Posted on 04/19/2006 7:49:45 PM PDT by grandpa jones
I took a class in which we had to produce some programs using a machine similar to this one...but we didn't have to punch 2000 -- EVER!
TGFWindows!
By the early 1970's only had a few choices in programming languages.
IBM has some strange ones, such as RPG and APL.
Personal note: APL was the first computer language that I ever learned!
FORTRAN and COBAL were the primary languages used, but BASIC was rapidly becoming an alternative. However, being innovative in the IBM controlled world, was almost impossible.
If you were a scientist, FORTRAN was the only language that you were allowed to use.
If you were a bank, then COBAL was the only language that you were allowed to use.
Anything else, was bucking against the endorsed computer languages provided by IBM.
Funny, I still seem to recall reading people saying almost exactly the same things about combustion engines and air streams... Wind being chaotic and all would make it impossible to sustain controlled flight. The human body cannot sustain speeds in excess of 60 mph... nothing but a bullet will ever travel that fast.
Just as there are limits to science, their are limits to nature. We beat sound. We conceive mastering energy-matter transfomations. Hell, we have hand-held devices more powerful than considered possible (and smaller) just 30 years ago.
They started reading electromagnetic fluctuations. Something a little more steady and constant (from our planet) than wind patterns. And we're talking hours notice, not years or months. We already have weeks notice on hurricanes. Days on suspected landfall.
Not asking you to donate to them. Just root for the dark horse once in a while.
Even if you are right about the system, who's to say what scientific benefits we wouldn't achieve from the reading systems they've developed?
I'm predicting a major New Madrid quake in mid May...
LOL! Gads! I ran one of these noisy things in the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game in Juneau in the 1960s.
There's only one explanation - he's hacked into the Bu$hitler Quake-O-Matic (by Halliburtion)! /s
Alamo Girl
PASCAL was invented by physiologists after studying how computer programmers think. It was NEVER intended to be an actual programming language. Of course, the DOD adapted PASCAL for their use and called it ADDA. For the next few years, the military required all new software to be written in the ADDA language.
At the same time, a new Macro Assembler had been created for the PDP-11 computer. As an Assembler, it would produce highly efficient machine code, but had a rather unique property.
You could develop and share subroutines written for other computers, while retaining the ability to translate this software for your own specific computer.
Today, we know this innovative computer language as "C".
That is full of so many inaccuracies I lost count.
I give up, what did I say that was not accurate?
I had to fight these battles each and every day, as we slowly got away from IBM's control.
I guess you don't like Stan Deyo either--even though he successfully predicted the Sumatran Tsunami and many since then.
He has more false positives than he probably would wish. But he seems to be on to something about a great temperature differential on opposing sides of a big plate fault being predictive of a significantly increased likelihood of a big quake within several days of such.
http://standeyo.com/Reports/06_EQ.warning/EQ.warning.html
Sorry, I did not detect that spelling difference.
ROFL..Stan Deyo...complete fraud and clown.
I'm truly sorry for anyone gullible enough to believe his claims of "successful" earthquake prediction.
People seem to be uniquely susceptible to utter BS when it comes to earthquakes..perhaps only surpassed by "alternative" health quackery.
Deyo basically carpet-bombs the earth with vast areas of vague forecasts day after day (especially making sure that basically every plate boundary is covered with a forecast) such that he can claim a successful prediction for any notable quake.
And that isn't even getting into the area of his methodology being utter nonsense.
ALL VALID QUAKE PREDICTIONS MUST HAVE THESE FOUR COMPONENTS:
1) A SPECIFIC time frame for the forecast (beginning hour/day ending hour/day)
2) A SPECIFIC magnitude range (e.g. between magnitude 5 and magnitude 7)
3) A SPECIFIC land area (either a "box" of latitude/longitude, or a radius around a specific point, that is "within 100 miles of LA City Hall" for example.)
4) Perhaps most importantly, a forecaster needs to calculate HIMSELF the probability he'll have a successful forecast by "dumb luck." This requires work, looking at quake catalogs, but other people shouldn't have to do his work for him.
For example, a forecast of "A magnitude 2.0 or higher quake within 200 miles of LA City Hall from midnight Pacific time 4/19 to midnight 4/26" is a completely worthless forecast, because there's such a quake EVERY week.
Any forecast not containing the above elements is worthless and should be ignored. The main way the uneducated get snowed by bogus quake predictors like Deyo and Berkland is them not understanding the truly huge number of earthquakes that occur on a regular basis, and not understanding statistics...bogus quake predictors make a LOT of VAGUE predictions, and then highlight the significant quakes that end up easily falling into their forecasts,and ignore the others.
LOLOL! Thanks for the ping!
oooooooo, you know STUFFFFF!!! I just barely--almost--know what I barely--almost--studied. It was fun; but I didn't make a career out of it. My programming (in BASIC) consisted of making things like Woodstock carrying a sign with my name in it...nothing more than becoming acquainted with a bare minimum of commands.
I'm appropriately impressed.
You helped create what all computer can do today, even if you did not know it at the time.
You know exactly what I am talking about, but it is difficult to explain to others.
Kind of the sort of thing I expected you to say but wanted to see what form you'd put it in and how strong you'd make it.
Interesting.
You seem to ignore his making an emphasis of the temperature differential and to pretend that he is more generic and covers more turf of potential quakes than he does. And, usually he doesn't have time to make a prediction much at all.
He just takes the temp data from NOAA, affixes the colored circles to the areas of significant differential and lets it go at that. The white circles signify the greatest temperature diffrential. And those areas are usually no more than a handful on any given day. And, they are far less than the potential areas for quakes.
I think your broadside is not quite accurate to the facts on his map.
We are just old farts that happened to be around when all of this computer stuff was being invented.
Nobody knew the answers, and the results of today are beyond anything that we could have imagined in our wildest dreams. Today's Internet was impossible!
Thank you oh so very much for your encouragements, Hunble! It was an exciting world back then and an honor to be a part of it at the root.
to play pong of course.
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