Mature technology
George William Herbert
>I was thinking about fighter jets - remembering how quickly we moved from
>propeller fighters to the SR-71 (slightly modified from a less known
>fighter) - then the development slowed down so much. We fly 30 year old
>jets which are almost as good as new jets. We no longer buy cars every
>year - they aren't that much better than the models we bought a year ago.
>
>Sure, current ships are better than 100 year old ships, but incrementally.
>Computers will soon follow this trend.
>
>And spaceships may have followed this trend as well.
The development goes sideways rather than into raw performance
numbers, more accurately.
Current ships are better than 100 year old ships in many ways.
One is in crew size; 20-30 people operate a large tanker or
container ship. Another is in reliability; modern ships can
run for years between functionally disabling failures.
Another is cost to manufacture; prefabrication, large welded
sections, automated plate cutting and welding, modular construction
mean that it takes a fraction of the man hours per ton to make
modern ships compared to those 100, 50, even 25 years ago.
And it takes a *tiny* fraction of the man hours per ton of
dry cargo to unload and load and transfer around; it used to
be people lifting every item out of the cargo hold onto
a crane platform, onto the dock, onto a truck, to a warehouse,
within the warehouse, onto a train or another truck, etc.
Nowadays, it's someone loads the container at the factory,
container onto truck, off truck onto ship, off ship onto
truck or train, to distribution center, and unload.
Commercial jets get more efficient, more reliable and less
likely to have mechanical failures preventing them from operating
economically, require less crew, etc.
Military jets also get more efficient, longer ranges,
more reliabile and more likely to be able to accomplish
missions without systems failures, more likely to be
available when called upon due to higher reliability, etc.
Also, lower man hours to manufacture for the engines and
structures, etc.
Same thing with cars. Even 10 years ago, car reliability
was a lot lower than it is now, safety was a lot lower than
it is now (pervasive airbags, better standards and understanding
of frame crashworthyness, etc). More features, too; A/C is
now pretty standard even in low cost cars; even low cost cars
with high gas mileage have good torque, if not top speeds;
etc etc.
Just because they cost about the same and don't drive any
faster doesn't mean there haven't been improvements.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Mike Williams
>Take a current movie back in time to 1960 and pass it off as SF. People
>would have have said "dressing sloppy and piercing and tatooing is NOT SF".
> They would have seen cell phones and maybe computers. But movies that use
>computers as part of the plot tend to be boring - watching someone type is
>NOT interesting. Cars wouldn't have been nearly as interesting as they
>thought. Our choice of good guys and bad guys would have been interesting,
>as stereotypes change.
>
>Even with our future shock age, culture changes faster than technology.
One of the really big differences that the 1960 audience will notice is
the music in the soundtrack. Musical instrument technology has changed
beyond recognition since then. In 1960 there was virtually no electronic
music. Every note in a 1960's soundtrack would be recognisable as coming
from a specific instrument. I remember the musical impact that things
like "Bach Goes Moog" and the "Dr. Who Theme Tune" had by being played
with electronic sounds that were not imitating existing instruments. A
sudden jump to 2002 music would be mind blowing.
--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
William Clifford
--
| William Clifford | wo...@yahoo.com | http://wobh.home.mindspring.com |
|"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world why'd we |
| have to come to the Prancing Pony." --Frodo Boggins |
Karl M. Syring
news:a2d162$5rv$1...@gw.retro.com...
> <how...@brazee.net> wrote:
> >I was thinking about fighter jets - remembering how quickly we moved from
> >propeller fighters to the SR-71 (slightly modified from a less known
> >fighter) - then the development slowed down so much. We fly 30 year old
> >jets which are almost as good as new jets. We no longer buy cars every
> >year - they aren't that much better than the models we bought a year ago.
> >
> >Sure, current ships are better than 100 year old ships, but
incrementally.
> >Computers will soon follow this trend.
> >
> >And spaceships may have followed this trend as well.
>
> The development goes sideways rather than into raw performance
> numbers, more accurately.
>
> Current ships are better than 100 year old ships in many ways.
> One is in crew size; 20-30 people operate a large tanker or
> container ship. Another is in reliability; modern ships can
> run for years between functionally disabling failures.
> Another is cost to manufacture; prefabrication, large welded
> sections, automated plate cutting and welding, modular construction
> mean that it takes a fraction of the man hours per ton to make
> modern ships compared to those 100, 50, even 25 years ago.
> Just because they cost about the same and don't drive any
> faster doesn't mean there haven't been improvements.
But isn't this an indication of the Red Queen syndrome. At the moment, we
are struggling to keep our position but for the future we can already
predict a slow slide- back of technology.
I am really waiting for explanations from the marketing departments like
"people can't operate that sophisticated equipment anymore". Perhaps, there
even will be a new ideology that will label those innate cravings for new
gadgets as a kind of departure from the right way. Whoops, we had that
already ...
Karl M. Syring
Paul F. Dietz
> But isn't this an indication of the Red Queen syndrome. At the moment, we
> are struggling to keep our position but for the future we can already
> predict a slow slide- back of technology.
We can predict that, but it would be an incorrect prediction.
Paul
Karl M. Syring
You can not know.
Do you see major breakthroughs like a working AI on the horizon? And do not
say that's impossible, as we have working (well, more or less) model
systems.
Karl M. Syring
Captain Button
> In <8j3o3EAd...@econym.demon.co.uk>,
> Mike Williams <mi...@nospam.please> wrote:
>> Wasn't it howard who wrote:
>>
>>>Take a current movie back in time to 1960 and pass it off as SF. People
>>>would have have said "dressing sloppy and piercing and tatooing is NOT SF".
>>> They would have seen cell phones and maybe computers. But movies that use
>>>computers as part of the plot tend to be boring - watching someone type is
>>>NOT interesting. Cars wouldn't have been nearly as interesting as they
>>>thought. Our choice of good guys and bad guys would have been interesting,
>>>as stereotypes change.
>>>
>>>Even with our future shock age, culture changes faster than technology.
>>
>> One of the really big differences that the 1960 audience will notice is
>> the music in the soundtrack. Musical instrument technology has changed
>> beyond recognition since then. In 1960 there was virtually no electronic
>> music. Every note in a 1960's soundtrack would be recognisable as coming
>> from a specific instrument. I remember the musical impact that things
>> like "Bach Goes Moog" and the "Dr. Who Theme Tune" had by being played
>> with electronic sounds that were not imitating existing instruments. A
>> sudden jump to 2002 music would be mind blowing.
>
> The KLF is going to rock you.
ObSF: _October The First Is Too Late_ by Fred Hoyle
Earth has gotten reshuffled in time, with it being WW1 in Europe,
the 1960s in Britain, Ancient Greece in Greece etc.
There a brief description of how the European nations are persuaded
to stop fighting by Britain.
They take some generals from both sides into a room and play them
some recorded music on a 1915 record player (or whatever). They
play them the same music on a 1960s Hi-Fi stereo.
Then they ask them to imagine what their weapons technology must
be like if their musical reproduction technology has advanced that
far, and send them home.
:-)}
--
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in
tolerance and free speech," - David Brin
Captain Button - but...@io.com
Maurizio Mugelli
wrote:
>
>One of the really big differences that the 1960 audience will notice is
>the music in the soundtrack. Musical instrument technology has changed
>beyond recognition since then. In 1960 there was virtually no electronic
>music.
yes, but in the last 15 years there's almost no new musical
technology, only refinement of the same and there is no prospect of
someting really new in the near future...
yes, today you can buy a high-level soudcard with a fraction of what
you buyed a Proteus synth ten years ago and is indheed better, but
there's no conceptual difference between the two.
--
(iao!!oai) (ICQ: 10860566)
//.aurizio
[WARNING!: togliete _nessuno_ per rispondere]
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
Christopher M. Jones
> Just because they cost about the same and don't drive any
> faster doesn't mean there haven't been improvements.
Minor quibble, cars have actually gotten cheaper in
recent years (compared to income, and that's impressive
since income hasn't risen much (or at all) in real terms
for a while).
--
When the hurlyburly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.
Karl M. Syring
> Earth has gotten reshuffled in time, with it being WW1 in Europe,
> the 1960s in Britain, Ancient Greece in Greece etc.
We must be in in a time loop now. Even the silly Paint the Moon thing
(http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/2002/01/17/net-interest.htm) comes back
again.
Karl Martin Syring
Ray
"Captain Button" <but...@io.com> wrote in message
news:%1B28.586506$C8.41...@bin4.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com...
1960s? Give 'em a ride in a B52 over their own country, then an F86 Sabre -
just for kicks :-)
Ray
Ray
"Maurizio Mugelli" <_nessuno_...@freemail.it> wrote in message
news:36ol4us46n93gbria...@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 20 Jan 2002 08:31:25 +0000, Mike Williams <mi...@nospam.please>
> wrote:
> >
> >One of the really big differences that the 1960 audience will notice is
> >the music in the soundtrack. Musical instrument technology has changed
> >beyond recognition since then. In 1960 there was virtually no electronic
> >music.
>
> yes, but in the last 15 years there's almost no new musical
> technology, only refinement of the same and there is no prospect of
> someting really new in the near future...
>
> yes, today you can buy a high-level soudcard with a fraction of what
> you buyed a Proteus synth ten years ago and is indheed better, but
> there's no conceptual difference between the two.
The conceptual difference is that a modern computer with a sound card
generates sound by either playing back or generating digital "images" of the
sound and feeding it into a digital/analog converter.
The old Moog, Arp, and other synthesizers did not generate the sound
digitally. They used various oscillators and mixers to make the sound.
A modern sound card is a whole lot more versatile.
Ray
Johnny1A
Off topic, but I have to ask: did he really say/write that, and if so
where? It certainly does _sound_ like the modern Brin, but it's _so_
descriptive and ironic...
Shermanlee
David Cowie
>
> 1960s? Give 'em a ride in a B52 over their own country, then an F86
> Sabre - just for kicks :-)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the B52 first flew in the 1950's, and the
USAF expect it to remain in service until the 2020's [1]. Now _that's_
what I call a mature technology - sufficiently Not Broken that it
doesn't need fixing for 70 years.
[1] Source: IRIS (I Read It Somewhere)
--
David Cowie
There is no _spam in my address.
"You had to do WHAT with your seat?"
George William Herbert
>But isn't this an indication of the Red Queen syndrome. At the moment, we
>are struggling to keep our position but for the future we can already
>predict a slow slide- back of technology.
Why would we predict a slow back-slide of technology?
Most modern toasters have more computing power than the
whole world did 55 years ago. So do many watches.
So do most cars, often in more than one computer,
tied together with a network...
We are seeing higher technology become pervasive as it
becomes more affordable. High school kids carrying pagers
and cellphones around; PDAs becoming ubiquitous; everyone
needs a DVD player; everyone has an Internet connection.
Average kids today grow up with more useful computer skills
than the average 1970 non-computer-science grad student had.
Mass media still report on neat new gadgets all the time,
and people still go "ooo" and "ahh".
