Dag Spicer from the Computer History Museum leaned over and unscrewed a bolt. Underneath, it read, "I am Going Mad". The operator's job was to look for cold war bombers that never came. I would go mad, too. Look:
The IBM SAGE spoke to me. It was old, but unlike other machines from the era, with crude punch interfaces, it had a GUI, a light gun, and hell, an ashtray. And a big yellow screen. The ashtray was so operators didn't have to leave their posts for cigarette breaks. Spotting incoming planes from the Soviet Union was precise work that needed constant attention.
You see, after World War II, it was believed that bombers were invincible; That their high altitude, distanced attacks from above and multiple engines would allow them to drop their deadly payloads and fly away without any resistance. It was believed that the only way to intercept these attacks was by having planes in the air at all times, to detect them and immediately respond with force.
SAGE stood for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment and its sole purpose was to analyze radar data in real time and relay targeting information to fighter planes' autopilots. It was built by IBM in 1954 based off of MIT technology and was a fore bearer of additional *amazing futuristic ideas* like magnetic core memory, networking, and modems to facilitate communication between the 27 bases. Each of those bases had a SAGE. And a backup that could be hot swapped. The entire system had a then impressive 99.6% uptime in an age when most computers would blow a vac tube at every day or so. The computer's console referred to a much larger back end that was 300 tons and took up an entire floor of a usually faceless concrete building. The software was written by the Rand corporation because IBM didn't know what they'd do with 2000 in house programmers after the project was done, something they admitted was a part of their historically out of touch vision of just how important programmers would eventually become to big blue. The code itself was 250,000 lines long. Nothing compared to a modern operating system on even your phone, but it was the most complex of its time, employing 20% of the world's programming force at the time.
What's sad is that these glorious machines, even at their best and earliest warnings of incoming missiles, would only be informing the United States of the inevitable: there wouldn't have been enough time to scramble jets and intercept a real threat, I would guess because the US is geographically too large to defend. Thank god for the great vastness of the Pacific, the Atlantic, Canada and Mexico.
The SAGE was retired in 1983 when ICBMs rendered them even more obsolete. But before then, adding shame to uselessness was the fact that in the end, the only place to get SAGE replacement tubes was from the Soviet Union itself. The industrial war machine is a complex and non nonsensical thing.
[Computer History Museum, Wikipedia] The Computer History Museum is a wonderful place. If you're in northern CA, I recommend you find a way to stop by. We'll be running pieces from their collection as an ongoing series. Special thanks to Fiona Tang, John Hollar and the amazing Dag Spicer for showing me around.
Dag Spicer from the Computer History Museum leaned over and unscrewed a bolt. Underneath, it read, "I am Going Mad". The operator's job was to look for cold war bombers that never came. I would go mad, too. Look:
The IBM SAGE spoke to me. It was old, but unlike other machines from the era, with crude punch interfaces, it had a GUI, a light gun, and hell, an ashtray. And a big yellow screen. The ashtray was so operators didn't have to leave their posts for cigarette breaks. Spotting incoming planes from the Soviet Union was precise work that needed constant attention.
You see, after World War II, it was believed that bombers were invincible; That their high altitude, distanced attacks from above and multiple engines would allow them to drop their deadly payloads and fly away without any resistance. It was believed that the only way to intercept these attacks was by having planes in the air at all times, to detect them and immediately respond with force.
SAGE stood for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment and its sole purpose was to analyze radar data in real time and relay targeting information to fighter planes' autopilots. It was built by IBM in 1954 based off of MIT technology and was a fore bearer of additional *amazing futuristic ideas* like magnetic core memory, networking, and modems to facilitate communication between the 27 bases. Each of those bases had a SAGE. And a backup that could be hot swapped. The entire system had a then impressive 99.6% uptime in an age when most computers would blow a vac tube at every day or so. The computer's console referred to a much larger back end that was 300 tons and took up an entire floor of a usually faceless concrete building. The software was written by the Rand corporation because IBM didn't know what they'd do with 2000 in house programmers after the project was done, something they admitted was a part of their historically out of touch vision of just how important programmers would eventually become to big blue. The code itself was 250,000 lines long. Nothing compared to a modern operating system on even your phone, but it was the most complex of its time, employing 20% of the world's programming force at the time.
