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"flipper" wrote in message
...
In short, IBM royally screwed things up. They had no idea what they
had wrought in making a 'PC' (or, rather, in buying an existing design
from a small shop) and, in fact, had no vision of it being what we
think of as a 'PC'. Their original notion was to use the thing as a
'smart terminal' front end to a 'real computer' and the cat was out of
the bag before they even knew there was a cat in the bag.


Smart terminal? Hell, with 640kiB, who even needs a mainframe!

I once wrote a pretty nice graphics engine in BASIC and assembly (all
three... QuickBasic alone, then with ASM modules, then the whole thing in
ASM). The machine code came to about 9kB, and it used 200k of memory
(textures, buffers, etc.). Even with DOS, that's hardly half the memory.
So, even intentionally being wasteful of memory, I haven't hit the ceiling
yet. Processor sure is slow, though ;-) (Modern processors fit the whole
thing in cache, so the 16-bit inner loops run at full speed, giving
~400FPS overall. I got about 5 SPF on the 8086, including a whole second
to naively convert the 8 bit frame buffer to EGA bitplanes.)

That computer's pretty sweet, if not for its relatively momentous
slowness. 256k EGA graphics. True 16 bit 8086. Even used to have a
sound card for it, too bad I lost that thing.

Tim

--
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Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms


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On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:07:34 -0500, flipper wrote:




0 (*octal* 0) was no-op on the PDP-8, and there was a short program
that filled all of core with 0, leaving it circulating around the 4K
memory forever.


How did the little program manage to write 0 on top of itself?


Beats me. I haven't programmed a PDP8 in about 40 years. It really was
kind of a dog.

John


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John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:07:34 -0500, flipper wrote:




0 (*octal* 0) was no-op on the PDP-8, and there was a short program
that filled all of core with 0, leaving it circulating around the 4K
memory forever.

How did the little program manage to write 0 on top of itself?


Beats me. I haven't programmed a PDP8 in about 40 years. It really was
kind of a dog.

John



Hey, don't insult dogs.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired
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On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:25 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:07:34 -0500, flipper wrote:




0 (*octal* 0) was no-op on the PDP-8, and there was a short program
that filled all of core with 0, leaving it circulating around the 4K
memory forever.


How did the little program manage to write 0 on top of itself?


Beats me. I haven't programmed a PDP8 in about 40 years. It really was
kind of a dog.


---
A poor workman blames his tools.

---
JF
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(resend)
flipper wrote:
On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:15:09 -0700, John Larkin
0 (*octal* 0) was no-op on the PDP-8, and there was a short program
that filled all of core with 0, leaving it circulating around the 4K
memory forever.

How did the little program manage to write 0 on top of itself?


Probably by arranging for the last instruction executed to
overwrite itself.

I designed a similar program for the Z-80 once. It went into
the last 7 bytes of RAM, with the last executed instruction
being a stack-push of a 16-bit register which contained zero.
The program would fill all of memory with zero (halt instructions)
and then halt at location zero. Cute.

Clifford Heath.


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flipper wrote:

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:26:48 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in Star Trek,
the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967) where the computer
keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock explained, the computer system had
been 'repaired' on a planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked
a 'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course.

It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

Well, at least that's a computer of the future where anything's
possible



A giggle is better than a rude '404 ERROR!' on your screen.


Hehe. Well, maybe for *you* but I'm sure Spock would much prefer
straightforward text and an appropriate error code.



I ran across a website a few years ago with a custom 404 page with a
'Marvin the paranoid Android' theme.


Tough enough dealing with emotional humans but an emotional computer
too? Must have seemed like sacrilege to ruin a 'logic' machine..



Don't you mean 'Fuzzy Logic'? ;-)


Making Spock half human was a stroke of brilliance because it would be
impossible for any human to flawlessly keep up an unemotional 'purely
logical' character for any length of time and any 'mistakes' can be
attributed to that, as well as providing the 'internal conflict'.



It also gave him plenty of excuses for being one of the weirdest
characters on the show.
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On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:39:20 +1000, Clifford Heath wrote:

(resend)
flipper wrote:
On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:15:09 -0700, John Larkin
0 (*octal* 0) was no-op on the PDP-8, and there was a short program
that filled all of core with 0, leaving it circulating around the 4K
memory forever.

