human-nets@ucbvax.ARPA (12/16/84)
From: Charles McGrew (The Moderator) <Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers>
HUMAN-NETS Digest Sunday, 16 Dec 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 83
Today's Topics:
Administrivia - Hold the Phone!
Computers and People - Networks and Manners &
"Idea Processors" &
Compact Disks (2 msgs),
Humor - Mr. Rogers in the nuclear neighborhood.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 16 December 1984 13:24-EST
From: Steven A. Swernofsky <SASW @ MIT-MC>
Subject: [PARKER: Correction to Levy and HACKERS!]
To: AILIST @ MIT-MC
MSG: *MSG 3521
Date: 12/16/84 07:31:19
From: PARKER at MIT-OZ
Re: Correction to Levy and HACKERS!
Date: Sun 16 Dec 84 07:29:20-EST
From: Randy Parker <PARKER%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: Correction to Levy and HACKERS!
To: bboard%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
cc: gerber%MIT-ATHENA@MIT-MC.ARPA
(Please do not contact me about this program, I'm only posting this as
a favor for interested parties and an old lady with her phone off the
hook.)
A CONVERSATION WITH STEVEN LEVY AND THE HACKERS AT THE COMPUTER
MUSEUM.
Steven Levy will be at The Computer Museum in Boston on Sunday,
December 16, 1984 to talk about his recently published book, "HACKERS:
Heroes of the Computer Revolution."
,
,
,
The CORRECT number to call for information from the Computer Museum
is:
423 - 6758
[The other number rings a private residence.]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 84 21:57:41 EST
From: The Home Office of <abc@BRL-TGR.ARPA>
Subject: Networks and Manners
I'm sure, as a recent contributor observed, "the world will
look a lot different 20 years from now." I don't know if
it follows that we all will be glued to terminals as the primary
form of interpersonal communication.
I've been "laid up" as they say since 1 November and have been
working at home. This will continue, probably, for seveal
more weeks (are you reading, boss?) But for the cat, I am
alone for the entire day.
I miss the old "water cooler," the communal cup of coffee, the
lunch with a friend, passing folks in the hallway, etc, etc.
Worldnet will never take the place of these.
For analogous behavior, we might consider radio amateurs. For
decades, they have squirreled themselves away in their shacks
operating in a pre-cybernetic "Worldnet." Yet, give 2 or 3 of
them the chance to have an "eyeball QSO," and they jump at it.
Brint
------------------------------
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry@Berkeley
Date: 12 Dec 84 06:08:20 CST (Wed)
Subject: Personal Assistants -- a skeptical viewpoint
> We already see a trend towards general purpose idea processors in
> such micro products as Framework, Symphony, Thinktank, Clout,
> Dayflo, Factfinder, and The Desk Organizer.
What we see is, to put it bluntly, the latest fad in microcomputer
software marketing. I fail to see strong evidence of a lasting trend
here. While I'm sure that there are valuable ideas under all that
sludge, I conjecture that there will be much less enthusiasm for such
things after the fad runs its course. Don't get me wrong. I don't
mean that the basic concept -- helping to organize knowledge -- is
silly. What I'm saying is that the current spate of programs will
fade because most of them do not address the basic problems very
well... because we don't know *how*.
Megabytes of memory are not an adequate substitute for lack of
thought. If really spiffo "idea processors" are possible in N
megabytes of RAM, then a convincing (i.e., *not* crude) prototype
should be possible *now*. The conclusion that "everything will be
better when there's more memory" is patently silly; memory helps only
when you know how to use it. A fast comparison of IBM-PC software
with Apple II software will make this clear: yes, the extra address
space helps... but the distribution of damn fine programs between the
two machines is nowhere near as skewed as you might think. (The
volume of trash is much greater for the PC, but so what?)
> A sign of the times: Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, recently
> commented in an MIS Week interview that the next key step for his
> company would be to explore current AI research in depth, and to
> develop new more powerful products that were capable of
> sophisticated qualitative, not just quantitative, information
> processing.
Once again, this is marketing hype. C'mon, *everybody* knows that AI
is the great buzzword of computers right now. Along with "5th
generation", that is. Not one tenth, not one hundredth of these
inflated schemes will ever come to fruition. Hey, guys, this has
happened over and over again: big claims, bubbling optimism, followed
by hard work and severe disillusionment. When will the bubble burst
*this* time?
> Optical disks would nicely interface with the next generation of
> general purpose idea processors. With them one could easily store,
> retrieve, and manipulate all the vital information and minute
> details in one's life: financial transactions, notes for
> miscellaneous projects, diary entries, address books, medical
> records, rough drafts, datebooks, electronic mail, shopping lists,
> statistics, papers, bibliographies, administrivia, programs in
> progress, graphs, abstracts and full-text documents downloaded from
> commercial databases, etc.
I'm surprised you didn't mention recipes, since that is the standard
silly-and-pointless "what you can do with your new home computer"
example. Why in the world would I put my shopping lists on a
computer? The whole "idea processing" fad has overlooked the simple
fact that pencil and paper are remarkably effective ways of doing some
jobs.
> The set
> of storage optical disks for a program of this kind would constitute
> for anyone, in compact and efficient form, an extremely thorough
> journal of his or her life.
Agreed; this would be the biggest threat to individual privacy since
the enactment of mandatory income-tax returns.
> ... (Literary scholars analyzing the biodisks of future Walt
> Whitmans or Virginia Woolfs would be able to reconstruct in
> microscopic detail the evolution of their subjects' works and
> themes, and the interaction of quotidian life events with their
> imaginative creations.)
