18095504
submission
vaporland writes:
According to the SD Times website, (http://www.sdtimes.com/blog/post/2010/12/16/COBOL-coming-to-Smithsonian.aspx) the Smithsonian is preparing a new exhibit to celebrate 50 years of COBOL. Before that actual, physical exhibit goes up, the national museums have put together an online history site for the language.
From the site:
Fifty years ago, each computer maker used its own programming languages to tell a computer what to do. In 1959, a group of programmers devised COBOL, a COmmon, Business-Oriented Language. Programs written in COBOL could run on more than one manufacturer's computer. In a 1960 test, the same COBOL programs ran successfully on two computers built by different manufacturers.
17316578
submission
vaporland writes:
Benjamin Scott sent an email around today stating that Alcatel/Lucent had published all the old Bell System Technical Journals from 1922 to 1983 online and freely accessible. As Ben said:
"Bell Labs practically invented much of our recent civilization (communications theory, transistor, laser, microchip, Unix, the list goes on). The public switched telephone network, before the Internet came along, was probably the most complicated system in human existence. They documented a lot of it in these journals. Making them available like this is a huge boon to technology historians.
Bell System Technical Journal Volume 57.6 was published in August of 1978. In it were a series of articles from the people who developed the first UNIX systems. Not only were these articles written "first hand" at a time when people could both formulate clearly the reasons why they created UNIX the way they did, but at the same time it was not so long after they had created the system to have forgotten some of the details.
A small example of this exists in the name UNIX itself. Most people today write "UNIX" as "Unix", but in these original typeset and scanned PDFs, you can see that the developers consistently spelled it "UNIX", with all capital letters.
Other gems that are available from these documents include a specification of an early PDP-11/70 computer where Ken Thompson programmed Unix, stating that Ken's system had 768K bytes of core memory, acknowledging that this system was very generously configured, that as a minimal system you could have as little as 90K bytes of core and (as Dennis Ritchie points out) be purchased for as little as 40 thousand dollars (in 1978) of hardware investment. Ken's "very generously configured machine" also had two 200 Mbyte disk drives, 20 dial-up modem lines and 12 hard-wired serial port lines, as well as several interfaces for "machine to machine transfer", a phototypesetter, a voice synthesizer and a chess machine.
Steve Bourne writes about the original Bourne shell while Dennis Ritchie, Steve Johnson, Brian Kernighan and M.E. Lesk write about the early "C" compiler, and there are some early works about Programmer's
Workbench and document preparation. There is even a discussion about the trade-offs of putting UNIX on a "microprocessor" of the day, an LSI-11 computer from Digital that only had 40K bytes of RAM.
Some of the problems they were investigating in 1978 are eerily similar to the problems (and solutions) that we have today. MERT was a real-time and (more-or-less) "virtualized" system, and the papers
even address issues in using the computer to control devices.
Take a look at these articles of history, both to find out how UNIX derived and why some things remain the same, even more than thirty years later."
12496240
submission
vaporland writes:
Monsanto's announcement that it is donating $4 million worth of GMO seeds and supplies to the Haiti relief effort should be accepted for what it really is: a shameless attempt to spread the GMO agenda to a country which is ill-equipped to deal with the ramifications. The Psychic Politics blog points out that there is no infrastructure available in Haiti for monitoring the effects of GMO farming, that much of the seed will likely end up being diverted as food, and that it is absurd to expect environmentally responsible farming to take place in a country which has denuded their countryside to the extent that the resulting damage can be seen from outer space...
8862836
submission
vaporland writes:
I received notice today from iPredator that their anonymizing VPN service was out of beta and available to the citizens of the world. This is a service that was originated by the owners of The Pirate Bay. I've been using it for a while and it seems to work as advertised. The letter they sent me is copied below:
Hello!
A while ago you showed an interest in our VPN service, Ipredator (www.ipredator.se)!
The service was at that time in a beta phase and we hope that you got a chance to use the service already. If not, we would like to tell you that it's now open for everyone!
For only 149 SEK (that's about 15 EUR / 21 USD) per 3 months you will get safe, encrypted communication between you and the internet, with no logging of the data transferred. It's of our utmost concern that you can use the network without anyone deciding what you're can communicate about.
Ipredator is not only another VPN-service. It's also a statement. Right now we're developing a new tool to make it harder (or impossible) for the government of Sweden to tap into their citizens traffic. Our goal is making people have the ability to use their democratic rights, without a fear of repression.
So, the more people that actually use the service, the better. We will get funds to build more tools and at the same time the users clearly show that they want to be anonymous. It sends a very clear message to the politicans!
Please invite your friends if they need a service like Ipredator, and tell people about the reasons why they should be allowed to communicate without a third party listening to their conversations... The most important thing is to actually make people aware of the situation.
Best regards,
the folks at
http://www.ipredator.se/