Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 15: Coming HomeIn this final chapter of "A World of Conflict," Kevin Sites returns home to the U.S., only to confirm what he suspected -- that in the year that he was gone little had changed.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 14: Israel-Hezbollah WarThe war between Israel and Hezbollah shook the landscape in the Middle East.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 13: Sri LankaKevin Sites covered Sri Lanka as violence erupted between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels, pushing a nation with so much to lose back to the brink of all-out war. In rebel-held territory Sites interviewed Tiger fighters about their tactics and reported on the many effects of war still seen in the region.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 12: Nepal and KashmirKevin Sites covered Nepal during a time of sweeping political change that followed mass nationwide protests, forcing the autocratic King to cede power.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 11: Child BrideIn Afghanistan, Kevin Sites met a 12-year-old girl named Gulsoma, whose incredible story of resilience resonated with millions of people worldwide. She was only six years old when she was sold to a neighbor family in Kandahar as a child bride.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter 10: AfghanistanReporting from Afghanistan in spring 2006, more than four years after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban, Kevin Sites found that war is not over in the country.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Nine: ChechnyaIn Chechnya during the winter of 2005-2006, Kevin Sites reported on a region still reeling from lingering conflict between Russia and Islamic separatists. The conflict engulfed Chechnya in the 1990s, and even now, half of the population is yet to return. Those that have eke out a living amid the rubble.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Eight: Iran
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone - Chapter Seven: IsraelIn Israel, Kevin Sites interviewed Kinneret Boosany, a victim of a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv cafe in 2002.
1944: Harvard and IBM dedicate the Mark I computer. Also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or ASCC, the pioneering computer was notable for producing reliable results and its ability to run 24/7.
Harvard electrical engineer Howard Aiken first dreamt up a large-scale calculator in 1937. He knew he needed a corporate partner and first courted Monroe Calculator Company, which turned him down. Aiken went back to the drawing board and came up with a proposal that convinced IBM, whose big product at the time was a punch-card processor. A big plus in the proposal was that it used so many existing IBM components in a new way.
Clair Lake, Frank Hamilton and Benjamin Durfee finished the Harvard computer at Endicott, New York, in January 1943. They demonstrated it to the Harvard faculty members in December, and then took it apart, packed it up and shipped it off to Cambridge, where it was rebuilt in the basement of the physics lab.
The Mark I was a monster: 55 feet long and 8 feet high. It weighed five tons and contained 760,000 components, including 3,000 rotating counter wheels and 1,400 rotary-dial switches, along with an assortment of shafts, clutches and electromagnetic relays, all linked together with 500 miles of wire. Its clickety-clack sounded like a "roomful of ladies knitting."
You fed instructions in on paper tape, and loaded the data on punch cards. It could only perform operations in the precise linear order it received instructions. The tape could not run backward.
The Mark I could handle 23-decimal-place numbers and perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It was also programmed with subroutines for logarithms and trigonometry.
It was slow, taking three to five seconds to do a multiplication. It gave you results through two outputs: teletypewriter and punch card.
Mathematician Grace Hopper of the U.S. Naval Reserve joined Aiken's team at Harvard and was instrumental in keeping the Mark I running. She repaired it one day by removing a moth that had fouled the Mark I's electromechanical innards, becoming the first person to debug a computer. She then coined the term computer bug.
When the time neared to dedicate the Mark I, in August 1944, the Harvard News Office put out a press release giving all the credit for the machine to Aiken. IBM chief Thomas J. Watson was himself so put out that his firm's work was not being acknowledged that he threatened to return to New York, boycotting the dedication and luncheon festivities. Cooler heads prevailed, and Watson stayed for the hoopla, but Aiken and Watson never got over their turf tiff. Years later, when Thomas J. Watson Jr. made a peace offering of a consultant gig at IBM, Aiken refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Hopper and Aiken (also USNR) used the Mark I to help the Navy produce tables for aiming artillery shells and bombs in the closing year of World War II. The electromagnetic machine remained in use until 1959, by which time it was left in the dust by true electronic computers using first vacuum tubes, then transistors, then chips.
And for all of the Mark I's advances, German engineer Konrad Zuse's Z3 model from 1941 may have preceded it as the world's first fully functional, programmable computer.
Aiken went on to build the Mark II in 1947, the same year he founded the Harvard Computation Laboratory and predicted, "Only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy the computing needs of the entire United States."
