Those of us who have reached a "certain" age can remember when Bell Telephone owned the phone system in most of the United States. In fact, they owned even the telephones we used (and rented from them). I can remember as a young ham radio enthusiast learning how to defeat the Bell engineers who could spot a second telephone in your house be reading the impedance of the lines. Yup, if you wanted a second phone in 1960 you had to pay 'em for it. One of the good things about the Bell system was Bell Labs in New Jersey. One of the two pre-eminent research institutions in the US during the early years of the computer revolution (the other was Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, CA), many good things came out of Bell Labs. Including the Unix operating system which was declared by the now-defunct Byte Magazine in the 1980s. How ironic that Unix is everywhere and Byte Magazine is... well... dead. Bell Labs researchers have gathered up more than their fair share of Nobel prizes over the years. Seven, I think. Not bad for a place that went out of existence decades ago. The latest Nobel for physics was shared amongst three men; two former Bell Labs researchers, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith each got a quarter of the full $1.4million prize. Their invention was the charge-coupled-device (CCD) which is basically the light sensor you use when you take digital photographs of your kayaking trips. I wonder if the board of directors of Kodak and Polaroid had a shiver-moment back when they discovered that tickling a semiconductor device in just the right way would react to light. The other two quarters (half) of the Nobel prize for physics this year went to Charles K. Kao who was working at another now-defunct firm in - but in England this time - who developed fiber optic cable. Without fiber optic cable we would not have much in the way of broadband network services and none of it would be cheap. So all three recipients of the Nobel prize for physics in 2009 have a direct impact on most paddlers... well any who take photographs and read this on their computer. And long-gone Bell Labs rests comfortably on its laurels. Oops... my iphone is ringing. Did I mention that the iphone (and all the modern Mac computers) runs a version of Unix as its operating system? I wonder where the editors of Byte Magazine are now. Using a Blackberry, no doubt. Craig Jungers Moses Lake, WA www.nwkayaking.net *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 04:36:39PM -0700, Craig Jungers wrote: > Oops... my iphone is ringing. Did I mention that the iphone (and all the > modern Mac computers) runs a version of Unix as its operating system? I > wonder where the editors of Byte Magazine are now. Using a Blackberry, no > doubt. <engage arrogant Unix wizard mode at: 50%> Having used Unix for 32 years now (and its little brother, Linux, for about half as long), I'm well-accustomed to the periodic pronouncements of its doom from the lesser minds inhabiting places like Byte and Datamation. It never quite seems to dawn on such people (if I might dignify these poorly-evolved simians with the term "people") that they've been more wrong every single time they've made the prediction. (I wonder how many of them realize that the little SOHO router on their desk is probably running Unix and that their PVR is probably running Linux?) It is not even a slight exaggeration to say that the Internet that everyone on this mailing list knows was just about entirely built on Unix. For example: - For a couple of decades, almost all the mail servers on the Internet ran sendmail on various flavors of Unix. Now sendmail has competition: postfix, exim, and courier, to name a few. Oh -- they run on Unix too. - The best programs and most widely-used programs for managing mailing lists -- majordomo, and now Mailman -- were designed and built on Unix. - The Apache web server which thoroughly dominates the landscape? (And understandably so, as it's the best available by a huge margin.) Designed and developed on Unix. - So was the HTTP protocol, which is how your browser asks for web pages and web servers send them back. - Oh, by the way: so was the web browser. The first one was built on Unix, and best available one (Firefox) is still primarily developed on Unix and Linux. - And all those fancy features on the web sites you visit? Largely built with scripting languages like perl, PHP, and Python. And yes, that's right: all built on Unix. - Which brings us to the database backends behind those web sites: they're mostly MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Berkeley DB. Same drill. (This is why the acronym LAMP exists: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/perl/Python. There are millions of web sites using this software stack.) - All of Usenet (which latecomers to the 'net probably aren't aware of, but is 30 years old and is the largest distributed discussion system ever built, dwarfing mere insignificant and transient newbies like Facebook) from the NNTP protocol to the INN server, is built on Unix. - And of course, if