The title refers to the idea of a submarine going silent so it can't be tracked by sonar. In early drafts of the screenplay, the hero wanted to do something similar with the Valley Forge, so he painted the ship black and tried to hide, knowing that Earth would come looking for it. That idea was abandoned but the title remained.
My sister had the ALK variant of non-small cell lung cancer. The special treatment she got worked until it didn’t, about 16 months. One oncologist said the cancer had likely mutated and the ALK specific therapy was no long effective.
I haven't spent much time on Reddit, but for me, Hacker News is close to USENET in terms of signal/noise. It doesn't have the subgroups covering every topic, but for what it does cover, it's a great source of interesting information with minimal noise. The karma system seems to help a lot in that respect.
If I had to guess, I would assume they chose not to use tmpfs because the earlier Pis had very limited RAM. With a 4GB or 8GB pi 4 or 5 this should not be a problem.
I live in Maryland and the first townhouse I owned, in the late 80s to early 90s, had a heat pump. It included an auxiliary electric heater for days that it got really cold. I don't remember it coming on all that often. (There was a light on the thermostat to indicate when it was on.) My current townhouse has a gas furnace. I plan to move soon into a single level home, more appropriate for an old greybeard, and I'll have to evaluate then if I want to switch to a heat pump, if the house doesn't have one already.
I have read that the Baby was disassembled and parts of it used to build the Mark 1. The Baby had been a proof of concept system for the Mark 1 design.
This was a long time ago, but I think you’re correct. If the system didn’t recognize you, it asked if you wanted an account. I only used the account for a year or so, mostly to access some mailing lists. I assume it died of neglect.
Interesting comparisons. Students were definitely using Unix in 1975. My first Unix was actually sixth edition running on a PDP-11/45 at the University of Maryland. I started using it in 1979, but the system had been in use for some years. The system was part of the Computer Vision Lab and was mostly used by grad students for their research. The systems available to the general student population were Univac mainframes (1108 and 1106).
About this time, my friend was working on his Ph.D. in Biology at Wayne State University and they had the MTS. It was pretty ubiquitous from what he’s told me.
I had a free account on MIT-AI at some point in the late 70s. I accessed it over the ARPANET!
I’ve also seen the opposite, where in-room Wi-Fi was charged, but in the hotel’s function spaces, it was free. The economics of this are confusing, at best. I have also had the situation where the in-room wi-fi was so slow that using my phone as a hot spot was faster!
There are some channels on my cable service that seem to be rebroadcasts of these sub-channels. They are unwatchable. Sadly, PBS likes to make use of the sub-channels to offer various educational program streams, but their main channel suffers for it. Fast motion degenerates into blocky artifacts quite often.
I am an old person and your notions of what we watch are insultingly uninformed. I have played around with OTA on my upstairs TV, where the signal is better, and it's fine for local news, PBS, etc., but I rarely watch much else on it. And I never, ever, watch Fox "News".
The linux image on the beagleboard site for the Black is three years old. Is it possible to just boot generic ARM linux on the Black now? Is there another site for official images?
When I worked at NASA, I basically did both. We had fixed format official "cattle" names that included the organization code and the computer's inventory number. Those names were useless to humans, so I always also registered a human-friendly "pet" alias. It was a bit more trouble, but it generally worked well. The pet names also has some structure, with prefixes differentiating classes of systems (desktop, server, lab), but they were otherwise free-form and picked to be useful to the users.
For a long time, the only (official) DVD available was a pan-and-scan version that was not very good. The new Shout Factory Blu-Ray release I have is excellent and worth buying if you want the best possible version. I need to hunt down a copy of the book, which I've never read.
Thank you! I took a programming languages survey course when getting my Masters at GWU in the early 90s. It was taught by Dr. Maurer. I couldn’t remember his name, but I did remember that he was into SNOBOL. I really need to find his “Forty Bucks” madrigal.
When I was a sysadmin at the Naval Research Laboratory in the 80s, I was asked to install Icon, Ralph Griswold’s follow-on language to SNOBOL. I had a little trouble installing it on our Gould minicomputer and mailed in a support request. It was answered by Griswold himself! I felt special! (It was just a Makefile issue, as I recall. This was the era of tar source file distribution. No rpms, no snaps, no debs.)
When I first read about the MTS, and saw that it was used at Wayne State, I asked my friend if he remembered it from his time there in the 70s and he said he used it quite a bit and remembered it well.
The book “Robots of Westinghouse” has a lot of information on Elektro and several predecessor robots Westinghouse built. The book is uneven and needed an editor, but the technical content is fascinating. Elektro was built largely with components (motors, relays, wiring) taken from Westinghouse appliances. There is a picture showing a bundle of cables like those used on kitchen appliances, with braided cloth cords and Bakelite plugs at the end. My mother’s electric skillet had one of those power cords.
Yep. I worked for a half dozen different contracting companies over those years and in three different groups. I was at Goddard two separate times, with a three year break in the Real World in between. My two stints together amount to just short of thirty years. I retired last July.