The Ford computer (named for Hannibal Ford, of Ford Instruments--which itself apparently became part of the Sperry Rand company)---was a marvel.

It was the gunnery computer until the 1970s aboard USN ships---when computers took over.
And apparently, remained the main battery computer (augmented by drone spotting?) onboard the battleships...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer

Thanks for this footage.

Your video, What does a computer mouse see?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

*food

Yep, like me with instructions for computer and electronic stuff.

Bob,

Here's where we agree on something.

I came from amazing wealth, like total top .01%, then lost everything and ended up in absolute poverty. I taught myself a valuable skill and kept building and building on it. It started with shit jobs, but I kept learning and doing more and never stopped believing in myself or in my ability to better my circumstance. I went to college and learned how to learn more efficiently. Even now, I'm improving my skills on a daily basis. 40 years later, now I'm in the 1%.

This is America to me, one part of it: that in America, you at least have a chance -- however small, however improbable -- to better yourself through your own skills, drive and determination. It's not a 100% guarantee, but I honestly haven't seen another country that fosters this attitude.

For the nb, did I have a leg up? Definitely. I was born with an extraordinary mind into a hyper-affluent family. As a child I went to the best public schools in America during a time when education was valued above all else. By the time my mom and I were basically on the street, I had enough base knowledge to build on what I'd already learned. I also took advantage of community college when it was all but free ($50 a semester) and was able to take pretty much any class that interested me. I was also able to afford a computer when they were very expensive and complicated.

Finally, I was born a white male and caught innumerable breaks because of that. I have zero doubt that I am where I am in part to this accident of birth, because I was told by cops, teachers and employers, sometimes quite openly and sometimes in coded language, that I was preferred over non-white people.

For all America's sin -- and many be thy score -- the nucleus of true capitalism is still alive.

You could recreate this with the exception of 3D. http://www.algodoo.com/.

Been playing with program for years and it's fairly simple once you play with it for a while.

Algodoo is a physics-based 2D sandbox freeware from Algoryx Simulation AB as the successor to the popular physics application Phun. It was released on September 1, 2009 and is presented as: a learning tool, an open ended computer game, an animation tool, and an engineering tool.

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

Newt, you've already lost.

You didn't lose with Trump in 2016, but with California's Prop 13 in 1978.

The goal of the Neocon movement was to decimate American public education because they knew that an educated population would never vote for the kind of shit they were selling, and because teachers (being educated and all) were a powerful Democratic voting block. Defunding public education was a win/win for them.

It worked beautifully.

The teacher's unions were starved. Public schooling imploded. We went from the most educated populace in the world to the point where 50% of the population can't find their own country on a map.

Then the real screw-job started with the wealth transfer. Unions were busted, jobs were moved overseas. The safety net that kept millions from abject poverty was dissolved ("welfare queens", "food-stamp cheats"). The Middle Class began to evaporate with about 10% climbing up the ladder and the rest being dumped into the street.

For people like me -- people with high-end skills and a college degree -- that shit worked out great. But people who aren't as lucky? Kinda sucks being them. So they got madder and madder. Luckily, there were dark-skinned people that this rage could be directed at. That good ol' American racism? That shit pays dividends if you play it the right way.

Now you have an increasing number of poorly educated people living in poverty with grievances. Hey, guess what -- we have a new tool to focus all that anger and it's called FOX News! They can show you whose dastardly plan it was to keep your poor, white self down on the farm while those FUCKING LIBERALS live it up in the cities!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

See Newt, people like Bob aren't an anomaly, they're the intended end result of a very well-conceived long-term plan by extraordinarily smart people who understood Chomsky, Orwell and Lasker better than you ever will. Bob is now the norm and you are the exception.

Go ahead and vote in Biden or Warren or even Sanders: it doesn't fucking matter because you can't vote out entrenched stupid. No matter who is sitting at 1600 Penn Ave, Bob is sitting in front of his computer, seething and being stupid. He's not going anywhere. He's not going to see things differently and he's damned well not going to get any smarter.

There's a shit-ton of Bobs in this country and their numbers are growing daily. What're you going to do with them? Put 'em in a camp somewhere? Shoot 'em? You cannot have Bobs and the America you want. That leaves you with exactly two choices: you pick up your gun and shoot them, or you pick up your passport and leave. It's one or the other. You might not like the taste of this shit sandwich, but you're going to eat it whether you like it or not.

Also, you think Bob's a little kooky? Go visit 4chan's /pol/, visit whatever 8chan became, visit the comments section of Zero Hedge, read the comments on FOX's YouTube videos: those motherfuckers make Bob look like a goddamn bastion of rationality. Those people, the ones who're yelling at their screens and pounding out febrile screeds? They're armed. They hate you. They want to kill you. The only reason they haven't is because they haven't reached critical mass yet. Give them a couple of years of post-Covid economic collapse and they'll get there.

I'll never forget the most important lesson a Holocaust Survivor taught me: "The smart Jews left first".

Good luck; see you in Lyon.

or... put a 4-way stop, where the main road (and cyclists in danger) would have to stop as well.

