Absolutely Anything Else

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

....

As for the uneconomic or irrelevant, I think it is very economic and relevant. BitCoin and all of these cryptocurrencies rely on the fact that it is hard to crack the cryptography. Now, it has been broken several times by brute force. As far as I understand it, being brief, varous outfits set upserver farms where electricity is cheap and Internet backbone available (e.g. in Ontario near Niagara falls, just as an example) and "harvest" the BitCoin. The word "Bubble" springs to mind. Yet Venezuela, in a rather odd move, is backing the Petro, which happens by the way to be my wife's maiden name, which is a pseudocurrency against the petrodollar which is essentially barrels of oil but denominated in something other than US dollars like normal people do, so you have a pseudocurrency or quasicurrency backed against another pseudo- or quasi- and that will get you out of the mire? You have plenty of mire, crude oil is nothing but mire, but all your politicians took it.

What I meant was uneconomic because you'd need huge processing power that would cost huge amounts.  And irrelevant meaning it'd take years to crack whereas the information therein might not be useful years later when someone has decrypted it.

The Economist has had some interesting articles on Venezuela recently.   I've been following what's been going on.  Some interesting comparisons to Zimbabwe which opted for dollarisation.  Obviously Maduro isn't keen on that but he could go with a basket of currencies not including the USD if he needs that politically.  Doing  what he's doing isn't going to change the underlying mess.  I actually thought the OAS might eventually invade - Brazil was moving troops up to the border.

For Bitcoin, the cheap electricity and server farms are quite popular in Iceland - free cooling helps.   I expect the North and South Poles could be worth while exploring for opportunities like that.  Server farms under the sea a possibility too.

The encryption is not the main thing in Bitcoin that caught my attention as that's a bit so what. It's the distributed ledger which I found more interesting.   If you take a look at the internals, it's rather weird, almost simplistic in how it works. 

SimonTrew wrote:

....
....and that was good fun wrote a lot of 6502 machine code to do tricky things on those, I am not quite so green as I am cabbage looking

I can read punch tape as if it were braille, although I cannot read braille, my aunt was a teletypist and always had reams of cast off punch tape I have no idea what she was trying to do with it. ....

.....Not really, you can't really get that sonar pulse in your shell-like.

But if you hold a half filled pint glass up to your ear, you can hear the brewery.

Ah well, the old 6502, that was used in the BBC Micro.  Excellent machine.   We used to load the OS program on PDP-8s using paper tape (actually it was Basic).  You had to load registers through the front panel in Octal to get the paper tape to load.

If you have enough of those pint glasses you can talk to God through the big white telephone.

6502 code still crops up a lot in various embedded microprocessors, it is amended but you can still see the lie of it, more likely the 6510. The BBC Micro was far too expensive, it was designed for schools (here we go again, public money, who cares how much it costs). You could get a Z80 extender board. I think they were 399 quid to the consumer, plus extra for the VDU as you could not shunt it to your telly with the god old UM1223 as everyone else did, had to have composite video. Ridiculously overpriced, this is what happens when you spend public money. My school had Research Machines RML380Z and woo one RML480Z in colour, but we were not allowed near the machines, far too precious, sat next to them doing flowcharts and stuff like that.

I am calling your bluff on you doing a bootloader on a PDP-8 in octal. Yes, that is how it was done. No, you never did it.

I would not agree on that,

this is what happens when you spend public money.

You don't know much about schools then.

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

....

As for the uneconomic or irrelevant, I think it is very economic and relevant. BitCoin and all of these cryptocurrencies rely on the fact that it is hard to crack the cryptography. Now, it has been broken several times by brute force. As far as I understand it, being brief, varous outfits set upserver farms where electricity is cheap and Internet backbone available (e.g. in Ontario near Niagara falls, just as an example) and "harvest" the BitCoin. The word "Bubble" springs to mind. Yet Venezuela, in a rather odd move, is backing the Petro, which happens by the way to be my wife's maiden name, which is a pseudocurrency against the petrodollar which is essentially barrels of oil but denominated in something other than US dollars like normal people do, so you have a pseudocurrency or quasicurrency backed against another pseudo- or quasi- and that will get you out of the mire? You have plenty of mire, crude oil is nothing but mire, but all your politicians took it.

What I meant was uneconomic because you'd need huge processing power that would cost huge amounts.  And irrelevant meaning it'd take years to crack whereas the information therein might not be useful years later when someone has decrypted it..

Uneconomic: you are right and not right. It is economic at the moment because it is a bubble (as far as I can see). Electricity suppliers see huge drains on their grids, and once you count the electricity, blah blah blah it is still right now economic for the private players, but it is a bubble that must burst. First as you rightly say, the electricity costs become ridiculous, and people tend to assume Moore's Law but that has nothing to say about power only transistor density, let's assume as transistors get closer they also obey the inverse Moore's Law so that in eighteen month's time you can get twice as much on a chip for half the power, that STILL will not help you.

As for irrelevant, I understand your technical meaning from the point of view of cryptography, you are saying if you read it too late then it is useless, like the birthday card your aunt always forgets to send you. But I was kinda assuming the content of the message is itself entirely irrelevant and in fact can be null, the token itself, the exchange of the tokens is what is relevant, what colour the tokens are or whether they are round or square is entirely irrelevant. I mean your argument about them being irrelevant is irrelevant, because the message body is irrelevant, the cryptographic exvhange of tokens is releant. Once you have that, say with HTTPS, then you can happily chit chat on a symettric key with reasonable chance of security

SimonTrew wrote:

.....
6502 code still crops up a lot in various embedded microprocessors, it is amended but you can still see the lie of it, more likely the 6510. The BBC Micro was far too expensive, it was designed for schools (here we go again, public money, who cares how much it costs). You could get a Z80 extender board. I think they were 399 quid to the consumer, plus extra for the VDU as you could not shunt it to your telly with the god old UM1223 as everyone else did, had to have composite video. Ridiculously overpriced, this is what happens when you spend public money. My school had Research Machines RML380Z and woo one RML480Z in colour, but we were not allowed near the machines, far too precious, sat next to them doing flowcharts and stuff like that.

I am calling your bluff on you doing a bootloader on a PDP-8 in octal. Yes, that is how it was done. No, you never did it.