Source: Various
SAN FRANCISCO -- LinuxWorld is the E3 for many open source visionaries, tinkerers and zealots who rally around the communal ethos of open software. This year's conference is especially charged. As more open source projects like Firefox go mainstream, it's an exciting time for the GNU gurus to show the rest of the world the light.
The conference boasts various keynote speakers such as, Kevin Clark, director of IT operations at Lucasfilm, Ltd., and also featured an exhibition hall packed with booths spreading the good word of the latest open source edicts.
Left: A skull-pture composed of various dead electronics greets visitors outside the Moscone North Convention hall. The skull interacts with passersby, eliciting a creepy electronic voice. The skull was presented by the Alameda County Computer Resource Center which aims to refurbish 1,000 salvaged computers in three days with open source software and donate them to local schools.
Fusion-io demonstrates its silicon-based storage drive. While CPU processors have advanced continuously since 1987, disc drives have always had a hard time keeping up, says Rick White, co-founder and chief marketing director.
“We’ll be able to replace racks and racks of disc drives with just one flash,” says White. “Computers will finally be completely silicon and use a lot less power, too.”
The new flash drives also promise to be environmentally friendly since companies that shift from spinning discs to the new drives would lower their carbon emissions considerably. According to White, a traditional 720-rpm disc drive uses over 300,000 kwh a year whereas the new drive uses less than 100 kwh yearly.
Expo attendees passing by the Fusion-io booth could sign a waiver to ride the bull, er, spinning hard drive.
“We’re putting the show back in trade show,” says Rick White co-founder and chief marketing director of Fusion-io. “Don’t feel bad," jeers White to the drive’s latest defeated passenger, "either way you’re eventually going to have to let go of that spinning drive anyway."
Shelly Milam, dressed as Tux the Linux penguin, and Ariana Parasco, dressed as The Gnu, dance their way around the expo showroom polling attendees on their favorite tech mascot.
“We are doing a stunt to promote Groundwork Open Source,” says Milam. “We’re looking for the next open source idol.”
Those who participate have four competitors to choose from; Tux, Beastie, The Gnu and The Firefox. “So far I think Tux is winning,” says Milam.
Here, one unlucky machine blasted with sand and saltwater gets a second chance at life.
DriverSavers Data Recovery displays various machines claimed before their time through unfortunate circumstance, and discusses how their company recovered the valuable data stored on the damaged disc.
"With more people than ever recording their lives digitally, that data has become exponentially more valuable," says Jacqueline Cunningham, a strategic alliances specialist for the company.
“We save data, we save reputations and we’ve even saved marriages,” says Cunningham. “It’s always either personal or financial but either way it’s very important.”
Gloria Galicia, left, and Perla Ibarra, middle, aren't your typical booth babes -- both of the savvy beauties run personal blogs that cover both the operating system BSD and their personal lives.
“I work for one of the sponsors of BSD,” says Galicia. “I’ve never been to a trade show before and wanted to check it out and support BSD.” Both women are onsite to answer questions about the latest version of the OS, PC-BSD 7, Fibonacci edition.
“This operating system has been under steady development since the ‘70s, and we’re a viable alternative to Linux,” says Matt Olander, who manned the BSD booth. “Yahoo’s entire network is run on PC-BSD.”
Possibly the only booth containing natural materials in the entire exhibition hall, Larry Frazier’s display of his hand-carved mobius strips draws a crowd.
“A mobius is a three-dimensional shape with only one edge and one surface,” says Marian Frazier, who manned the booth with her husband. The beautiful sculptures fashioned from blocks of wood, both exotic and domestic, bronze and alabaster befuddle onlookers as they run their fingers along an edge only to end up back where they started.
“People’s eyes sparkle when they walk up,” says Larry. “They’ve been very enthusiastic.”
Rackable Systems' modular data center is housed in a 40' x 8' container. The system's unique design allows the operator to get it up and running in just a couple of hours whereas a traditional data center can take a couple of years to build.
“To run it we just need power, networking and water,” says Jason Coari, Rackable Systems' senior marketing manager. “We’ve taken the fans out of the individual servers and replaced them with central fan bases." The larger fans not only keep the servers cooler and are less prone to break down but they’re also more energy efficient, reducing energy costs up to 80 percent.
The units’ modular status and energy efficiency also makes it a likely candidate to be deployed in disaster recovery zones.
A lost businessman is lulled to sleep by a barrage of geekery, jargon and woefully optimistic philosophies about open software's transformative potential.