it weren't for BIND, the reference-standard DNS server, you'd be typing http://1.2.3.4 into your web browser instead of http://www.example.com. BIND is a category-killer: it's so solid that almost nobody runs anything else, and many of the people running it in embedded software products don't even know they are...because it *just works*. - Java. Did I mention Java? Right. - And oh by the way: all the significant work done on TCP/IP for the last twenty-five years. TCP/IP (along with UDP) is what moves most of the bits around around the 'net. It's not just critical infrastructure, it *is* the Internet. It's worth noting that NO significant Internet technology that's shown up in the last thirty years has been developed on any other platform. None. That's not an accident. Which brings us back to Bell Labs, and Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan, and all the other brilliant minds who hatched Unix and enabled the Internet to take huge leaps forward. It was truly a unique place, and it's a pity that there's nothing comparable to it any more -- we're all poorer for that loss. Credits: Nod to: Information Wants to be Valuable http://www.netaction.org/articles/freesoft.html whose main points I've appropriated, and and pointer to: Reflections on Trusting Trust http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html which is Ken Thompson's tour-de-force Turing Award lecture from 1984, and absolutely mandatory reading for anyone who even wants to pretend to have a few rudimentary clues about IT security. Point of order: Yes, there are primitive, incompetently-built web sites and mail servers that run on Windows and serve content via IIS and have MS-SQL backends and run Exchange and so on. These divide neatly into two categories: those that have already been compromised, and those that are going to be compromised. There are no exceptions. Not even Microsoft has managed to run these securely, as we see by the long and ongoing history of major security incidents involving their products, including a particularly embarrassing one just this week at Hotmail. <disengage arrogant Unix wizard mode> ---Rsk *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
---- Rich Kulawiec <rsk_at_rockandwater.net> wrote: > <engage arrogant Unix wizard mode at: 50%> > > Which brings us back to Bell Labs, and Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie, > and Brian Kernighan, and all the other brilliant minds who hatched Unix > and enabled the Internet to take huge leaps forward. It was truly a > unique place, and it's a pity that there's nothing comparable to it > any more -- we're all poorer for that loss. > <disengage arrogant Unix wizard mode> I've only been involved with *nix systems since 1986, and I know about 3% of what Rich knows, but I want to say "Hear, Hear!" And speaking of little brothers, the current technowizards of AT&T, great grandsons of Bell Labs, aren't even capable of building a website that will allow them to take my $$ for the cell phone service they are providing me. It's a pity, that's what it is. And if this has nothing to do with paddling, well, Craig started it :P Steve Whizzer, not Wizard *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
I feel the need to add some balance to all the Unix-praise. While it's true that Unix/Linux changed the world, and while all great software has been developed on Unix/Linux platforms, we should remember that some of the _worst_ packages owe their life to Unix too. - While "vi" is arguably the best and most elegant editor ever, we shouldn't forget that the monstrous "Emacs" came from the same cradle. - Java is the greatest practical joke ever. A language that consists of 90% declarations and then "compiles" to a processor that doesn't exist and never will... Yeah, very funny. To do some actual programming, I'll take Python any time. Back to the topic though: How technology has changed kayaking. I could go on for hours, so I'll limit myself to taking pictures. It's not that long ago that we carried a camera with actual _film_ in it. A picture wouldn't get developed until the film was used up; usually 36 exposures - which could take months, film being expensive. When you finally got your pictures back from the shop and looked through the blurry mess, you'd have trouble remembering what you actually wanted to photograph. Any pictures that were decently exposed and showed something that was still interesting after 3 months of waiting would disappear into a treasured shoe-box, to stay there forever. Compare that to how we take pictures now: First, you select a camera to buy. In the old days, we had to rely on friend or expensive magazines to give us reviews. Mostly the advice was pretty bad. These days, we don't ask friends, we ask Google, in a question like "canon powershot a470 review". Within minutes, you've found extensive reviews from users, test-images, solid comparisons with other cameras and the cheapest place to buy. For a price of a single film in the old days, you buy a memory-card that will store not 36 but 1000 images - over and over. (Remember