In this article from PFS France (http://
www.propertyforsalefrance.co.uk/), B A Boyle a British expat, writes a
"tongue in cheek" account about the communication challenges they
faced when they moved to France.

For many newcomers to France, one of the greatest challenges is
actually to make sense of the French language which we studied years
ago in school.

If you're lucky you may still remember a little vocabulary or how to
conjugate verbs, the exceptions and the rules. Nevertheless, beware.
french learned at school has its limitations. It's most unlikely that
you will be able to impress anyone by asking "Where is the station?"
"I'd like to book a room with a shower" or even "How do I get to the
Eiffel Tower"

So, soon after we moved here, we came to rely on two very good pieces
of advice:

doug@BKASSOCIATES.NET (Doug Fuerst) writes:

clone controller business was supposedly primary motivation
for the future system project ... lots of past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#futuresys

edgould1948@COMCAST.NET (Ed Gould) writes:

360/85 was first machine with cache.

this web page has some number of ibm product announcements
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/IBM-ProdAnn/index.html

including the 360/85
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/IBM-ProdAnn/360-85.pdf

I was astounded, as I recently noted, to learn from Gordon Bell's
"Computer Engineering" that the PDP-9 was a microprogrammed machine.

The PDP-4/7/9/15 architecture involved a very simple instruction set.
If anything, the PDP-15 gave the appearance of being an enlarged
version of the PDP-8.

Thus, back in the 1970s, I had wondered - since the PDP-8 was so
cramped that it didn't have even a proper load and store instruction,
but made do with TAD and DCA, why DEC didn't make machines with the
PDP-15 architecture, priced at half again as much as a PDP-8, and make
some effort to migrate users to that, because, clearly, a
straightforwards machine would offer more for the money than one that
was cramped.

But since then, I've learned a few things.

One of them is that a bare-bones PDP-15 cost $15,500, which was close
to half again the price of a PDP-8/e, despite coming in a bigger box.

Another is that DEC had made an effort to bring that architecture to
people at a lower price; the PDP-9/L shows how hard they tried.

On 17 Dec 07 11:02:39 -0800 in alt.folklore.computers, "Charlie Gibbs"
wrote:

The time it takes to load your site can make or break a visitor's
first impression of your site. If your site takes too long to load,
the visitor will click "Stop" or "Back" and leave your web site. If
you are a business and offering people important information, it is
critical to have a nice design, with a quick load time.

You may want to check out the load time of your page, to indeed see if
your site loads quick enough for the average user. A great site tool
can be found at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
where you are able to enter your site and it displays a report on the
time it takes to load your site on different connections, in addition
to tips to decrease load time.

Upon doing a speed test, if your first page takes a great time to load
in the visitor's browser, it is in the best interest to do some
redesigning to decrease load time and increase the number of visitors
that will not click back on the browser. We must remember that not
everyone is running on DSL or Cable modem. Many users still dial up
using a 56K connection. As web designers and site maintainers, we want
to ensure our site's load quickly, as to not lose potential visitors
to your site.

I'm trying to locate a decent copy of Cringley's 'Nerds 2.0' TV series from
around 2001. There's a couple of ropey quality torrents out there but
nothing watchable.

Can anyone help?

TIA

2007 Roundup: The march of the botnets
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2206172/botnets-branded-worst-security

recent posts mentioning botnets:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm27.htm#65 MITM spotted in Tor
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm28.htm#2 Death of antivirus software imminent
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#42 My Dream PC -- Chip-Based
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#7 Hypervisors May Replace Operating Systems As King Of The Data Center
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007o.html#16 Hypervisors May Replace Operating Systems As King Of The Data Center
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007q.html#6 what does xp do when system is copying
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#71 folklore indeed
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007u.html#74 folklore indeed
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#35 Inside a Modern Malware Distribution System

a couple other recent botnet news items:

Storm, Nugache lead dangerous new botnet barrage
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1286808,00...
Botnet-controlled Trojan robbing online bank customers
http://www...

Data Breaches Soar in 2007
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/apwire/77ed8eb2ed03127dc4893ecdfc16fd0b...

from above:

Another group, Attrition.org, estimates more than 162 million records
compromised through Dec. 21 _ both in the U.S. and overseas, unlike the
other group's U.S.-only list. Attrition reported 49 million last year.

... snip ...

Current paradigm, crooks can afford to possibly outspend the defenders
by 100:1 .... i.e. in the current paradigm, the value of the records to
the crooks far exceeds the value of the records to the defenders.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007v.html#86 folklore indeed

The scenario for x9.59 financial standard protocol was to make
the records worthless to the crooks:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/x959.html#x959

... past posts mentioning security proportional to risk:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm10.htm#cfppki13 CFP: PKI research workshop
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm11.htm#45 Web site exposes credit card...

can only
reason about things of that kind, would lack proofs.

40. If we wished to prove the examples which we take to prove other things,
we should have to take those other things to be examples; for, as we always
believe the difficulty is in what we wish to prove, we find the examples
clearer and a help to demonstration.

Thus, when we wish to demonstrate a general theorem, we must give the rule
as applied to a particular case; but if we wish to demonstrate a particular
case, we must begin with the general rule. For we always find the thing
obscure which we wish to prove and that clear which we use for the proof;
for, when a thing is put forward to be proved, we first fill ourselves with
the imagination that it is, therefore, obscure and, on the contrary, that
what is to prove it is clear, and so we understand it easily.

41. Epigrams of Martial.--Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men nor
the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud. People are mistaken in
thinking otherwise.