The BBC Micro was a pricey machine and they were indeed £400 - there was a model A and a model B.  I think one had 16K and the other  32K.   But it had some excellent features such as the dual processor option with either Z80 or 6502 plus more unusually and I don't remember if it was every marketed, the 16032 which was quite a beast back then. In a parallel universe they could have had Unix up on it easily.  I had less knowledge of those processors in the day.  It's a shame they didn't do an add on processor for the BBC using the ARM processor which I had way back then, a good amount of knowledge.  It's probably nothing like the ARM of today.  I believe there are a few BBC BASIC emulators around.   The BBC micro gave a lot of people a start in IT - it was a great project.  I have been toying with the idea of getting the Fluffyettes into the Raspberry Pi (basically a re-run of the BBC Micro).

I can assure you that I was pressing the switches on the PDP-8.  Below you can see them in all their glory - notice the groups of 3 switches (hence the easier use of Octal per register).  It had a massive 4K of memory when I was messing around with it - less than a toaster or microwave now. 

I really liked Digital machines. These were the machines I used in my early professional life. I was intimately involved with VMS (the OS) and various incarnations of their clustering technology on VMS and on Unix.  Clustering was quite an innovation and that technology made it into Windows NT and maybe Windows Server as well.  Commercially it was popular too. Shame about Digital though - taken by Compaq, screwed up, then taken by HP and subsumed into corporate nothingness.

One thing for sure, all world leaders are in the ,"Club" and you and I aren't in it, to quote George Carlin....
All goes back to ancient Babylon , mystery religions , pagan rituals etc.
Just a modern version of the same old blood line that ruled thousands of years ago. Same crap, different day.

I'm not sure US Marines are all that nasty at the US embassy.
At least here years ago before they changed the set up inside it was a more "American" feel when entering the building.
There was a strong handsome young black US Marine in his crisp  white uniform behind the glass.
I got a big smile our of him, maybe he was breaking portocal by flashing his pearly whiles.
He looked great in the uniform, maybe that's why he was chosen to be up front and center.
( I did salute that Marine and say Semper Fi while my bag went through the screening to enter the US embassy, hench his big smile? Maybe I was the only person all day long to joke with him, Marines are people too after all...)

I worked in an office just one week then quit, not my style, thought it was the most boring thing ever to wear heals all day long and have to sit with other office workers for our 15 min. coffee break, bored to death isn't even the word to cover how much I disliked having to be indoors in such a stuffy setting.
My fave job I suppose was from age 18 to 19 when I worked outside made great money and met all sorts of different people while still not actually getting my hands dirty.
Just served trays of food and collected the payments, needed more energy then any other job I ever did though.
Running and standing for 8 hours a day.Bobs Big Boy in Toluca Lake Ca. as a carhop, no skates were worn though.

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

I am calling your bluff on you doing a bootloader on a PDP-8 in octal. Yes, that is how it was done. No, you never did it.

(image of PDP-8)

OK well I have to take it on trust that you did it, the image is from Wikimedia Commons and not uploaded by you as far as I can tell, but yes what you say rings true, you would have three switches to do each octal digit (in binary) so you patently know what you are talking about... I believe you.

I liked the VAX 11/750 very much. VAX/VMS was a really nice operating system. It was HEAVY, basically the operating system did everything for you. I still have somewhere the VAX/VMS 11-750 handbook with chapters on virtual memory, disk operating system, etc etc, and that was just the little introduction, the manuals filled a good bookshelf with RMS, VMS, etc etc etc. The machine language was most peculiar with stackloads of indirect addressing modes.

My favourite still for bizarre processors would have to be the Ferranti Argus M700 that would do fixed-point trigonometry in a single cycle, yet could not subtract one number from another. It was actually quicker and easier to do subtraction by taking sine squared plus cosine squared equals one and working back from that. It was really really good when doing radar etc where everything is radial, polar geometry, since you shouldn't if you get the equations right have too many needs to actually do much in the Cartesian plane. As a general purpose processor it was pretty hopeless though. I suppose these days you would call it a coprocessor or something, that it was incredibly good at doing polar geometry but pretty useless at much else.

Apart from of course its HCF instruction (Halt and Catch Fire).

SimonTrew wrote:

....
Uneconomic: you are right and not right. It is economic at the moment because it is a bubble (as far as I can see). Electricity suppliers see huge drains on their grids, and once you count the electricity, blah blah blah it is still right now economic for the private players, but it is a bubble that must burst. First as you rightly say, the electricity costs become ridiculous, and people tend to assume Moore's Law but that has nothing to say about power only transistor density, let's assume as transistors get closer they also obey the inverse Moore's Law so that in eighteen month's time you can get twice as much on a chip for half the power, that STILL will not help you.
....

More important than all that is the cost of cooling.  Airco means power.  If you look at say, Australia, it'll be uninhabitable in 50 years never mind Bitcoin.  Hungary will be like  Saudi Arabia notwithstanding Orban vagy Turban*. Now wouldn't that be vaguely surreal. 

Moores Law has parallels elsewhere but it still works even after all these years.  But maybe you're missing a point, the factor is 4 times direct improvement - double the performance and half the power but you can also throw in half the price so it depends on which measure you take.  Perhaps a factor  of 8 (i.e. 2^3).

There's a problem in data centres  these days which is rack power density.  A standard rack can have  over 40kW in it and weigh over ton. That's a very dense bit of heat generation. Getting rid of that heat is a major issue.  Cooling would be the issue not so much the processing (you cannot do much about it as an end user with a Bitcoin farm).

   

* Whoever coined that phrase is an idiot - as far as I know only Sikhs wear Turbans, not Islamic people.

The BBC Micro was made by Acorn, and effectively made its name. The model B was just under £400, But the Original Model A was must less. It was very popular with schools because of its build, tough casing so could stand a few knocks. It also later became very popular as a home computer.

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

....
Uneconomic: you are right and not right. It is economic at the moment because it is a bubble (as far as I can see). Electricity suppliers see huge drains on their grids, and once you count the electricity, blah blah blah it is still right now economic for the private players, but it is a bubble that must burst. First as you rightly say, the electricity costs become ridiculous, and people tend to assume Moore's Law but that has nothing to say about power only transistor density, let's assume as transistors get closer they also obey the inverse Moore's Law so that in eighteen month's time you can get twice as much on a chip for half the power, that STILL will not help you.
....

More important than all that is the cost of cooling.  Airco means power.  If you look at say, Australia, it'll be uninhabitable in 50 years never mind Bitcoin.  Hungary will be like  Saudi Arabia notwithstanding Orban vagy Turban*. Now wouldn't that be vaguely surreal. 

Moores Law has parallels elsewhere but it still works even after all these years.  But maybe you're missing a point, the factor is 4 times direct improvement - double the performance and half the power but you can also throw in half the price so it depends on which measure you take.  Perhaps a factor  of 8 (i.e. 2^3).