How did the little program manage to write 0 on top of itself?


Probably by arranging for the last instruction executed to
overwrite itself.

I designed a similar program for the Z-80 once. It went into
the last 7 bytes of RAM, with the last executed instruction
being a stack-push of a 16-bit register which contained zero.
The program would fill all of memory with zero (halt instructions)
and then halt at location zero. Cute.


Except that zero is nop on z80.

Grant.

Clifford Heath.

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flipper wrote:

On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:25:11 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:26:48 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in Star Trek,
the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967) where the computer
keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock explained, the computer system had
been 'repaired' on a planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked
a 'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course.

It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

Well, at least that's a computer of the future where anything's
possible


A giggle is better than a rude '404 ERROR!' on your screen.

Hehe. Well, maybe for *you* but I'm sure Spock would much prefer
straightforward text and an appropriate error code.



I ran across a website a few years ago with a custom 404 page with a
'Marvin the paranoid Android' theme.


Make that Norman and you got a winner.

Tough enough dealing with emotional humans but an emotional computer
too? Must have seemed like sacrilege to ruin a 'logic' machine..



Don't you mean 'Fuzzy Logic'? ;-)


Spock might think that no better than an ermine violin



Gee. Do you think that's why 'fuzzy logic' is rarely mentioned these
days?


Making Spock half human was a stroke of brilliance because it would be
impossible for any human to flawlessly keep up an unemotional 'purely
logical' character for any length of time and any 'mistakes' can be
attributed to that, as well as providing the 'internal conflict'.



It also gave him plenty of excuses for being one of the weirdest
characters on the show.


LOL

Well, I liked him better than McCoy. He was *too* irrational.



Well, Deforst Kelly was an old school actor from the days or
'westerns'. Did you ever see anything rational in a western?


The recurring 'debates' between Kirk and Spock on the virtues of human
intuition and emotion were a lot of fun, though.



Spock didn't like sex, and Kirk did.
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On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:58:49 +1000, Clifford Heath wrote:

Grant wrote:
Except that zero is nop on z80.


You're right, my memory failed me (it was 20 years ago!).
Still, wall-to-wall NOPs is still cute.


They are, a popular micro using z80 way back clamped data lines to zero
volts on startup so the z80 walked through RAM memory space up to the ROM
space in high memory They also used the light pen registers in video
chip as part of scanning keyboard, much less successful Thing called
Microbee.

Grant.
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flipper wrote:

They at least got that part sort of right with Star Trek's M5. There
was *supposed* to be an 'off switch' but the loony computer 'protected
itself'. An obvious design flaw

Kind of fun watching Kirk out psych it, though.


More often than not, it is necessary to shoot the computer.

Killing a computer by shooting it:

The Squire of Gothos
That Which Survives
A Taste of Armageddon
The Apple
Who Mourns for Adonais?
Requiem for Methuselah

Killing a computer by confusing it:

The Ultimate Computer
The Return of the Archons
The Changeling
I, Mudd


The Colossus voice was
downright creepy.


I don't really remember it.


When I was a kid we had box fans in the windows with metal blades. I'd
speak lines into the fans to imitate Colossus. It doesn't work as well with
plastic fan blades.


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flipper wrote:

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They changed
the time line.


The NBC executives said the original pilot was "too cerebral". I don't
think they would have said that movie was too cerebral.


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John Ferrell wrote:
I spent a lot of time there as a Field Engineer.

It was FET storage and terribly unreliable. It was endowed with
on-the-fly error recovery or it would have never worked at all. You
could count on rebooting the system at least once a shift.


It ran Windows 95?

What if we had unreliable software and hardware at the same time?


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flipper wrote:

On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:14:33 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:25:11 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:26:48 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in Star Trek,
the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967) where the computer
keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock explained, the computer system had
been 'repaired' on a planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked
a 'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course.

It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

Well, at least that's a computer of the future where anything's
possible


A giggle is better than a rude '404 ERROR!' on your screen.

Hehe. Well, maybe for *you* but I'm sure Spock would much prefer
straightforward text and an appropriate error code.


