Presidential Ramblings

Several interesting things happened this month. While your list might differ somewhat from mine, here are some things I found interesting.

First, someone managed to write an Internet worm that does not need an attachment. This means that you can infect your computer by merely reading an email message. Internet malware is no longer funny or clever – it’s terrorism, and the authors should be treated accordingly.
Now on a much more pleasant note, DACS has become a member of the Science Horizons Planning Committee. This means that our club is now a conduit through which you, the members, can participate in the planning and operation of the science fairs and symposiums run by Science Horizons. There will be opportunities to participate as mentors, judges and in many other ways. You can learn more about Science Horizons on their web site, www.sciencehorizons.org. This will be fun.

The IBM 360, the first really successful mainframe computer, had its fortieth birthday this month. Forty years ago IBM introduced the 360 with the promise that it would not change the instruction set of this series ever! Before the 360, buying a new computer, even from IBM, meant you had to rewrite all of your software pretty much from scratch. Every new computer was a completely new design and thus had a new assembly language that was only marginally compatible with any computer that came before. Plus, in 1964, COBOL and other high level languages were either not yet invented or were just gaining popularity, so a lot of the software used by businesses was still written in Assembly Language where the programmer must tell the computer what to do in excruciating detail, one instruction at a time. Early personal computer programmers called this “programming down to the metal”. IBM offered companies a way to escape from this Herculean effort, and when combined with the IBM sales force, the result was industry domination. Today, IBM still dominates the mainframe industry and, yes, there is still a mainframe industry–how do you think credit card authorizations are done is less than a second?

So did anyone learn from this lesson? Well, golly yes! Intel knew from the get-go that the x86 instruction set was the key to controlling the market for processors in desktop computers. So still today, when you first turn on a computer with a 286. 386, 486, Pentium®, II, III, IV – even the Xeon® processors in high end servers–all boot up as a simple 8086, running the same instruction set as the first IBM PC. Once things are running, the software (generally the operating system) switches the processor into its “native” mode so it sheds the limitations of a chip introduced roughly 30 years ago.

Now mighty Intel has had trouble gaining acceptance for the new Intel® Itanium® 2 processor because it runs a new instruction set. Yes, it can run x86 software in an emulator, but this saps away some of its speed. Right now it looks like Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) has a winner in its 64-bit Opteron® processor. In a most ironic twist, IBM has introduced a workstation that runs–can you guess?–the AMD Opteron! The more things change, the more they stay the same–or–it ain’t over ‘till its over. I’m sure one of those applies here.

One last item: this month I got a new digital video recorder (DVR) and I can attest that they are marvelous devices. No, I didn’t buy a TiVo, or a ReplayTV. I ordered Charter Communication’s DVR. For an extra $9.95 per month, you get a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 in place of your ‘regular’ digital cable box. Physically, the Explorer 8000 (the name reminds me of the brooms in Harry Potter) is a little thicker than the box it replaced, which made it difficult to fit into the available space in my TV stand. After removing a piece of the stand I was able to fit the 8000 on top of the VCR/DVD player. The cables were a one-for-one swap with the old cable box.

In operation, the 8000 uses the same digital cable menu and you pick shows in exactly the same way as with the standard box. Naturally, they moved some of the buttons on the remote control, so my thumb is still climbing the learning curve. Like a TiVo, you can tell the 8000 to record every episode of any show on television. I immediately set it to record every episode of West Wind (my favorite show) and have been rewarded not only with the current episodes on NBC but all of the reruns on Bravo as well. It would be nice if you could tell it to record just the new episodes or limit it to a specific channel. Recording The Screen Savers is even worse, as that show is repeated three times a day!Is Charter’s DVR a good value? At ten bucks a month, it will be many months before it equals the cost of a TiVo or ReplayTV purchase. By that time, I might want to move to HDTV so this keeps my options open. Of course some parts of the country get this same service for half the price.

Naturally, I checked out the hacking possibilities. A Google search for ‘Explorer 8000’ yielded several discussion boards. The people on Broadband Reports (www.dslreports.com) do not hold out much hope for hacking the 8000. Right now, there is no way to move a recording off the 8000 and on to other media, like a DVD. While there are both USB and Firewire ports, these are unsupported at present. The hard disk is partitioned in some proprietary way. There is no ethernet port, although the setup screen shows places for two IP addresses. One of these is used to address the box over the Charter digital network for configuration changes, pay per view, etc. The other is, so far, unsupported. Wouldn’t it be nice if a future upgrade allowed a USB ethernet adapter to connect the 8000 to your home network? This is a really new device so we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, a DVR really does change the way you watch television.

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