Or create a new sign "Cyclists, look left for arseholes"

Even if you don't put a 4-way stop, could certainly have a solar-powered (battery at night) LED "flasher" on the stop signs that would blink when detects movement on main road. A raspberry-pi has enough cpu power. Might cost $20k to install a pole to mount 2 cameras and solar panel(s). This "blinking stop sign" would be so rare, that it would catch drivers attention and they'll be more likely to stop.
(I'm not suggesting raspberry pi are reliable enough for this application, but my point is the computer vision can be done in < 10W, which can easily be handled by a solar panel, even in England)

If this isn't a prank, those objects would have to be astronomically huge to be seen from Earth, even with a powerful telescope, and to cast a shadow that was also visible. I'm sure a quick trigonometric analysis would show this video is probably someone having a fun with their computer.

I played it on my king ant's huge and heavy office IBM P70 portable computer that was a 386 10 Mhz PC. It had a monochrome monitor, internal Hayes 2400 dial-up modem, and no sound card. It was so choppy, but still worth it.

A billion computers, counting a billion numbers a second, will take 10 to the 74 power years to count to googol. To give you some sense of the ridiculousness of this scale, the current accepted age of the universe is 10 to the 9th years.

I know what you mean.

I'll stoop to watch those sometimes, but as a starting point that needs (sometimes lengthy) investigation to know if I'm listening to obscure but real stories or the next round of BS propaganda. They're usually awful, full of mistakes or misrepresentation paired with feigned naivete or ignorance, and are often created by foreign agencies that use the computer voice to hide their accents. When I do visit those rabbit holes, I excuse myself by pretending I'm only getting prepared to contradict it with fact when someone uses it in a discussion....but that assumes I'll follow up with the investigation.

I'll get back to you after reading, but i actually cringed when my dad sent me a video read by some computer generated voice he said he listens to daily.

But.....Bcglorf said: Capitalism (or many unrelated civic freedoms) made science and progress possible. The implication is that without capitalism, science and progress are impossible.
Edit: my mistake, vil said that, not bcglorf.

Also, the video is about contradicting that exact contention.

No they aren't, because America isn't just "an economy based on capitalism", which you yourself pointed out. They all come from innovations in systems and inventions created through American socialism.

Again, pre '68, before America went the socialist route to advance computer sciences, not after. Yes, after we used a combination of socialism and capitalism, we were more successful. That's my point.

China is working on 6g, and nearly ready with 5g. America isn't. That cannot be simply because China stole our advancements since they're ahead of us. They also, as you've admitted, developed better (cheaper/faster) manufacturing methods both because of technological advancements and few or no regulations (which have caused them horrendous issues). Funny enough, removing the regulations for more profit at the expense of the workers/environment is capitalistic, not socialist.

Their 5G is better because it's 1)almost ready to deploy and 2) cheaper. Ours isn't ready for prime time yet, and has used billions in public funds to get where it is. The FCC also proposed a $20 billion fund to expand broadband (5g)....that's not capitalism.

Ahhh, switching topics, eh? I thought the topic is capitalism vs socialism as it relates to invention, not fascism. I'm not going to bite.

Ok, personal enrichment is one of many incentives that drive invention, but invention happens without that incentive daily.

Once again, necessity is the mother of invention, not capitalism or profit.

You miss the point if you claim he contradicts that conclusion, because the systems invented that the examples require were ALL publicly funded. Without the socialist inventions, there would be no capitalistic innovations. No internet=no world wide web. No WiFi means no WiFi. No displays=no mobile computers/phones. No access to phone lines=no data transfers, so no internet, www, etc.

If his numbers are correct, 72% of research spending is public funding, not private. Nuff said.

your contention that ONLY personal profit drives invention or innovation.

I'm afraid I've never argued that, I can lead by agreeing whole heartedly that such a contention is false.

I merely pointed out that in a video about how 'capitalism didn't create the iphone', the authors own examples of innovations that lead to the iphone are all 100% from within an economy based on capitalism. My very first post stated clearly that it's not a purely capitalist system, but that it is noteworthy that not a one of the examples chosen by the author making his point came from a socialist country.

Can you offer a comparative American/Russian timeline of computer innovations
Well, I could actually. If you want to deny the fact that Russia basically halted their computer R&D multiple times in the 70s, 80s and 90s in place of just stealing American advances because they were so far behind I can cite examples for you...

And for some unknown to you reason China is beating the ever loving pants off America lately.
1. Factually, no they are not. The fastest network gear, CPU and GPU tech are all base on American research and innovation. America is still hands down leading the field in all categories but manufacturing cost, but that isn't for reasons of technological advancement but instead a 'different approach' to environmental and labour regulations.
2. Within the 5G space you alluded to earlier, there is an additional answer. Their 5G isn't 'better' but rather 'cheaper' for reasons stated in 1. The existence of their 'own' 5G tech though isnt' because Huawei's own R&D was caught up so fast through their own innovation. Instead if you look into the history of network companies, Canadian giant Nortel was giving Cisco a solid run for it's money for a time, until they utterly collapsed because of massive corporate espionage stealing almost all of their tech and under cutting them on price. China's just using the same playbook as Russia to catch up.

Russia beat America into space

Well, if you want to go down that road the conclusion is that fascism is the key to technological advancement, as America and Russia were largely just pitting the scientists they each captured from the Nazis against one another.

Once again though, my point has never been that only capitalism can result in innovation. Instead, I made the vastly more modest proposal that personal profit from inventions is beneficial to innovation. I further observed that the video author's own examples support that observation, and in that contradict his own conclusion.