It's sort of a pernicious failure of imagination where
sci-fi folks think that just because we haven't made
faster airplanes since the X-15 some 35+ years ago
and haven't gone beyond the moon that the pace of
high tech is slowing. Capabilities for great projects
always come from two core roots: technical capability,
and economic capability. High-tech becoming cheaper
and more pervasive affects that equation just as
much as developing new cutting edge stuff does,
perhaps moreso. Less money is wasted on inefficient
stuff so more can be spent on doing what people
want to do.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Karl M. Syring
> >But isn't this an indication of the Red Queen syndrome. At the moment, we
> >are struggling to keep our position but for the future we can already
> >predict a slow slide- back of technology.
>
> Why would we predict a slow back-slide of technology?
>
> Most modern toasters have more computing power than the
> whole world did 55 years ago. So do many watches.
> So do most cars, often in more than one computer,
> tied together with a network...
>
> We are seeing higher technology become pervasive as it
> becomes more affordable. High school kids carrying pagers
> and cellphones around; PDAs becoming ubiquitous; everyone
Well, that shortens their attention span to zero. It is even a problem with
adults, only think of the beeping phone in meetings.
And speaking of PDA I get dizzy also the way. There is a certain brand that
should be called "Atari reborn". The 64k segments made me falling over.
> needs a DVD player; everyone has an Internet connection.
> Average kids today grow up with more useful computer skills
> than the average 1970 non-computer-science grad student had.
May he/she be needs a DVD player but probably has no time to watch a movie.
>
> Mass media still report on neat new gadgets all the time,
> and people still go "ooo" and "ahh".
May be kids do, I only produce a yawn.
Where is my flying car? Where is the the display with the size and
resolution of a printed book page?
>
> It's sort of a pernicious failure of imagination where
> sci-fi folks think that just because we haven't made
> faster airplanes since the X-15 some 35+ years ago
> and haven't gone beyond the moon that the pace of
> high tech is slowing. Capabilities for great projects
> always come from two core roots: technical capability,
> and economic capability. High-tech becoming cheaper
> and more pervasive affects that equation just as
> much as developing new cutting edge stuff does,
> perhaps moreso. Less money is wasted on inefficient
> stuff so more can be spent on doing what people
> want to do.
Hmm, industrial software technology seems to have effectively stalled
somewhere in the mid-seventies. If I look at the byzantine programming
languages that fashionable today, I think we must have taken the wrong time
line.
Karl M. Syring
Erik Max Francis
> A social problem that will need to be solved is defining how
> accessible we
> are. People won't want to call your phone - they will want to call
> you.
> But you will tell your phone to make decisions about whether to be
> interrupted depending on changing circumstances - and who is calling
> you.
Hate to break it to you, but that already happens. Ever heard of call
screening? You let the caller talk to a machine while you listen for a
few moments and decide whether or not you want to pick up the phone.
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ Laws are silent in time of war.
\__/ Cicero
Esperanto reference / http://www.alcyone.com/max/lang/esperanto/
An Esperanto reference for English speakers.
Eric the Read
> The old Moog, Arp, and other synthesizers did not generate the sound
> digitally. They used various oscillators and mixers to make the sound.
>
> A modern sound card is a whole lot more versatile.
It can reproduce a wider variety of sounds, but it's a good deal less
versatile. Don't like that horn sound on your sound card? Tighten up
the ADSR envelope to give it a bit more "punch". Oh wait-- you
can't. Okay, never mind that, I want this really neat sweep sound on
my strings-- can you put a LFO on that filter for me? What? You
can't even put the filter on? Tsk, tsk.
You can do all that stuff with software, it's true, but that's using
raw CPU power (as a rule), not the average sound card's hardware.
Modern sound cards are not much more than ultra-spiffy player pianos.
-=Eric
Ray
> > and people still go "ooo" and "ahh".
>
> May be kids do, I only produce a yawn.
> Where is my flying car?
> Where is the the display with the size and
> resolution of a printed book page?
http://www.media.mit.edu/micromedia/elecpaper.html
http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/gyricon/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1692000/1692141.stm
I think that we are considerablly closer to having e-paper than we are to
getting Mr. Moller's flying car in the air.
Anyhow, when I was in school, I had planned on taking my flying car to the
local spaceport and hopping a flight to Luna City for the Year 1000
celebration. Instead, I played Doom in by brother's basement on a bunch of
networked 486s, and kept my beeper turned on in case one of our clients had
problems with the programs we modified to make "Y2K complient." BTW, I had
the beeper just for that purpose. I hadn't had one before, and I haven't
had one since :-)
>
> >
> > It's sort of a pernicious failure of imagination where
> > sci-fi folks think that just because we haven't made
> > faster airplanes since the X-15 some 35+ years ago
> > and haven't gone beyond the moon that the pace of
> > high tech is slowing. Capabilities for great projects
> > always come from two core roots: technical capability,
> > and economic capability. High-tech becoming cheaper
> > and more pervasive affects that equation just as
> > much as developing new cutting edge stuff does,
> > perhaps moreso. Less money is wasted on inefficient
> > stuff so more can be spent on doing what people
> > want to do.
>
> Hmm, industrial software technology seems to have effectively stalled
> somewhere in the mid-seventies. If I look at the byzantine programming
> languages that fashionable today, I think we must have taken the wrong
time
> line.
What languages do you use?
Software technology is going so fast that it's very difficult to keep up.
Even reliable old Fortran has changed. C is quite a new departure.
While many programmers obfuscated their code as a form of job security,
"readable" code was always supposed to be "top down". After that, modular
code became the way to go. Nowadays, object-oriented programming (OOP) is
the standard.
Methodology has changed, too. Managing a large software project is very
difficult. We have learned a lot about how to do that effectively. Still,
the programming process defies management. Actually, programmers tend to
defy management ;-)
Ray Drouillard
>
> Karl M. Syring
>
>
Ray
"Eric the Read" <emsc...@pcisys.net> wrote in message
news:87y9isi...@pcisys.net...
> "Ray" <Droui...@home.com> writes:
> > The old Moog, Arp, and other synthesizers did not generate the sound
> > digitally. They used various oscillators and mixers to make the sound.
> >
> > A modern sound card is a whole lot more versatile.
>
> It can reproduce a wider variety of sounds, but it's a good deal less
> versatile. Don't like that horn sound on your sound card? Tighten up
> the ADSR envelope to give it a bit more "punch". Oh wait-- you
> can't.
Actually, you just change the sound table a bit. I'm sure there are
programs that will allow you to do that.
Anyhow, with computer control, you can do whatever you want with the ADSR
envelope. You don't have to go with the standard attack, decay, sustain,
release pattern if you don't want - though most "natural" instruments do
follow that pattern (which is why the old synthesizers were made that way in
the first place).
> Okay, never mind that, I want this really neat sweep sound on
> my strings-- can you put a LFO on that filter for me? What? You
> can't even put the filter on? Tsk, tsk.
I want this locomotive to go faster! Throw some more coal in the box! You
can't? Tsk, tsk.
The methodologies are different, but you can simulate the old analog
controls if you want. It's just a matter of writing a program to do it. If
it's desirable to do it, someone will do it (or has done it).
Again, you can get the computer to make whatever you want. It can be done
easier than messing with patch panels and the like.
>
> You can do all that stuff with software, it's true, but that's using
> raw CPU power (as a rule), not the average sound card's hardware.
What's wrong with that? You can buy a 1 GHz computer for about five hundred
bucks, then spend another eight hundred or so on some really spiffy sound
card (or set of cards) from Acustic Labs or something like that.
> Modern sound cards are not much more than ultra-spiffy player pianos.
The "player piano" part would be the MIDI sequencer. You can make up your
own sounds, or record them and put them into a sound table. You can even
record the sound of all 88 keys on a piano, and play the appropriate sound
when desired (rather than recording one key and changing the pitch).
The real heart of a sound card is the digital/analog converter. All that
other stuff (sound table and the like) just takes some load off of the
processer.
Anyhow, I can understand that you might miss the look and feel of an old
Moog. There is something "organic" about the way you start with the various
waveforms, filter it, run it through the ADSR modulator, and end up with a
sound of your own creation.
It's similar with photographic darkroom work. I used to put the negative in
the carrier, carefully focus it on the easel, make my best guess at exposure
and color, then make a test strip. I would then adjust the color and
exposure based on the test strip. I could go with a little less contrast by
using 74RC paper, or with more contrast by going with 78RC. Goofing with
the development times could have some effect, too. I even did some dodging
and burning.
Now, I put my negatives into my film scanner and end up with images that are
about 2500 by 3750 pixels at 36 bits per pixel. All of the information is
extracted. I even resolve the grain. I can also bull details out of the
highlights and shadows that I could never get with an enlarger (at least not
both at the same time). I can clean up imperfections, and even move things
around. Finally, I can print them on a printer that displays the shadow
details better than any chemical-based print paper.
Sure, I can buy an enlarger. Why would I want to, though?
Ray Drouillard
>
> -=Eric
Maurizio Mugelli
>
>The conceptual difference is that a modern computer with a sound card
>generates sound by either playing back or generating digital "images" of the
>sound and feeding it into a digital/analog converter.
>
>The old Moog, Arp, and other synthesizers did not generate the sound
>digitally. They used various oscillators and mixers to make the sound.
the proteus chip was used in the best of first '90 synth - later
Creative buyed the entire firm and today audiology are only an
evolution of those chipset..
George William Herbert
>> Mass media still report on neat new gadgets all the time,
>> and people still go "ooo" and "ahh".
>
>May be kids do, I only produce a yawn.
Have you carefully considered how your disposable
income has grown over your lifetime, and how much
of that is likely due to improved tech?
>Where is my flying car?
This has been possible for some years, the trick has been
making it reliable and controllable enough for mass
public consumption. Which are functions, oddly enough,
of improved technology.
>Where is the the display with the size and
>resolution of a printed book page?
That would be possible right now if someone
demanded it, but the market doesn't. People are
acceptably happy with the 70-100 dpi LCD screens
available now.
Just because you want something doesn't mean
that it makes sense for someone in the world
to make it for you. No matter how neat an
idea it is.
>> It's sort of a pernicious failure of imagination where
>> sci-fi folks think that just because we haven't made
>> faster airplanes since the X-15 some 35+ years ago
>> and haven't gone beyond the moon that the pace of
>> high tech is slowing. Capabilities for great projects
>> always come from two core roots: technical capability,
>> and economic capability. High-tech becoming cheaper
>> and more pervasive affects that equation just as
>> much as developing new cutting edge stuff does,
>> perhaps moreso. Less money is wasted on inefficient
>> stuff so more can be spent on doing what people
>> want to do.
>
>Hmm, industrial software technology seems to have effectively stalled
>somewhere in the mid-seventies. If I look at the byzantine programming
>languages that fashionable today, I think we must have taken the wrong time
>line.
Industrial software technology has been increasing the effective
output per coder steadily since ENIAC. The programming languages
and environments available today are somewhat less efficient in
some senses than some of the past environments, but when the
average new PC has much more power than a supercomputer of that
era the rules are different. We generally need to optimize output
rather than raw performance, and you do that with industrial
software like what's seen today.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Mitch Wagner
how...@brazee.net says...
> Take a current movie back in time to 1960 and pass it off as SF. People
> would have have said "dressing sloppy and piercing and tatooing is NOT SF".
> They would have seen cell phones and maybe computers. But movies that use
> computers as part of the plot tend to be boring - watching someone type is
> NOT interesting. Cars wouldn't have been nearly as interesting as they
> thought. Our choice of good guys and bad guys would have been interesting,
> as stereotypes change.