There's a problem in data centres  these days which is rack power density.  A standard rack can have  over 40kW in it and weigh over ton. That's a very dense bit of heat generation. Getting rid of that heat is a major issue.  Cooling would be the issue not so much the processing (you cannot do much about it as an end user with a Bitcoin farm).

* Whoever coined that phrase is an idiot - as far as I know only Sikhs wear Turbans, not Islamic people.

Yeah I suppose it depends how you measure it, basically you chuck in the second law of thermodynamics and you are a bit stuffed, just right now the economics means people will go to all that trouble to "harvest" cryptocurrencies. The basic premise is to make them difficult to harvest, that is, essentially to say they are difficult to counterfeit. And there is always a trade-off there. The Bank of England a couple of years ago finally got around to putting in countermeasures on the fifty pound note, the highest denomination in the UK, the thing is they didn't really need to because nobody forges fifty pound notes. The only time you ever see a fifty is if you buy a car for cash, you take fifties from the bank, give them to the seller, they go back to the bank. A fifty in a pub or supermarket is automatically suspicisious by virtue of it being too much, and that the ATMs only give twenties and tens (sometimes fives) so people are en guarde when they see a fifty. The countermeasure does not have to be in the note, it is in people's heads, why is this chap giving me a fifty to buy a can of coke? So actually what gets forged is twenties and tens which are in daily use and people pay little attention to them. (Hint: My wife was a bank manager and teller for many years.)

It is absolutely complete nonsense, all my money is in tulips obviously, but we have been there before. It is essentially the Greater Fool Theory, and sooner or later it will collapse. For an entire country to peg itself to a cryptocurrency seems absolutely astounding to me. All we have is fiat money, and as soon as that fiat is lost, bang goes the currency.

It is quite funny really, I was talking with a chap who is coming to stay in Hungary with us for a few months and he lives in Australia until the middle of next month, and he is a firefighter. They do what they do in the UK, they can tell who is growing cannabis in their loft by getting a thermal camera on it and seeing how hot the roof is. I wonder what it would do if you put it on one of those server farms, must be a lot hotter than a cannabis farm in your loft. Of course you can water cool it or use ethylene glycol which is what I think the VAXen were cooled with, i.e what you stick in your car radiator, but the heat has to go somewhere. The only difference is running a server farm to harvest cryptocurrency is not illegal, although you are going to have to have a shedload of watts to whack through the things.

Heat density is not just a problem in server farms, actually one of the bigger problems is cooling laptops and these days smartphones, as it is very tricky to get the heat out of a very small enclosure. WIth smartphones you tend to do it by lowering the volts, but it still has to go somewhere. WIth laptops, it is patently apparent if you have ever put one on your lap, the back tends to get rather warm.

fluffy2560 wrote:

Moores Law has parallels elsewhere...

Flat screen televisions would seem to be obeying it. But that is not quite a parallel as it is still transistors and diodes.

SimonTrew wrote:

......But that is not quite a parallel as it is still transistors and diodes.

I think the name marketing name OLED gives it away.

SimCityAT wrote:

The BBC Micro was made by Acorn, and effectively made its name. The model B was just under £400, But the Original Model A was must less. It was very popular with schools because of its build, tough casing so could stand a few knocks. It also later became very popular as a home computer.

It was very popular with schools because it was government funded it was a government push to get computers into schools. Actually Research Machines also bid but lost. Fluffster is right, the Raspberry Pi is kind a the next generation BBC Micro, although much cheaper, you can plug things into it, it has analogue to digital converters and stuff so you can run motors and get your bits of electronics from Maplins... well OK not from Maplins these days but from Lomex on the corner by Lehel Piac where the 14 and 12 villamos terminate.... build yourself a circuit, make some simple electronics and so on. I have always been meaning to get one to play with but never quite find the time, but Fluffy is right they are a wonderful way to start coding, exploring, actually finding out how stuff actually works.

It was called the BBC Micro because it was funded by the UK Government, which ultimately also owns the BBC. It was a branding exercise really, and then the BBC would broadcast programmes with here is what you can do with your BBC Micro. Now that was WAAAAY to expensive to get for my family. My brother had an Acorn Electron a few years later, I started with a ZX81 and absolutely loved it. I still have a ZX Spectrum here at home and occasionally play Paperboy on it.

Drastically changing the subject, I must be one of the few people who have actually been fined for not having a TV licence. The licence detector people who I had always assumed were fictitious, were quite happy to accept I did not actually have a TV, I had computer monitors but nothing that had a TV input, and after looking around they fined me anyway. They were perfectly nice about it but fined me anyway. I appealed the fine and got my money back. Without an apology.

If you are reasonably clever and persistent then you get your money back, usually without an apology. It is just another regressive tax, really, and I am not fond of regressive taxes. I quite like the BBC but make no mistake about it, I am still paying for it through subscription, but don't see why it just doesn't come out of general taxation. It is not even hypothecated, the UK government decides and agrees every ten years with the BBC whether to renew its charter and how much money it gets. They stole the money from the BBC World Service, 150 million quid a year down at Bush House, well it is not at Bush House any more, and we don't even get Lilibulero on the hour. Now who in the UK gives a shit about the BBC World Service. So it is easy to steal that. I on't care that much, I have fibre optic internet and all that. Bouncing shortwave off the atmosphere is still bloody important, not everyone has fibre optic internet. Yes I suppose it is imperialist as if we still owned the globe, but I tell you something true, even in Hungary, if people don't believe something, they go to the BBC. It can be wrong, it can be stupid, it can be patronising, but it tells the truth as it sees it, even when it is beating itself up which it usually is. The BBC has an enormous amount of trust, that is I suppose these days what we would say its "brand value". It is probably the best vehicle for free speech in the world, for all its faults, and I am bloody happy that we pay to keep it so.

Yet the way we pay, the licence fee, is absurd. A hundred and twenty quid a year in regressive tax? Just fund it out of general taxation, which you do anyway.

Blind people I think get about 1.50 off, which must be an enormous comfort to them. Deaf people get no reduction at all. Now, that is just absurd. Depending on how visually impaired you are, you might or might not want to watch a bit of telly, they are plugging Audio Description at the moment on BBC and UK Channel 4 (also government owned, although most people don't realise that).

Deaf people can watch telly and there are subtitles and sign language, brilliant, I learn some sign language off the telly too, not much use my knowing British Sign Language in Hungary but even so I learn some of it from the telly.  Yes, the stenogs doing live subtitles make mistakes well rather they are doing stenog then the computer puts it into words and occasionally gets it wrong, but I don't hear any deaf people complaining.

