Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.
My best friend George (Gyuri) from college is Hungarian and I've picked up a few words (mostly cuss words) from him. One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (how long you articulate it) is significant. Finnish uses doubled letters for this, Hungarian uses accents (a vs á, o vs ó, etc.) for vowels and doubled letters for consonants. I've gotten to where I can hear the difference when listening to George speak Hungarian but it took some effort.
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what this is showing me. I'm running it on my home linux system, which is connected to the Internet via Verizon FIOS. The map shows three red dots, none of which are near me.
I’ve wondered if there should be two string types in C, analogous to different length numeric types. Short strings (“tokens”? “words”?) could be Pascal style strings and longer strings (“buffers”) could be standard C-style null terminated strings. I’ve never tried to work this out for real, it just seems to me that one-size-fits-all strings might not be the best model.
When Gosling was at Sun, he was one of two principal architects of the NeWS Window system. The X Window system was designed for "dumb" display devices and so the display elements were all static, not requiring much work from the server. NeWS was designed to run on a (Sun) workstation, where there was a lot of computational power available, so it was based on Postscript. A NeWS client would send a program to the server, not just static commands.
Gosling, unsurprisingly, designed Java with the NeWS model in mind, where web pages were programs, not just static HTML documents. When I got him to sign my copy of "The Java Programming Language", I asked him if Java was the revenge of NeWS. He just smiled.
I definitely remember that one, one of the first ATCs I attended. I took an NFS course and the speaker told us that after the class was over for the day, all of the Californians were planning to go out and play in the snow! I had planned to show off my brand new "DEV CAR" license plates at that ATC, but the snow was so bad I took Metro. I still have those tags.
It is frequently stated that Hawking used a DECTalk system, but in fact he did not. He used a Speech Plus CallText 5010. They sound similar because DECTalk and CallText were both based on the MITalk work of Dennis Klatt. The full story can be found here:
It’s a reality of cinema that when they do a biopic or a film about a real event, they often have to make changes that enhance the drama. Some of these are reasonable, some not so. In Apollo 13, they upped the drama by significantly shortening the time required to get the LEM up and running as a lifeboat. I’m okay with that. Inserting drama where there was none is less justifiable, as it speaks to the character of the persons involved.
That said, as a retired NASA contractor, I can say that Apollo 13 is highly respected at NASA. Hidden Figures has a lot of fans there, too. In spite of the horrible physics, Gravity also has its fans - some astronauts said it really captured the feeling of being in space.
Agreed. As for the Russian spoken by American actors, my friend, a Russian linguist, said Alec Baldwin’s Russian was fine, but Sean Connery’s was terrible.
Before clicking on the link, I thought it would be and article about Tangier. A friend flew my sister and me down there many years ago. The accent was definitely unique, but calling it Elizabethan seems a bit of a stretch. We did have some of the best crab I ever ate there. Sadly, the island is disappearing, due to sea level rise.
In 2006 my friend and I decided to stop talking about visiting the NRAO and actually go. We picked a weekend and then discovered that that Sunday was the 50th Anniversary open house! There were special exhibits and more of the facilities were open to tours than on regular visitors days. I can highly recommend visiting if you get the chance.
Coincidentally, my friend's last name is Blonder! And he's related to the Blonder-Tongue founder. According to my friend, all Blonders are related, the family name was originally Gottlieb, but was changed to something more Anglo sounding, to avoid anti-semitic discrimination, probably when they immigrated to the US from Russia.
Years ago, someone on Usenet explained that Apple upgrade prices are so high because they use components made from the powdered bones of Unicorns and I truly believe that is the truth.
I used to have a bunch of over-complicated aliases, but due to their limitations, I now use a mix of aliases and functions, with a few scripts in ~/bin. It’s all a matter of using the right tool. I use aliases for simple things, like default options on some commands. Things that need to happen in the current shell, but are too complex for an alias, are functions. That leaves extra-complex things that I don’t want to write a shell function for as programs in ~/bin, which can be shell, or python, or whatever.
I’ve been to the System Source Museum many times and it’s well worth the visit if you are in the area. The G15 is a fascinating system, small and compact compared to the huge mainframe-sized contemporaries of the era.
When I was at the University of Maryland in the late 70s, Schwartz visited the Computer Vision Lab and gave a talk. Sadly, I don't remember much about the talk but I did enjoy meeting her and discussing computer art.
At Pixar, Steve Jobs was always just Steve, never Mr. Jobs. That was also true of his other companies I believe. After I left Pixar, I was accused of named dropping when I kept referring to him as Steve and I had to change to calling him Mr. Jobs or just Jobs.
I don’t speak Russian or any other language written in Cyrillic, but I learned the alphabet years ago for reasons. It has come in handy when looking at pictures of computers and other tech, where many of the words are cognates with English. Words like “register” and “control” are clear in some of the pictures linked to here.
At one point, I considered going into theoretical physics (this would have been in the late 70s to early 80s), but got seduced by computers instead. If I had stuck with physics, I might have jumped on the string theory bandwagon and now, in retirement, find myself regretting that I'd wasted my life on it. You never know.
I will say that when I read "The Elegant Universe" I really enjoyed the early chapters that explain relativity and quantum mechanics and why they are incompatible. I don't think I ever finished the later parts of the book, nor did I read any of the "sequels". I was not very impressed with the NOVA adaptation. Too much glitz, too much Greene.
I grew up in Huntsville, AL, in the 60s and the space program was the main business of the city. My father worked for Chrysler Corp. on the Saturn 1B, and most of our neighbors worked for either NASA or one of the many contractors.
Hello! This was a great read, thanks. I'm slightly amazed that we've never met as far as I know. I was at the U of MD at the same time as you (late 70s) and remember the 1108 and 1106 well. Friends in the Computer Vision Lab on the fourth floor introduced me to Unix in 1979 and I never looked back. I worked at Goddard from 1995-1998 in Building 26 for the NSSDC, then again from 1998 to 2022 in building 28 (SVS) and Building 11 (DCL). My father worked there from 1971 to 1987, in Building 11. It was a wonderful place to work.
My Verizon FIOS router came with the ridiculous default domain "mynetworksettings.com". I haven't changed it yet, because I wasn't sure about .local vs .home and whether changing it would break something. As an OG ARPANET user, I rather like the idea of having a home "arpanet" so I think I'll give home.arpa a try!
The group Clam Chowder, who played at conventions in the Washington, DC area and beyond, did a cover of Benson Arizona that was extremely popular at their concerts.
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.