Oh my, where to begin? I haven't posted because I'm doing several things at once, and in a number of instances, where time is essential. I can't let the pecans languish in their husks too long or they'll get moldy, even inside. The last of my monarch larvae have all turned into pupae at this point, so I need to worry about making wing tags out of produce stickers because Monarch Watch warns against purchasing stickers for the wrong year, so screw that. Etc etc etc etc...and on the mathematics scene, just coming down the pike is news about a rather long-standing, obscure proof by a Japanese mathematician that is only now drawing attention: he takes over 500 pages to show proof of "The ABC Conjecture", just as Stephen Hawking contemplates a black hole paradox , others revise the string theory, and computer scientists start to bemoan the possibility that there may be NO way to effectively compute long sequences (whether it be the human genome variations or working out the final decimal place that Pi computes to in decimal, I guess).
Please, people--you consistently insist on using a number system that considers imaginary numbers to be real, and you think you haven't gone completely bonkers proclaiming that certain solutions using this number system are simply not possible. You guys should be the poster boys for irrational numbers rather than be proud mathematicians, in my humble view. Einstein wasn't a mathematician per se, you know, so dwell on that as long as it takes until the situation finally dawns on you.
Consider the widely acclaimed brilliance of Stephen Hawking, for instance, the guy who threw a party for time travelers and reported that nobody showed up. He doesn't see the flaw in his premise, that what he claimed to have proven is that NO intelligence ANYWHERE in the universe has EVER developed time travel, as in NEVER AT ANY TIME, AT ANY LOCATION IN THE UNIVERSE. Capaldi's Doctor Who took a sour turn lately, too, in the science/math department by erroneously citing The Bootstrap Paradox and the Faraday Cage and I suppose just to make the claim that the Doctor Who series has finally opined that it's worthwhile for the series to take the science seriously again in its script even if it did less than a half-assed job of it.
The good news for Doctor Who is that whomever wrote Matt Smith's script hit the mathematical nail on the head when it was stated, "humans are so----linear." That, people, is the mathematical and scientific description of the difficulty, even with Mr. Hawking, in a nutshell.
Even with loop-backs, string theory is, well, infernally linear. So is the computation of a lengthy sequence. So would be the computation of any time traveler likely to encounter that Bootstrap Paradox. All the time travel paradoxes I've seen listed online make the erroneous presumption of linearity, and so we arrive at why Mr. Hawking is in error just because no time traveler from any time, from any point in space in the universe, showed up at his party. A chess game is a perfect example of sequence from opening to end that is not linear, but at the same time it's a perfect example of why it's a mental trompe l'oeil to claim that it's amazing for chess masters to play several games at once, win every time against anyone less of a "genius", and even play "multi-dimensional chess" to boot. Take a wild guess why a computer is capable of playing a game of chess.
Chess is too damn predictable, that's why. So, any person can claim to be able to see far enough into the future to win at a chess game or multiple chess games played at the same time (yeah--THAT would be a non-linear enterprise, too, wouldn't it), because when you're capable of making moves that preclude the possibility of other moves, you know how the future moves are going to go. So anyone watching in amazement at a chess master is basically watching as much an illusion as watching a master magician insofar as what you're thinking about how it's possible is entirely wrong.
The linear-minded looks at a chess board and figures out to the nth power how many moves are possible. The chess master, on the other hand, figures out how many moves get ruled out if his first five moves are such-and-such, which is why such opening moves (and response moves, for that matter) get formal names, as named gambits. The irretrievably linear mind is convinced that one can never prove a negative, while the chess master, in his opening gambit, proves that certain moves cannot be made, proving negatives throughout the progression of the game. You can't solve any sudoku puzzle without proving negatives, either, and goodness knows how non-linear THAT game is, even though it does incorporate linearities. It is not confined to linearities like the frustrated mathematicians who are convinced that there's no shortcuts to long sequence calculations and that those bogus time travel paradoxes means that time travel is impossible.
Well, Stephen--time just doesn't work that way. Just don't give up on trying to understand it. The reason why the mathematic proof of "The ABC Conjecture" had to take no less than 500 pages is because even among high level theoretic mathematicians, they remain frustratingly and infernally too damn linear. That, and their reliance on a faulty number system that treats imaginary and irrational numbers as real things, not to mention inable to establish accurately the precise ratio of Pi. Seriously--"quadratic time" talked about re: the Wagner-Fischer algorithm is clearly an improvement over strictly linear computing, but you braniacs still can't figure out the branched conditional exclusion chess game method of narrowing that down even one bit? While we have computers that are capable of playing chess using that method?? Gimme a stinkin' break already. You guys grasp the mathematics of fractals but you fall down on THIS job. Sheesh.
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You were expecting maybe a lengthy screed about the Dem debates, hm? It's too early.
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Friday, July 25, 2014
Suffered malware attack via NCH Software, plus update
Tuesday Mini-UPDATE: --
My main machine contracted a bad case of malware in the form of SafeSearch, which will not uninstall even when you do a system restore to a previous restore point. Had to return to Factory Condition and have to figure out how the dingus machine will recognize a previous backup, which it refuses to do now. Why? It appears to operate like the old fashioned TSR type programs did. It certainly has a behavior pattern of a TSR.
