Chat, Power, and frog-boiling

To the chap who extolls chat for its anti-weasel properties (logging what was said by whom), I note that a former coworker (still at the weasel-farm I left years ago) has informed me that they are now forbidden to log chats. Not surprising from a company that shunned email for coordination in favor of flaky wikis and meetings that reliably started 18 minutes after the scheduled time and consisted mainly of "Oh, did you expect me to do that? I'll get to it this week." repeated weekly.

The pictured dock gave me shudders as it seems that all device manufacturers have taken up the position that Toshiba took in 2000, when I was shocked to be told, after the battery in a month-old laptop had failed, that it was my fault, as I was not meant to leave it on the adapter/charger once it was fully charged, and by doing so I had killed the battery. SInce I was familiar with IBM and Apple laptops that could be "docked" for days and still retain full capacity, I thought Toshiba were clueless feebs, but my most recent Apple laptop has the same sort of warning. I'd hate to think how often one would need to replace the battery in a docked iPad.

Voice Quality? I pine for that days that a phone, while far from perfect, did not regularly sound as if the call to Dave in Accounting was via satellite to Ulan Bator. I wonder how bad voice quality will get once all us old farts who can remember those days have gone permanently on-hook.

Show me an efficient system...

... and I'll show you a single-point failure.

When one goes looking fot the "internet Kill Switch", it will be on that control-plane.

Silicon Valley is not Heaven

I do live in Silicon valley, and have "the fast internet connection" (Comcast, as opposed to AT&T), but "fast" is relative and latency burps are _very_ common. I do not recall ever getting though a whole movie on NetFlix without several multi second pauses, and the occasional much longer screwup. And now Comcast are apparently doing Deep Packet Inspection and javascript injection in web-pages to provide "important notices".

So, just to say, I don't think living here normally provides an illusion of living in the future. Working for a major company and having "Business class" ($100+/month) service, paid by your employer, might.

Yeah, what's with that loss figure?

The loss does seem excessive. I recall several years ago some boffins at MIT did this sort of thing, just in time for the collapse of broadband market. So, since their main (achieved) goal was low loss (hence increased repeater spacing) they pivoted to selling the stuff for surgical laser guides. It seems folks get uncomfortable with the waste heat from conventional fiber delivering surgical power levels.

I.E. zombies

Now _there's_ a vivid image. Canadian MPs huddled in the cellar, beset by ravening hordes of ActiveX-infested voters. At least they may be "exchanged for masses of people out of control", which sounds much more amenable to paid political advertisments.

Re: the 'expected distance' for car keys would be very small

You need to be far enough to sustain minimal damage when the pipe-bomb wired to the starter goes off.

Or at least that's the use-case I would expect for at least some buyers of keyless starters, in some lines of business.

Video Music

There's a reason it was often referred to in house as "StoneVision". :-)

BTW: the Amiga was designed by Ex-Atarians, while the ST was designed by ex-Commodore folks. Corporate shenanigans lead to strange bedfellows. (And that's not even counting the ice swan left in a certain Marketing VP's bed)

About those Windmills

ISTR Cervantes was actually making a point with them. The windmills in his vicinity were run as government monopolies, with home-milling forbidden, so that taxes could be levied on all grain, even that used by the farmer and his family. The fact that the monopolistic millers could now charge exorbitant rates for the milling itself, and were all "connected" to the rulers, was, I'm sure, a mere unintended consequence.

Programmable refrigerators

1) EDSAC had Wheeler's "Initial Orders" from pretty much the beginning. This provided a Higher Level (than toggling in binary) language somewhat like a Forth assembler, and a subroutine library on paper tape. EDSAC was also based less on ENIAC than on EDVAC, although that machine did not appear until later.

2) While I agree that the PDP-8 was very significant, small (i.e. fridge-sized) computers such as the LGP-30 and G-15 (designed by harry Huskey, who had worked with Turing) pre-date it. They did, however, cost about the same as a suburban single-family house (still cheap at the time), while the PDP-8 could be had for the price of a (very nice) auto.

Not surprising

"God does not play dice with the Universe"

- Einstein

"He does, however, occasionally enjoy Billiards"

- Velikovsky

Looking for more?

Maybe they should swing through The Netherlands

http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/antikythera/antikythera.html

Tech vs Legal jargon

I assume from the comments that many have not actually read any patents. They are most definitely not written in Tech Jargon. They are written in their own special dialect of Legal Jargon. I can barely recognize the inventions at the base of my own patents, so what hope does a jury of non-patent-lawyers have?

And yes, it doesn't help that juries are expressly forbidden to use anything that they know independently of the testimony. That leads me to wonder how one could inject his own definition of "prior art". In theory, you are not even allowed to know that the sun sets rather later than 6PM in mid-summer, if neither side introduced that in testimony

Why buy it?

