't....
I've recently had to go through a bunch of old scripts written by people who were (at the time) pretty new to Perl. The simpler scripts were fine, but the more complicated they got, the more some real discipline would have helped the code.
I'm not advocating a B&D language like Pascal, but if it's a script that is important to our business operations, I turn on warnings and use strict. It's amazing how many local-looking variables were used as globals. Still, I'm happy to have Perl as my nth language. Hmm, good subject for a Slashpoll, "how many languages have you developed programs in?"
Pete
Hmm, that's the attitude that will keep MS in business, I think. I don't know what the answer is, but when I tell my customers (I develop IC test applications) what my schedule is, if they don't like it, I *can't* tell them to shove it.
Giving them the source code won't work either. They are coming to you for your expertise. If they want source code, there's lots of distributions.
What I can do is to politely, but firmly, tell them the facts, that I can develop so many lines of code a day, and if they want it faster, better, and cheaper, that two out of three is all they can get.
If I tell them to get lost, they'll go to someone who says that 'faster, better and cheaper is fine', the customer will get ticked off at them when they fail, but meanwhile, I don't have a job with them. They won't come back to me, most likely. Maybe they'd give the OS another try, but it's not going to be business coming back to me.
BTW, another thing that will help Linux get ready for primetime is a more complete set of printed install documents. I'm doing a Readhat install at home, and while they want the netmask, the term is nowhere defined in any of their manuals (nor Oreilly's Systam Admin book). Picked it up from the web, but that's lame.
I think that distinctly is too strong a word. I suspect that the best categorization is psychological/socialogical, but since Soc 201 was way too many years ago, I'll give a quantum analogy:
It's possible for a site (or a user's surfing habits) to appear in one or more categories at the same time, or to go from one category to the next with no apparent pattern.
Similarly, I suspect, that like the heisenberg principle, if you try to pin down a definition, you'll not be able to. Thus you can get constructs like geekculture.com, where you get the techno/commerical/erotic realm all at once, but if you try to pin it down, you won't find it fitting any of these categories.
Pete
On the distinction between DeCSS and Doubleclick.
Irrelevant. He did it without permission. (I can just as well argue that DoubleClick is done for a "benign" cause).
Last time I looked, it was made awfully clear that DeCSS was currently used so that people could view DVDs that *they* had paid for. (I know, come the day everyone has T3s in every room and DVDroms are dirt cheap, it might possibly facilitate copying. Bah.)
Let's try extending this logic a wee bit. I buy a book from BigConglomerate.com. Somewhere inside the shrink wrap (evil in books, of itself) is a license agreement that says I can only read the book if I fit it into a special bookstand, available from Filth&Greed and others.
Well, I don't want to read the book using a bookstand, I want to read it in the john and the bookstand won't fit. So, I modify the book so I can take it into the john and read away. *This* should get me in trouble?
Now, let's look at the Doubleclick issue. Some 4 years ago, they said with all piousness that they would not track users with individual information. Even now, the first few paragraphs of the privacy policy says that.
Now, it's changed. While Doubleclick doesn't track, its (quietly purchased) subsidiary lets them put the tracking data together. Now, where is my agreement with Doubleclick where I gave them a right to track me in exchange for the privilege of looking at fancy GIFs for stuff? Funny, I can't see any.
So, IMNSHO, the DeCSS issue is that of making a tool so that I can use data *I* paid for. With Doubleclick, it's an issue of preventing them from using data about me that they *haven't* paid for.
BTW, if the woman had signed up with one of the 'free pc' outfits that make it part of the agreement that she could be tracked, I'd consider a fool, but the company is in the right.
Ah, I feel better. May I have my Blue pill now?
Ummmm, the steam engine wasn't even a curiosity by 1800, damn near everyone had seen one doing practical work by then. Cugnot had even built his tractor.
Well, stationary steam engines were in existance by 1800, but steam boats were not in commercial existance before the early 1800s. (Fulton had the first viable steam boat business, but some other guy (Fitch) was earlier. He went broke though.
OTOH, the steam locomotive was a creature of the 19th century. IIRC (I'm reading Asimov's history of science and discovery, but am still in the 181x's) it was invented circa 1830.
By the 1840s, steam power was at about the peak of its technology. Some other inventions, such as the Corliss steam engine (rather complex, but about as efficient a piston powered steam engine as you can get) and flash steam (no boiler, just add enough water to make enough steam for your application) came later, but all the heavy work was done.
If all you want is not to have cookies be set, you could sybolic link your cookie file to /dev/null.