If I were an academic studying pop culture, I think I'd like to do a
monograph on the use of the cell phone in TV and movies, especially
thrillers.
If your character needs some information, but you don't want to clutter
off the story with a lot of business on how he gets the information: have
someone call him on his cell phone, with the information.
Need two characters to talk to each other without maneuvering them into
physical proximity: have them talk on the phone. This is especially handy
when it's the hero and the villain calling to exchange taunts and
torment.
One entire movie, a romantic comedy starring George Clooney and Michelle
Pfeiffer, was built on the premise of a single man and single woman
accidently swapping their nearly identical cell phones.
--
Mitch Wagner weblog http://drive.thru.org
Mitch Wagner
> Current ships are better than 100 year old ships in many ways.
...
> And it takes a *tiny* fraction of the man hours per ton of
> dry cargo to unload and load and transfer around; it used to
> be people lifting every item out of the cargo hold onto
> a crane platform, onto the dock, onto a truck, to a warehouse,
> within the warehouse, onto a train or another truck, etc.
> Nowadays, it's someone loads the container at the factory,
> container onto truck, off truck onto ship, off ship onto
> truck or train, to distribution center, and unload.
http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/container/container.html
Hooray for the 40' shipping container! "I first became
fascinated with shipping containers when I spotted them
mentioned in Civilization 2 as a technological
achievement. This confused me at first, but I now
understand that before these things became the norm,
people spent weeks loading and unloading ships with
carefully packed clay urns and cargo nets full of
pumpkins. It was a mess. Malcolm McLean is credited as
the inventor of the simple but revolutionary idea of a
standard-sized shipping container that could be loaded
onto ships, railcars and trucks. Invented in 1956, they
changed cargo shipping from a labor-intensive
enterprise to a equipment-intensive enterprise."
...
"The 40-foot containers are usually stowed on deck.
Refrigerated containers are stacked in special areas
with electrical outlets. Light or empty containers
usually travel on deck at the top of container stacks,
so those containers you saw tumbling off the ship in A
Perfect Storm were probably empty or filled with
stuffed animals."
Of course, as with many technological advances, the standardized shipping
containers put a lot of people out of work: longshoremen and stevedores.
George William Herbert
>gher...@gw.retro.com (George William Herbert) wrote:
>> Most modern toasters have more computing power than the
>> whole world did 55 years ago. So do many watches.
>> So do most cars, often in more than one computer,
>> tied together with a network...
>
>ago. Sure they work better - but not in a way to noticeably change society.
Toasters are a somewhat silly example.
Watches are not a technology which is fundamentally more enabling
as it has evolved; they're cheaper and more accurate now, don't need
winding anymore, and have nifty functions like being able to clock
laps around the track or tell you how far underwater you are.
Cars, on the other hand, are fundamentally different than what
they were 50 years ago. They're fundamentally more pervasive
for one; their longevity and reliability and cost have combined
to mean that in some states in the US, there are more operating
registered cars on the road than there are people (California,
where I live, is one). Everyone can buy one, because their
availability and cost and reliability are improved.
That *has* made a huge fundamental change in people's lives.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Karl M. Syring
> > > Mass media still report on neat new gadgets all the time,
> > > and people still go "ooo" and "ahh".
> >
> > May be kids do, I only produce a yawn.
> > Where is my flying car?
>
> http://www.moller.com/
>
> > Where is the the display with the size and
> > resolution of a printed book page?
>
> http://www.media.mit.edu/micromedia/elecpaper.html
> http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projects/gyricon/
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1692000/1692141.stm
>
> I think that we are considerablly closer to having e-paper than we are to
> getting Mr. Moller's flying car in the air.
I know that of course. But like the fusion reactor, we may never get it
before plate tectonics stalls.
>
> Anyhow, when I was in school, I had planned on taking my flying car to the
> local spaceport and hopping a flight to Luna City for the Year 1000
> celebration. Instead, I played Doom in by brother's basement on a bunch
of
> networked 486s, and kept my beeper turned on in case one of our clients
had
> problems with the programs we modified to make "Y2K complient." BTW, I
had
> the beeper just for that purpose. I hadn't had one before, and I haven't
> had one since :-)
Yes, you have got the spirit. Sitting in dark basements instead of flying to
the moon.
(I really got bitten by the Y2K bug, because my customer had and old 16bit
Windows program around. He was on holidays and I was the proud holder of the
mobile 2nd level support phone. Never forget that: born in 2072)
> > > It's sort of a pernicious failure of imagination where
> > > sci-fi folks think that just because we haven't made
> > > faster airplanes since the X-15 some 35+ years ago
> > > and haven't gone beyond the moon that the pace of
> > > high tech is slowing. Capabilities for great projects
> > > always come from two core roots: technical capability,
> > > and economic capability. High-tech becoming cheaper
> > > and more pervasive affects that equation just as
> > > much as developing new cutting edge stuff does,
> > > perhaps moreso. Less money is wasted on inefficient
> > > stuff so more can be spent on doing what people
> > > want to do.
> >
> > Hmm, industrial software technology seems to have effectively stalled
> > somewhere in the mid-seventies. If I look at the byzantine programming
> > languages that fashionable today, I think we must have taken the wrong
> time
> > line.
>
> What languages do you use?
Well, I really started out with Fortran...
>
> Software technology is going so fast that it's very difficult to keep up.
> Even reliable old Fortran has changed. C is quite a new departure.
I think, C was born in 1971 or so.
>
> While many programmers obfuscated their code as a form of job security,
> "readable" code was always supposed to be "top down". After that, modular
> code became the way to go. Nowadays, object-oriented programming (OOP) is
> the standard.
This is one of the funny fashions, essentially resurrected 60ies technology.
There seems never to have been any study that shows it does any good as
general programming model.
I have become somewhat convinced that functional programming is the only way
to go. Especially when it comes to things like formal proofs of program
correctness, there is little you can do in imperative languages.
>
> Methodology has changed, too. Managing a large software project is very
> difficult. We have learned a lot about how to do that effectively.
Still,
> the programming process defies management. Actually, programmers tend to
> defy management ;-)
The PHB syndrome :-). The figure of 85% failure rate in major software
projects seems to be correct.
Karl M. Syring
Captain Button
On a panel at the World Science Fiction convention in 1998:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/daily/sciencefiction.htm
--
George William Herbert
I came across one of the earliest containers in a maritime
museum in Sturgeon's Bay, Wisconsin, about 18 months ago.
Fascinating how far things have come, and how obvious an
idea it is in retrospect. The basic technology could have
been invented back in the late 1800s, some 75 years before
they actually were, in terms of being able to manufacture
them and transport and load them. But it took until 1956
for MacLean (I think that's the correct spelling) to try
them out...
>Of course, as with many technological advances, the standardized shipping
>containers put a lot of people out of work: longshoremen and stevedores.
Which was somewhat offset by the growth in total traffic
volume, but not entirely; there has been a noticable decline
in total employment in the sector. And a huge change in
the skills required, towards the higher trained and away
from simple manual laborers. That's been a generic feature
of automation in the workforce worldwide, though.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Ray
> > dry cargo to unload and load and transfer around; it used to
> > be people lifting every item out of the cargo hold onto
> > a crane platform, onto the dock, onto a truck, to a warehouse,
> > within the warehouse, onto a train or another truck, etc.
> > Nowadays, it's someone loads the container at the factory,
> > container onto truck, off truck onto ship, off ship onto
> > truck or train, to distribution center, and unload.
>
> http://www.cockeyed.com/inside/container/container.html
>
> Hooray for the 40' shipping container! "I first became
> fascinated with shipping containers when I spotted them
> mentioned in Civilization 2 as a technological
> achievement. This confused me at first, but I now
> understand that before these things became the norm,
> people spent weeks loading and unloading ships with
> carefully packed clay urns and cargo nets full of
> pumpkins. It was a mess. Malcolm McLean is credited as
> the inventor of the simple but revolutionary idea of a
> standard-sized shipping container that could be loaded
> onto ships, railcars and trucks. Invented in 1956, they
> changed cargo shipping from a labor-intensive
> enterprise to a equipment-intensive enterprise."
..... and
If you put some food, a porta-potty, and some other modern amenities into a
shipping container, it's a dandy device for getting yourself into a foreign
country that is interested in keeping you out.
Ray
Chad Irby
> ..... and
>
> If you put some food, a porta-potty, and some other modern amenities
> into a shipping container, it's a dandy device for getting yourself
> into a foreign country that is interested in keeping you out.
But minor advances in technology lets that country have a really good
shot at finding out that you're in that container, and two minutes worth
of work with a drill and a cylinder of poison gas ("just fumigating,
honest!") is a dandy way of keeping you out of their hair permanently.
Remember: Objects in rearview mirror may be hallucinations.
Slam on brakes accordingly.
George William Herbert
>Until containers became cheaper than labor, they weren't really a good idea.
If you look at the cost structure of shipping in the 1800s and
early 1900s, it was similar to the cost structure of shipping in
1956 when Containers were invented: much of the cost was in the
various labor areas of transshipping it and warehousing it.
The capital cost of shipping and operational cost of shipping
were large too, but were perhaps half of the total typically.
Today, it costs around $225 to ship a twenty ton container
across the pacific ocean, half a cent a pound.
-george william herbert
gher...@retro.com
Ray
<how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:a2fmgi$r6b$1...@peabody.colorado.edu...
>
> On 20-Jan-2002, "Karl M. Syring" <syr...@email.com> wrote:
>
> > I think, C was born in 1971 or so.
>
earner
> in 1968. While I can get OO CoBOL, I haven't yet seen it used on
> mainframes.
>
> I have seen CoBOL compared to a shark - mature long before the dinosaurs
and
> doing their job very well - and lasting after the dinosaurs are gone -
still
> fitting well in their niche. Under evolutionary theory it is the
languages
> that are changing that don't fit - and which will be replaced.
I recall people wearing buttons that read "Yes, we CAN eradicate CoBOL in
our lifetime!", or something to that effect.
I have to agree with the part about earning money. I still see companies
seeking CoBOL programmers. Now, if I could find someone who is looking for
ForTran programmers, I would enjoy "going retro" for a while. It's still
about the best thing out there for raw number crunching.
Ray Drouillard
Ray
<how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:a2fmp9$r6j$1...@peabody.colorado.edu...
>
> On 20-Jan-2002, "Ray" <Droui...@home.com> wrote:
>
> > If you put some food, a porta-potty, and some other modern amenities
into
> > a
> > shipping container, it's a dandy device for getting yourself into a
> > foreign
> > country that is interested in keeping you out.
>
> port. I don't know if we can afford for them to be black boxes anymore.
That leads to a really interesting question. Is a nuclear bomb likely to be
shielded well enough to slip past a radiation detector mounted on the
whatchamacallit at the end of the cable on the crane that picks up each
container and removes it from the ship?
Ray
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
Sounds like something from one of the essays in _Otherness_. It's also
online here, near the bottom: URL:http://kithrup.com/brin/newmemewar.html
--
Joe Foster <mailto:jlfoster%40znet.com> Sign the Check! <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're coming to
because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away, ha ha!
Ray
<how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:a2ft9b$19o$1...@peabody.colorado.edu...
in
> > our lifetime!", or something to that effect.