The next person using a search engine on the term SafeSearch will get this post, among others, and what I have to convey to you guys is this: it appears to be a TSR type trojan and even cleaning your Registry won't get rid of it, and it is also piggybacked with DeltaSearch and you have to hunt up info on BOTH. Most info out on the web is inadequate in this regard. I've done a Factory Condition restoration but I've also put a block in the router for keywords SafeSearch safesear.ch deltasearch and delta.
When/if I get more information on this bastard, I'll update this post with it.
I posted a similar status update on Facebook, and one of my friends recommended Ubuntu, which is the latest version of Linux, which, in its turn, is a version of the very very very old Unix, with which I'm more familiar. I'll repeat my reply to this person here on this blog:
Right now I'm trying the system "repair disk", which did locate my backup set, so now I'm optimistic. The problems I had with Unix was the command set and that infernal system text editor, which was extremely user-unfriendly, and I'm speaking as a person experienced with Wordstar and EDLIN. The reason I've stuck it out with Microsoft is because I knew Microsoft when it was still using C/PM. Me & Gates go back to the beginning.
Yup--all the way back to the very C/PM beginning, when Gates was still playing in his garage, and it's my familiarity with Unix that has ruined me on Linux/Ubuntu...but...if enough of this snit happens, I'm not far away from changing my mind about that.
Malware UPDATE: I found the .exe file that was running but when I edit it, it gets reinstalled by something and YES I found my system backup files infected as well. This is gonna take a lot of quality time by the looks of it.
I found the file spro.exe to be running while my browsers got hijacked, and that's found under User\name\AppData\Local\SearchProtect. There's also an uninstall.exe file there, and when I ran it, it did look like the program actually got uninstalled. But when I clicked on a browser, it was still hijacking the browser. This is gonna be a long, long battle {sigh}.
....and I see that people in China are very interested in this post. Hehehehe--you guys ain't whupped me yet, and I have my ways of locating TSRs. It...Is...ON!
Recognize this line, guys? : Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a
How about this one? windows_tracing_logfile=C:\BVTBin\Tests\installpackage\csilogfile.log
Or this one? ComSpec=C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe
Yeah, I lifted those out of your program. And I speak hexadecimal fluently. There's nothing like actually reading the trojan program to find out where the TSR is installed, now, is there. You boys picked on the wrong gal this time.
Malware UPDATE 2: Origin of my infection has been established. It is #NHCSoftware via what it claims are free versions but instead are free trials. Freeware doesn't expire, but NCH "free version" software does, and when it expires, the malware launches. Boycott NCH Software.
As to locating a TSR, what I found was a bunch of not-exactly-TSRs and they were spread out through the operating system. I'm cured, but reverse-engineering this stuff ain't gonna happen overnight. Yeah, you hackers are too clever by half. At least where MY machines are concerned. Just remember this, hackers--when you leave files on my machines, I can and will use them to find you where you live. It's elementary, my dear Watson--the info you filch from others is of no use to you without you being online too, and when YOU are online, you'd best keep watching over your shoulder.
Almost forgot to add this li'l story of what I did to an ad hacker outfit based in France a few years back. If you're old enough to remember Xupiter, you get the idea of what these guys did, using the name Xiti although their main ops was named Yatoula. They infected my machine, and by reading their files I found their main server and discovered that browser hijacking/ad serving wasn't the only thing they did. I got in the server's back door and found a treasure trove of animated GIF images they lifted from their victims, and I, in turn, lifted the images from them.
I've already posted a few, by the way, last year in between the Turkey Day recipes I posted about in November. ALL of those came from THEM. And now, I shall commence to be insufferably smug for the rest of the day.
I think I forgot to mention, too, that after I got into their server's back door, I also saved pages and pages of the links to their image collection and hot-linked 'em all over cyberspace. I'll bet the damn thing got extremely non-stop busy, ha.
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Hello again, China.
I'm posting a post dedicated just to you, because not only have you been hitting on this blog hard, you've been sending me crap email about how there are new comments on this blog.
Who do you think you're fooling, exactly?
Who do you think you're fooling, exactly?
EPIC FAIL
Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Facebook turns 10 years old, with Freud's ghost; PEGASYS update
Snowmageddon has hit Enid and the first order of business is digging out...of about 3 inches over here, while some OKC guy driving through downtown Enid was saying it was 5 or 6 inches. Yeah, I don't think so.
Turned on the tube, flipped to MSNBC to watch Prof. Jachk Learner, of USC Gould School of Law, talk about Facebook at 10 years and privacy issues...whereupon he used the term "gaslight". Enter Sigmund Freud's ghost, and the ghost of summer Chautauqua in Enid, at this point. The theme was the 1920s and "Anything Goes", with one of the characters having her mental health issues discussed with zero consideration of the impact the aforementioned Austrian had to change American attitudes toward mental health and the American usage of resulting mental health laws to use as a weapon against spouses, nearly all female.