What's sad is that these glorious machines, even at their best and earliest warnings of incoming missiles, would only be informing the United States of the inevitable: there wouldn't have been enough time to scramble jets and intercept a real threat, I would guess because the US is geographically too large to defend. Thank god for the great vastness of the Pacific, the Atlantic, Canada and Mexico.
The SAGE was retired in 1983 when ICBMs rendered them even more obsolete. But before then, adding shame to uselessness was the fact that in the end, the only place to get SAGE replacement tubes was from the Soviet Union itself. The industrial war machine is a complex and nonsensical thing. Sometimes that complex nonsensicality costs several billion taxpayer dollars.
GALLERY END
[Computer History Museum, Wikipedia] The Computer History Museum is a wonderful place. If you're in northern CA, I recommend you find a way to stop by. We'll be running pieces from their collection as an ongoing series. Special thanks to Fiona Tang, John Hollar and the amazing Dag Spicer for showing me around.
Pop Sci has a neat video of the Teamworkbot, a robot who can watch you attempt to carry out a task, then offer help when you're doing it wrong. But I won't lie...when you fail, Teamworkbot seems pretty intimidating.
As part of a project under the EU's Joint Action Science and Technology team, the Teamworkbot was designed with the goal of having it be able to monitor progress, ask questions, and anticipate what you might do next, helping to prevent errors along the way.
But I really just can get over how peeved the robot seems when you mess something up. [Pop Sci]
Today people were shocked to discover that the first turn-by-turn navi iPhone app to hit the iTunes App Store cost $9.99—per month. Well, get used to it, because there are a lot more subscription apps coming.
Think about it: Carriers like Sprint, Verizon and AT&T regularly charge between $8 and $10 per month for GPS apps. Gokivo is just a made-for-iPhone version of Verizon's not-so-great VZ Navigator. Why did you expect an updated and hopefully improved version of that would cost less?
TomTom, TeleNav and Navigon are all expected to be launching their own turn-by-turn navi apps for iPhone before the year is out, and it would be a shock to me if they went any less than $10-per-month.
The question is, are they worth it?
Because we're talking turn-by-turn navi apps, the numbers are easy to break down. Not only do we know what carriers charge already, but we know, for instance, that TomTom still lists its PDA software (supports Dell Axim, Sony Clie and Palm Zire, among other extinct devices) for $99.95—without free map updates. At the same time, we know that even the cheapest decent portable navigators, like the Garmin Nuvi 250, cost $128 on sale—also without free map updates.
These apps, by definition, don't come with maps loaded into the phone—they download the most recent ones from a server which the software maker pays for the right to use on an ongoing basis. So add to that the cost of licensing instantly up-to-date (Nokia-owned) Navteq or (TomTom-owned) Tele Atlas map databases, and you see why no navi can just be a $15 one-time app. As Gokivo's creators, Networks In Motion, say on their blog:
It takes a lot of work and money to deliver all these features and functionality that's included in a turn-by-turn navigation app; and unlike product with maps on the device, we are updating maps and search indexes constantly.
This is just one category, but there are many that will need higher pricing or persistent subscription fees to keep them going. This isn't about The Man—Apple or AT&T or "Macho Man" Randy Savage. It's about developers, and it's rough for them when they want to distribute flagship software over a platform that's used to distributing 99-cent iFarts. The transition must come. I hate to say it, but the iTunes App Store needs more advanced software, and if that means higher costs then, for the sake of the iPhone OS's continued growth and viability, I say we get behind it.
This isn't to say Networks In Motion unveiled the pricing strategy in the most graceful way. But what they did to was make the first move. I think everybody in the navigation category was hoping someone else would go first, and Gokivo drew the short straw.
Now come the next questions, like how many devices you can load the software onto. After all, if the download is $100, and you put it on two iPhones, isn't it more like $50 each?