> >
> > I have to agree with the part about earning money. I still see
companies
> > seeking CoBOL programmers. Now, if I could find someone who is looking
> > for ForTran programmers, I would enjoy "going retro" for a while. It's
> > still
> > about the best thing out there for raw number crunching.
>
> accounting, finance, and profits. Simplicity is valued.
>
> Number crunchers are more likely to be seduced by new toys - and they also
> don't have programs running for 30 years as they often only need to
> calculate one answer once.
Don't I know it. <sigh>
A few years ago, we (I, mostly) wrote a system for a credit union. They
were ditching their old mainframe provider. We were in a big meeting with
the mainframe folks (they were somehow coerced to cooperate).
After we took care of most of the business, I asked the programmers, "What
is your system written, CoBol?" One of them said "yes", while another
muttered "Is there any other language?" under his breath.
I was a bit younger and a bit cockier back then, but I didn't say anything.
I was really kind of bummed that I forgot to bring that old piece of core
memory that I had bought for a couple of bucks at a swap & shop, though ;-)
Anyhow, my favorite language (Visual FoxPro) is becoming less popular - even
though nobody has managed to achieve the performance of that language. Ah,
well... I can do web development, too.
Actually, I need to sell a book or two :-/
Ray
John Andrew Fairhurst
> dry cargo to unload and load and transfer around; it used to
> be people lifting every item out of the cargo hold onto
> a crane platform, onto the dock, onto a truck, to a warehouse,
> within the warehouse, onto a train or another truck, etc.
> Nowadays, it's someone loads the container at the factory,
> container onto truck, off truck onto ship, off ship onto
> truck or train, to distribution center, and unload.
>
And it's quite amazing just how quickly that caught on. There are films
in the sixties/seventies, where they show ships being unloaded with
netting for stuff that couldn't be crated.
> Commercial jets get more efficient, more reliable and less
> likely to have mechanical failures preventing them from operating
> economically, require less crew, etc.
>
But from the outside, at least, a 747 built now looks like it's
prototype.
> Military jets also get more efficient, longer ranges,
> more reliabile and more likely to be able to accomplish
> missions without systems failures, more likely to be
> available when called upon due to higher reliability, etc.
> Also, lower man hours to manufacture for the engines and
> structures, etc.
>
There is a degree of designing a generation or two behind with military
hardware for two main reasons; that the lead time in project
specification is so great that future advances are virtually guaranteed
in a number of fields involved in the project; and a greater deal of
reliability is required from the hardware.
The same is true of the deep space probes as well.
--
John Fairhurst
In Association with Amazon worldwide:
http://www.johnsbooks.co.uk/Books/Masterworks
The Gollancz Masterworks Collections
Mike Williams
>yes, but in the last 15 years there's almost no new musical
>technology, only refinement of the same and there is no prospect of
>someting really new in the near future...
I've been waiting for a system that can listen to an audio piece of
music and convert it into musical notation for me, and, equivalently,
create a MIDI file from it so that I can then get it to play with a
different set of instruments. I know that there's several teams working
on it.
The end result won't sound any different to what can be achieved today,
but it would revolutionise the way I perform my music, and make high
technology music much more accessible.
--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
Mike Williams
>how...@brazee.net wrote:
>
>> A social problem that will need to be solved is defining how
>> accessible we
>> are. People won't want to call your phone - they will want to call
>> you.
>> But you will tell your phone to make decisions about whether to be
>> interrupted depending on changing circumstances - and who is calling
>> you.
>
>Hate to break it to you, but that already happens. Ever heard of call
>screening? You let the caller talk to a machine while you listen for a
>few moments and decide whether or not you want to pick up the phone.
There used to be computerised systems for sale that read the caller ID
from your phone, looked it up in a database, and decided whether you
were likely to appreciate being interrupted at this time of day by that
person, or whether they should go straight to answerphone.
I've not seen them advertised for quite a while now. Perhaps they didn't
prove to be very popular.
Chad Irby
> gher...@gw.retro.com says...
>
> > Commercial jets get more efficient, more reliable and less likely
> > to have mechanical failures preventing them from operating
> > economically, require less crew, etc.
>
> But from the outside, at least, a 747 built now looks like it's
> prototype.
Currently, anyway.
Aircraft designers are running into the inherent limits of "old"
airplane design, and the only way to beat a lot of those limits is to
get away from the "wing halfway down a tube" standard. The problem is
that when you do try something else, you have to figure out ways to make
it fit modern airports, which demand certain things (entrances and exits
a certain distance off of the ground, and limits on how big the whole
plane can be).
The new Airbus monster jet that's supposed to be in the works will
almost certainly need special terminal setups in order to make loading
and unloading feasible in less than geologic time frames... Multiple
jetways, better luggage loading and unloading, and expedited servicing
are some of the problems with Really Huge Planes.
And if someone built a commercial flying wing, they'd have to start from
scratch on terminal design (or go back to the "walk the passengers out
and run them up a set of stairs" days).
"Modern" planes aren't particularly "mature," they're just habitual.
Helgi Briem
<Droui...@home.com> wrote:
>If you put some food, a porta-potty, and some other modern
> amenities into a shipping container, it's a dandy device
>for getting yourself into a foreign country that is interested
>in keeping you out.
In some poorer countries, people also steal them ( or even
buy them used) , because if you cut a door and a couple of
windows in the sides, they make a great little house to live
in.
I also worked for a government research facility once that
bought some and used them to set up fish breeding tanks.
And a private company that used some for long term
storage (in the parking lot)þ
Useful things, containers.
Ex-longshoreman.
--
Regards, Helgi Briem
helgi AT decode DOT is
Robert Carnegie
> Wasn't it Maurizio Mugelli who wrote:
>
> >yes, but in the last 15 years there's almost no new musical
> >technology, only refinement of the same and there is no prospect of
> >someting really new in the near future...
MP3, buddy. And then digital rights management, the anti-MP3.
Watermarking. Video tracks and Internet links on the CD...
we may be working with different definitions of "musical technology"
here ;-)
Okay, how about the sensor-equipped stage that tracks a dancer
and plays musical notes accordingly, or the jacket with an electronic
drum-kit built in so that as you dance from the waist up you're your
own rhythm section. These exist as prototypes and I can't imagine
why they haven't caught on :-)
> I've been waiting for a system that can listen to an audio piece of
> music and convert it into musical notation for me, and, equivalently,
> create a MIDI file from it so that I can then get it to play with a
> different set of instruments. I know that there's several teams working
> on it.
>
> The end result won't sound any different to what can be achieved today,
> but it would revolutionise the way I perform my music, and make high
> technology music much more accessible.
You'll be aware that with a flute or a recorder it's easy,
been available for years, in a box (MidiMic, plus software that
accepts MIDI cable input into musical notation). If you're playing
piano with both hands, or if your whole band is jamming, the
computer (I presume it's a computer) probably does have an obvious
challenge separating out the violin from the drum kit, just by
sound, let alone distinguishing the individual violin strings
and the fingering. Of course each instrument could be heavily
wired up to track what you're doing to it; essentially put a
separate MidiMic onto each string. But applying such
modifications to your Stradivarius may reduce its actual sound
quality and value ;-)
I presume that the different instruments that you want to play
on are all electronic, too.
Was I just trolled, here?
Charlie Stross
as <how...@brazee.net> declared:
> On 20-Jan-2002, gher...@gw.retro.com (George William Herbert) wrote:
>
>> I came across one of the earliest containers in a maritime
>> museum in Sturgeon's Bay, Wisconsin, about 18 months ago.
>
> Until containers became cheaper than labor, they weren't really a good idea.
One historical point where they'd have been incredibly useful --
during WW2, for lend-lease convoys to the UK and USSR from the USA.
(One less longshoreman is one more solider, and the UK was critically
short on manpower by late 1944 -- it got to the point where Montgomery
wasn't able to follow through on one front because he had no reserves,
and there weren't any more coming from home: every warm body the British
army could supply was already in combat.)
IIRC, the great shipping breakthrough of the war period was the standard
sized shipping pallet that could be loaded by fork-lift truck. And the
jeep.
-- Charlie
Lee DeRaud
>I was thinking about fighter jets - remembering how quickly we moved from
>propeller fighters to the SR-71 (slightly modified from a less known
>fighter)
Ok, I'll bite: exactly what "less known fighter" is it that you
believe the SR71 was "slightly modified from"?
>- then the development slowed down so much. We fly 30 year old
>jets which are almost as good as new jets.
For some rather small value of "almost". Compare the F15 with the F22
and see what's missing on the older bird: stealth, super-cruise,
thrust-vectoring. And that ignores the advances in radar, display, and
battle management avionics. (Yes, some of that has been back-fitted
into the later F15s, but if you want a *real* example of 'new wine in
old bottles', look at the current B52s.)
>We no longer buy cars every year -
The overwhelming majority of car buyers *never did*. The tiny fraction
that did probably still do, for the same reasons now as then: status
and vanity, not because of any functional change in the vehicles.
>they aren't that much better than the models we bought a year ago.
In most cases they're barely *different* from the models we bought a
year ago...but aside from trivial cosmetic changes, that's *always*
been true. OTOH, *functionally* the cars of today are much better in
very many ways than the cars of even two decades ago.
Both cars and fighter planes are mature technologies at a rather gross
structural level, but in both cases, there is a *lot* of improvement
going on at the subsystem level that isn't necessarily visible on the
showroom floor.
Lee
Lee DeRaud
<david_co...@lineone.net> wrote:
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but the B52 first flew in the 1950's, and the
>USAF expect it to remain in service until the 2020's [1]. Now _that's_
>what I call a mature technology - sufficiently Not Broken that it
>doesn't need fixing for 70 years.
More or less...rather *large* chunks of that particular example of
technology have been replaced over the years: engines, sensors, nav,
avionics, weapons management etc.
Lee
Charlie Stross
>> ObSF: _October The First Is Too Late_ by Fred Hoyle
>>
>> Earth has gotten reshuffled in time, with it being WW1 in Europe,
>> the 1960s in Britain, Ancient Greece in Greece etc.
>>
>> There a brief description of how the European nations are persuaded
>> to stop fighting by Britain.
>>
>> They take some generals from both sides into a room and play them
>> some recorded music on a 1915 record player (or whatever). They
>> play them the same music on a 1960s Hi-Fi stereo.
>>
>> Then they ask them to imagine what their weapons technology must
>> be like if their musical reproduction technology has advanced that
>> far, and send them home.
>
> 1960s? Give 'em a ride in a B52 over their own country, then an F86 Sabre -
> just for kicks :-)
British author, British novel. What B52's?
(On the other hand, ISTR that Hoyle softened up the generals by having
their armies leaflet-bombed by Vulcans, then flying them straight into
London Airport by airliner.)
-- Charlie
Charlie Stross
> The new Airbus monster jet that's supposed to be in the works will
> almost certainly need special terminal setups in order to make loading
> and unloading feasible in less than geologic time frames... Multiple
> jetways, better luggage loading and unloading, and expedited servicing
> are some of the problems with Really Huge Planes.
It's not that bad.