Ari Melber didn't recognize the term "gaslight" and submitted instead that it be called "the Seinfeld Effect--It's not me, it's you". Doing that might make the concept more understandable, but the term "gaslight" evokes the entirety of the history of the practice, as the term originates from a stage play, by Patrick Hamilton, about exactly that, scenes taking place in the time period of the 1920s. It was eventually made into a movie in the 1940s, by the same title, because mental health abuses continued to ramp up between the 1920s and, quite frankly, through the 1960s.
Prof. Learner was saying that today's companies were about the business of creating an online environment where privacy wasn't considered the norm, and in doing so, the fault of being alarmed wasn't their fault but all in the minds of the people online who objected. Yup--that is indeed a classic case of gaslighting. Calling it the Seinfeld Effect does this no justice especially when it makes the concept comical. It is a serious matter indeed; it never should be thus trivialized.
Those of you reading this post and are snowed in are urged to take this time to view the movie "Gaslight", the 1940s movie, keeping in mind that this may very well be happening with online service providers other than Facebook as well. Learn from history lest ye repeat it.
Ummm, no--I will not be attending Winter Chautauqua this year. Or the Summer event either. I've said so before: it's good for the basics and I'm beyond the basics. I don't get much out of it these days and I've got more productive things to do with my time--going is pretty pointless. That's that. Finis.
PEGASYS research update: Found the original Articles of Incorporation filed with the State of Oklahoma. Love me or hate me, fact remains that I'm a helluva researcher whether you plonk me down into a public library, university library, science library, or law library. And as Will Sonnet used to say: That ain't brag--that's fact.
I don't see the City Council mentioned in the corporation laws/bylaws....
Oklahoma State Courts Network
The case: PEGASYS v City of Enid
UPDATE 2: Still doing some legal research but in regards to the public's right to demand public access channels as a public forum, and specifically the Pruneyard case from which came "the Pruneyard Test" utilized in subsequent court cases. If this line of research pans out, that means that the clause in the most recent contract PEGASYS entered into with the City is unenforceable and the City is out of line demanding that City promotion can be demanded as a "priority", as stated in that contract. Interesting.
Basically, even on private property, if the public frequents something or somewhere, it's still a public place, and so this can be said of public access channels, which, by definition, provide access to the public. The City's demands on the channels restrict that access by the public.
The lawsuit filed:
(The following have been resized and margins cropped)
Turned on the tube, flipped to MSNBC to watch Prof. Jachk Learner, of USC Gould School of Law, talk about Facebook at 10 years and privacy issues...whereupon he used the term "gaslight". Enter Sigmund Freud's ghost, and the ghost of summer Chautauqua in Enid, at this point. The theme was the 1920s and "Anything Goes", with one of the characters having her mental health issues discussed with zero consideration of the impact the aforementioned Austrian had to change American attitudes toward mental health and the American usage of resulting mental health laws to use as a weapon against spouses, nearly all female.
Ari Melber didn't recognize the term "gaslight" and submitted instead that it be called "the Seinfeld Effect--It's not me, it's you". Doing that might make the concept more understandable, but the term "gaslight" evokes the entirety of the history of the practice, as the term originates from a stage play, by Patrick Hamilton, about exactly that, scenes taking place in the time period of the 1920s. It was eventually made into a movie in the 1940s, by the same title, because mental health abuses continued to ramp up between the 1920s and, quite frankly, through the 1960s.
Prof. Learner was saying that today's companies were about the business of creating an online environment where privacy wasn't considered the norm, and in doing so, the fault of being alarmed wasn't their fault but all in the minds of the people online who objected. Yup--that is indeed a classic case of gaslighting. Calling it the Seinfeld Effect does this no justice especially when it makes the concept comical. It is a serious matter indeed; it never should be thus trivialized.
Those of you reading this post and are snowed in are urged to take this time to view the movie "Gaslight", the 1940s movie, keeping in mind that this may very well be happening with online service providers other than Facebook as well. Learn from history lest ye repeat it.
PEGASYS research update: Found the original Articles of Incorporation filed with the State of Oklahoma. Love me or hate me, fact remains that I'm a helluva researcher whether you plonk me down into a public library, university library, science library, or law library. And as Will Sonnet used to say: That ain't brag--that's fact.
I don't see the City Council mentioned in the corporation laws/bylaws....
Oklahoma State Courts Network
The case: PEGASYS v City of Enid
UPDATE 2: Still doing some legal research but in regards to the public's right to demand public access channels as a public forum, and specifically the Pruneyard case from which came "the Pruneyard Test" utilized in subsequent court cases. If this line of research pans out, that means that the clause in the most recent contract PEGASYS entered into with the City is unenforceable and the City is out of line demanding that City promotion can be demanded as a "priority", as stated in that contract. Interesting.
 |
| Of interest are the footnotes which reference specific precedent legal cases, possibly brought to bear on the City's demand that PEGASYS place the needs of the City to promote itself over and above (a "priority") over access that the community is within its rights to demand. |
 |
| Another snippet of analysis on the PruneYard Test |
 |
| Part of Supreme Court decision: Justice Thomas, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Scalia, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part. rendered June 28, 1996. |
The lawsuit filed:
(The following have been resized and margins cropped)
The City of Enid's response:
(The following have been resized and margins cropped)Thursday, October 10, 2013
About this blog's statistics recently...