"Greater Fool" theory, I suppose. Mind you, I was apparently the greater fool back in the early 80s when a mate had three of these for sale, asking $75 each. If I had bought all three maybe today I'd have a chance at a house near the new FaceBook HQ. Well, a small one. But I didn't even buy one. Sigh.

Battery Life

I'd like to see a laptop that delivers on battery life measured in calendar months as well as running hours. My daughter's "Space Clam" iBook could sit on her homework desk, plugged in, for weeks at a time, then be unplugged and get 4 hours on the battery charge. My mid-2000 Toshiba killed its battery after less than a month of such use, and while Toshiba replaced it, they chided me for expecting any different. Now everybody seems to take the same line: "You _must_ unplug when the battery is fully charged, and re-plug when it is close to fully drained, or we cannot guarantee battery life". IIRC my Thinkpad T-40 worked decently, too. Later Dell and Apple laptops, not so much.

So what is it that at least Apple and IBM used to know about chargers and power management, that everybody has forgotten?

Before cat's whiskers ...

we had coherers. Typically called "Branly Coherers", due to Stigler's law ( Nothing is ever named for its actual discoverer). That's for the receiver. Transmitters were spark-gaps, internationally forbidden in the 1920s, but I have beside me as I type a toy using both these items, from the 1950s.

Also from the 1950s (and more relevant) Sylvania's ceramic multi-component modules (think: macro-scale I.C.s). incorporating thermionic valves, and intended for space use.

Yes, DRAM

One of the nifty things about the 6502 was its very simple, regular memory interface. This allowed some clever stunts to do, say, video DMA (and incidental refresh) without using so much of the bus that the CPU was starved. So, yes, DRAM. In pretty much all the 6502-based systems. At about one quarter the cost per bit, it was, how you say "a no-brainer".

Yeah, I'm an old enough codger to have designed with 1K through 64K _bit_ DRAMs before I went to the dark side (management, and software)

Lack of problem

may be more due to lack of people using OTA TV. Once the Digital cutover was complete, a lot of folks found their antennae of more use to birds than humans, and had to move to cable or equivalent.

Not that I'm suggesting there was any sort of agenda there...

Computer Poetry

has been around for over 50 years.

http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/archives/2009/03-12-09_poetry/

(With a bonus video about the computer itself)

I was hoping

that this story was really about a Telegraph Web Site. Something like GreenKeys, but older yet

"Mr Wheatstone, come here...".

I suppose that the telautograph would be a better fit for today's graphics-heavy web, though.

Is it still a game...

@mark63

That would be about 1978, IIRC, with "Atari Football". First game I ever saw with "pay to continue" as opposed to "pay for another game". Worked a treat, as the player currently losing would often pay up in the hopes of reversing the situation. But if the world has been going downhill since then, why aren't at bottom yet?

I blame the Lydians. No money -> nobody stealing your money. And it's darn hard to pass a sheep over an SSL connection.

Joe Jobs

I'm amazed that none of the folks demanding that ISPs respond to all spam complaints haven't considered how common (hint: nearly pervasive) the use of fake "From" addresses is.

If the subject line doesn't ring a bell, I can only say "How quickly they forget"

Steve Jobs (as clearly correct as the average "from" line)

All intertwingled

Interesting to hear of the Adabas connection, since Omex (Ellison's job before starting Oracle) used Adabas, according to a friend who worked there at the time. IIRC, their document-storage system stored images on a Write-once optical unit, with indexing in Adabas on a PDP-11. So, how few people were actually involved in the birth of the database?

But the real question is...

... WTF would Paul Allen have a debit card?

Debit cards are for people with lousy credit ratings, or who are blissfully unaware of the security implications of the difference between them and credit cards (or both). How does that apply to Paul Allen?

It's like "Susanne Klatten's Trabant recovered after high-speed chase".

Re: Implicit in this thought...

Is nothing new, to those of us who recall the test for an acceptably IBM-PC compatible enterprise desktop. No good trying to get mgmt to consider a major-brand actually 16bit (8086, not 8088) machine with more memory and a faster clock, that could run all the official apps, for less money, than the beige-box from nowhere that could play Flight simulator.

Put on your mu-metal cap

And consider that _they_ (you know who, nudge, nudge, wink wink) are gung-ho for whitespace because it will be rife with "cheaters" who ignore the databases or pollute them with false data, or simply use a few hundred times the allowed power. Most of us will consider this a bad thing, but then we would (like those who make excuses for porn-scans and junk-touchingl) support "vitally needed new legislation" making it illegal for anyone, anywhere, to build or operate anything capable of emitting R.F. (except CFL bulbs, those are grandfathered) unless it is subject to control by "the authorities". Eventually, possession of a 1929 copy of The Radio Amateur's Handbook will be a one-way ticket to the gulag.

Have a nice day.

_All_ information?

From errant emails and the like I conclude that there are at least four individuals with my name and significant "footprints" on the internet. Larger than mine anyway. If one of them made this sort of request, would I be "un-personed", just in case?

More to the point if Sony were to demand that "All references to Michael Jackson not appearing on Sony sites" be removed, how would fans of beer or software be affected?

