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Author Topic: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?  (Read 15648 times)

app103

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IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« on: November 20, 2007, 05:02 AM »
In a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court judgment concerning the prosecution of a cinema owner, Associate Justice Potter Stewart completely failed to define what is obscene by deciding that, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material [under discussion] . . . but I know it when I see it." In other words, pornography is - community standards notwithstanding - in the eye of the beholder.

A reasonable (to me) definition of pornography is "that which appeals to base human desires and is contrary to the established moral code of the society." It is with this in mind that I deem the IT industry to be pornographic.


Renegade

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2007, 08:27 AM »
It's no wonder that they call it 'hardware'.  :-[
Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

Ralf Maximus

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #2 on: November 20, 2007, 08:39 AM »
This thread is useless without pix.

SQMDataCenter.jpg

Oh yeah, baby...

Edvard

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #3 on: November 26, 2007, 10:45 AM »
Umm... Is it me, or is the Mainframe running hot today?...

computer era001.jpg

Ralf Maximus

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #4 on: November 27, 2007, 08:11 AM »
Hadn't noticed.  I keep staring at her dual monitor setup.

7.jpg

Deozaan

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #5 on: November 28, 2007, 03:59 PM »
Then there's lust: Tell me you don't long in a completely unwholesome way for a Mac Pro with two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 16 gigabytes of RAM with 3TB of disk storage and an Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics card with two 30-inch Apple Cinema displays (all yours for just over $15,500).

I don't long in a completely unwholesome way for a Mac Pro. I don't long in any way for a Mac Pro. Besides the totally ridiculousness of the article in the first place, he just lost all credibility with that sentence.

 :P

app103

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #6 on: November 28, 2007, 05:10 PM »
I do...if by 'unwholesome' you mean with an evil gleam in my eye and a screwdriver in my hand.   >:D

Ralf Maximus

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #7 on: November 29, 2007, 01:01 AM »
Oh, baby...

2070168575_d4efbbdc59_o.jpg

Grorgy

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #8 on: November 29, 2007, 02:28 AM »
hehe i love it Ralf, but i really hope it isn't doing anything important  ;D

tinjaw

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #9 on: November 29, 2007, 05:07 AM »
That's actually a synthesizer. That is what they used to look like before they went digital and started to just look like electronic keyboards. The one in the picture (as you can see from the upper left) is named Damius. Damius is the name given to TOTO’s Steve Porcaro and David Paich's synthesizer.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2007, 05:08 AM by tinjaw »

Lashiec

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #10 on: November 29, 2007, 07:35 AM »
Isn't that guy in the photo the same Steve Porcaro?

Ralf Maximus

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #11 on: November 29, 2007, 08:54 AM »
Heheheheh... I thought it was an old modem or something.

app103

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #12 on: November 29, 2007, 09:07 AM »
It looks like a giant one of these:

kit.jpg

 ;D

Edvard

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #13 on: November 29, 2007, 12:01 PM »
It looks like a giant one of these:
:-* :-* :-*
I had one of those for my 9th birthday... :warm fuzzy:

I got one for my son too and he's not as interested, although we have a few laughs with the sound effect circuits you can make.

As one who is versed in repairing vintage sound effects, I can tell you those old synths are every bit as impressive as, say, a 682-node supercluster of DEC alphas.
Or heck, even a Cray-1

Ralf Maximus

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #14 on: November 29, 2007, 12:34 PM »
Oooh, Cray.  In a past life I worked for a NASA contractor, and got to visit the computing center at JSC (Building 40, IIRC).  They had a Cray XMP at the time... 1990?  It was still a powerful beast; they used a "regular" IBM mainframe as the front end for it.

What'd they use it for?  Among other things, real-time airflow simulation of the shuttle's wing surfaces.

Whole thing is probably less powerful than the machine on my desk now...


Edvard

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #15 on: November 29, 2007, 03:11 PM »
Whole thing is probably less powerful than the machine on my desk now...

Depends on if your machine can do real-time airflow simulation of the shuttle's wing surfaces. ;)

And the new ones run on Linux  :Thmbsup:

Deozaan

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #16 on: December 18, 2007, 07:12 PM »
Whole thing is probably less powerful than the machine on my desk now...

Here's your answer:

It cost $8 million and performed at blistering 80 MFLOP/s. For comparison, a Pentium 4 2.8ghz can hit about 2.5 GFLOP/s or about 31 times faster. The current supercomputer champ can handle 280 TFLOP/s or about 350,000 times faster.

Target

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #17 on: December 18, 2007, 07:41 PM »
As one who is versed in repairing vintage sound effects

just curious, but just how does one actually repair a sound effect (vintage or otherwise...)?

Target

Ralf Maximus

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #18 on: December 18, 2007, 10:54 PM »
Oooh, thanks Deozaan.  I missed this from before.  So I'm basically using 30x the processing power NASA had in one room to surf the web and play games.  Oddly enough, I'm okay with that.

And now, onto the obligatory pr0n...

1948_ibm_ssec_large.jpg

That, my friends, is the IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) built in 1948.  Operating at a blistering 50 operations per second, it was 140 feet long, had 21,000 relays and 12,000 tubes.  Its moon-orbit calculations were used as the basis for the Apollo missions.

ssec.jpg

While the title is disputed, the SSEC is considered (by some) to be the world's first stored-program computer, in that it used paper tape for both input, output, and as "buffer" memory for intermediate calculations.  It even had a small amount of digital RAM.  However, IBM avoided using the word "computer" in its sales literature (5600 were sold) in order to give the impression they were trying to replace "human computers", a real job title at the time.

It was programmed using an extremely simple native assembly language, punched onto tape, then read in.  For quick calculations like your familiar 4-function calculator the operator could utilize the handy plug-board.

It was a speed demon for its day:

"For each position of the moon, the operations required for calculating and checking results totaled 11,000 additions and subtractions, 9,000 multiplications, and 2,000 table look-ups. Each equation to be solved required the evaluation of about 1,600 terms — altogether an impressive amount of arithmetic which the SSEC could polish off in seven minutes for the benefit of the spectators."

The main control desk was one of its more beautiful features:

003.jpg

Ooh, baby... blink those lights for me.  You know I like it...

(You can read all about the SSEC and its gigantic brethren at the Columbia University Computing History Archive.)
« Last Edit: December 19, 2007, 02:26 AM by Ralf Maximus »

Darwin

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #19 on: December 18, 2007, 10:58 PM »
Now that is COOL. Thanks for sharing this, Ralf. The whole thing is beautiful - even breathtaking. And my cell phone is more powerful. Crazy.

Edvard

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #20 on: December 19, 2007, 02:15 PM »
Deozaan: Point taken...  :Thmbsup:
Target: To clarify; I'm all about the little boxes and gadgets that make your electrified instrument do goofy noises. Everything from Guitar Effects to Tape Delays to Tube Amplifiers.

Target

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Re: IT Pornography: Is Getting It All Obscene?
« Reply #21 on: December 19, 2007, 04:19 PM »
Deozaan: Point taken...  :Thmbsup:
Target: To clarify; I'm all about the little boxes and gadgets that make your electrified instrument do goofy noises. Everything from Guitar Effects to Tape Delays to Tube Amplifiers.

cool! (i did get that, but just couldn't resist asking anyways...)

actually, I looked into doing sound engineering at one stage, but was put off by the job prospects (ie nil - the consensus at the time seemed to be that you needed to work for nothing for 12 months to 2 years before you could expect to get a paying job...)

Target