Although this blog is tied to Google Plus, a lot of the recent traffic here has been tied to my activities on Facebook, by the looks of it. I'll explain, of course. Blog statistics have a default setting of viewing traffic on a week-by-week basis. The following screenshot is after the Day's traffic was selected, so it's traffic in the past 24 hours.
Over the past few days, there has been an increased activity on Facebook by IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) which invited me to Like a number of its pages, and for the most part I obliged. In the past few days, hits on my blog posts about Iran and Persia went up quite a bit, while my hits from China, mostly directly via Google Plus, declined. I guess my minders consider me to be under control, ha. For now, anyway.
Prior to that, my association with Inca Trail on Facebook seems to have been driving all the traffic to my Peru posts, and when I posted about the Latin y Persia event in OKC, you guessed it--the hits basically doubled, but they also put me under the Chinese radar for the time being. Seeing Brazil lit up a bit is interesting; I've used Portuguese on only one spot on this blog, but in an update of considerable vintage. Interesting. UPDATE: I just reviewed all the new Adds on Google Plus and apparently an Add I overlooked is a Brazilian. Hey, that works. Hello, Brasil! :) Well, I Added back everybody who Added me tonight, so this should be good.
What this blog's statistics will not show: it doesn't identify individuals--the only traffic sources ever shown are hits relayed by stat-counting websites and search engines. It will identify operating systems and countries of origin, but not individuals. The best I can do is notice patterns like the ones described above. Due to the nature of countries that do not permit unscreened access by their citizens to the Internet, I fully understand the necessity of the use of proxy servers and IP masking. As a former admin of forum boards, and because of interaction with whom I refer to as "my pet Russian" (hi, gri! ^_^), I was usually laxer than other admins regarding the wanton banishment of IPs, specifically or in sets, and would not use Project Honeypot boardware.
Basically, even if I could see your IP, I wouldn't trust it as being the genuine article even if I did a lookup on it. But I can't see your IP, rest assured of that. The traffic to this blog does indeed go through SEO entities first, and they're not talking to me.
After I posted the above, I looked at the stats again, same setting, and it looks like this:
4 hits on this post already. That most likely would be Google Plus people online now, cuz that's how fast that worked. Oh--and I already selected the "do not track myself" option, so I know it's not me.
Also--I'm content to know that even with the number of my Islamic readers has increased, no further challenges to my posting about Islamic law have been proffered. It stands with presumed approval.
And speaking of other questionable people I Like on Facebook, there's the inimitable Arnie Coro of Radio Havana. He's a freakin' junkyard genius who IS Radio Havana. I don't care how your politics run regarding Cuba, or what you think of Cuban jamming ops, or the finger he usually pokes into the eye of the HFCC, but Arnie is a one-of-a-kind technological treasure. Luvz ya, Arnie! (noteworthy material 6 minutes in...)
Over the past few days, there has been an increased activity on Facebook by IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) which invited me to Like a number of its pages, and for the most part I obliged. In the past few days, hits on my blog posts about Iran and Persia went up quite a bit, while my hits from China, mostly directly via Google Plus, declined. I guess my minders consider me to be under control, ha. For now, anyway.
Prior to that, my association with Inca Trail on Facebook seems to have been driving all the traffic to my Peru posts, and when I posted about the Latin y Persia event in OKC, you guessed it--the hits basically doubled, but they also put me under the Chinese radar for the time being. Seeing Brazil lit up a bit is interesting; I've used Portuguese on only one spot on this blog, but in an update of considerable vintage. Interesting. UPDATE: I just reviewed all the new Adds on Google Plus and apparently an Add I overlooked is a Brazilian. Hey, that works. Hello, Brasil! :) Well, I Added back everybody who Added me tonight, so this should be good.
What this blog's statistics will not show: it doesn't identify individuals--the only traffic sources ever shown are hits relayed by stat-counting websites and search engines. It will identify operating systems and countries of origin, but not individuals. The best I can do is notice patterns like the ones described above. Due to the nature of countries that do not permit unscreened access by their citizens to the Internet, I fully understand the necessity of the use of proxy servers and IP masking. As a former admin of forum boards, and because of interaction with whom I refer to as "my pet Russian" (hi, gri! ^_^), I was usually laxer than other admins regarding the wanton banishment of IPs, specifically or in sets, and would not use Project Honeypot boardware.
Basically, even if I could see your IP, I wouldn't trust it as being the genuine article even if I did a lookup on it. But I can't see your IP, rest assured of that. The traffic to this blog does indeed go through SEO entities first, and they're not talking to me.
After I posted the above, I looked at the stats again, same setting, and it looks like this:
Also--I'm content to know that even with the number of my Islamic readers has increased, no further challenges to my posting about Islamic law have been proffered. It stands with presumed approval.
And speaking of other questionable people I Like on Facebook, there's the inimitable Arnie Coro of Radio Havana. He's a freakin' junkyard genius who IS Radio Havana. I don't care how your politics run regarding Cuba, or what you think of Cuban jamming ops, or the finger he usually pokes into the eye of the HFCC, but Arnie is a one-of-a-kind technological treasure. Luvz ya, Arnie! (noteworthy material 6 minutes in...)
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Latest technology renders a prehistoric generation?