The A-380 (prototype due for roll-out in just two and a half years,
now -- they're committed to bending metal, with customer orders on the
books) is designed to fit into the same size of box as a 747. The cargo
version has got three big cargo doors, instead of one or two, and two
lifts (to facilitate getting containers in and out of the three cargo
decks -- redundancy in case one lift breaks down), but it's basically
more of the same. The initial passenger configurations only carry 580
passengers; that's about 30 more than the short-haul 747's used in Japan
as commuter airliners. And the cargo variant only carried 150 tons with
trans-Pacific range, instead of the 747's 100 tons.
Yes, two jetways would be a good thing, and some airports are going to
have to get bigger -- especially when the all-economy-class 800-900
seaters come along in a couple of years -- but the 380 is basically
evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. If Boeing simply stretched the
747 fuselage and ran the top deck all along the length of the plane (as
they've been threatening to do, on and off, for the past 20 years) they'd
overlap with the 380 on passenger capacity. (The 380 will go bigger than
the 747's upper limit, but starts within the same envelope.) Heathrow
can turn around a 747 in an hour; I'd be surprised if the A380 took
any longer.
We'll begin running into problems if/when Airbus decide to lengthen the
A380, or someone builds something with a bigger wingspan. Airports are
built to accomodate planes that fit in a standard-sized box, which
governs how far apart terminals and taxiways have to be built. The A380
and 747 both just about fit inside the box. Anything much bigger, and
they'll have to start building new terminals and taxiways. And Airbus
are getting paranoid about safety, to a degree beyond even the normal
paranoia of the civil aviation market. The idea of a thousand-passenger
super-jumbo going down beggars the imagination ...
-- Charlie
Nick Davies
<how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:Cdn28.464$jd7....@bin6.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com...
> I was thinking about fighter jets - remembering how quickly we moved from
> propeller fighters to the SR-71 (slightly modified from a less known
<snip>
The SR71 was a well-kept secret for about twenty years. In my opinion
technological development has not stagnated, as you suggest, but leapt
ahead. The digital computer of today vastly exceeds the capacity of machines
twenty years ago. But this progress has been in the public eye. Development
of leading-edge aircraft design is kept secret, hence your/our ignorance of
these developments.
Nick Davies
Karl M. Syring
> <how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
> news:Cdn28.464$jd7....@bin6.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com...
> > I was thinking about fighter jets - remembering how quickly we moved
from
> > propeller fighters to the SR-71 (slightly modified from a less known
> > fighter) - then the development slowed down so much
>
> <snip>
>
> The SR71 was a well-kept secret for about twenty years. In my opinion
> technological development has not stagnated, as you suggest, but leapt
> ahead. The digital computer of today vastly exceeds the capacity of
machines
> twenty years ago. But this progress has been in the public eye.
Development
But this is exactly the point. There is only more of the same. No
qualitative leaps in technology. Essentially, people are working for there
gadgets, when it should be the other way round.
> of leading-edge aircraft design is kept secret, hence your/our ignorance
of
> these developments.
There is no Unobtainium to build those wonder planes.
Karl M. Syring
--
Winner in the category "most moronic mission statement":
Die avocado AG hat es sich zur Aufgabe gemacht,
Informationen verfügbar zu machen und verfügbar zu halten,
damit Wissen da entstehen kann, wo es gebraucht wird
phil hunt
>Wasn't it Maurizio Mugelli who wrote:
>
>>yes, but in the last 15 years there's almost no new musical
>>technology, only refinement of the same and there is no prospect of
>>someting really new in the near future...
>
>I've been waiting for a system that can listen to an audio piece of
>music and convert it into musical notation for me, and, equivalently,
>create a MIDI file from it so that I can then get it to play with a
>different set of instruments. I know that there's several teams working
>on it.
If it is a simple piece of music, with only one instrument playing,
that seems to be not too difficult. For many instruments, and vocals
as well, it is a lot harder.
--
===== Philip Hunt ===== ph...@comuno.freeserve.co.uk =====
One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie.
Lee DeRaud
>
>On 21-Jan-2002, Lee DeRaud <lee.d...@boeing.com> wrote:
>
>> Ok, I'll bite: exactly what "less known fighter" is it that you
>> believe the SR71 was "slightly modified from"?
>
>Only 2 or 3 YF-12A's were built before they decided that the plane just
>wasn't suitable as a fighter and decided to emphasize speed and altitude for
>the reconnaissance tasks of the SR-71. The SR-71 doesn't have to make
>tight turns with weapons hanging off of it.
Yeah, but that's the *same* plane. AFAIK, it was never intended to be
a fighter: it was designed from the get-go as a high-speed/high-
altitude reconnaissance platform...the "YF" designator may just have
been a ploy to hide its true purpose - I'll check my reference
tonight. (Also known as the "A12" IIRC, when it was being operated
under CIA auspices.)
Lee
Ray
"Nick Davies" <Sp...@Drovefield.co.uk> wrote in message
news:a2hcqq$10bmta$1...@ID-90321.news.dfncis.de...
I often wonder what they have flying over area 51. I have heard rumors -
planes flying from horizon to horizon in minutes, dotted contrails, etc. I
wouldn't be surprised if we have something that'll come close to orbital
speed in the upper atmosphere.
Ray
Mark Atwood
>
> The public sees that we went to the moon decades ago. Now we can go to near
> orbit.
Yeah, but we don't spend 3% of our GNP to do it.
--
Mark Atwood | Well done is better than well said.
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Elf Sternberg
how...@brazee.net writes:
>But toasters, watches, and cars still do pretty much what they did 50 years
>ago. Sure they work better - but not in a way to noticeably change society.
That's a strange misstatement. "Watches" have certainly changed
society; from a simple device that states the time (and you can still
buy one of these but why bother?) one can wear a device that keeps track
of multiple appointments and alert one to the mere interest of another.
More sophisticated users have gone to something approximately the size
of a pocket watch that carries a plethora of data and relieves one of
much of the burden of memorization or weight-- backs are healthier and
brains can be dedicated to other purposes.
The car in fifty years has gone from a steel box likely to kill
you in an accident to a plush conveyance filled with modern
conveniences, powered by more horses than Henry VIII ever owned,
supplied with a gift of perfect musical reproduction Queen Victoia could
never order up, cooled with an efficiency that would make Henry Ford
sweat, and so protective of its passengers it is possible to survive a
head-on collision at 100kph without injury. All this at four times the
fuel efficiency polluting at less than one-tenth of the automobiles of
1952.
One might argue that the toaster hasn't changed all that much,
but then one could argue that it is as perfect for its function as the
fork. But if one wants more than "a toaster," one need look no further
than the new GE toaster oven my mother purchased upon the death of her
old toaster-- a device that takes up the same amount of space and still
grills toast, but also reheats pizza, perfects waffles, and bakes french
fries for one-- and when dirtied can be tossed into the dishwasher
without concern. From a drudge to the realm of the household nun, the
kitchen has been transformed into a space where even moderately
difficult dishes can be created for fun.
"Working better" is the whole reason that society has changed.
Watches that monitor your blood-sugar constantly, cell phones that tell
your doctor your heart rate, PDAs that tell you where your car is; the
amount of time waiting and wasting that used to be a part of one's life
is simply gone forever.
Elf
--
Elf M. Sternberg, Immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf/ (under construction)
I have seen the light. I was not impressed.
Erik Max Francis
> That gets used at home quite a bit. What I want is to be in a
> meeting - if
> my phone rings there it means my wife has gone into labor or the
> computer
> has exploded. If I am at my desk, my mechanic can call me to tell me
> my
> car is ready. If I am in my car, something in between would work.
This is pretty trivial with Caller ID. So trivial, in fact, no such
project has succeeded commercially, probably because it's not needed.
One issue is that whether or not you want to take a call from a
particular person depends strongly on not just where you are but what's
going on, something a call screener can't know. If my father calls me,
I might want to take the call even during business hours because I asked
him an important question earlier in the day and he said he'd get back
to me. It's better to check Caller ID when I receive a call and decide
then if I want to take it, rather than have an automated service decide
for me.
> And they don't call my work number, my home number, and my cell number
> -
> they call me.
There were some phone services that gave you only one external access
number and would alternatively check your home number, your cell phone,
and then your voicemail for fallback. I'm not sure if they're still
around.
--
Erik Max Francis / m...@alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
__ San Jose, CA, US / 37 20 N 121 53 W / ICQ16063900 / &tSftDotIotE
/ \ Laws are silent in time of war.
\__/ Cicero
Esperanto reference / http://www.alcyone.com/max/lang/esperanto/
An Esperanto reference for English speakers.
Mike Williams
>> I've been waiting for a system that can listen to an audio piece of
>> music and convert it into musical notation for me, and, equivalently,
>> create a MIDI file from it so that I can then get it to play with a
>> different set of instruments. I know that there's several teams working
>> on it.
>>
>> The end result won't sound any different to what can be achieved today,
>> but it would revolutionise the way I perform my music, and make high
>> technology music much more accessible.
>
>You'll be aware that with a flute or a recorder it's easy,
>been available for years, in a box (MidiMic, plus software that
>accepts MIDI cable input into musical notation). If you're playing
>piano with both hands, or if your whole band is jamming, the
>computer (I presume it's a computer) probably does have an obvious
>challenge separating out the violin from the drum kit, just by
>sound, let alone distinguishing the individual violin strings
>and the fingering. Of course each instrument could be heavily
>wired up to track what you're doing to it; essentially put a
>separate MidiMic onto each string. But applying such
>modifications to your Stradivarius may reduce its actual sound
>quality and value ;-)
>
>I presume that the different instruments that you want to play
>on are all electronic, too.
Actually, the first thing I want to be able to do is capture pieces of
music that *someone else* has played and hand sheet music to the members
of my band who don't seem to be capable of playing a note unless it's
properly written down. With the particular type of music that we play,
there's an awful lot of music out there that's never been properly
notated.
If they could play the piece on midi instruments, then I wouldn't need
the sheet music.
I can play the guitar parts on my midi guitar, but I usually can't play
the keyboard parts on it.
There are people out there developing systems that should be able to do
the job.
Jonathan Hendry
"Mike Williams" <mi...@nospam.please> wrote in message
> Actually, the first thing I want to be able to do is capture pieces of
> music that *someone else* has played and hand sheet music to the members
> of my band who don't seem to be capable of playing a note unless it's
> properly written down. With the particular type of music that we play,
> there's an awful lot of music out there that's never been properly
> notated.
>
> If they could play the piece on midi instruments, then I wouldn't need
> the sheet music.
>
> I can play the guitar parts on my midi guitar, but I usually can't play
> the keyboard parts on it.
>
> There are people out there developing systems that should be able to do
> the job.
In the meantime, there's probably some company that'll have the
music cheaply transcribed by low-paid musically-trained Chinese
labor. Send them an MP3 today, and get PDF sheet music in your
email tomorrow.
Karl M. Syring
> In article <a2f6te$it0$1...@peabody.colorado.edu>
> how...@brazee.net writes:
>
> >But toasters, watches, and cars still do pretty much what they did 50
years
> >ago. Sure they work better - but not in a way to noticeably change
society.
>
> That's a strange misstatement. "Watches" have certainly changed
> society; from a simple device that states the time (and you can still
> buy one of these but why bother?) one can wear a device that keeps track
> of multiple appointments and alert one to the mere interest of another.
> More sophisticated users have gone to something approximately the size
> of a pocket watch that carries a plethora of data and relieves one of
> much of the burden of memorization or weight-- backs are healthier and
> brains can be dedicated to other purposes.