But why not just say it as simple as this: if you are registered deaf, your TV licence is free? Why not just do that? It is done with a stroke of a pen. It doesn't cost much. You already say, if you are over 75, your TV licence is free, whether or not you are deaf or blind or just the grumpy cow in front of me at the post office counter trying to cash in seventeen million farthing pieces? Why not just make telly free for the deaf? We can afford it, we can pay for it.

Where did our ideals go of supporting and helping each other? Where did they go? When did we lose them? About 1979.

SimonTrew wrote:

....
I liked the VAX 11/750 very much. VAX/VMS was a really nice operating system. It was HEAVY, basically the operating system did everything for you. I still have somewhere the VAX/VMS 11-750 handbook with chapters on virtual memory, disk operating system, etc etc, and that was just the little introduction, the manuals filled a good bookshelf with RMS, VMS, etc etc etc. The machine language was most peculiar with stackloads of indirect addressing modes.

Oh, the 11/750 was a baby.  The top one was the 8800 which was rather a big box - with 6 processors if I remember. Digital used to charge a massive amount for software on that.  So when we compiled stuff,  we used to submit the job to the cluster batch queue that ran on a low cost workstation where the compiler cost just a few dollars.  Because Digital machines ran the same code all the way up the range, we could run the same development/compiled code on the 8800 straight away.   

I had a couple of 11/780s once and I tend to think of that as "the standard" machine. I also had a 782 once - floating point processor add on if I remember correctly.  I've still got my VMS Internals book. Must be an rare book now.   It was required bedtime reading when I was a mere whippersnapper of a nerd.  However I believe  VMS is still around and some machines are still working.  It was a very good OS and of course the precursor to Windows NT.

I never fiddled with a Ferranti but I did have some dabblings with a machine called Prime stylised as Pr1me.   It was similar to the VAX machine.  Things then all moved on to workstations thereafter, like the Apollo (that was also absorbed into HP eventually).   That was a very very cool machine the Apollo.  Had a very nice distributed file system.  Silicon Graphics was a nice box - many a movie made on those machines.  Strangely also used for airline flight crew planning - very nice graphics processors with lots of parallelism.

I had some dealings with a strange AT&T Unix box once which was delivered and no-one knew why we'd received it. I unpacked it, set it up, kicked it off and after some hocus pocus, abracadabra I could login to it.  Why we had it was never clear and as far as I know no-one ever used it.  At least no-one came to me to ask for a user name for it.

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

....
I liked the VAX 11/750 very much. VAX/VMS was a really nice operating system. It was HEAVY, basically the operating system did everything for you. I still have somewhere the VAX/VMS 11-750 handbook with chapters on virtual memory, disk operating system, etc etc, and that was just the little introduction, the manuals filled a good bookshelf with RMS, VMS, etc etc etc. The machine language was most peculiar with stackloads of indirect addressing modes.

Oh, the 11/750 was a baby.  The top one was the 8800 which was rather a big box - with 6 processors if I remember. Digital used to charge a massive amount for software on that.  So when we compiled stuff,  we used to submit the job to the cluster batch queue that ran on a low cost workstation where the compiler cost just a few dollars.  Because Digital machines ran the same code all the way up the range, we could run the same development/compiled code on the 8800 straight away.   

I had a couple of 11/780s once and I tend to think of that as "the standard" machine. I also had a 782 once - floating point processor add on if I remember correctly.  I've still got my VMS Internals book. Must be an rare book now.   It was required bedtime reading when I was a mere whippersnapper of a nerd.  However I believe  VMS is still around and some machines are still working.  It was a very good OS and of course the precursor to Windows NT.

I never fiddled with a Ferranti but I did have some dabblings with a machine called Prime stylised as Pr1me.   It was similar to the VAX machine.  Things then all moved on to workstations thereafter, like the Apollo (that was also absorbed into HP eventually).   That was a very very cool machine the Apollo.  Had a very nice distributed file system.  Silicon Graphics was a nice box - many a movie made on those machines.  Strangely also used for airline flight crew planning - very nice graphics processors with lots of parallelism.

I had some dealings with a strange AT&T Unix box once which was delivered and no-one knew why we'd received it. I unpacked it, set it up, kicked it off and after some hocus pocus, abracadabra I could login to it.  Why we had it was never clear and as far as I know no-one ever used it.  At least no-one came to me to ask for a user name for it.

Perhaps it was not an 11/750 perhaps it was the 11/780. We had a little microVAX when they first came out, that was r2d2 on the cluster, and we even had a colour terminal somewhere but most of us were logging in via RS232 cable. It was about twelve feet long, four feet high. It had four tape reels for backups on half inch tape, and a massive 689Mb hard disk. Of the 2Mb core memory, 1Mb was reserved for the operating system, the rest for anyone else. I particularly liked say in VMS the directory syntay if you did e.g. $SOMEWHERE:[my.code...] the ellipsis "..." would mean "and all subdirectories" and that worked absolutely throughout the whole system in a totally orthogonal way. Also that every file was versioned and it would upversion it, save a new copy when you saved it and increment the version, so you could do $SOMEWHERE:[my.code]myfile.trew;9001 and it would have that exact version, but it would also have myfile.trew;9000, myfile.trew;9002 and so on. Admittedly it was a bit hard to do a difference on the versions, but at that time was still better than Unix diff. (Diff tools have got much much better, although still struggle with if you move a block of code without changing it, they won't notice that you just moved it, they will say that you deleted this and inserted that. A couple do, but most don't.)

It had really quite an orthogonal instruction set, so pretty much every instruction could be addressed to pretty much everything. Even the command line of course was programmable in DEC/CLI so you could add syntax and stuff with help prompts to the command line, the command line had its own bloody language to program in, in some I imagine LR(1) grammar ! I suppose you could say Unix had/has that, but I would say that they are kinda at the other ends of the spectrum, UNIX gave you nothing except the bare bones, VAX/VMS gave you everything and so you were trying constantly to wrestle control away from the thing. I wrote a spelling checker in VAXTPU, see, even the text editor had its own sodding language and had the concept of windows and ranges and so on and so forth. It was quite a good spelling checker too. I learned very quickly that the secret is DO NOT PUT TOO MANY WORDS IN. This is not just because of memory limits etc, but actually "teh" is usually a typo even if it might happen to be a Syriac letter or whatever, so actually you benefit by keeping the checklist small. Doing a binary chop on a word list in VAXTPU is really hard work. But everyone used it and it worked really well. Was a bit slow though.