Among all the big topics on the talking head programs this weekend was the fact that schools in most states don't require learning cursive handwriting anymore, the excuse being that literacy isn't dependent on that, that keyboarding is the thing to learn in gradeschool.
I'm stepping forward to point out that if Plato had that technology back in his day, we wouldn't have a clue as to who he was, let alone what he wrote, because when technology becomes just two years old, it's perishable, let alone thousands of years. Think about what the term "prehistoric" actually means. As in, history that pre-dates written record.
Just because data is written on silicon, it's not really carved in stone. Picture an archaeologist digging up an ancient personal thumb drive 2000 years from now. Has he discovered the personal letters of some famous person of the past? I'll bet he'll never know.
Related article
The Friday immediately following the date of this post was a day that NHK World ran a story about how the Chinese government expressed similar issues with basic Chinese spelling and it's now periodically running lesson blurbs on China state media, even where it's explaining the root of the nature of Chinese characters, at their basis, hieroglyphic. Hmmm.
November UPDATE: Doris Kearns Goodwin echoed the above sentiment at the 2013 Miami Book Fair International on a panel discussing presidential history (took place on November 24), observing that letters on paper won't exist, by and large, for our current era and therefore it's a lot that's going to be lost to future historians. In another posting regarding the Enid City Council, I did say to Google this and that about stuff that happened just a few years ago, let alone decades ago, and because much of what I wrote back then has been taken off of the Internet by the hosts of those websites, I'm sure nobody can google, say, HuffPo's Off The Bus project prior to the time that HuffPo was sold to AOL. There's a lot that's lost, including my old MySpace blog. Gone. Well, gone off of the Internet, that is. I did make a point of making my own archives of that, but as to the rest? Poof. And Google no longer produces archived (cached) stuff in its searches anymore. It used to.
I'm stepping forward to point out that if Plato had that technology back in his day, we wouldn't have a clue as to who he was, let alone what he wrote, because when technology becomes just two years old, it's perishable, let alone thousands of years. Think about what the term "prehistoric" actually means. As in, history that pre-dates written record.
Just because data is written on silicon, it's not really carved in stone. Picture an archaeologist digging up an ancient personal thumb drive 2000 years from now. Has he discovered the personal letters of some famous person of the past? I'll bet he'll never know.
Related article
The Friday immediately following the date of this post was a day that NHK World ran a story about how the Chinese government expressed similar issues with basic Chinese spelling and it's now periodically running lesson blurbs on China state media, even where it's explaining the root of the nature of Chinese characters, at their basis, hieroglyphic. Hmmm.
November UPDATE: Doris Kearns Goodwin echoed the above sentiment at the 2013 Miami Book Fair International on a panel discussing presidential history (took place on November 24), observing that letters on paper won't exist, by and large, for our current era and therefore it's a lot that's going to be lost to future historians. In another posting regarding the Enid City Council, I did say to Google this and that about stuff that happened just a few years ago, let alone decades ago, and because much of what I wrote back then has been taken off of the Internet by the hosts of those websites, I'm sure nobody can google, say, HuffPo's Off The Bus project prior to the time that HuffPo was sold to AOL. There's a lot that's lost, including my old MySpace blog. Gone. Well, gone off of the Internet, that is. I did make a point of making my own archives of that, but as to the rest? Poof. And Google no longer produces archived (cached) stuff in its searches anymore. It used to.
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Train wrecks and smaller government: workplace safety, cost cutting issues.
Fuel train in Quebec went boom, it's employee's fault. According to any company, all safety failures are employee's fault and never faulty equipment fault or company negligence. Ever.
This situation is the case no matter where you go--when something goes wrong even in a circular coal-feed rail yard, it's the employee's fault and the violation can be found in the safety book, if you're working in a union shop. And if you don't violate safety procedures at the direction of the company, you get a poor performance review and fail to get promoted. This is tradition, and was even the case in non-union Motorola's factories where OSHA, not union contract, held sway. And we know how under-funded OSHA has been since our small governmental small minds have had anything to do about it.
Let's review some railroad history: in its earliest days, trains would careen down steep slopes and jump the tracks, or run clean off of a drop-off caused by a bridge getting washed out or sabotaged. That's why the Deadman's Stick got invented. Yeah--it's an arrangement where the brake is applied to the train as default, released only in the presence of a live man to keep it held off. Man dies by, say, train robber or Indian, train stops dead on its tracks. Man dies, train's dead too. Locomotive engines have been manufactured with the brakes always on ever since.
Corker question: who defeated the train's Deadman's Stick? Negligence doesn't explain the fact that it takes an action, not an inaction, for taking the brake off.
Part of my job at the power plant included railroad controls out in the coal yard. That train wasn't manned either, and brakes weren't an issue because it's the radio control that actively kept the brakes off when the train was in motion. When the radio control was off, the brake was always engaged as default position.
That wasn't the only railroad involved with the power plant, either. On another track, we had tanker car full of chlorine gas used for water treatment while turning the lake water into boiler circulation water, for steam generation. While the coal yard train, with engine, went around in circles (delivering coal from the point where it was railed in to the point where it was fed to a crusher and then fed, on conveyor belts, to the generating plant), the rails that brought in the chlorine tanks that were left with no engines and therefore the cars had their wheels chocked. The brakes on any train engine are always on unless they're deliberately taken off by human or by remote.