when a 30Mb harddrive was considered big? My current cheap-as-dirt flashcard is the equivalent of a stack of 100 of those drives - yet that flashcard is considered _small_ these days.) Even the cheapest cameras now include a pretty decent video-mode. My 88-euro compact makes better video than the 1000-euro video camera I used to own. In the old days, we were at the mercy of the shops to decently develop and print our pictures. No cropping, no color-balancing, no contrast-adjustment. Right now, if you want your own dark-room, you don't rebuild your bathroom: You download a piece of software. "The Gimp" installs in minutes (seconds on Linux) and gives you a darkroom that would cost tens of thousands of dollars some years back - for free. And no printed pictures anymore, on the usual 2x3 inch glossy paper, from the mice-infested shoebox. We now _share_ pictures, not only by the internet, but also on our big-screen TV's or highres laptops and computer screens. The phrase "May I show you some pictures?" has taken a whole new meaning. Yes, I _love_ technology. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
Don't forget Alfred, the original Nobel: http://nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/ Where would we be without dynamite? Hook and line is soooo slow! [Mandatory paddling content: "I hasten to say that my own subject is a very minor ripple compared to Rutherford's. It may seem rather like a cyclone when Sir John Eccles arrives from Australia. But in neurophysiology we have none of those vast tidal waves of discovery which shake the world to its foundations and which have such incalculable consequences for good or evil. "Research in neurophysiology is much more like paddling a small canoe on a mountain river. The river which is fed by many distant springs carries you along all right though often in a peculiar direction. You have to paddle quite hard to keep afloat. And sooner or later some of your ideas are upset and are carried downstream like an upturned canoe." Source: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1963/hodgkin-speech.html ] Back to my hole ... Unix my kix! -- Dave Kruger Astoria, OR *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Niels Blaauw <niels_at_nibla.nl> wrote: > > > Back to the topic though: How technology has changed kayaking. I could go > on for hours, so I'll limit myself to taking pictures. > > I still ask paddling friends about their experiences with cameras (Dave Kruger recommended the Canon my wife finally bought after I vacillated for weeks) but Niels is right about the changes technology has wrought on the kayaking world. Not the least of which affects the kayaks themselves. It's no secret that I have several kayaks. But when I look out there I see a kevlar state-of-the-art kayak (at least in production techniques... it's a Mariner II designed a few years back but still, I think, very modern) next to a fiberglass kayak next to a plastic kayak next to a skin-on-frame kayak. That pretty much fills out the history of the production of kayaks, huh? There are few things less natural than kevlar and polyester resin. And even the SOF has a nylon skin impregnated with polyurethane. I would have gone more natural but the seal population in Moses Lake has, alas, declined precipitously. With the current focus on Greenland techniques (and I am a big fan) even that has progressed to the use of kevlar and carbon fiber in paddle construction. Precious few carbon fiber rolls washed up on Greenland's beaches, I'm thinking, but you just can't stop progress. Even so, modern life has mostly changed in the details. I theorized once that a person transported from USA1900 to USA1950 would find a world utterly unfamiliar. Everything would have changed. The transition would have been incredibly difficult. Radio, television, airplanes, telephones, trucks and cars, houses with heat and a/c, electric lights everywhere, jet planes, etc. But a person from the USA in 1950 to the USA in 2000 would have fit in pretty easily. The details of life had changed but the basic culture would be pretty easy to fit into. Cameras are different but the basic premise remains the same. And our fiberglass kayaks look a *lot* better. Telephones in homes would not be that strange and cell phones would just be an extension (after all, they had "walkie talkies" in the 40s). Still, the devil is in those details. We don't fly personal airplanes to work (in fact, there are fewer personal airplanes now than in the 1950s when airports had lines of Cessnas, Pipers, Taylorcrafts, Bonanzas and the others tied down) like magazines predicted; and are still, incredibly, predicting. Goretex is one of those details... outerwear wouldn't look all that different to a 1950s person. The way it works is revolutionary but it's not obvious. I expect "progress" to become even more granular in the future. Nanotechnology, for instance, could affect us in ways we can't imagine now (some of which, according to at least one famous technologist, might not be all that good for us). I think energy will be the biggest change