I ran across a website a few years ago with a custom 404 page with a
'Marvin the paranoid Android' theme.

Make that Norman and you got a winner.

Tough enough dealing with emotional humans but an emotional computer
too? Must have seemed like sacrilege to ruin a 'logic' machine..


Don't you mean 'Fuzzy Logic'? ;-)

Spock might think that no better than an ermine violin



Gee. Do you think that's why 'fuzzy logic' is rarely mentioned these
days?


Seeing as how Spock is supposedly in the 'future' you must be
proposing another of those Star Trek 'temporal mechanics' dilemmas.

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They changed
the time line.

I've got a friend with whom it's virtually impossible to even discuss
it because as soon as you try mentioning anything about the movie they
scream: "THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !"

Making Spock half human was a stroke of brilliance because it would be
impossible for any human to flawlessly keep up an unemotional 'purely
logical' character for any length of time and any 'mistakes' can be
attributed to that, as well as providing the 'internal conflict'.


It also gave him plenty of excuses for being one of the weirdest
characters on the show.

LOL

Well, I liked him better than McCoy. He was *too* irrational.



Well, Deforst Kelly was an old school actor from the days or
'westerns'. Did you ever see anything rational in a western?


The recurring 'debates' between Kirk and Spock on the virtues of human
intuition and emotion were a lot of fun, though.



Spock didn't like sex, and Kirk did.


THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !



They dumbed it down for the unwashed asses. People who have no clue
what Science Fiction is, or was.
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Tom Del Rosso wrote:

John Ferrell wrote:
I spent a lot of time there as a Field Engineer.

It was FET storage and terribly unreliable. It was endowed with
on-the-fly error recovery or it would have never worked at all. You
could count on rebooting the system at least once a shift.


It ran Windows 95?

What if we had unreliable software and hardware at the same time?



Have you forgot about the fake low ESR capacitor problem?
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Michael A. Terrell wrote:
flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:14:33 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:25:11 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:26:48 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in Star Trek,
the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967) where the computer
keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock explained, the computer system had
been 'repaired' on a planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked
a 'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course.

It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

Well, at least that's a computer of the future where anything's
possible

A giggle is better than a rude '404 ERROR!' on your screen.
Hehe. Well, maybe for *you* but I'm sure Spock would much prefer
straightforward text and an appropriate error code.

I ran across a website a few years ago with a custom 404 page with a
'Marvin the paranoid Android' theme.
Make that Norman and you got a winner.

Tough enough dealing with emotional humans but an emotional computer
too? Must have seemed like sacrilege to ruin a 'logic' machine..

Don't you mean 'Fuzzy Logic'? ;-)
Spock might think that no better than an ermine violin

Gee. Do you think that's why 'fuzzy logic' is rarely mentioned these
days?

Seeing as how Spock is supposedly in the 'future' you must be
proposing another of those Star Trek 'temporal mechanics' dilemmas.

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They changed
the time line.

I've got a friend with whom it's virtually impossible to even discuss
it because as soon as you try mentioning anything about the movie they
scream: "THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !"

Making Spock half human was a stroke of brilliance because it would be
impossible for any human to flawlessly keep up an unemotional 'purely
logical' character for any length of time and any 'mistakes' can be
attributed to that, as well as providing the 'internal conflict'.

It also gave him plenty of excuses for being one of the weirdest
characters on the show.
LOL

Well, I liked him better than McCoy. He was *too* irrational.

Well, Deforst Kelly was an old school actor from the days or
'westerns'. Did you ever see anything rational in a western?


The recurring 'debates' between Kirk and Spock on the virtues of human
intuition and emotion were a lot of fun, though.

Spock didn't like sex, and Kirk did.

THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !



They dumbed it down for the unwashed asses. People who have no clue
what Science Fiction is, or was.


I learned about science friction in physics, does that count? At
least my lab reports were works of friction.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired


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"flipper" wrote in message
...
Seeing as how Spock is supposedly in the 'future' you must be
proposing another of those Star Trek 'temporal mechanics' dilemmas.

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They changed
the time line.

I've got a friend with whom it's virtually impossible to even discuss
it because as soon as you try mentioning anything about the movie they
scream: "THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !"


It's too bad they seem to confuse "temporal mechanics" every other
episode...

Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which changes
itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The universe is
still the same as last week. They did that a few times on TNG.

More often, they do a Back To The Future type story, where the characters
are somehow aware of temporal changes, which is just silly.

Maybe about halfway through the serieses (DS9/Voyager?), the writers
seemed to make some effort to try to explain the perception of changes,
like the ship being masked by chronitons or something. One of the more
interesting episodes does both reasonably well.
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Year_of_Hell_(episode)

But then, they mess things up in other ways, like how some episodes use a
multiverse, so time travel is apparently going between universes; changing
the past simply moves you to the universe where that change happened. But
then they go do an episode where it's all the same timeline.

Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms


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"Tom Del Rosso" wrote in message
...
It ran Windows 95?

What if we had unreliable software and hardware at the same time?


Most of the problems with, well maybe not 95, but 98SE and up, are
software or hardware issues. Specifically, user software and hardware
drivers, doing things they aren't supposed to be doing.

Lots of people have maligned Windows 98. I always found it reasonable. I
turned off the computer every night, which kept the cobwebs from
collecting. It only rarely crashed, and that was almost always a result
of running a questionable program (like... Adobe Reader...).

XP runs a lot slower because it's always caching everything. The first
time you boot up / load your favorite programs, it takes a few minutes;
after that, it's always prompt (unless you thrash the RAM with some
weighty programs, pushing everything out of memory). Because of these
delays, I leave the computer running all the time. That, and
Folding@home. It seems like enough RAM leaks accumulate that a reboot
every couple of weeks is beneficial. Which is about as often as Microsoft
releases patches...

Of course, when a program crashes on XP, the program dies. On '98, it
runs off into blissfully unprotected kernel memory, BSoD's, and dies. I
forget, I might've seen one BSoD in six years of running XP. And that was
probably a driver issue -- the only thing that can screw with it, it
seems.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms


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"flipper" wrote in message
...
When I was a kid we had box fans in the windows with metal blades. I'd
speak lines into the fans to imitate Colossus. It doesn't work as well
with
plastic fan blades.


I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.


http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/40288

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms


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Tim Williams wrote:
"flipper" wrote in message
...
When I was a kid we had box fans in the windows with metal blades. I'd
speak lines into the fans to imitate Colossus. It doesn't work as well
with
plastic fan blades.

I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.


http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/40288

Tim


"Luke, I am your father...and your brother" - "Redneck Star Wars."

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired
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Grant wrote:
Except that zero is nop on z80.


You're right, my memory failed me (it was 20 years ago!).
Still, wall-to-wall NOPs is still cute.


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Dan wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:14:33 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:25:11 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:26:48 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in Star Trek,
the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (1967) where the computer
keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock explained, the computer system had
been 'repaired' on a planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked
a 'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course.

It also has an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

Well, at least that's a computer of the future where anything's
possible

A giggle is better than a rude '404 ERROR!' on your screen.
Hehe. Well, maybe for *you* but I'm sure Spock would much prefer
straightforward text and an appropriate error code.

I ran across a website a few years ago with a custom 404 page with a
'Marvin the paranoid Android' theme.
Make that Norman and you got a winner.

Tough enough dealing with emotional humans but an emotional computer
too? Must have seemed like sacrilege to ruin a 'logic' machine..

Don't you mean 'Fuzzy Logic'? ;-)
Spock might think that no better than an ermine violin

Gee. Do you think that's why 'fuzzy logic' is rarely mentioned these
days?
Seeing as how Spock is supposedly in the 'future' you must be
proposing another of those Star Trek 'temporal mechanics' dilemmas.

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They changed
the time line.

I've got a friend with whom it's virtually impossible to even discuss
it because as soon as you try mentioning anything about the movie they
scream: "THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !"

Making Spock half human was a stroke of brilliance because it would be
impossible for any human to flawlessly keep up an unemotional 'purely
logical' character for any length of time and any 'mistakes' can be
attributed to that, as well as providing the 'internal conflict'.

It also gave him plenty of excuses for being one of the weirdest
characters on the show.
LOL

Well, I liked him better than McCoy. He was *too* irrational.

Well, Deforst Kelly was an old school actor from the days or
'westerns'. Did you ever see anything rational in a western?