Blaming the employee for failure to engage brakes is BS.
(I used to have this tune on a rather old 78 rpm platter; don't remember the artist)
I'm adding this sidebar in order to add a link to a site where I found historic railroad jargon, so that I can find it again more easily than I could if I bookmarked it. And in the event anyone else may be interested in such things. Catskill Archive
Let's review some railroad history: in its earliest days, trains would careen down steep slopes and jump the tracks, or run clean off of a drop-off caused by a bridge getting washed out or sabotaged. That's why the Deadman's Stick got invented. Yeah--it's an arrangement where the brake is applied to the train as default, released only in the presence of a live man to keep it held off. Man dies by, say, train robber or Indian, train stops dead on its tracks. Man dies, train's dead too. Locomotive engines have been manufactured with the brakes always on ever since.
Corker question: who defeated the train's Deadman's Stick? Negligence doesn't explain the fact that it takes an action, not an inaction, for taking the brake off.
Part of my job at the power plant included railroad controls out in the coal yard. That train wasn't manned either, and brakes weren't an issue because it's the radio control that actively kept the brakes off when the train was in motion. When the radio control was off, the brake was always engaged as default position.
That wasn't the only railroad involved with the power plant, either. On another track, we had tanker car full of chlorine gas used for water treatment while turning the lake water into boiler circulation water, for steam generation. While the coal yard train, with engine, went around in circles (delivering coal from the point where it was railed in to the point where it was fed to a crusher and then fed, on conveyor belts, to the generating plant), the rails that brought in the chlorine tanks that were left with no engines and therefore the cars had their wheels chocked. The brakes on any train engine are always on unless they're deliberately taken off by human or by remote.
Blaming the employee for failure to engage brakes is BS.
I'm adding this sidebar in order to add a link to a site where I found historic railroad jargon, so that I can find it again more easily than I could if I bookmarked it. And in the event anyone else may be interested in such things. Catskill Archive
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
History, computer style--only coding geeks can grok most of this.
The missing pictures were linked to Facebook album pics and that's why they're not appearing. Looking into fixing that.
As stated in my Profile, I've been online ever since computers could talk to each other even before the PC was invented. Mainframes were talking to each other on the phone via acoustic couplers using what would eventually become an RS232 standard port for the PC after the PC was invented. Same deal, same standards, familiar rate of 300 baud. I was mainly on an IBM 370 VM/CMS at Academic Computing in my early college years (okay, so I occasionally played a game of Star Trek) where the first language I picked up was CMS (Conversational Monitor System).
Computer language, that is. Forget the French I grew up with, forget the Portuguese I signed up for as a freshman (at the end of the day, it's all Latin anyway)--CMS was the language that would serve me well even today as VM (Virtual Machine) became regarded as some kind of Microsoft novelty when it really isn't. Windows is still evolutionary bloatware that would still take antique WordStar commands in its earlier versions. When MSDOS 2.0 finally came out with the first version of commercially sold PCs, it would still take CP/M commands. Nothing about Microsoft is original.
I did some moving around since the PC was finally invented by IBM (enlisting Intel for the purpose of miniaturizing the venerable IBM 370 onto a microchip that became the Intel 8080 microprocessor). So there ya go--I was already intimately familiar with the thing by the time a whole huge room of computer became small enough to fit on a desktop. Alas, all the moving I did had the effect of my being able to preserve some documentation from this computer history, but also losing a lot. Recently, storage damage due to moisture incursions mandated that I go through all my old packing boxes and scan stuff into today's technology storage media before I completely toss it all, and it's partly in presentation with this blog entry, beginning with record of interactions on the now-defunct CompuServe.
I have a Facebook Album which has a lot of it already scanned in, but just today I located some stuff I thought I'd lost or tossed long ago and pertains to what I put in my Profile on Google Plus: printouts from my CompuServe WITSIG days (aka NETWITS). When I was on there, I had the first laptop ever manufactured, and that was the Tandy Model 100. I also bought a suite of attachments including a 4-color plotter (not to be confused with a printer; the Model 100 could indeed do scientific plotting as a sort of proto-CAD manner), and it was the plotter that preserved some of that irreplaceable humorous chatter that took place on WITSIG with some of my favorite people. I've scanned it, and I will post it here.
"RR" = Ronald Reagan. <>lessa<> was the sysop of the SIG (Special Interest Group), but just as guilty as smartassery as the rest of us NETWITS renegades. Definitely one of the family among such luminaries as Otto Graph and Mahatma Coate. Partial list:
The following duplicates a couple of Users, but my name and ID is listed, and I post this as a proud badge of long standing NETWITS smartassery with seniority.
Of course I noted with much interest that Son of Sister Sam was also in via the Phoenix node of CompuServe. Yes, you would be accurate if you said that I honed smartassery down to a science--but I was not alone. My co-conspirators are still out there somewhere in cyberspace, so keep looking over your shoulder. Typical chatter would be just as off-colorful as it was colorful:
Yeah, that wasn't a condominium we were talking about, and the preceding discourse was omitted because I checked an agreement with Blogger not to post adult content. Among my historic artifacts in storage I also discovered everything I ever wrote as an assignment for all of my English classes, thinking that this particular story was worth writing an essay about, because this is where smartassery surfaced in the first place.