We were only using them as host machines for writing in MASCOT and CORAL-66, manuals again that I have not only got, but have signed by the people who wrote them, who I knew personally and were my mentors. Wow, the idea we have interfaces and stuff, this was really really new, well before the days of COM and whatever, that you go through a controlled interface.

Fluffster we are probably getting a bit too technical even for Anything Else, but it is quite fun chatting about this.

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

......But that is not quite a parallel as it is still transistors and diodes.

I think the name marketing name OLED gives it away.

Possibly. Although I have never found out what "HD Ready" means. I have tried and tried. I am assuming it is a marketing name that is entirely meaningless. Now we have "4K ready".

I forget who said it, probably Clive James, but nobody ever complained about the pictures, they complained about the programmes. Maybe A. A. Gill, brilliant TV critic and insufferable git. I really enjoyed reading his columns, even though sometimes I wanted to brick him with a 16K ZX Rampack.

fluffy2560 wrote:

I never fiddled with a Ferranti but I did have some dabblings with a machine called Prime stylised as Pr1me.   It was similar to the VAX machine.  Things then all moved on to workstations thereafter, like the Apollo (that was also absorbed into HP eventually).   That was a very very cool machine the Apollo.  Had a very nice distributed file system.  Silicon Graphics was a nice box - many a movie made on those machines.  Strangely also used for airline flight crew planning - very nice graphics processors with lots of parallelism.

I had some dealings with a strange AT&T Unix box once which was delivered and no-one knew why we'd received it. I unpacked it, set it up, kicked it off and after some hocus pocus, abracadabra I could login to it.  Why we had it was never clear and as far as I know no-one ever used it.  At least no-one came to me to ask for a user name for it.

Well the Ferranti Argus M700 is in the British Wasteospace end of Rapier 2000, and probably still is. We used to get military hardened processors, Intel used to make them, of course they don't set up a line especially to harden them, just put them through more tests chuck the ones that don't and say these ones passed, Dr Deming must be turning in his grave. Yeah, I have had strange computers like that too. I have a purple wire Itanium well I chucked it when I moved to Hungary but was a prototype Itanium that Intel was pushing at that time, nice architecture on them actually, so it was just sat in my garage with stacks of purple wire and so on, fired it up it worked OK but of course no software to work with it, as nobody had been bothered to cross port a compiler to it, Intel's left hand not knowing what Intel's right hand was doing. Really nice streamlined RISC architecture with a conditional branch on every instruction or rather signal that "do this instruction or don't" so you can really get the instruction pipeline going, nowadays of course the tables have turned because it is not the processor that slows things down, the memory fetch slows things down, and yes you can pipeline but you still have to stuff things in at the front of the pipe as quick as they come out of the back, otherwise the pipeline stalls. Memory speeds have not really kept up with processor speeds so that is usually where the lag is now. And Moore's Law has nothing to say about speed, not even implicitly. THe shorter electrons have to travel the less time it takes, as electrons over copper or silver (ideally, gold is rubbish) are about a third of the speed of light, obviously the shorter you make the distance the quicker they get there, that is yer basic speed equestrian, speed is distance over time. Equestrian sorry I meant equation. Just was backing "Nofatchance" in the 3.30 at Kempton. Anyway, so you can't speed up the electrons, make the distance shorter. Simple, job done. But Moore never envisaged that, never said anything about that. Moore's Law does hold true but tends to get extrapolated to all kinds of things Moore never said anything about. And anyway he worked for IBM, nuff said.

And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.

Thatcher, you are wrong. There is such a thing as society, and you destroyed it. the Conservative Party bashes on all the time about families, everyone is a member of a family, by blood, by marriage, by whatever. The missus and I choose not to pollute the planet with more children, that is fine, but we still are part of society, we still have responsibilities to our neighbours and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and whatever, to make sure they are all right.  I see no difference in "society" and "family", it is not 2.4 children. Am I to pass by on the other side, or am I to be a good Samaritan? Do I have to ask if someone is related to me, check his bloodstock, is he Jewish or black or Roma, to help him out, and hope he helps me one day, or passes the favour on  to someone else when he can?

There is such a thing as society. Thatcher, you destroyed all that. Orban, you are destroying it here in Hungary, you are Thatcher II, you took everything that Thatcher did and are applying it to Hungary, and you will destroy Hungarian society. There is such a thing as society. I pay very indirectly for the Fluffiette's education and free bus passes or whatever. The Fluffiettes pay me back in twenty years when I collect my pension and they are paying their taxes by being successful and fulfilled fluffiettes. There is such a thing as society. We are society. All of us.

We used to have a thing called building societies, in American, savings and loan. Now there is only one left, the Nationwide, which I have been a member of for thirty years now. But it was before that the Nationwide Anglia Building Society, took over Angia Building Society, and various other small Building Societies. My first mortgage was with the Leeds Permanent Building Society.

My point is that they do not call themselves, as they did, the "Nationwide Building Society". "Society" is now just a dirty word, the idea that people are social, that they gather together for the common good, even the Building Society drops the word "society" from its name. Why is "society" such a bad word? I thought it was a good thing. I can remember when National and Provincial had their ad jingle, "We're the national and provincial we're today's society, with a lot of common interest in our homes. We're the biggest new society that Britain's ever seen, with more strength to help more people own more homes". Now N and P disappeared in the banking crisis, but my point is on their ad they said twice  "society". Partly this is due to allowing building societies to become banks, but in the process we lost the word "society". We also lost the meaning of it. Now it is every man for himself, as Thatcher put it. It does not have to be.

SimonTrew wrote:

We used to have a thing called building societies, in American, savings and loan. Now there is only one left, the Nationwide,

There is a hell of a lot more than just one Simon.

SimCityAT wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

We used to have a thing called building societies, in American, savings and loan. Now there is only one left, the Nationwide,

There is a hell of a lot more than just one Simon.

There are. Just they don't call themselves societies any more. The Nationwide Building Society does not call itself the Nationwide Building Society, it calls itself Nationwide. The word "society" has dropped out of the argot. That is my point.

SimonTrew wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

We used to have a thing called building societies, in American, savings and loan. Now there is only one left, the Nationwide,

There is a hell of a lot more than just one Simon.

There are. Just they don't call themselves societies any more. The Nationwide Building Society does not call itself the Nationwide Building Society, it calls itself Natiowide. The word "society" has dropped out of the argot. That is my point.

Maybe this might help > http://www.buildingsociety.com/uk.shtml

SimCityAT wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

There is a hell of a lot more than just one Simon.

There are. Just they don't call themselves societies any more. The Nationwide Building Society does not call itself the Nationwide Building Society, it calls itself Natiowide. The word "society" has dropped out of the argot. That is my point.

