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#41
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Core Memory
"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 -- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms |
#42
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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 |
#43
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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 |
#44
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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 |
#45
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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. |
#46
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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. |
#47
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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. |
#48
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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. |
#49
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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. |
#50
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#51
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#52
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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? -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#53
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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. |
#54
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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? |
#55
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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 |
#56
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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 |
#57
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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 |
#58
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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 |
#59
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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 |
#60
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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. |
#61
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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'. |
#62
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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. |
#63
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#64
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#65
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#66
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#67
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#68
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#69
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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. |
#70
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
#71
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
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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". -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
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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. -- Reply in group, but if emailing add one more zero, and remove the last word. |
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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 -- 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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