| Personal background |
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I was born in London in the early fifties, when there was still rationing, and the famous smog was still a seasonal killer. My secondary school (6th-12th grade for Americans) was, I believe, the first in Europe to have its own computer - an Elliot 903 as I recall - and I learned the joys of Algol 60. Imagine my disappointment when I had to learn FORTRAN IV at University (Exeter). Still, after I graduated in Physics in 1973, I entered the software industry, where I have been hanging out ever since. I wrote Assembler for years, then C (second-best language ever invented), a bit of C++ (C with all the gotchas, and none of the benefits), and now, Java (best language ever invented... so far)
Although I have been using Unix/Linux professionally for... nearly twenty years now, my OS of choice at home is Mac OS X. I converted from Windows to Mac about fifteen years ago, and have NEVER regretted it. I have recently built my first PC, onto which I installed Ubuntu (a Linux distro), and I was amazed at how painless the process has become. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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1) I have lots of spare cycles at the moment! My new PC is an AMD Athlon X2 5600+, running Linux, which means that it has lots of spare processing capacity. I also built an energy-efficient and quiet machine, so I don't bother switching it off.
2) It's interesting; when the project started, it was a leap of faith: now, with increasing numbers of exo-planets being discovered, it feels more like the project to crack 56-bit DSA... it's just a matter of time.
3) Call me cynical, but has anyone thought of pointing a radio-telescope at the Earth? I see very little signs of intelligent life here! |
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