Hmm, I think the percentage of people with health insurance is dropping. And
the quality of brains has not improved, but there is more opportunity for
meaningless activities now.
>
> The car in fifty years has gone from a steel box likely to kill
> you in an accident to a plush conveyance filled with modern
> conveniences, powered by more horses than Henry VIII ever owned,
> supplied with a gift of perfect musical reproduction Queen Victoia could
Well, Queen Victoria did not need a reproduction of music, she could afford
an orchestra.
> never order up, cooled with an efficiency that would make Henry Ford
> sweat, and so protective of its passengers it is possible to survive a
> head-on collision at 100kph without injury. All this at four times the
> fuel efficiency polluting at less than one-tenth of the automobiles of
> 1952.
Yep, cars have risen from the status of killer machines (or were it
killdozers?).
>
> One might argue that the toaster hasn't changed all that much,
> but then one could argue that it is as perfect for its function as the
> fork. But if one wants more than "a toaster," one need look no further
> than the new GE toaster oven my mother purchased upon the death of her
> old toaster-- a device that takes up the same amount of space and still
> grills toast, but also reheats pizza, perfects waffles, and bakes french
> fries for one-- and when dirtied can be tossed into the dishwasher
> without concern. From a drudge to the realm of the household nun, the
> kitchen has been transformed into a space where even moderately
> difficult dishes can be created for fun.
I had such a contraption when I was a student, suffices to say. And reheated
pizza is an abomination.
>
> "Working better" is the whole reason that society has changed.
> Watches that monitor your blood-sugar constantly, cell phones that tell
> your doctor your heart rate, PDAs that tell you where your car is; the
> amount of time waiting and wasting that used to be a part of one's life
> is simply gone forever.
If you do need a heart rate or blood pressure monitor, this technology will
not help you at all. You need a new life.
And all that free time that is wasted with all-important mobile phone calls.
Karl M. Syring
Erik Max Francis
> If it's that trivial, I really hope it gets invented soon.
I'm sure it has been (someone else suggested there was such a product),
it just hasn't met commercial success, probably for the reasons that I
mentioned.
> Because it IS
> needed. I don't want a phone that rings during an important meeting,
> that
> I have to pull out, and recognize who sent it then put the phone back.
That's why you can turn off ringers and/or put the phone on vibrate.
> A
> smart phone could allow her to input an emergency code to get through.
> My
> daughter-in-law phoned her parents from a hospital when she was in
> labor.
> But the caller ID didn't work because she was behind a PBX and they
> never
> even got the phone call.
That's why you have voicemail. Important meeting or not, certainly you
can take the time to check your queued calls while you're on the way to
a bathroom break.
> You can get one number for home and cell. But not connected to your
> work
> unless you plug in a call forwarding by hand.
Well that's likely got more to do with businesses not liking the idea of
integrating home and business phones seamlessly. Mostly businesses
actively discourage personal calls on company facilities, after all.
Karl M. Syring
I think, there are approaches to do it automatically. A wavelet based
approach has been described (http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/~chapman/spectrum/).
This was on my to do list for a could and rainy evening, but it got
ditched, because I have certain restrictions, musically speaking.
Karl M. Syring
Mark Atwood
> On 21-Jan-2002, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
> > > The public sees that we went to the moon decades ago. Now we can go to
> > > near orbit.
> > Yeah, but we don't spend 3% of our GNP to do it.
But is a hell of a lot more important.
Chad Irby
> On 21-Jan-2002, "Ray" <Droui...@home.com> wrote:
>
> > I often wonder what they have flying over area 51. I have heard rumors -
> > planes flying from horizon to horizon in minutes, dotted contrails, etc.
> > I wouldn't be surprised if we have something that'll come close to orbital
> > speed in the upper atmosphere.
>
> I don't. If it was useful technology, it would get used. Maybe we have
> something faster than the SR-71 - but we mothballed that.
...and as pretty much every defense analyst pointed out, the only way we
could let go of the SR-71 was if we had some sort of follow-on plane
with a similar mission but much better performance...
Captain Button
>> That gets used at home quite a bit. What I want is to be in a
>> meeting - if
>> my phone rings there it means my wife has gone into labor or the
>> computer
>> has exploded. If I am at my desk, my mechanic can call me to tell me
>> my
>> car is ready. If I am in my car, something in between would work.
> This is pretty trivial with Caller ID. So trivial, in fact, no such
> project has succeeded commercially, probably because it's not needed.
But this still requires you to look at the Caller ID, not a
minor matter if you are sleeping.
But this assumes that your telephone service provider has a
Caller ID system that actually *works correctly*. By which I mean
that essentially all calls are either identified or explictly
marked "anonymous call" or some other such refusal.
Both area where I have had Caller ID would frequently say
"Unavailable". Which may mean "long distance", or may mean
"telemarketer whose system doesn't send Caller ID information".
Are there any places where Caller ID is properly implemented?
> One issue is that whether or not you want to take a call from a
> particular person depends strongly on not just where you are but what's
> going on, something a call screener can't know. If my father calls me,
> I might want to take the call even during business hours because I asked
> him an important question earlier in the day and he said he'd get back
> to me. It's better to check Caller ID when I receive a call and decide
> then if I want to take it, rather than have an automated service decide
> for me.
I saw an ad for some device that required callers to enter a secret
4 digit number to bypass the answering machine and ring the phone.
But unless such a system is common, you have to explain it to
everyone you want to be able to use it.
>> And they don't call my work number, my home number, and my cell number
>> -
>> they call me.
> There were some phone services that gave you only one external access
> number and would alternatively check your home number, your cell phone,
> and then your voicemail for fallback. I'm not sure if they're still
> around.
You might be able to simulate this with various call forwarding
methods, but the problem might then be having to remember to keep
changing the settings when needed. I'm not familiar with the details
of such schemes.
ObSFs:
_The Age of the Pussyfoot_ by Pohl - The protagonist doesn't listen
to his message, which include one from a Martian who is going to
beat him to death legally.
"Bicycle Repairman" by Sterling - Everyone has a "mook" a personality
simulator that pretends to be them to screen calls. Mostly calls
from other peoples' mooks.
--
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in
tolerance and free speech," - David Brin
Captain Button - but...@io.com
Jonathan Hendry
"Chad Irby" <ci...@cfl.rr.com> wrote in message
news:Kf%28.401139$oj3.76...@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com...
> how...@brazee.net wrote:
>
> > On 21-Jan-2002, "Ray" <Droui...@home.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I often wonder what they have flying over area 51. I have heard rumors -
> > > planes flying from horizon to horizon in minutes, dotted contrails, etc.
> > > I wouldn't be surprised if we have something that'll come close to
orbital
> > > speed in the upper atmosphere.
> >
> > I don't. If it was useful technology, it would get used. Maybe we have
> > something faster than the SR-71 - but we mothballed that.
>
> ...and as pretty much every defense analyst pointed out, the only way we
> could let go of the SR-71 was if we had some sort of follow-on plane
> with a similar mission but much better performance...
Um, or sufficiently advanced satellite technology. And the collapse
of the Soviet Union probably has something to do with it, too.
Karl M. Syring
> "Bicycle Repairman" by Sterling - Everyone has a "mook" a personality
> simulator that pretends to be them to screen calls. Mostly calls
> from other peoples' mooks.
Aren't those called lowthers?
Karl M. Syring
Kyle Haight
Karl M. Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
>"Elf Sternberg" <e...@drizzle.com> schrieb
>
>> The car in fifty years has gone from a steel box likely to kill
>> you in an accident to a plush conveyance filled with modern
>> conveniences, powered by more horses than Henry VIII ever owned,
>> supplied with a gift of perfect musical reproduction Queen Victoia could
>
>Well, Queen Victoria did not need a reproduction of music, she could afford
>an orchestra.
1) Many more people can afford cars today than could afford to hire
orchestras a hundred years ago.
2) Not even Queen Victoria could have hired an orchestra to play _inside
her carriage_.
--
Kyle Haight
kha...@alumni.ucsd.edu
Karl M. Syring
You missed me. The intention was to point out that the wealthy and powerful
people might shun gadgetry altogether. That's for the slaves and henchmen.
Karl M. Syring
Kyle Haight
Perhaps we're missing each other. Of course the wealthy and powerful
_might_ shun gadgetry -- they, like everyone else, have free will. But
my point (2) indicates that "gadgets" can provide real benefits even to
the wealthy and powerful that might not be otherwise available to
them.
--
Kyle Haight
kha...@alumni.ucsd.edu
pervect
"George William Herbert" <gher...@gw.retro.com> wrote in message
news:a2d162$5rv$1...@gw.retro.com...
> Just because they cost about the same and don't drive any
> faster doesn't mean there haven't been improvements.
OBSF: "Safe at any speed" by Larry Niven.
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
> "Nick Davies" <Sp...@Drovefield.co.uk> schrieb
> > <how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
> > The SR71 was a well-kept secret for about twenty years. In my opinion
> > technological development has not stagnated, as you suggest, but leapt
> > ahead. The digital computer of today vastly exceeds the capacity of
> machines
> > twenty years ago. But this progress has been in the public eye.
> Development
>
> But this is exactly the point. There is only more of the same. No
> qualitative leaps in technology. Essentially, people are working for there
> gadgets, when it should be the other way round.
It's hard to expect our gadgets to manage themselves when we can't
even seem to manage our own selves, let alone design gadgets that
can do so. Oh never mind, let's all just keep buying those things
with the biggest feature-lists, nevermind the additional $21/month
"subscription fees" riding the coattails of certain "features"...
> > of leading-edge aircraft design is kept secret, hence your/our ignorance
> of
> > these developments.
>
> There is no Unobtainium to build those wonder planes.
Look around you. For each material you currently take entirely for
granted, estimate how long ago that substance would have qualified
as an "Unobtainium".
--
Joe Foster <mailto:jlfoster%40znet.com> Sign the Check! <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're coming to
because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away, ha ha!
pervect
"Elf Sternberg" <e...@drizzle.com> wrote in message
news:1011640865.11386@yasure...
Topic drift alert!
Well, it's a SF parody about toasters, actually.
http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/Toaster.html
A few fair use quotes
"If Microsoft made toasters ...
Everytime you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a toaster. You
wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd have to pay for it anyway.
Toaster'95 would weigh 15,000 pounds"
If Cray made toasters ...
They would cost $16 million but would be faster than any other single-slice
toaster in the world."
Various other sorts of toasters are mentioned, including the "batch"
toaster.
We now return you to your regular topic.
John Savard
Herbert) wrote, in part:
>Everyone can buy one, because their
>availability and cost and reliability are improved.
Actually, in many places, fewer people own cars than in 1950.
Insurance rates are much higher than they were back then.
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
> On 21-Jan-2002, Chad Irby <ci...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > > I don't. If it was useful technology, it would get used. Maybe we
> > > have
> > > something faster than the SR-71 - but we mothballed that.
> >
> > ...and as pretty much every defense analyst pointed out, the only way we
> > could let go of the SR-71 was if we had some sort of follow-on plane
> > with a similar mission but much better performance...
>
> Or they decided satellites do most of the job cheaper. If they had
> something better - why not use it? What is the advantage in having it in
> secret in Nevada? What politician will gain by keeping this secret? What
> general will gain by keeping it secret? What American will gain by it not
> being used?