I went from doing battle with a TA who proclaimed that "English is hard" every chance he got to getting not just A+-es on my papers but smiley faces too. Stewart Vyse, you know I'm talking about you, man.
This was basically the launch of the Clara Listensprechen Report as first conceived in English class and then into print on the ASWLC. Whole 'nother tale, that. Anyway...
Ah, the wonderful world of languages. French, Portuguese, CMS, CP/M, which was the proto MSDOS command set; MSDOS proper, and BASIC. I really took to BASIC like a duck takes to water, and that proved useful when I interviewed with Motorola for its USA-1 automated factory project, so despite its acronym, it was NOT a language used by beginners. When I first signed on, it didn't start out with a central computer control system, but they were working up to it. Central computing involved a DEC mainframe, but the individual machine co-ordinators were (ta-da!) Tandy Model 100s. Well hey--that was the ONLY laptop on the market with a shrunken IBM 370 smooshed inside, and I knew how to program the thing like it was my native language.
Not just in BASIC, but also machine language (assembly language).
Served to come in handy still yet again when USA-1 closed down, and two departments later, wound up in the Electronics Materials Operation of Motorola and they had an interesting automated acid dipper I got more or less assigned to: the Autotraq. Learned a new version of BASIC: robot BASIC, which was called RBASIC.
And since my employment at Motorola, I picked up a few other machine languages as well, including one that was proprietary to Westinghouse, whose boilers I was already familiar with, heh.
So there you have it. What was used for calculators, though? Slide rules. What's old is new again (except for the slide rule), and just because it may be new to you, doesn't mean it was invented just yesterday, although the programming language standard these days is C++. @Tipa, if you should come over from Facebook to read this, you should note that not every editor will accept ASCII coding from your keyboard just like Facebook editors can. The following is a test of what low-end ASCII that Blogger will tolerate:
☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○.........◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼.........¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔.......▲▼ !"#$%&'
Confirmed: Blogger editor will accept low-end ASCII code. Let's see how well it does with extended ASCII.
⌂Çü......éâäàåçêëèï.....æÆôöò.....¢£¥₧ƒ.....ñѪº¿⌐...¬½¼¡«»░▒▓│.....┤╡╢╖╕╣║╗╝╜
Ya, I'd say it does well with extended ASCII too. Very good. P.S.--I also speak hexadecimal fluently.
Before that, I was a C&I tech at Illinois Power Co. and member IBEW, Instrument Man 2nd Class. Is this computer history? You bet. The Leeds and Northrup computer which monitored all the subsystems of all three boilers was a classic analogue computer using a truckload of operational amplifiers (op amps).
Before there was such a thing as digital computers, there were analogue computers and not just using vacuum tubes either. There were pneumatic analogue computers and relay computers as well, and the one thing they had in common was that their configuration worked as computational logic gates.
The Leeds & Northrup computer was used for on-grid operations monitoring/safety, but a separate computer was used for combustion efficiency analysis and that was a Honeywell digital mainframe that spoke octal, and generated printouts on not printers exactly--they printed out using EBCDIC on relay-equipped IBM Selectric typewriters.
A third computer made by Bailey was used for ramp ups and shutdowns.
The notations with LN numbers = Leeds & Northrup part numbers. A typical L&N logic diagram follows:
Next is a publication for the employees...What, this isn't the computer history part now? Actually, Illinois Power Company doesn't exist anymore either. It's where the computers were, and it, too, is history.
The following is a sort of map of one of the three boilers I worked on. There were two of these (Westinghouse cyclone-fired once-throughs, universal pressure type) and one General Electric recirc, drum type.
Taking photos of the power plant are usually prohibited, but on my last day at work, before going to Motorola, I was permitted one shot from the ladies' room...
{okay, so I took 3 to make this composite} As dirty and as hot as it was, it had its good moments and there are times I actually miss the ole place, especially that lake. You should see the channel cat and drummers you could pull outta that thing. Oh yeah--I was granted permission to keep my boiler book and hardhat.
As stated in my Profile, I've been online ever since computers could talk to each other even before the PC was invented. Mainframes were talking to each other on the phone via acoustic couplers using what would eventually become an RS232 standard port for the PC after the PC was invented. Same deal, same standards, familiar rate of 300 baud. I was mainly on an IBM 370 VM/CMS at Academic Computing in my early college years (okay, so I occasionally played a game of Star Trek) where the first language I picked up was CMS (Conversational Monitor System).
Computer language, that is. Forget the French I grew up with, forget the Portuguese I signed up for as a freshman (at the end of the day, it's all Latin anyway)--CMS was the language that would serve me well even today as VM (Virtual Machine) became regarded as some kind of Microsoft novelty when it really isn't. Windows is still evolutionary bloatware that would still take antique WordStar commands in its earlier versions. When MSDOS 2.0 finally came out with the first version of commercially sold PCs, it would still take CP/M commands. Nothing about Microsoft is original.
