No perfect resistors

Nov 30, 2010 GMT

 Recently I was watching a video that Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, the founder of the Xiph.org project had produced on audio and video formats. They did a good job on the video, putting it out in both WebM format and Ogg format, with subtitles in English, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian. They even include the SRT files so other subtitle translations could be done. About position 7:36 on the video, where Monty was describing how "there is no such thing as a perfect transistor, or a perfect inductor or a perfect capacitor" , I burst into laughter. In 1972 I told my college roommate *exactly* *those* *words* while he was studying digital...

CeBIT - Free Exhibit Space Offered to FOSS projects

Nov 28, 2010 GMT

CeBIT, held in Hanover, Germany each year, is the largest IT trade show in the world. Companies come from all over the world to show their goods and services to each other, and to make deals. For several years now Linux New Media, the publishers of various Linux magazines around the world has sponsored a “Linux Park” at CeBIT.For the past three years, in the spirit of “Free and Open”, Linux New Media has offered free exhibit space to Open Source projects. This gives an excellent opportunity for projects to “show their stuff” to both “the choir” of FOSS people that stop by and to other people who are just learning about FOSS. Interested projects have about two weeks to find...

Latinoware 2010

Nov 10, 2010 GMT

 I am at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, attending a conference called Latinoware. Of course I am seeing a few old friends and many new ones, but I am also happy to report that the facilities for Latinoware, which is held on the grounds of the Itaipu hydro-electric plant, have been upgraded to be a very comfortable conference facility. There is a good-size exhibition hall, many different rooms for the different talks, and is well laid out.  The conference attendees are even more diverse this year than past years, with people from Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Uruguay and other South American countries.  Early (for me) in the morning I...

Bell Systems Technical Journals Published

Oct 31, 2010 GMT

My friend Benjamin Scott send some 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. My favorite Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ, for short) was Volume 57.6, published in August of...

Eating Your Own Dogfood

Oct 31, 2010 GMT

 One of my favorite sayings has always been “You should eat your own dog food”. When applied to programming it quite simply means that you should use the code that you generate. I started saying this many years ago when I noticed that the Unix product managers at Digital Equipment Corporation were not using Unix in their day to day work. They had Microsoft Windows systems on their desktop, and would often go over to VMS to use “EDT” (the VMS text editor) for doing “real editing”. One product manager at a very high level even admitted to “hating Unix”, and when asked why they were the product manager of a product they hated said “Where else could I make this...

What if ITs all the same?

Oct 30, 2010 GMT

 Recently I was reading an article that was quoting Steve Jobs about how the Android phones from different manufacturers were all slightly different. He was pointing out that HTC and Motorola were putting on slightly different human interfaces and that this was crazy compared to his iPhone where all the phones were exactly the same. I started wondering what world Mr. Jobs lives in. Is it a world where every car is the same? Every house is the same? Do people shop around for different makes and models of things out of some type of twisted self-hate, or is it that people like to have choice in the way things look and work? As a software developer, I can appreciate the fact...

How much money for memory?

Oct 29, 2010 GMT

 Readers may have noticed that I have a theme lately regarding storage sizes, for example talking about disk drives and the TK50 tape drives. This was in anticipation of purchasing a new “laptop” computer, the first new one I have had in six years. More about that machine tomorrow. Recently I reached into the history museum of my mind and pulled out an old memory board from a VAX 11/780 that we used at Bell Laboratories in the time-frame of 1980. That VAX system used quarter- megabit integrated circuits on the memory boards for its main memory. Since the VAX used ECC correctable memory, it meant that each quarter megabyte of memory had eight chips for the actual data and a...