Perhaps there's something /potentially/ better, but it's still too
glitchy or costly to make it out of the "prototype" stage? Perhaps
it's like higher-temperature superconductor -- sure, it exists, but
don't look for consumer products using the stuff anytime soon!
--
Joe Foster <mailto:jlfoster%40znet.com> Space Cooties! <http://www.xenu.net/>
John Savard
Herbert) wrote, in part:
>It's sort of a pernicious failure of imagination where
>sci-fi folks think that just because we haven't made
>faster airplanes since the X-15 some 35+ years ago
>and haven't gone beyond the moon that the pace of
>high tech is slowing.
Technologies do mature. Progress is being made at a fast pace in
different areas. Right now, although the dizzying rate of progress in
computers is still impressive, it isn't as obvious as advances in
energy production or materials science, because no particularly
noteworthy applications have emerged. Computers are a bit easier to
use, and documents that used to be typed now look typeset.
Artificial intelligence, if greater computer power makes it practical,
would be impressive enough to change that perception. Stuff like
nanotech would *definitely* impress people and cause them to think we
live in a science-fiction age.
If the human genome project leads to us figuring out how to rebuild
our telomeres... well, I think people *will* be impressed with the
chance to live to be 200 or more.
The pace of progress in some areas is slowing. The overall pace is
not, and to that extent I agree with you. But it just happens that
right now the current progress is taking place in areas that aren't
currently yielding results that are as obviously impressive as in the
past.
John Savard
wrote, in part:
>I remember the musical impact that things
>like "Bach Goes Moog" and the "Dr. Who Theme Tune" had by being played
>with electronic sounds that were not imitating existing instruments. A
>sudden jump to 2002 music would be mind blowing.
I think you're thinking of "Switched-On Bach".
John Savard
wrote, in part:
>"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in
>tolerance and free speech," - David Brin
Maybe that used to sound self-contradictory, but after September 11,
it's starting to sound like a good idea.
John Savard
wrote, in part:
>Modern sound cards are not much more than ultra-spiffy player pianos.
Think Mellotron!
Chad Irby
> "Chad Irby" <ci...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> > how...@brazee.net wrote:
> >
> > > On 21-Jan-2002, "Ray" <Droui...@home.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > I don't. If it was useful technology, it would get used. Maybe we have
> > > something faster than the SR-71 - but we mothballed that.
> >
> > ...and as pretty much every defense analyst pointed out, the only way we
> > could let go of the SR-71 was if we had some sort of follow-on plane
> > with a similar mission but much better performance...
>
> Um, or sufficiently advanced satellite technology.
Unfortunaely, "sufficiently advanced" satellite tech to completely
replace the SR-71 is so far out there it's not funny. A faster SR-XX
equivalent is the simpler explanation.
> And the collapse of the Soviet Union probably has something to do
> with it, too.
Even before the SU fell apart, we had enough "new" bad guys to keep an
eye on.
Chad Irby
wrote:
> On 21-Jan-2002, Chad Irby <ci...@cfl.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > > I don't. If it was useful technology, it would get used. Maybe we
> > > have
> > > something faster than the SR-71 - but we mothballed that.
> >
> > ...and as pretty much every defense analyst pointed out, the only way we
> > could let go of the SR-71 was if we had some sort of follow-on plane
> > with a similar mission but much better performance...
>
> Or they decided satellites do most of the job cheaper. If they had
> something better - why not use it? What is the advantage in having it in
> secret in Nevada?
As many stories have indicated over the last couple of decades,
*something* has been in use. A multi-Mach plane of some sort has been
doing flights that have been tracked by seismic sensors in California,
among other places. Just because you don't see it, don't assume it's
not in use.
> What politician will gain by keeping this secret? What general
> will gain by keeping it secret? What American will gain by it not
> being used?
The most obvious gain is that our competitors have to decide whether or
not to defend against something that may not exist, 24/7/365.
Nyrath the nearly wise
> >"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe
> >in tolerance and free speech," - David Brin
>
> Maybe that used to sound self-contradictory, but after September 11,
> it's starting to sound like a good idea.
Well, maybe. Though I am more in favor of Ben Franklin's
view.
Brin tends to get a bit extreme for my tastes.
He tends to the view that privacy should be illegal.
And this leads us to the situtation in David Drake's
short story "Nation Without Walls". There, by law,
every room of every house and building in the U.S.
there has to be a closed circuit TV camera, each
constantly recording and sending the signal to
the police department.
pete hardie
> There used to be computerised systems for sale that read the caller ID
> from your phone, looked it up in a database, and decided whether you
> were likely to appreciate being interrupted at this time of day by that
> person, or whether they should go straight to answerphone.
For those with the inkling, any good Linux-based system has mgetty, a
program
that will read CID info, and allow action based on the number lookup.
I'm planning to use it for audible caller ID, so I don't need to find
the
blasted phone to see who's calling.
--
Better Living Through Circuitry
Paul F. Dietz
> If the human genome project leads to us figuring out how to rebuild
> our telomeres... well, I think people *will* be impressed with the
> chance to live to be 200 or more.
I think we'll discover that some of aging is due to sensence of
stem cells (which are constantly proliferating and differentiating
in the body to replace aging cells in tissues.)
The solution is obvious: when young, have some of your stem cells
removed and cryogenically preserved. As you age, periodically have
some thawed, cultured, and injected.
Paul
Paul F. Dietz
> >Modern sound cards are not much more than ultra-spiffy player pianos.
>
> Think Mellotron!
"A sweeping blade of flashing steel riveted from the massive
barbarians hide enameled shield as his rippling right arm thrust
forth, sending a steel shod blade to the hilt into the soldiers
vital organs."
( My Yamaha! My Mellotron! I need those for the gig tonight! )
Paul
Eli Brandt
Karl M. Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
>Do you see major breakthroughs like a working AI on the horizon? And do not
>say that's impossible, as we have working (well, more or less) model
>systems.
If the history of AI has taught us anything, it's that a model AI
system is not a model.
--
Eli Brandt | el...@cs.cmu.edu | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/
Jim Cambias
jsa...@ecn.aSBLOKb.caNADA.invalid (John Savard) wrote:
> On 20 Jan 2002 14:31:38 -0800, gher...@gw.retro.com (George William
> Herbert) wrote, in part:
>
> >Everyone can buy one, because their
> >availability and cost and reliability are improved.
>
> Actually, in many places, fewer people own cars than in 1950.
> Insurance rates are much higher than they were back then.
>
Where are these places? Are we talking United States here? Because I'm
sure the number of places where ownership has dropped is vastly
compensated by the number of places where it has risen. This may simply
be an artifact of some unrelated phenomenon: if a city has lost
population, then obviously there could be fewer cars even if the rate of
ownership has increased.
Cambias
Bryan Derksen
>I often wonder what they have flying over area 51. I have heard rumors -
>planes flying from horizon to horizon in minutes, dotted contrails, etc. I
>wouldn't be surprised if we have something that'll come close to orbital
>speed in the upper atmosphere.
One thing which comes to mind is the plethora of unmanned
reconnaisance drones that have come into general usage over the past
couple of years. Something like that doesn't just pop up out of
nowhere; I'm sure the US military was testing the technologies for
them for quite some time before the finished product/usable prototypes
started showing up on the news.
Now they're fitting the Predator drones with antitank missiles, and
Tomahawks can drop bombs at two different targets before finally
ramming a third. Want to bed they've been testing armed drone aircraft
for a while already, in secret? Current-day combat aircraft design is
severely limited by the need to carry a pilot, in many respects.
Without a pilot there's no transparent canopy to worry about
stealthing, no limit on the G forces beyond what you can engineer into
the plane's capabilities, no pilot fatigue or other endurance
problems, and you can make the entire package a lot smaller. An
unmanned dogfighter could be next.
There are lots of interesting ways aircraft development can go even
just considering advances in computers alone.
Mike Williams
>how...@brazee.net wrote:
>
>> If it's that trivial, I really hope it gets invented soon.
>
>I'm sure it has been (someone else suggested there was such a product),
>it just hasn't met commercial success, probably for the reasons that I
>mentioned.
A number of such products were advertised when caller-ID first became
available in this country. They were generally to be found in the rather
geekier computer magazines. I've not seen them advertised for a while
now.
--
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure
Maurizio Mugelli
wrote:
>There used to be computerised systems for sale that read the caller ID
>from your phone, looked it up in a database, and decided whether you
>were likely to appreciate being interrupted at this time of day by that
>person, or whether they should go straight to answerphone.
you can do that yuorself with a voice-modem (all recent modem are
voice-modems...) and a computer...
yuo can also put on a personalized voice mailbox for every registered
caller-id and with a little scripting do almost everithing to interact
with the caller, via the keyboard of the phone - all with the standard
software that go in any modem retail box...
analog modems are a bit slow to get incoming calls but digital (isdn)
TA can get the caller-id and put on a busy tone w/o any delay if you
want to screen-out the caller (or, more evily, play a copy of the
tape used by your tlc carrier for non existent numbers... ;-)
>
>I've not seen them advertised for quite a while now. Perhaps they didn't
>prove to be very popular.
only obsolete...
--
(iao!!oai) (ICQ: 10860566)
//.aurizio
[WARNING!: togliete _nessuno_ per rispondere]
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
Robert Carnegie
> In rec.arts.sf.written Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com> wrote:
> > how...@brazee.net wrote:
>
> >> That gets used at home quite a bit. What I want is to be in a
> >> meeting - if
> >> my phone rings there it means my wife has gone into labor or the
> >> computer
> >> has exploded. If I am at my desk, my mechanic can call me to tell me
> >> my
> >> car is ready. If I am in my car, something in between would work.
>
> > This is pretty trivial with Caller ID. So trivial, in fact, no such
> > project has succeeded commercially, probably because it's not needed.
>
> But this still requires you to look at the Caller ID, not a
> minor matter if you are sleeping.
>
> But this assumes that your telephone service provider has a
> Caller ID system that actually *works correctly*. By which I mean
> that essentially all calls are either identified or explictly
> marked "anonymous call" or some other such refusal.
>
> Both area where I have had Caller ID would frequently say
> "Unavailable". Which may mean "long distance", or may mean
> "telemarketer whose system doesn't send Caller ID information".
>
> Are there any places where Caller ID is properly implemented?
>
> > One issue is that whether or not you want to take a call from a
> > particular person depends strongly on not just where you are but what's
> > going on, something a call screener can't know. If my father calls me,
> > I might want to take the call even during business hours because I asked
> > him an important question earlier in the day and he said he'd get back
> > to me. It's better to check Caller ID when I receive a call and decide
> > then if I want to take it, rather than have an automated service decide
> > for me.
>
> I saw an ad for some device that required callers to enter a secret
> 4 digit number to bypass the answering machine and ring the phone.
>
> But unless such a system is common, you have to explain it to
> everyone you want to be able to use it.
But that doesn't sound too difficult. You just tell them the longer
phone number with the extra digits. And yet what if you really
aren't home? Have the answering machine cut in anyway after 10
rings, perhaps.
Which stand-up comic had the short routine about his crazy friend
who has answering service on his car phone? "I can't come to the
phone because I'm home right now." A historical curiosity, now?