my grandchildren will face whether it will be fusion, efficient and inexpensive solar, hydrogen or something else... it will almost certainly not be petro-chemical. By then we will be reserving *that* for the manufacture of even better kayaks. Craig Jungers (I use vi) Moses Lake, WA www.nwkayaking.net *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk_at_rockandwater.net> wrote: > > <engage arrogant Unix wizard mode at: 50%> > > Having used Unix for 32 years now (and its little brother, Linux, for > about half as long) > I have no wish to burden this list with trash talk about operating systems... my Nobel posting was near enough to the line as it was... but I had a smile on my face as I read Rich's posting about Unix (and Linux). For network engineers the ability to work in *nix is almost essential. In fact Cisco's most up-and-coming competitor is based on Linux (Vyatta) along with many bandwidth tools. For many years I used the term "remote access" only to be met with blank stares. For me it was essential to be able to configure systems from a distance - often quite a distance - but for most people the idea was a non-issue. However as technology improved lots of folks found that they could use remote access to get more work done; or, for kayakers, the same work done but not in the office. This was driven home to me last summer on the muthah-ship as we tootled around the San Juan Islands. I don't have anyone to replace me at work so in order to support my clients I have to be able to respond when I'm needed. For the better part of the last decade I've searched for a PDA that would allow me to do this conveniently. I have a collection of Linux and Palm PDAs that could only do it when there was a wifi access point within range but until the last year or so there was nothing that would let me take a vacation and still feel like I was able to work effectively. Before that a cell phone would let me do little more than talk a client through the keystrokes needed to determine what the problem was; not a very satisfactory experience for anyone involved, I can assure you. It was only bearable because so often my end of the connection was in a kayak cockpit somewhere near Whidbey Island. Suddenly, in what seems like only a few months, that situation has completely reversed itself. My iphone, with a little fiddling (can you spell "jailbreak"?) could get me into my systems securely from the muthah-ship anchored between two little islands off Orcas Island last summer because it could use both an available wifi connection *and* AT&T's 3G cellular system. Now Verizon has a device that will let you connect several computers to the Internet via its 3G and 4G networks. Just yesterday AT&T announced that we can now install Skype (a voice-over-ip application that can let you answer your calls from an isolated harbor in BC's Broughton archipelago while avoiding the severe "roaming charges") on our iphones and use them with no penalty. Access to corporate networks is now possible from many places not even remotely similar to your office. Netbooks, diminutive laptops with no internal CD, DVD or floppy drives, now are available that include the connectivity for these 4G networks; no cell phone required. I once once smug at being able to sit on my sofa in my Spongebob jammies and get useful work (e.g.: billable) done mainly because of Linux or Unix and my knowledge of arcane commands. Now, with these operating systems and their incredible power hidden away in so many consumer devices (as Rich mentioned) anyone can do it. These things can get us all out on the water more often. So it was for many reasons that a story about yet-another Nobel prize for Bell Labs researchers even if the work they did was decades ago. A 20-something girl recently told me that she thought it was "wonderful" that a person of "your age" could function in a connected world. That stopped me for a few seconds until I realized that she - and many of her contemporaries - thought that *they* had invented all this. She couldn't have been more wrong. (They didn't invent sex, either.) Craig Jungers Moses Lake, WA www.nwkayaking.net *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
[Please remove all old content that is not pertinent to your reply including old headers and footers. It's list policy.... this post was modified to meet policy] > Craig Jungers shared: > So all three recipients of the Nobel prize for physics in 2009 have a > direct impact on most paddlers... well any who take photographs and read this on > their computer. And long-gone Bell Labs rests comfortably on its laurels. > > Oops... my iphone is ringing. Did I mention that the iphone (and all the > modern Mac computers) runs a version of Unix as its operating system? I > wonder where the editors of Byte Magazine are now. Using a Blackberry, no > doubt. yep, I'm sure in the old days it was hard mounting that 8mm film camera to your deck and then sending it around via US Mail to all your friends. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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