Maybe this might help > http://www.buildingsociety.com/uk.shtml

THen you have proved my point. There is such a thing as society. Thatcher and Orban are wrong.

And by the way old DIckens, "Our Mutual Friend", it should be "Our Common Friend", according to Fowler. Mutuality is strictly between two parties, you can't introduce a third party, so it should really be titled "Our Common Friend". I am sure Dickens would be glad to hear it.

SimonTrew wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

There are. Just they don't call themselves societies any more. The Nationwide Building Society does not call itself the Nationwide Building Society, it calls itself Natiowide. The word "society" has dropped out of the argot. That is my point.

Maybe this might help > http://www.buildingsociety.com/uk.shtml

THen you have proved my point. There is such a thing as society. Thatcher and Orban are wrong.

And by the way old DIckens, "Our Mutual Friend", it should be "Our Common Friend", according to Fowler. Mutuality is strictly between two parties, you can't introduce a third party, so it should really be titled "Our Common Friend". I am sure Dickens would be glad to hear it.

I just proved you wrong twice!!

SimCityAT wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

Maybe this might help > http://www.buildingsociety.com/uk.shtml

THen you have proved my point. There is such a thing as society. Thatcher and Orban are wrong.

And by the way old DIckens, "Our Mutual Friend", it should be "Our Common Friend", according to Fowler. Mutuality is strictly between two parties, you can't introduce a third party, so it should really be titled "Our Common Friend". I am sure Dickens would be glad to hear it.

I just proved you wrong twice!!

You didn't prove anything, you just gave examples of things that call themselves "societies". My point was, do we as normal people ever use the word "society", or do we mean anything by it? Thatcher's drift with "there is no such thing as society" was essentially to say "every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost" or perhaps "I'm all right Jack, pull up the ladder". What I mean by society is help other people out when you can, in the hope that they will help you when you can't. But the shift over the last thirty years or so has been to the right, you can see this all across Europe. The socialist, mutualist ideal was only ever an ideal, it was just perhaps better than the selfishness inherent in capitalism.

This is getting a bit deep, but what do you pay your taxes for? Some of them, you pay for services you receive directly, that your bin gets emptied etc. Most of them are paid indirectly, they are a way to redistribute wealth. There are things held in common like roads and water that are not much good unless there is a common infrastructure, that they are held in common., whoever might technically own them. So then your vote, if you bother to vote, is really about how we decide as a society to redistribute those taxes. If you have VAT or AFA i.e. sales tax then you have a regressive tax because poor people spend a larger proportion of their income on things that attract sales tax than richer people do. But unfortunately there are not that many rich people and they can afford good accountants, so there is no point taxing the rich "until the pips squeak", you have to tax the hoi polloi. So you do that through income tax, sales tax, council tax, etc etc etc. As a society through voting, through demonstration, through letters to the Press or on facebook or opinion polls or whatever, eventually we get our voices heard on how we want those taxes spent.  So there is such a thing as society.

I was only saying that "society" appears to be a dirty word nowadays. In the compound noun "Building society" it has kinda lost that taint as nobody thinks of buildings or societies when they say it, they just think "some sort of bank".

What we also have is "the public". We are always being told "the public does this, the public thinks that, etc". You will notice whoever uses the term "the public" or "the general public" automatically excludes themselves. So you get a policeman saying he must protect "the public", excluding the police who know better, or a shopkeeper saying that his goods must be made safe for "the public", excluding shopkeepers who know better. "The public" always means "everyone except me and my lot". The notion that Prime Ministers and  Presidents are also "members of the public" seems never to cross their tiny minds.

SimonTrew wrote:

...
Perhaps it was not an 11/750 perhaps it was the 11/780. We had a little microVAX when they first came out, that was r2d2 on the cluster, and we even had a colour terminal somewhere but most of us were logging in via RS232 cable. It was about twelve feet long, four feet high. It had four tape reels for backups on half inch tape, and a massive 689Mb hard disk. Of the 2Mb core memory, 1Mb was reserved for the operating system, the rest for anyone else. ..
Fluffster we are probably getting a bit too technical even for Anything Else, but it is quite fun chatting about this.

If it was 4ft high, it was the 11/750.  The 11/780 was about 6ft high.  All the terminals were vt100s or if you were lucky a vt102.  I remember doing some nice graphics on them.  Interestingly enough, the vt100 turns up a lot on TV shows set in the 1980s.  I don't remember how much RAM the thing had but it was probably a whopping 4MB on the 11/780.   I loved my VAXes.  I also had dealings with a large IBM mainframe with MVS and VM on it and I was stunned to hear they all had different OSes on them.  What a ridiculous mess!

But, you are right, it's far too technical for other readers.

A bit technical for us,"laymen" but then again what would you recommend for the best clipper cut?
An Oster 76, a Wahl or would you go for the Andis?
It's all just what is one's way of expressing themselves through work or hobby.
Personally I find the Oster to be a bit too heavy handed for my smaller hands, it's a bit over weight too for long days of clippering.
The Wahl would jam at times but overall I found it easier to grip and didn't tire my shoulder out after a long day of clippering.
Andis made many good  trimmers but their clipper was also a bit heavy handed.
Personally I prefer the old technic of scissor over comb but if going for speed nothing beats a electric clipper.
Sorry just being a idiot here...
Have to decide by the years end if I will keep up my professional cosmetology license or not... Every 2 years I have to take a test and pay to keep my working papers in order.
I do not plan on ever working again and for sure not going to be behind a chair, not with my bad shoulder.
My friend in Vegas has been cutting for over 35 years and just had rotator cup surgery on her shoulder.
Occupational hazard.
She isn't working at the moment because she is in rehab.
Good thing she can also drive a semi-truck and just finished a 2 year degree in IT.
She has all her bases covered and is just a tiny little lady aged 56 from Puerto Rico.
Sometimes I wish I did enjoy working, to me work was always just a means to an end, never got any self satisfaction from punching a time card and making someone else rich.
Even had my own salon but still hated it.
Any moment that is not my own I resent, working is 8 hours of doing something because someone else will give you paper for it.
I think one of these days I'll just go for volunteer work, not yet, one of these days perhaps.
Just a bit odd to think about letting my professional papers slide, so much time money and energy was put into getting them.
Living here in Hungary they are pretty much useless, only good thing in the US is with having them you can teach hairdressing if you wished to in a school, you can get good discounts on products and in a pinch you could even work the front desk or wash hair without taking on a full load of clients.
Naw, at some point in time people have to give it up I suppose. After all I am already collecting early Social Security by choice.
Hmm, then again what is another test and a few more bucks down the WC? probably will keep my self legal. I worked in the past with a women who did the best clipper cuts ever, fast, clean and all her clients were super happy, she was 63 at the time too.
Of course she was dead tired at the end of the day.
She was single( think a gay lady) and lived in a huge mansion in Las Vegas with about another 7 room mates.That's one way to enjoy a nice place to live, everyone gets their own room and everyone enjoys the common areas, big pool, BBQ pit and getting to live a better part of town.
Seems you don't need to own anything to enjoy the best in life after all.