14-yo Sophie Frost was trying to find shelter from a thunder storm when she dropped unconscious and fried like a bag of chips. The culprit: A lightning bolt. Thankfully, this one didn't die thanks to her iPod.
It's not the first time that this happens. Apparently iPods have a tendency to save people from lightning strikes. Like other times before, instead of killing her the bolt killed the audio player, which acted as an electricity conductor taking most of the damage for her. The British teenager was only burnt on her neck, chest, and leg. She is now being treated at Broomfield Hospital, in Chelmsford, wherever that is. Don't know, don't care, she's safe, I'm headed to Atlantic City. Bye. [The Press Association]
Asked if he could have just one do-over, Ballmer replied, "I would probably say I would start sooner on search."
Ballmer's been talking about search now for the last couple years as something Microsoft needs to put more money and effort into. The failed Yahoo deal last year was one play that didn't quite work out. So they're trying Bing.
What do you think? Is search Microsoft's biggest mistake? If you ask me (you didn't), I'd say Microsoft's biggest mistake is the guy answering this question. [TGDaily]
Intel Research showed me a demo of their Platform Power Management system. Essentially, they're applying the smart, quick, hardware level idling you find on a CPU to many system parts. The result: systems that idle at 10x less juice.
The tech is applied to things like USB ports, which in 3.0, will go from polling (clock based, always checking) devices to being managed via events, so they can sleep whenever not being used. And graphics, when the page isn't changing, can be run out of a frame buffer so the GPU and video RAM can sleep. When I say more sleep, I mean for additional milliseconds or longer. This adds up, over the course of a day when people stop to read or step away from their computers. In the past, the OS controlled the power savings, and that required power to process in turn, so you were using the system's power to manage power, keeping those other components from ever really turning off. By doing power management with more granularity, in hardware and software together, you can switching things on/off fast enough to fit in lots of "naps" and you can also do it with less processing overhead.
I'm excited for this tech to go everywhere where there's a chip.
The Rapid Repair crew ventured to France to obtain an early iPhone 3GS, dismantle it, and scope out the inner components. Their discovery? The same 600 MHz CPU powering the Palm Pre (that can actually run at 833 MHz).
Though the two phones share the same CPU and GPU, they run on different chipsets (iPhone: Samsung SoC S5PC100, Pre: TI OMAP 3430). However, this Samsung chipset is also capable of handling 720p video recording, streaming vid conferencing and even Dolby 5.1 audio processing, giving this hardware some serious future potential.
AnandTech also posted an interesting theory regarding this particular chipset and battery life last week after the 3GS announce. They noticed that the CortexA8 processor can use up to 3x more power than the previous ARM 11 in the first two iPhones, yet battery life managed to improve with the 3GS. At the time, they thought the hardware might be using a process similar to Intel's Quick Start technology, which saves power by quickly ramping the processor up to full power when in use, and then dropping it down to an idle state when not in use actually averages out saves more power than running it at more constant power levels.
This might explain the improved battery life. Then again, the increased-capacity battery (1219 mAh, compared to the previous 1150 mAh), might also have something to do with it. [AnandTech and Rapid Repair via Engadget]
Two things here in what seems to be the world's first Twittercide: don't use your computer while taking a bath. And if for whatever reason you do, don't be like this 17-year-old Romanian girl and risk your well-being to Tweet.
The Austrian times says that Maria Barbu was, in fact, in the tub while using Twitter when she likely reached to plug in her charger with a wet hand, electrocuting herself in the process. You smell that? Yeah, that's a Darwin Award in the making. [Austrian Times]
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Dag Spicer from the Computer History Museum leaned over and unscrewed a bolt. Underneath, it read, "I am Going Mad". The operator's job was to look for cold war bombers that never came. I would go mad, too. Look:
Pop Sci has a neat video of the 
Today people were 
14-yo Sophie Frost was trying to find shelter from a thunder storm when she dropped unconscious and fried like a bag of chips. The culprit: A lightning bolt. Thankfully, 
Asked if he could have just one do-over, Ballmer replied, "I would probably say I would start sooner on search."
The 
While we've been working hard all week, Kotaku's been writing about 
Two things here in what seems to be the