apl73 - Slashdot User

Comment telecomms have been using computers for a while... (Score 1) 124

by apl73 on Saturday August 01, 2015 @12:43PM (#50229747) Attached to: ISPs Claim Title II Regulations Don't Apply To the Internet Because "Computers"

..basically since 1891, when the Strowger switch was invented. And if you don't know the story behind this; it's really worth looking up if only to discover that undertakers were an important part of early telephony progress...

Comment I have a DECtape 2 reel with a 1976 write date... (Score 1) 375

by apl73 on Monday July 19, 2010 @11:07AM (#32951218) Attached to: The Oldest Timestamp On a File I Created and Still Have Is...

..I might also have one with files written in 1968.

But in both cases, I bet they can't be read even if someone had a working PDP10 with a DECtape drive.

Hand Written Clock 86

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 14, 2009 @02:11PM from the up-to-the-minute dept.

a3buster writes "This clock does not actually have a man inside, but a flatscreen that plays a 24-hour loop of this video by the artist watching his own clock somewhere and painstakingly erasing and re-writing each minute. This video was taken at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2009."

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 11, 2009 @01:48PM from the toil-and-trouble dept.

Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

10 Worst Evolutionary Designs 232

Posted by samzenpus on Monday August 10, 2009 @06:35PM from the everyone-makes-mistakes dept.

JamJam writes "Besides my beer gut, which I'm sure has some purpose, Wired is running a story on the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs. Ranging from baby giraffes being dropped 5-foot during birth to Goliath bird-eating spiders that practically explode when they fall from trees."

Comment Design of an Optimizing Compiler, Wulf, et al (Score 1) 517

by apl73 on Tuesday December 23, 2008 @05:47PM (#26216473) Attached to: Your Favorite Tech / Eng. / CS Books?

This little (and long-out-of-print) book is an amazing description of the actual engineering associated with building an optimizing compiler for the Bliss-11 language. It's also interesting in that many of the co-authors (Wulf's PhD students) have gone on to develop significant software products.

It got me started in compilers over 30 years ago, and I've been doing language design and code generation for most of the time since.

Another suggestion is to check the ACM website. A couple of years ago they ran a contest to find out-of-print classics and arrange to get the top N of them reprinted.

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