Well, if I were on a linux box, yep, but this thing is on Windoze. BTW, I tried re-logging and couldn't get back into Slashdot. Evidently, there is some odd reformatting in a cookie file that really does prevent you from effectively editing it.
So, for the MK II attempt, I let Slashdot set a cookie, then reset permissions to read only. It looks like a cookie will be set (if you let it), but it's only active for the length of the session.
As is my habit, I'll keep manually refusing cookies for the while. I've found very few sites where a long term cookie really needed to be set. I stopped doing business with Amazon, so that's another cookie not needed.....
What's the best way to block them from knowing who you are without going through an anonymizing site?
I'm trying something right now that should/might help. First, I edited the *DO_NOT_EDIT* cookies file that Netscape puts in my directory. Then, I set permissions to read-only.
I tried a couple of sites with cookie warning enabled. Even let doubleclick try to set a cookie. It (IIRC) lets cookies run during a Netscape session, but it cannot write the file.
This wasn't my idea--read it somewhere else, but never got around to trying it. We'll see if any complications arise. At least, I got back into Slashdot....
an X GUI version?
:-)
Speaking from experience, it gets really old after a while. Never got the current version to make it past the proxies at work, but if 2.0 really does work, I might set up a couple of work boxen to crunch. Preferably, without the gui.
OTOH, if Nitrozac@home ran under X, I'd be there in a heartbeat.
Even if there are 100,000,000 people using the client, what good does that do if there aren't enough telescopes
The setiathome FAQ covers most of it, but the short story is they are getting data in 2.5MHz wide chunks. To keep a work unit small enough so that a reasonably powered machine will do the job, they filter the data so that a workunit comprises 107 seconds of data, in a band a bit over 9kHz wide.
So, for every hour they are running ar Arecibo, they can get over 8600 work units. That helps a bit, too.
One other thing I've seen (I've been on since they went with the release) is that a lot of people sign up, process a few units and lose interest.
For what it's worth, I've processed a bit over 335 units. This is on a single box, because I couldn't get through the proxies at work. Even so, I'm running in the 97th percentile.
Hint: With a Windoze box, the screen saver chews up a lot of resources. On Win98, I let it run in the background without (usually) writing to the screen. This speeds up processing about 3X. (It takes about 11 to 12 hours on a 350MHz PII in background, 39 hours on the screen. I never finished a workunit on my 486 box....)
The guy is a genuine genius. One of the things that troubles me most about him and Asimov, though, is that all their books have characters using papers, reading books and newspapers, checking files, etc. Funny that electronic data escaped them.
I think that 2001 did a good job, considering the technology of when it was written. As best as I can recall, 2001 came out in 1968, simultaneously with the movie. Back then, my high school was just getting to replacing a Burroughs computer with 4 tape drives and 8K worth of RAM for a newer machine with 98K worth of RAM and two 5M hard disks. Each machine would fill a large living room. The 'newspad' on the space craft was a pretty fair approximation of a notebook.
Both ACC and Isaac Asimov did a lot of their work when Moore's law had not been conceived, more likely, the observations it was based on could not have been made, much less stated. When Childhood's End was written, the transistor was 4 to 5 years old, and the first pocket transistor radio had not been invented. Trying to extrapolate a future is pretty tough.
In one of Heinlein's books, he has an essay on the nature of progress. He makes the point (mostly valid, IMHO) that technological progress is largely exponential. (The model seems to fall down when politics/government come into play.) Given that thesis, it's easy to see why novels written about the year 2000 from several years back seem horribly dated. Still, when they get it right, it's a lot of fun.
My favorite example of prediction is also one of Heinlein's, The Door into Summer I think it dates back to 1956, but is set briefly in both 1970 and 2000. I first read it in the late '60s, and it was clear that the inventions the hero had done were well beyond the state of the art for 1970. Interestingly enough, I think Heinlein got 2000 down a lot better, at least technically. (His concept of a largely electromechanical drafting machine is pretty dated, but the robots universally present in industry was pretty solid.)
BTW, in college, we read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Slaughterhouse Five was on my own time.
I wonder if it was this concept (in particular, the test of unspooling the filament from a spacecraft in LEO)
Hmm, it's been a few years, but about the time Fountains came out, there was a lot of discussion in the L5 group about using similar fibers as a means to get to orbit. I suspect that both ACC and NASA got the idea from the same sources...
So if no one reads that group, no one will know that the exploit exists, and the problem will go away!
Don't suppose that may have been why WebTv blocked Net4TV as a 'spammer' on Monday? Funny how the spam block got deleted 20 minutes after the lawyers got into it..
"We control the vertical. We control the horizontal....."