The recurring 'debates' between Kirk and Spock on the virtues of human
intuition and emotion were a lot of fun, though.

Spock didn't like sex, and Kirk did.
THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !



They dumbed it down for the unwashed asses. People who have no clue
what Science Fiction is, or was.


I learned about science friction in physics, does that count? At
least my lab reports were works of friction.



I learned to love books by reading Science Fiction as a child. My
bosses were always upset that my reports weren't fiction.

OTOH, some of the biggest fiction I've ever read were test
procedures, and how ISO-9001 'works'.
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Tim Williams wrote:

"flipper" wrote in message
...
Seeing as how Spock is supposedly in the 'future' you must be
proposing another of those Star Trek 'temporal mechanics' dilemmas.

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They changed
the time line.

I've got a friend with whom it's virtually impossible to even discuss
it because as soon as you try mentioning anything about the movie they
scream: "THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !"


It's too bad they seem to confuse "temporal mechanics" every other
episode...

Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which changes
itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The universe is
still the same as last week. They did that a few times on TNG.

More often, they do a Back To The Future type story, where the characters
are somehow aware of temporal changes, which is just silly.

Maybe about halfway through the serieses (DS9/Voyager?), the writers
seemed to make some effort to try to explain the perception of changes,
like the ship being masked by chronitons or something. One of the more
interesting episodes does both reasonably well.
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Year_of_Hell_(episode)

But then, they mess things up in other ways, like how some episodes use a
multiverse, so time travel is apparently going between universes; changing
the past simply moves you to the universe where that change happened. But
then they go do an episode where it's all the same timeline.

Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.



Too much 'bad' Trek, anyway.
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flipper wrote:
I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.


Hear attachment.


I was probably disappointed by the predictability of it all by that
point.


But it was a lot more "cerebral" than Skynet.

Skynet wanted to kill us. Colossus wanted to serve us by enslaving us.
Like some people.


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Dan wrote:

"Luke, I am your father...and your brother" - "Redneck Star Wars."


I know what you're getting for Christmas.

NO! NO! It can't be!

I felt your presence.


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flipper wrote:

The characters having more than a dozen brain cells between them is
one reason *why* I liked the original Star Trek.


Spock would walk over the computer and tell it to "compute to the last digit
the value of pi", and then explained his actions in a few words. When they
did anything similar on The Dumbed-Down Generation they would take a few
minutes and a lot of BS to explain what they were doing.

"Phase variance". It's called JITTER guys.


One of my favorite lines is a small one, perhaps unnoticed by some, in
Balance of Terror where Kirk has been sending quarter hour reports to
the nearest command base and in the middle of things Uhura reports
"Approximately three hours before receiving a reply to our first
message."

That highlights their isolation and his 'command' position. They're
essentially 'alone' with everything resting on his skill and
judgement. Of course, he might be excoriated later but, in the heat of
battle, he's 'it'.


That paradigm made it fun. On TNG they almost never explored anything
unknown. They were always on an assignment, usually diplomatic, where they
had specific orders already. Way to make a boring show.

Voyager had some good episodes because they had the original paradigm again.
Of course it was even dumber at other times.


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Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:

John Ferrell wrote:
I spent a lot of time there as a Field Engineer.

It was FET storage and terribly unreliable. It was endowed with
on-the-fly error recovery or it would have never worked at all.
You could count on rebooting the system at least once a shift.


It ran Windows 95?

What if we had unreliable software and hardware at the same time?



Have you forgot about the fake low ESR capacitor problem?


Short-term problem of faulty manufacturing. Not the same as not really
knowing how to make it work reliably.


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Tim Williams wrote:
Of course, when a program crashes on XP, the program dies. On '98, it
runs off into blissfully unprotected kernel memory, BSoD's, and dies.
I forget, I might've seen one BSoD in six years of running XP. And
that was probably a driver issue -- the only thing that can screw
with it, it seems.


The protected model was there since the 286. There's no excuse for not
implementing it properly. Even though the OS didn't cause the crashes it
should have prevented them.


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Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Voyager had some good episodes because they had the original paradigm
again. Of course it was even dumber at other times.


And, of course, the latest movie is in a whole new realm of stupid.


