Low orbit missions are hardly cutting edge. And there is very little the space shuttle or ISS can teach us about going to the moon or Mars (that we haven't already learned many years ago anyway). If anything, NASA needs desperately to break out of a low orbit mentality and get back into the Apollo engineering mindset (which has long since been forgotten). ISS and the shuttle are just distractions--largely pointless distractions.

Just a thought, but the presence of so much good stuff (emitting their own smells/pheromones) in your big bowl of food may overwhelm and/or mask the the negative impact of the fatty acid system. Their experiments seem to be on far more simplistic model systems free from interference.

19 years ago, I had the opportunity to take home a working KI-10 for free! I was so excited. Unfortunately, when my wife found out why I was calling to rent a van, she put a stop to it. She was probably right, given our other circumstances at the time, but I've always regretted that lost opportunity.

Foonly and SC Group (originally Systems Concepts) both made or pretended to make DEC-10 alikes. I know Foonly actually sold some; wikipedia claims that SC Group did too, although the concept of doing business with the SC Group gang was always a bit nebulous (they were archetypal hackers).

I'm pretty sure Foonly is dead and gone; SC Group existed as of recently, although their web site seems to be AWOL.

You can get a hobbyist license for TOPS-10 (dunno about -20), and an emulator on a fast PC would probably outpace a KA10, maybe even the later models.

I just remembered another gem that CMU was running: TSS-8, which ran the EDUsystem-50 variant of the PDP-8.

I wouldn't be surprised if some school out there is still running a TSS-8 instance in a dark corner.

Last CTOS systems I saw were running the backroom apps of a local drugstore chain in the 90's. They replaced N-GEN and CTOS with some sort of PC based stuff; not sure of the date, probably 98-99 or so.

I think CTOS probably counts as "dead".

TSS/360 is dead and gone. You can actually download (some of?) the source for TSS/370, which was a sort-of successor. The TSS/360 installation at Carnegie Mellon University was turned off right about the time I left there, and I think it was either the last or the next-to-last TSS/360 running.

Two simple words:

"Yes, Dear."

I've been happily married 27 years, thanks to those two little words.

Supposedly there was a study run by a bunch of marriage counselors some years back, looking to prove that couples that actively communicate have the happiest marriages. To their dismay, it turned out that the happiest marriages were the ones where the husband did pretty much whatever the wife told him to do. (One has to assume that the wife doesn't overly abuse her position here.) I don't know if the story is true or not, but it certainly matches my experience, and the experience of most of my happily married friends.

I'd say it depends on what you see yourself doing. If you want to be a deep thought thinker in an R&D department, or if you want to stay at least semi academic, get the Masters.

If you want to be a programmer, engineer, or whatever you want to call it, I'd say get the experience. I've been directly involved in any number of hiring decisions over the last 20 years, and I can't recall a single instance where the existence of a masters degree made the slightest difference in our decision.

Indeed. That was the conclusion I came to a few years back.

It might be different if one could eliminate CACM as part of the deal, as CACM became completely worthless about 20 years ago. I asked, and was told that I could suppress the CACM subscription ... for zero reduction in dues. Whatever.

Ah. Like the almost-universally hated original IBM PC keyboard, which "made you a better typist"...

While AlgolW was a pleasant enough language, calling it "object oriented" is wildly optimistic. Perhaps the language Hoare envisioned was very different from the one I actually used,long ago.

RTFA. This was a *Customs* system. Not LAX, not airlines. The only blame that the airlines can (and should) get for this is not shining the big light on Customs and Border Patrol from the very start. I think it's time that the airlines started putting public and private pressure on CBP and TSA to get the hell out of the way. It's not as if they are actually securing anything.

CBP deserves a punch in the nose for not having a proper network design with redundancy; and another punch in the nose for not having any clue what to do in an outage. They should have a reduced-service backup plan, and a manual backup plan, and a diversion backup plan. There's no excuse for federal officials to sit there like idiots waiting for things to magically get fixed. Oh wait, I guess some of them ARE idiots.