Web Interfaces

Note that embedded systems (like, oh, my Linksys NAT-ing router) may overuse the "shiny parts" of the whole web experience. Such that I have to keep an older version of Firefox around (on an older computer) to talk to mine. New Firefox (or Safari) on a newer computer blows chunks.

In _principal_, there is nothing that router needs to do that a very simple webserver serving vanilla HTML can't do. But competent web-designers are apparently hard needles to find among the haystack of "teach yourself javascript in 15 minutes" types.

RE: Redirect all sites

Exactly how is a person who has been fairly clueless for 120 days meant to distinguish that particular infect threat from the other dozen or so per day?

It's like my bank, who send me notices indistinguishable from phishing attempts, and can't understand why I don;t want to sign up for online banking.

The point of scanners?

It is neither to catch terrorists, nor to let some mouth-breather exercise power over a nicer woman than will ever speak to him, not even (fully) to get folks to reflexively obey the new Stasi.

It is to make money for Michael Chertoff and his pals and fellow investors.

Follow the money.

As others have noted, the TSA folks who steal from your luggage are not (precisely) the ones that grope your kids or ogle you, although they may rotate positions.

Never is a long time

When SOPA passes and leaves the DNS in chaos, I'd expect some wag to set up a porn site and redirect vatican.xxx to it, if only to smirk.

Old Fashioned?

text: those "letter viewed through a bottle" and "incriminating note curling as it burns" effect from 1930s movies.

Cat Videos: Who wouldn't want to tweak them with custom css to turn the original cat into one's own?

Porn: Likewise, a webpage with a single, not-particularly interesting "actress" could, via CSs, look like the celebrity of your choice. A natural Freemium business model: give away the porn, sell the CSS.

Transfers?

What constitutes a "transfer"? It is almost certainly not a transaction, unless 4.0 is logically very different from its predecessors. Perhaps "transitions"? or maybe they mean "signal elements", which we used to call "baud" (max signal elements/sec.) before the PC muppets (no disrespect to Jim Henson) decided that every signal was strictly binary. (Hint: take a look how GigE, or even 100BaseT are done)

Rotating chamber?

How does it differ from the "Coffee Grinder" used by Union forces in the "Recent Unpleasantness" (aka "War Between the States" or "U.S. Civil War")?

That weapon suffered from the barrel-heating problem and so was eclipsed by Doctor Gatling's invention. Of course, Gatling is better known because both sides got to use his version, thanks to a conveniently located factory... ("Allegedly"...)

8008, not the child of 4004

8008 was based on the Datapoint processor. Had little to do with the 4004. I had wondered why the interrupt was not really usable until I read that the original had two register sets. Ah!

Those crazy segments? The 286 finally did them almost right, if by "right" you meant "well tuned for a Multics-like system". But by then all the new kids were running DOS and Unix, so...

Interesting how AMD is touted as just a minor goad. Forgetting both Sledgehammer (morphed into x86_64) and HyperTransport (aka "father of QPI")

And don't get me started on 6502s vs Z80s for graphics-intense systems. Been there (CPU eval "shoot outs") Done that (chose 6502).

Lead, Gold, and Apples

I suspect that the "death by tin whiskers" part of the life equation is nicely balanced by the "gold on the connectors so thin it might as well not be there" side. Of course both MSFT and Apple are working on the other side, de-supporting hardware _almost_ as fast as it can wear out. And Canonical seems to be moving that way as well.

Meanwhile the single dumbest financial decision I ever made was to turn down a friend's offer to sell me one of his three Apple I computers for $75. If he did manage to sell them all at that price, though, he was dumber than me.

Moving to ARM

"Time to move"? Nope. Win8 will run on ARM.

Communication Company Information

You might want to look into how that worked out for Qwest, and its CEO.

"Nice little comms company you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it, and you..."

AC had it right

The threat is not that your precious bits will get lost. At least not the _main_ threat. Rolling from one generation of HDD to another works fine for that.

The threat is that when you try to open your PageMaker4 or Word3.0 files, you will be darn lucky to get anything recognizable back. Similarly for any other application (nearly all of them) that uses a proprietary binary storage format.

Why...?

@David W.:

-- This is a no-win situation - but there are a hell of a lot more sex offenders than freedom fighters, and the enemies of sex offenders are much better placed to raise hell. --

This sounds like a bizarre statement. I realize that there are not yet heads on pikes on Capitol Hill over the Patriot Act renewal, but I wonder just how many such incidents it will take before a fair number of "Freedom Fighters" pass the fear/duty threshold and take action. Of course, that's counting only U.S. freedom fighters. And for "better placed", I'd suggest that even in these days of swat teams for copyright infringers, the actual army is capable of raising more hell than the vigilantes and "Moral Majority".

And I suspect that you are counting everybody who ever watched a X-rated video or read an Evergreen Press book as a Sex Offender, to get that side of the ratio up.