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Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:

John Ferrell wrote:
I spent a lot of time there as a Field Engineer.

It was FET storage and terribly unreliable. It was endowed with
on-the-fly error recovery or it would have never worked at all.
You could count on rebooting the system at least once a shift.

It ran Windows 95?

What if we had unreliable software and hardware at the same time?



Have you forgot about the fake low ESR capacitor problem?


Short-term problem of faulty manufacturing. Not the same as not really
knowing how to make it work reliably.



Short term? Crappy low ESR caps are still a problem. I first saw
them over 10 yeas ago on a Compag 7360 computer running Win 98.
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flipper wrote:
On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:44:27 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:

The protected model was there since the 286. There's no excuse for
not implementing it properly.


Of course there was. 9x windows is a GUI on top of DOS and there is
just no way that's going to implement protected mode. That's what NT
was for.


I think it could have been done, because DOS could have been treated like
its boot loader, and the DOS code that had been executed didn't preclude
entry to protected mode. Resident TSRs could just be wiped, since nothing
stopped you from turning off the power at any time.


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flipper wrote:
On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:46:58 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Voyager had some good episodes because they had the original
paradigm again. Of course it was even dumber at other times.


And, of course, the latest movie is in a whole new realm of stupid.


Yes and, frankly, I loath to call it 'Star Trek'.


Ditto. Star Trek is over.


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Fred Abse wrote:
On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:35:07 -0400, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Spock would walk over the computer and tell it to "compute to the last
digit the value of pi"


What last digit?


"Star Trek" for the 19th century: "Space, a place to put things,
these are the sausages of the steamship Boobyprize..."

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired
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flipper wrote:

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:24:18 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


flipper wrote:
I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.


Hear attachment.


Thanks.

I was probably disappointed by the predictability of it all by that
point.


But it was a lot more "cerebral" than Skynet.

Skynet wanted to kill us. Colossus wanted to serve us by enslaving us.


Yeah, like Norman and his android pals. Although, there's an obvious
up side to being 'enslaved' by the Alice series, or the Annabelle
series, or the Trudy series, or build one to taste.

Got to admit, Star Trek had the hottest babes on TV.

Too bad Dr. Forbin didn't have Kirk and company around to help him
drive Colossus crazy.



Or nymnuts.
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Dan wrote:
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:14:33 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:25:11 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:26:48 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

flipper wrote:
One of my favorites was a meaningless byline to the plot in
Star Trek, the original series, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday"
(1967) where the computer keeps calling Kirk "dear." As Spock
explained, the computer system had been 'repaired' on a
planet dominated by women and they felt it lacked a
'personality'. So they gave it one. Female, of course. It also has
an unfortunate tendency to giggle.

Well, at least that's a computer of the future where
anything's possible

A giggle is better than a rude '404 ERROR!' on your screen.

Hehe. Well, maybe for *you* but I'm sure Spock would much prefer
straightforward text and an appropriate error code.

I ran across a website a few years ago with a custom 404 page
with a 'Marvin the paranoid Android' theme.
Make that Norman and you got a winner.

Tough enough dealing with emotional humans but an emotional
computer too? Must have seemed like sacrilege to ruin a 'logic'
machine..

Don't you mean 'Fuzzy Logic'? ;-)
Spock might think that no better than an ermine violin

Gee. Do you think that's why 'fuzzy logic' is rarely mentioned
these days?
Seeing as how Spock is supposedly in the 'future' you must be
proposing another of those Star Trek 'temporal mechanics' dilemmas.

Speaking of which, is why I hate the new Star Trek Movie. They
changed the time line.

I've got a friend with whom it's virtually impossible to even
discuss it because as soon as you try mentioning anything about the
movie they scream: "THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !"

Making Spock half human was a stroke of brilliance because it
would be impossible for any human to flawlessly keep up an
unemotional 'purely logical' character for any length of time
and any 'mistakes' can be attributed to that, as well as
providing the 'internal conflict'.

It also gave him plenty of excuses for being one of the
weirdest characters on the show.
LOL

Well, I liked him better than McCoy. He was *too* irrational.

Well, Deforst Kelly was an old school actor from the days or
'westerns'. Did you ever see anything rational in a western?


