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Comment Paper Tape (Score 1) 498

by 6er (#34675754) Attached to: What's the Oldest File You Can Restore?

I still have some files from 1973 of BASIC programs that I wrote on punched tape. They seemed "fine" the last time I looked (within a couple of years). I'm sure I could scan them and OCR them if I had to, and I still have access to a teletype if I really wanted it (though I'd have to make a current-loop to RS-232 converter). HOWEVER -- you can just look at the tape and copy the data, if you REALLY need to. Tedious, but possible...

Comment It's not for you... (Score 1) 834

by 6er (#27907827) Attached to: Go For a Masters, Or Not?

Get the MS. It will never be easier or cheaper. Both a BS and an MS are simply credentials that prevent your resume from being rejected early. Where I currently work, they don't consider candidates without an MS. Play the game, get the degree. Make contacts, never burn bridges...

Comment Yggdrasil? (Score 1) 739

by 6er (#27713193) Attached to: What Did You Do First With Linux?

First linux I downloaded was early 1.x Slackware. Many floppies. The first I recall messing with was Yggdrasil. I ran minix on my Atari ST at the time, and UNIX at work so got my *nix fix there. When I bought an x86 machine for home, I started with NetBSD 0.9, then FreeBSD 1.*, 2.*,OS/2 Merlin, Warp, Solaris x86, Redhat 5,SuSE 7.x,Fedora, and now Ubuntu (under Vmware on the Mac). Next step is Angstrom on the Beagleboard....
Moon

Lunar Oxygen and Water Production Tech Tested 56

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bathtub-in-space dept.
savuporo writes "NASA and its industry partners organized a two-week lunar in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawaii. The tested machines included a few different rovers and prototype plants for generating oxygen and water from lunar regolith. Astrotoday has a picture gallery and a video report. This follows on the heels of the recent ESA lunar robotics challenge event held on Tenerife, which tasked student teams to build a lunar robot that would be able to search for water ice in lunar polar craters."
Microsoft

Microsoft Feared Mac Vs. Vista In '05 652

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-so-much-any-more dept.
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer sifted through many threads of e-mails released under the 'Vista Capable' lawsuit to dig up this jewel...More than a year before Windows Vista's release — and long before Apple started poking fun at the OS — Microsoft officials were already worried about comparisons between Mac OS X and Vista. An e-mail thread from October 2005 showed that an article in the Wall Street Journal by Walt Mossberg grabbed the attention of managers at Microsoft. In a column headlined What PC to Buy If You Are Planning On a Vista Upgrade, Mossberg alarmed one Windows manager who forwarded a bit from the column.... 'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written. 'Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista.' Warrier added a comment of his own: 'A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple. This is why we need to address [the column].'"
Image

American Nerd 240

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Adam Jenkins writes "This book seemed to have potential, particularly since the image of nerds has changed in recent times. Once objects of derision and schoolyard bullying, nerds are now acknowledged as having a place in society. The Lord of the Rings became a multi-million dollar movie trilogy, the internet is now used by an incredible number of people, and computer games are no longer seen as being 'just for kids.' Around the years of the dot-com boom, successful nerds were driving Ferraris and going to cool parties. So it's not so surprising that the definition of a nerd has changed over time, nor that a society which has generally become better at accepting people who are different, has accepted nerds." Read below for the rest of Adam's review.
NASA

Astronaut Loses Tools While Performing an EVA 445

Posted by CmdrTaco from the only-human dept.
tpheiska writes "NASA press release states that 'At approx. 3:33 p.m. EST, Piper reported that one of the Braycote lubrication guns had released grease into her toolbag. As she was cleaning the bag and wiping the tools and equipment inside, the bag floated away. Another bag carrying identical equipment is now being shared by Piper and Bowen.' Luckily they had a spare."
Sci-Fi

Ray Kurzweil Wonders, Can Machines Ever Have Souls? 630

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'd-settle-for-a-chobit dept.
Celery writes "There's an interview with Ray Kurzweil on silicon.com talking up the prospects of gene therapy as a means to reverse human aging, discussing different approaches to developing artificial intelligence, and giving his take on whether super intelligent machines could ever have souls. From the interview: 'The soul is a synonym for consciousness ... and if we were to consider where consciousness comes from we would have to consider it an emerging property. Brain science is instructive there as we look inside the brain, and we've now looked at it in exquisite detail, you don't see anything that can be identified as a soul — there's just a lot of neurons and they're complicated but there's no consciousness to be seen. Therefore it's an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself. And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property.'"
Government

Fewer Than 1% Arrested From TSA's "Behavior Detection" 412

Posted by kdawson from the department-of-funny-walks dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports using the much vaunted 'suspicious behavior detection' techniques are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show. The TSA program, launched in early 2006, looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method based on behavior detection and has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. It has resulted in only 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said. The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program." In related news, the odds of sanity coming to the TSA plummeted today when Schneier said he's not interested in the top job there.
Biotech

Oldest Nuclear Family Found Murdered In Germany 186

Posted by kdawson from the calling-csi-stone-age dept.
Pickens writes "The oldest genetically identifiable nuclear family met a violent death, according to analysis of remains from 4,600-year-old burials in Germany where the broken bones of these stone age people show they were killed in a struggle. Comparisons of DNA from one grave confirm it contained a mother, father, and their two children. 'We're really sure, based on hard biological facts not just supposing or assuming,' says Dr. Wolfgang Haak, from The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. The stone-age people are thought to belong to a group known as the Corded Ware Culture, signified by their pots decorated with impressions from twisted cords. The children and adult males had the same type of strontium in their teeth — which was also found locally, but the nearest match to the women's teeth was at least 50km away, suggesting they had moved to the area. 'They were definitely murdered, there are big holes in their heads, fingers and wrists are broken,' says Dr. Alistair Pike from Bristol University. He noted that one victim even had the tip of a stone weapon embedded in a vertebra. 'You feel some kind of sympathy for them, it's a human thing, somebody must have really cared for them. ... We don't know how hard daily life was back there and if there was any space for love,' added Dr. Haak."
Programming

When Agile Projects Go Bad 139

Posted by kdawson from the antonym-of-agile dept.
blackbearnh writes "CIO Magazine has an article up looking at some of the ways that Agile projects can fail, or Agile can be misapplied in organizations. Some of the issues raised may not be new, but folks might want to pay special attention to these, since the people throwing the stones are two of the original Agile Manifesto signatories, Alistair Cockburn and Kent Brock. From the article: 'Once individuals become familiar with Agile, either through training or practice, they can become inflexible and intolerant of people new to the process. Cockburn has seen this in action. "I'm one of the authors of the manifesto, so if I say something 'weird,' they can't tell me I don't understand Agile. But if someone else — and it doesn't matter how many years of experience they have — says something funny, they get told they don't understand Agile."'" Here's another recent article by the same author on the perils now besetting Agile.

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