SimonTrew wrote:

My point was, do we as normal people ever use the word "society", or do we mean anything by it? Thatcher's drift with "there is no such thing as society" was essentially to say "every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost" or perhaps "I'm all right Jack, pull up the ladder". What I mean by society is help other people out when you can, in the hope that they will help you when you can't. But the shift over the last thirty years or so has been to the right, you can see this all across Europe. The socialist, mutualist ideal was only ever an ideal, it was just perhaps better than the selfishness inherent in capitalism.

I think you are simply arguing from a limitation of the English language. It lacks a distinction that German has, for example between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

Gesellschaft: a hypothetical mode of society, made up of self-serving individuals linked by impersonal ties

Gemeinschaft: an association of individuals having sentiments, tastes, and attitudes in common; fellowship

I might suggest, that Thatcher's individualist view was there was Gesellschaft more than Gemeinschaft,

OK folks, if you never hear from me again then I probably was a victim of a indoor bike riding refugee!
Today while we were shopping in a near by sort of indoor mini--mall in our district I was nearly run over by some ( judging only by looks) refugee who decided it was OK to speed ride his bicycle inside a indoor mall!
My husband said it's time to sell out and ( I'll not use his foul language" )Leave Hungary before it is over run by idiots.
Maybe since it's Sunday the security is lack?
I have never ever in my 63 years on God Green Earth seen an adult human riding inside a inclosed area on a bike!
New low for sure!! I am thankfully uninjured but even my pacifist husband said if he had actually hit me he would also get a beat down. At our old age, we can always claim our med's made us go crazy on some dumb A**! One perk of getting old for sure!
I was not aware that HUngary has already brought in the 5 G network, this guy was out of his mind and they say we all will be going bonkers once the % G system is up and running.
In Vegas they are always putting it up on st. lights everywhere...
It is actually a WMD.
And people ask me why I like my wine?! Think I have to lower my I.Q. by at least 50 points to survive at times....After all we need a equal playing field.

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

A bit technical for us,"laymen" but then again what would you recommend for the best clipper cut?
An Oster 76, a Wahl or would you go for the Andis?
It's all just what is one's way of expressing themselves through work or hobby.
Personally I find the Oster to be a bit too heavy handed for my smaller hands, it's a bit over weight too for long days of clippering.
The Wahl would jam at times but overall I found it easier to grip and didn't tire my shoulder out after a long day of clippering.
Andis made many good  trimmers but their clipper was also a bit heavy handed.
Personally I prefer the old technic of scissor over comb but if going for speed nothing beats a electric clipper.
Sorry just being a idiot here...
....

I think you just taught us a lesson there Marilyn.  We shouldn't engage in 1980s nostalgia about mini-computers in this forum. 

I  have no idea which clippers would be the best.  My maternal grandfather  and grandmother owned a hairdressing salon.  She had this big book of 1940s hair styles. I always thought this was a fantastic book to look at.  It was like a snapshot of life in those times.   

But technologically,  they were all manual with clippers and my grandad could only really do short back and sides military style.   He did have an electric razor he used to barb the back of your neck. I think anyone could have done it.   

If he was able to see my hippy hair ways now, he'd be turning in his urn.

Hey, it's a "free world" or at least that's the bill of sale we have been told...
Talk away about computers all you want, I was just being weird once again.
I have seen so many good education videos about hairdressing on U Tube , really wish we had the internet when I was learning hairdressing.
I sometimes watch them for hours, ancient Greek hairdressing , Middle Ages styles, updo's all fantastic. Love watching how the updo's were done in the time of Marie Antoinette, bird cages and all!
My curse was wanting to do hair as a 7 year old.
I remember seeing a beauty salon  doll in the store and telling my parents every time I saw it that I wanted it.
She was a large doll about the size of your average 2 year old, had beautiful long blonde hair and came with her own salon chair, rollers etc.
Well my parents surprised me at Christmas and there she was waiting under the tree for me.
Spend hours on end doing her hair.
Fast forward 12 years... My parents enrolled me in beauty college and paid for it up front. They told me on a Friday that on Monday I was starting school.
Since I happened to be temp. living with them with my son I had little choice but to start on Monday.
Free baby-sitter was part of the package deal.
Of course half way through my class I got back together with my husband ( had a tiff for a bit) . My husband paid my mom for babysitting though, it was too much to ask for so much from her.
Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for, it could come true.

Oh, make that 15 years later...Time is slipping away on me.

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

.....
My curse was wanting to do hair as a 7 year old.
I remember seeing a beauty salon  doll in the store and telling my parents every time I saw it that I wanted it.
She was a large doll about the size of your average 2 year old, had beautiful long blonde hair and came with her own salon chair, rollers etc.
Well my parents surprised me at Christmas and there she was waiting under the tree for me.
Spend hours on end doing her hair.
....

Hope you didn't cut the doll's hair and expect it to grow back?!!!

Youtube is fantastic for learning stuff, even really obscure things like putting an engine in a specific truck or how indeed how to do your hair.  There is almost inevitably a video about it.   Thinking 20 years ago, that's pretty amazing that you can even do it on your phone too.

Funny enough, I never cut any of my dolls hair as a kid.
I always thought they looked perfect as they were.
Once however around age 8 or 9 I found my Barbie doll's hair in a mess, literally. My baby brother will never live this down, he dunked her head in the WC , seems he did some business on her head too!
He must of been jealous of my Barbie doll!
He was just a toddler at the time...
Worst day ever to come home from school and find her in such a state.
I wonder if he would remember doing that or not? Don't think I'll ever bring it up with him, just too odd.

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

Funny enough, I never cut any of my dolls hair as a kid.
I always thought they looked perfect as they were.
Once however around age 8 or 9 I found my Barbie doll's hair in a mess, literally. .....

We've got a Mermaid Barbie here from sometime ago and I found the head was off so I spent 10 minutes trying to put it back on - it's not that easy. 

Well, I managed and the Fluffyette said to me, "Whaaatt...!!  You put her head back on...." to which I replied, "Yes, I thought I'd repair her head".  I thought I was helping.