The recurring 'debates' between Kirk and Spock on the virtues of
human intuition and emotion were a lot of fun, though.

Spock didn't like sex, and Kirk did.
THEY CHANGED THE TIME LINE !



They dumbed it down for the unwashed asses. People who have no
clue what Science Fiction is, or was.


I learned about science friction in physics, does that count? At
least my lab reports were works of friction.


Once I wrote a lab report, in which I was supposed to list possible sources
of error, and I suggested one thing that might have caused an error that the
physics prof wasn't even sure of. He said to ask the ME dept, so I spoke to
3 ME profs in their lounge and they weren't sure, offhand anyway, and they
didn't want to bother thinking about it much.

So I got a 9 out of 10, and I asked the prof why I only got a 9. He said,
"to get a 10 it has to be publishable".

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Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.


I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!


Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.


Nah.


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flipper wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:50:41 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:


flipper wrote:

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:24:18 -0400, "Tom Del Rosso"
wrote:


flipper wrote:
I see. Strange but I'm still drawing a total blank other than the
visual.

Hear attachment.

Thanks.

I was probably disappointed by the predictability of it all by that
point.

But it was a lot more "cerebral" than Skynet.

Skynet wanted to kill us. Colossus wanted to serve us by enslaving us.

Yeah, like Norman and his android pals. Although, there's an obvious
up side to being 'enslaved' by the Alice series, or the Annabelle
series, or the Trudy series, or build one to taste.

Got to admit, Star Trek had the hottest babes on TV.

Too bad Dr. Forbin didn't have Kirk and company around to help him
drive Colossus crazy.



Or nymnuts.


Well, we only want to drive the computer crazy; not everyone on the
planet.



Then toss him into the room with the computer, and seal the door
forever.
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Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.


I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!



A common effect of scripts written by warped minds...


Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.


Nah.



When i was in the service, we had all the original series on 16 mm
color film, but the idiot station manager refused to put them on the
schedule. So, we would run them after midnight, after the transmitters
were shut down and watch it in the control room. The down side was it
was a B&W only station.
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Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.

I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!



A common effect of scripts written by warped minds...


Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.

Nah.



When i was in the service, we had all the original series on 16 mm
color film, but the idiot station manager refused to put them on the
schedule. So, we would run them after midnight, after the transmitters
were shut down and watch it in the control room. The down side was it
was a B&W only station.


You didn't use the film chain to convert them to video tape? In the
1960s we had 1" and 2" video tape, I'm sure it would be no problem to
find a player now

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired
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"Tom Del Rosso" wrote in message
...
The protected model was there since the 286. There's no excuse for not
implementing it properly. Even though the OS didn't cause the crashes
it should have prevented them.


I can just imagine it...

C:\WINDOWSwin
DOS4/GW Protected Mode Executable
Starting Windows...

'Course, they took advantage of protected mode just fine, how else to get
those precious extended memories and 32 bit applications (once win32 came
out). But to this day, programs run in flat memory spaces with very
little protection between areas (let alone "segments", a concept long
since forgotten after the 8086, of course they call them "selectors" now,
but still).

Tim

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Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms


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Dan wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Tom Del Rosso wrote:
Tim Williams wrote:
Sometimes, they'll do an episode where some story happens, which
changes itself, so only you, the viewer, know anything happened. The
universe is still the same as last week. They did that a few times
on TNG.
I liked the environmentalist episode where they discovered that warp speed
was destroying space, so they had to be limited to warp 5 or so, from then
on. Next week, it was back to warp 9!!!



A common effect of scripts written by warped minds...


Sigh... Oh well, maybe I've been watching too much Trek lately.
Nah.



When i was in the service, we had all the original series on 16 mm
color film, but the idiot station manager refused to put them on the
schedule. So, we would run them after midnight, after the transmitters
were shut down and watch it in the control room. The down side was it
was a B&W only station.


You didn't use the film chain to convert them to video tape? In the
1960s we had 1" and 2" video tape, I'm sure it would be no problem to
find a player now



There was no video tape equipment at the base. It was a small
research center. Our color conversion package and video tape equipment
was diverted to Greenland when it was 'Discovered' in a warehouse. It
came out of our budget, and some ass in the supply line stole it.
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