I wonder how enthusiastic the Virgina Woolfs or (my Ghod!) Walt
Whitmans will be about leaving this sort of audit trail behind. The
whole thing strikes me as a literary scholar's dream, but a
privacy-minded individual's nightmare.
I don't mean to scoff the notion out of existence; it *would* have its
good points. Certainly would be handy for some things... And I don't
mean to imply that big promises from the AI enthusiasts have *always*
proved false. (Hear those afterburners lighting?) I am cautiously
optimistic that there will be *some* useful developments coming out of
the current applied-AI craze. And some of the "idea processing"
widgets actually strike me as being *almost* useful enough to justify
buying one of them rather than a pad of paper, some file folders, and
a pen. Maybe with decent bulk storage they would actually be
reasonable. Maybe.
And optical disks... now *they're* going to be useful. No arguments
there.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
------------------------------
Date: 13 Dec 84 16:55:01 EST
From: DIETZ@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: CD-ROMs
High Technology magazine has a 2 1/2 page article on CD ROMs in the
January 85 issue.
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 84 20:11 MST
From: "Glasser Alan%LSL"@LLL-MFE.ARPA
Subject: storage capacity of a CD
I have a couple of interesting ways of comprehending the
magnitude of the storage capacity of a compact disc. Consider a
CD with a capacity for one hour of music. Suppose the sampling
rate is 50 KHz, and each sample consists of 2 16-bit words, one
for each stereo channel. This comes to 720 Megabytes. By
comparison, this represents 2000 5.25" floppies holding 360 KB
each. It represents 72 10-MB hard disks as used on the IBM
PC/XT, or 36 of those used on the PC/AT. A typical encyclopedia
holds about 40 MB of words, so you can carry 18 of them around in
your shirt pocket. A high-density screen with a resolution of
1024x1024 and 16 simultaneous colors represents half a MB, so you
can store 1440 of these images in uncompressed raster form on the
CD. Of course, there are some pretty good algorithms for
compressing graphic images, so you could probably do a bit better
than that. Anyway, I find these figures impressive.
------------------------------
Date: 11 Dec 1984 20:04-PST
Subject: Mr. Rogers in the nuclear neighborhood.
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow <Geoff@SRI-CSL.ARPA>
To: Info-Cobol@MIT-MC
n034 1025 11 Dec 84
BC-CHEER
(Newhouse 002)
(Note to editors: Karen E. Henderson is a staff writer for the
Cleveland Plain Dealer)
By KAREN E. HENDERSON
Newhouse News Service
CLEVELAND - The strains of Mister Rogers' neighborly theme song no
longer linger on the airwaves at the Perry nuclear power plant, but
anonymous signs on plant bulletin boards assure workers that Rogers is
not dead.
He has only been fired.
Promptly at 7:30 a.m. every day for three months, plant workers
would hear Mister Rogers' reassuring voice crooning over the public
address system: ''It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. ... Won't
you be my neighbor?''
Last Wednesday, Mister Rogers sang for the last time at the
Cleveland plant. Security guards, who had been trying to catch the
culprit who had been playing the Rogers' tape, swooped down a flight
of stairs and caught electrician Larry Nudelman in the act of trying
to cheer people up.
Officials of Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. (CEI) weren't
laughing.
They were especially irked when Mister Rogers came on the air
precisely at 7:30 a.m. two weeks ago when CEI was running a mock
disaster drill at the plant which was overseen by officials of the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency.
Shortly after the theme was played, a CEI official came on the
system and informed workers a test was in progress, and the public
address system was not to be used for unauthorized business.
Nudelman says he believes that was what really got the utility
angry.
Nudelman, 38, of Highland Heights, Ohio, says they took his tape
recorder and tape. They told him to go back to work, but he was fired
from his job with L.K Comstock Inc. two hours later.
Nudelman says he started playing the 50-second tape to cheer
people up and help them get started.
''A lot of guys drive 45 minutes to get to work,'' he says. ''They
feel like they've already worked half a day by the time they get
there. ... It brought a little bit of something to everyone's day. I
had only planned to do it for a week or so, but I'd hear people talk
about it. And nobody said it was wrong or to stop doing it.'' If they
had, he said, he would have stopped.
''Some days it would be raining hard, and Mister Rogers would come
on and say it was a beautiful day,'' says Nudelman. ''Then somebody
would get on the public address system and say that Mister Rogers was
blind.'' It was good for a laugh, he adds.
Officials of Comstock could not be reached for comment.
CEI spokesman Glenn Heffner says Nudelman was fired for
unauthorized use of the public address system. ''The system is
specifically for emergencies and plant business,'' he says.
Nudelman says it has been used by workers in the past. ''Last
Christmas, I guess they had a dog barking Christmas carols,'' he says.
The system is easily accessible, with phones all over the plant.
Security personnel began trying to isolate the area in the plant from
which the Rogers message was being sent.
Nudelman says the day he was caught, guards apparently had been
stationed near many phones.
Although Nudelman says he believes getting fired was too harsh a
punishment, he does not plan to fight it. It is the first time he has
been fired in 20 years, he says, but he is working at a construction
site in Cleveland.
''I won't play Mister Rogers over there, but we do have a radio
going all the time,'' he says.
Though Mister Rogers is gone, the broadcasts are not forgotten. A
notice on a plant bulletin board offered a $1,000 reward for the
capture of the security guards - referred to on the notice as
''gestapo agents'' - who did away with Mister Rogers.
JM END HENDERSON
(DISTRIBUTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE)
nyt-12-11-84 1323est
***************
------------------------------
End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
************************