Voice mail has even reached Yorkshire (I called the other day).
Robert Carnegie
[reasons why the big Airbus may not be the biggest hit]
> And Airbus
> are getting paranoid about safety, to a degree beyond even the normal
> paranoia of the civil aviation market. The idea of a thousand-passenger
> super-jumbo going down beggars the imagination ...
I approve of obsession with safety, but note that casualties from
ferryboats sinking have been in or close to four figures - although
the bad publicity following that led to an (apparent) major effort
to improve _their_ safety substantially; specifically, ferries that
transport trucks and automobiles, roll-on roll-off.
Meanwhile, of course, those same automobiles (or their users) continue
to kill a surprising number of people on roads, day-to-day. Well,
everyone's got to go in the end anyway, one way or another; road deaths
are usually quick ;-)
David Allsopp
Button <but...@io.com> writes
>In rec.arts.sf.written Erik Max Francis <m...@alcyone.com> wrote:
>> how...@brazee.net wrote:
>
>>> That gets used at home quite a bit. What I want is to be in a
>>> meeting - if
>>> my phone rings there it means my wife has gone into labor or the
>>> computer
>>> has exploded. If I am at my desk, my mechanic can call me to tell me
>>> my
>>> car is ready. If I am in my car, something in between would work.
>
>> This is pretty trivial with Caller ID. So trivial, in fact, no such
>> project has succeeded commercially, probably because it's not needed.
>
>But this still requires you to look at the Caller ID, not a
>minor matter if you are sleeping.
>
>But this assumes that your telephone service provider has a
>Caller ID system that actually *works correctly*. By which I mean
>that essentially all calls are either identified or explictly
>marked "anonymous call" or some other such refusal.
>
>Both area where I have had Caller ID would frequently say
>"Unavailable". Which may mean "long distance", or may mean
>"telemarketer whose system doesn't send Caller ID information".
>
>Are there any places where Caller ID is properly implemented?
The caller ID here in the UK seems to work OK. I always get a number, or
"WITHHELD", or "INTERNATIONAL".
Of course, in one of those tiny but annoying bugs so beloved of hi-tec
devices, the phone recognises numbers in its memory when they're calling
(and you get a different ringtone), but still displays the number rather
than the associated text. Which you *do* see when looking at the call
logs...:-(
--
David Allsopp Houston, this is Tranquillity Base.
Remove SPAM to email me The Eagle has landed.
Dave O'Neill
<how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:a2hf64$qob$1...@peabody.colorado.edu...
>
> On 21-Jan-2002, "Nick Davies" <Sp...@Drovefield.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Cell phones and computers are new - but in 40 years will they look much
> different than they do now? I don't know. Maybe they are approaching
> maturity. That isn't to say that new technologies won't arise.
They might not look very different, on the other hand - mobile phones today
look nothing like they did 2 years ago. (Well, for the rest of the world,
and I am sure one day the US will catch up ;-) ) - I had to borrow a phone
recently while mine was repaired. It was about 3 years old and 4-5 times
larger and had virtually no functionality I expect from my phone (WAP,
diary, games etc...)
There are constraints on physical form (until we implants of course) so
things will tend to merge towards the optimum usable design. eg. a box with
a wheel at each corner.
>
> My grandmother remembered the first time she saw a car, the first time she
> saw a telephone, the first time she flew a jet to a foreign country, and
the
> first time she saw someone walking on the moon on her television set.
That
> is an incredible change. I am a grandfather who hasn't seen anything
near
> that type of change (even though I am a computer programmer by
profession).
Part of that is because the change happens in the background. Ubiquitous
mobile phone technology is a huge paradigm shift, we just don't really think
of it that way. When I was growing up in the UK in the 70's, you didn't
touch the phone under pain of father. Now you have a phone with you, or two
and use them all the time in ways I couldn't have imagined 30 years ago.
True, travel is more of a pain in the arse - that's economic I suppose and a
shame. People didn't want to go any faster, therefore they didn't need a
next generation SST. But Concorde still looks like a slice of the future to
me when she takes off.
On the other hand, look at medicine. We tend to ignore that. I was talking
to a nurse who just retired about the changes he'd scene over the last 30
years - and bearing in mind this is the NHS so its way behind other nations.
But over his career treatments for heart problems have gone from, "nothing
we can do but keep them comfortable" to routine multiple bypass surgery.
Many cancer's that were a death sentance a few years back can at least be
treated now, new treatments for dieases are coming along all the time.
However, because people still die and generally we try to avoid being
involved with the health industry (or at least I do) we don't think how much
has changed. All I know is I'd prefer to go into hospital now, compared to
20 or less years ago.
Maybe the big things haven't changed all that much, but a lot of background
technology is incredible - its just more hidden from eyes than it used to
be.
--
Dave O'Neill
Principle Word Wraggler - Atomicrazor
The lowest editorial standards on the web!
Karl M. Syring
<snip>
> Rail technology has advanced. High speed trains going 300 km/h (200 mph)
> are real, and you can wath the. Maglev is coming soon.
The technology was ready for deployment 15 years ago. They could not find
any takers, partly because it was believed there may be high temperature
superconductors in the near future. Another promise that just was not
fulfilled.
Karl M. Syring
Karl M. Syring
> In article <a2emd4$10kf27$1...@ID-7529.news.dfncis.de>,
> Karl M. Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
> >Do you see major breakthroughs like a working AI on the horizon? And do
not
> >say that's impossible, as we have working (well, more or less) model
> >systems.
>
> If the history of AI has taught us anything, it's that a model AI
> system is not a model.
Well, WE are the models.
Karl M. Syring
Andrew Ducker
7529.news.dfncis.de:
Yeah, there's been 'promising developments' every 6 months for the last 10
years at least.
Still no superconductors in my house...
Andy
Lee DeRaud
>On 21-Jan-2002, Lee DeRaud <lee.d...@boeing.com> wrote:
>
>> >Only 2 or 3 YF-12A's were built before they decided that the plane just
>> >wasn't suitable as a fighter and decided to emphasize speed and altitude
>> >for
>> >the reconnaissance tasks of the SR-71. The SR-71 doesn't have to make
>> >tight turns with weapons hanging off of it.
>>
>> Yeah, but that's the *same* plane. AFAIK, it was never intended to be
>> a fighter: it was designed from the get-go as a high-speed/high-
>> altitude reconnaissance platform...the "YF" designator may just have
>> been a ploy to hide its true purpose - I'll check my reference
>> tonight. (Also known as the "A12" IIRC, when it was being operated
>> under CIA auspices.)
I had it a bit backwards: the A12 came first, operated as a "black"
program. When LBJ 'outed' the plane during the '64 campaign (calling
it the "A11", BTW), the program basically split in half. There was an
overt interceptor component called the YF12, which consisted of a
total of three modified A12s, operating out of Edwards AFB...the Air
Force actually fired some air-to-air missiles from it at (much :-))
lower-altitude targets. There was even a proposal for a "B12" bomber
variant, but the PTBs were concerned that it would drain money away
from the B70, so it was quickly dropped at the concept stage. The
"mainstream" portion of the program was redesignated SR71 shortly
thereafter.
All this is from a book (one of three, I think) about the SR71 by Paul
F. Crickmore...google or Amazon should get you more details.
>Please share what you find out. Actually, I shouldn't have said "fighter",
>but said "attack" instead. Not quite the same thing - and the YF-12A would
>be better as an interceptor than a fighter. I would think - I assume it
>can take off in a hurry.
Not really. The thing leaked so bad at "room temperature" that they
fueled it up just before take-off. Typical missions involved taking
off with a partial fuel load and refueling almost immediately - it
used a *lot* of fuel just getting off the ground. Plus, they had to
have dedicated tankers because it didn't use normal jet fuel.
Not exactly "mature technology". :-)
Lee
Lee DeRaud
<j...@bftsi0.UUCP> wrote:
>It's hard to expect our gadgets to manage themselves when we can't
>even seem to manage our own selves, let alone design gadgets that
>can do so. Oh never mind, let's all just keep buying those things
>with the biggest feature-lists, nevermind the additional $21/month
>"subscription fees" riding the coattails of certain "features"...
Damn right. My biggest gripe in this regard is the TiVo and similar
devices: just make a cheap hard-disk-based video recorder that
*doesn't* require a "subscription" (and connection) to a service I
absolutely *don't* need, and I'll be in line to buy one today.
[Somebody wanna jump in here and tell me such a widget already exists?
Please, oh, please...]
Lee
Chad Irby
> On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 18:00:58 GMT, "Ray" <Droui...@home.com> wrote:
>
> >I often wonder what they have flying over area 51. I have heard rumors -
> >planes flying from horizon to horizon in minutes, dotted contrails, etc. I
> >wouldn't be surprised if we have something that'll come close to orbital
> >speed in the upper atmosphere.
>
> One thing which comes to mind is the plethora of unmanned
> reconnaisance drones that have come into general usage over the past
> couple of years. Something like that doesn't just pop up out of
> nowhere; I'm sure the US military was testing the technologies for
> them for quite some time before the finished product/usable prototypes
> started showing up on the news.
>
> Now they're fitting the Predator drones with antitank missiles, and
> Tomahawks can drop bombs at two different targets before finally
> ramming a third. Want to bed they've been testing armed drone aircraft
> for a while already, in secret?
Well, no, since they've been testing them in not-that-secret at Edwards
AFB and other places. They may be new to CNN, but not to folks who read
the various Jane's publications or watch Discovery Wings.
Nyrath the nearly wise
> If the human genome project leads to us figuring out how to rebuild
> our telomeres... well, I think people *will* be impressed with the
> chance to live to be 200 or more.
And some will be impressed negatively.
There are those in the U.S. who would be appalled at,
say, Senator Strom Thurmond being a senator
for *another* hundred years.
The argument is something like: initially only
the rich will be able to afford life-extending
medical technologies. The rich tend to be leaders.
Since "new ideas cannot be implemented until all
the Old Guard have died off", the pace of
innovation will slow to a crawl.
ObSFRef: Alan E. Nourse "The Martyr", collected
in PSI-HIGH AND OTHERS.
phil hunt
>
>Rail technology has advanced. High speed trains going 300 km/h (200 mph)
>are real,
In Britain, low speed trains doing 50 mph (when they work at all) are
considerably more real.
--
===== Philip Hunt ===== ph...@comuno.freeserve.co.uk =====
One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie.
Matt Clark
Wolfgang Schwanke wrote:
> e...@drizzle.com (Elf Sternberg) wrote in news:1011640865.11386@yasure:
>
> > The car in fifty years has gone from a steel box likely to kill
> > you in an accident to a plush conveyance filled with modern
> > conveniences
>
> likely to kill you in an accident.
>
> Sorry, cars are just not it. They're low tech devices, even if you fill
> them with quad music systems and computer control gadgets.
>
Talking to my grandparents, I would have to disagree. On a fairly short (by
North American standards) trip (about 150 km) they would expect to have to
patch a flat tire (this would be in the '30s and '40s). I drive a car that
is the equivalent in terms of relative cost to what they'd have been
driving at the time. I'd have to check the numbers to be precise, but I've
driven it 60,000+ km with _one_ flat tire. This flat was the result of
driving over a screw in a parking lot. The improvement in other areas was
not as dramatic, but were still significant.
Matt