The reply was "You shouldn't interfere, I was going to do her hair".

I was a bit surprised - normally people keep their head on their shoulders when they get a new coiffure!  Not sure of the logic of taking the head off as that's something you don't learn by observation.

Oh believe me, I can relate.
So many times I'd of loved to have removed the heads off some of my clients over the years!
I at one time thought I'd rather style wigs then work on real,"humans".
The thought of working on the dead even crossed my mind once or twice, at least they don't bitch and moan and can keep their heads from bobbing around!
Kids are funny, can't figure them out at all sometimes.
Many years ago in Ca. before I was finished with my beauty college training, my sister was dating a crazy guy who did hair in Beverly Hills.
He did our hair for us for free, always though he was half drunk and  it was always a  home cut in the WC.
Can't complain though.
OK, so once he snapped at a client who just wouldn't stop moving her head around, he just hit her on top of the head with a hairbrush saying, " Sit still you sill old cow"  ( actually he used the B word) and walked out of the salon , he quit.
I've never done anything like that although my mind went there a few times.
Loose doll heads, the things of nightmares...
My sisters used to chase me around the house in the dark with the heads of their walking dolls ( very popular dolls in the 50's)  I remember once running down the flight of stairs in terror with the 2 doll heads coming at me, I screamed so loud my sisters finally had mercy on me and put them away.
They said it was revenge for me breaking their dolls but honestly I don't remember even touching their dolls.
Not easy to be the little one sometimes, get all the blame for everything.

Waiting to get a message from a friend here, a ex-pat from the US who just arrived from the states to teach English here in Hungary.
Hope her day went well, must of been a bit nerve racking.

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

...
Not easy to be the little one sometimes, get all the blame for everything.

Oh, I dunno, kids are sneaky.   

The youngest ones tend to sneak stuff and because they are younger they know they can go all  innocent and the older ones will get the blame. 

I used to watch my two in the rear view mirror and see the younger one, bashing the other one. 

Then there's a "you two stop it" and when I managed to look around, the older one was crying and the younger one was all sweetness with a halo.  But I know the younger one was the cause as I saw them in the mirror.   Guilty!

But now they have both become even more sneaky as they know we've sussed that one out!

My old friends relative who is missing is still missing, been 17 days now.
Just saw more posts on FB looking for a Missing Person.
Not seen since morning of Aug. 10th. Only 21 years old.
He is from my hometown area so it's sort of sad, used to be rated the safest city in Cal. Half the population of course is either in the fire dept or police force, red necks that keeps the riff raft away...
The Rodney King trail was held in our city and my brother was still living there at the time. He said they had road blocks on the highway to check everyone's ID before letting them into the city!
Of course the news wouldn't mention that fact.
They didn't want any riots in the city.

Kids love to pull the power trip on each other.
I had 2 older sisters , was outnumbered from the start.
I didn't dare do anything to crazy with either of them because their revenge was swift and they both hit hard.
Everytime my mom left the house it was pay back time for me...
All good though, they never allowed anyone to mess with me, I just had to tell any bully that I was getting my sisters and the bullying stopped.
Later they both made it up to me by fighting each other as to you could have me for the summer months.
I really don't know why they both wanted me to stay with them so much but perhaps my mom was paying them to get me off her hands for summer?
Can't think of any other reason they had me over their houses for weeks on end.

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

My old friends relative who is missing is still missing, been 17 days now.
Just saw more posts on FB looking for a Missing Person.
Not seen since morning of Aug. 10th. Only 21 years old.
He is from my hometown area so it's sort of sad, used to be rated the safest city in Cal. Half the population of course is either in the fire dept or police force, red necks that keeps the riff raft away...
.

Sorry to say that if he's been gone that long - unless it's deliberate that's he's run away from something - it's not going to be happy ending.  He might never be found there.  It looks like very wild country.

BTW, the rain today is a bit annoying.  It's supposed to be sunny tomorrow (at least that's positive).  Bit of a relief from all those high temperatures.

Yes, sadly it seems like a bit too long to  be missing.
His parents swear though that he had no issues and wouldn't want to run away. He just moved into a new apt. etc.
A very handsome young man too...Was last seen in Topanga canyon near a look out area.
The police didn't take it serious until the family pushed hard. Locals news stations have also finally made the public aware of his disappearance.
He's been on my mind even though I've never met him, just as a parent it is upsetting to hear about.

Love the rain but was hoping for a few more nice sunny swim days.
I always seem to forget that here in Hungary summers are short and weather can change fast.
I'm so used to having summer for 10 months of the year and even then just having to wear a light leather jacket in the "winter".

Marilyn Tassy wrote:

Yes, sadly it seems like a bit too long to  be missing.
His parents swear though that he had no issues and wouldn't want to run away. He just moved into a new apt. etc.
A very handsome young man too...Was last seen in Topanga canyon near a look out area.
The police didn't take it serious until the family pushed hard. Locals news stations have also finally made the public aware of his disappearance.
He's been on my mind even though I've never met him, just as a parent it is upsetting to hear about.

Love the rain but was hoping for a few more nice sunny swim days.
I always seem to forget that here in Hungary summers are short and weather can change fast.
I'm so used to having summer for 10 months of the year and even then just having to wear a light leather jacket in the "winter".

I Google'd for the missing person.  I think it's too long.   From what I could see, quite a few people go on those trails and never come back.   

Strangely enough, here, our neighbours disappeared.  One minute they were there, then they were gone.  Took the kids and the car, left everything in their apartment.   I wondered how they could do that.   Then we found out the guy was involved in some large scale fraud or something.  His wife was always very nervous.  We never found out what happened to them.  We think they ran away to Germany or something.    We only found out from gossiping with other neighbours and watching the police in the garden and housing block.    We think they were also involved in stealing our car!

Weatherwise, it's messing up my plans for gardening, tidying and some DIY.   I shall have to do some work instead.

That is an odd tale, guess your car was never recovered?
What a pain.
Our old reliable Toyota van was stolen in Vegas in our gated community shortly before we moved to Hungary.
The police impound contacted us 2 weeks before we were moving, they had it in their impound yard.
It was a smelly mess, food wrappers and trash inside, the windows had several parking notifications on the windows, those hard to removed clue stickers.
Not sure why it didn't come up as stolen when the traffic dpt. put stickers on the van?
Had to sell it super cheap and fast before we left the states.
2 Hippie sort of guys bought it to drive into Mexico, it was so trashed and cheap priced that it was perfect to go on that sort of adventure with. It ran great and looked horrid.