I did some moving around since the PC was finally invented by IBM (enlisting Intel for the purpose of miniaturizing the venerable IBM 370 onto a microchip that became the Intel 8080 microprocessor). So there ya go--I was already intimately familiar with the thing by the time a whole huge room of computer became small enough to fit on a desktop. Alas, all the moving I did had the effect of my being able to preserve some documentation from this computer history, but also losing a lot. Recently, storage damage due to moisture incursions mandated that I go through all my old packing boxes and scan stuff into today's technology storage media before I completely toss it all, and it's partly in presentation with this blog entry, beginning with record of interactions on the now-defunct CompuServe.
I have a Facebook Album which has a lot of it already scanned in, but just today I located some stuff I thought I'd lost or tossed long ago and pertains to what I put in my Profile on Google Plus: printouts from my CompuServe WITSIG days (aka NETWITS). When I was on there, I had the first laptop ever manufactured, and that was the Tandy Model 100. I also bought a suite of attachments including a 4-color plotter (not to be confused with a printer; the Model 100 could indeed do scientific plotting as a sort of proto-CAD manner), and it was the plotter that preserved some of that irreplaceable humorous chatter that took place on WITSIG with some of my favorite people. I've scanned it, and I will post it here.
Yeah, that wasn't a condominium we were talking about, and the preceding discourse was omitted because I checked an agreement with Blogger not to post adult content. Among my historic artifacts in storage I also discovered everything I ever wrote as an assignment for all of my English classes, thinking that this particular story was worth writing an essay about, because this is where smartassery surfaced in the first place.
I went from doing battle with a TA who proclaimed that "English is hard" every chance he got to getting not just A+-es on my papers but smiley faces too. Stewart Vyse, you know I'm talking about you, man.
This was basically the launch of the Clara Listensprechen Report as first conceived in English class and then into print on the ASWLC. Whole 'nother tale, that. Anyway...
Ah, the wonderful world of languages. French, Portuguese, CMS, CP/M, which was the proto MSDOS command set; MSDOS proper, and BASIC. I really took to BASIC like a duck takes to water, and that proved useful when I interviewed with Motorola for its USA-1 automated factory project, so despite its acronym, it was NOT a language used by beginners. When I first signed on, it didn't start out with a central computer control system, but they were working up to it. Central computing involved a DEC mainframe, but the individual machine co-ordinators were (ta-da!) Tandy Model 100s. Well hey--that was the ONLY laptop on the market with a shrunken IBM 370 smooshed inside, and I knew how to program the thing like it was my native language.
Not just in BASIC, but also machine language (assembly language).
Served to come in handy still yet again when USA-1 closed down, and two departments later, wound up in the Electronics Materials Operation of Motorola and they had an interesting automated acid dipper I got more or less assigned to: the Autotraq. Learned a new version of BASIC: robot BASIC, which was called RBASIC.
And since my employment at Motorola, I picked up a few other machine languages as well, including one that was proprietary to Westinghouse, whose boilers I was already familiar with, heh.
So there you have it. What was used for calculators, though? Slide rules. What's old is new again (except for the slide rule), and just because it may be new to you, doesn't mean it was invented just yesterday, although the programming language standard these days is C++. @Tipa, if you should come over from Facebook to read this, you should note that not every editor will accept ASCII coding from your keyboard just like Facebook editors can. The following is a test of what low-end ASCII that Blogger will tolerate:
☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○.........◙♂♀♪♫☼►◄↕‼.........¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔.......▲▼ !"#$%&'
Confirmed: Blogger editor will accept low-end ASCII code. Let's see how well it does with extended ASCII.
⌂Çü......éâäàåçêëèï.....æÆôöò.....¢£¥₧ƒ.....ñѪº¿⌐...¬½¼¡«»░▒▓│.....┤╡╢╖╕╣║╗╝╜
Ya, I'd say it does well with extended ASCII too. Very good. P.S.--I also speak hexadecimal fluently.
Computer Employment Gallery
Before that, I was a C&I tech at Illinois Power Co. and member IBEW, Instrument Man 2nd Class. Is this computer history? You bet. The Leeds and Northrup computer which monitored all the subsystems of all three boilers was a classic analogue computer using a truckload of operational amplifiers (op amps).
Before there was such a thing as digital computers, there were analogue computers and not just using vacuum tubes either. There were pneumatic analogue computers and relay computers as well, and the one thing they had in common was that their configuration worked as computational logic gates.
The Leeds & Northrup computer was used for on-grid operations monitoring/safety, but a separate computer was used for combustion efficiency analysis and that was a Honeywell digital mainframe that spoke octal, and generated printouts on not printers exactly--they printed out using EBCDIC on relay-equipped IBM Selectric typewriters.
A third computer made by Bailey was used for ramp ups and shutdowns.
The notations with LN numbers = Leeds & Northrup part numbers. A typical L&N logic diagram follows:
Next is a publication for the employees...What, this isn't the computer history part now? Actually, Illinois Power Company doesn't exist anymore either. It's where the computers were, and it, too, is history.
Taking photos of the power plant are usually prohibited, but on my last day at work, before going to Motorola, I was permitted one shot from the ladies' room...
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