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| Politics Forum Index » Radical Politics Forum » New Video on Challenges Facing Young Workers Screens... |
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| Dan Clore... |
 Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2009 5:22 pm |
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_4209
New video on challenges facing young workers screens Nov. 10
14 October 2009
MINNEAPOLIS - No matter how hard they work or how well they do in
school, young people know it can be difficult to stay afloat when you're
coming of age in a "McJob" economy. On Nov. 10, attend a free screening
of a new film about the challenges facing young workers – and how they
are taking the lead in addressing them.
The film “Eyes on the Fries: Young Workers in the Service Economy” will
be shown Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m. at Minneapolis Community and
Technical College, 1501 Hennepin Ave. S. The screening will be in Room
L3000 of the library in Whitney Hall (take the elevator to the third
floor and follow the signs).
The screening is free and open to all. Following the 20-minute film,
workers active in the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) will hold a
panel discussion on organizing in the fast food sector in the Twin Cities.
Young people are coming of age in a service economy. Seven of the ten
fastest-growing jobs are in the service sector: jobs like cashier, sales
clerk, and fast food preparer. These positions are low-wage, part-time,
and offer few benefits, little training and no job security. Young
workers, who are concentrated in service sector jobs, bear the brunt of
the rapid and unregulated expansion of the low-wage, service economy.
The voices of young workers are rarely, if ever, heard in public debates
about issues that affect their lives. "Eyes on the Fries” features the
successful campaign to raise the minimum wage in San Francisco, and the
daily struggles of young workers from Oakland to Brooklyn. The video and
discussion give young workers the opportunity to talk about their
struggles to survive in the service economy.
The Nov. 10 event is sponsored by the University of Minnesota Labor
Education Service as part of its Labor in the Community programming, the
Minneapolis Community and Technical College Departments of Philosophy
and Political Science and the IWW-Twin Cities.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_ |
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| Ha-Emet... |
| Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2009 7:28 am |
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Guest
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ENIAC
ELECTRONIC NUMERICAL INTEGRATOR AND CALCULATOR
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (Eniac), was
only a dream in the 40s. My interest in computers goes way back
to the late 50s to the ENIAC. I had been a Ham Operator since
1955 (K4EVY), when I was still in high school. There was no such
thing as a personal computer then.
But, my excitement about computers really began when I saw the
first computer, the ENIAC, at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland
in the 50s. I was in military school in Georgia then but on one of
our family visits to Pennsylvania and Maryland my uncle invited me
to see his laboratory and the ENIAC.
As early as the 40s (1943) scientists at the University of Pennsylvania
proposed a machine which would calculate "firing tables" - settings used
for directing artillery under varying conditions vis-a-vis weather,
distance to the target, etc. to be used for aiming artillery, which
up to that time sometimes took hours to calculate. That is when the
computer age was actually launched. The ENIAC, which weighed 30 tons,
was funded by the U.S. Army.
Dr. Goldstine lobbied a committee headed by Oswald Veblen, mathematician,
who influenced the army to go forward with funding at the Aberdeen
Proving Grounds (in 1943) with a request for half a million dollars
to pay for the research and the computer. Up to that time the army
had been shipping their guns without firing tables. Col Leslie E. Simon
was then the director of the Army's Ballistics Laboratory, where my
uncle worked. Simons retired as a general. Dr. Goldstine was in charge
of the operation for the army. A team of scientists and engineers at
Penn's Moore School built the computer. The project was secret.
After three years of military school and one year of regular high
school I enlisted in the army. It was there that I was selected for
a secret assignment and after extensive investigations by the FBI and
the Secret Service I worked at the White House for the President of
the United States. I had a top secret clearance but also a crypto and
nuclear clearance. I was privy to everything the President said and
later on the Chiefs of Staff ("need to know" was extended to everything
I heard). In the 60s I worked in the War Room for the Chiefs of Staff at
the Pentagon (before going to helicopter school and before the Yom Kipper
War in 73).
My uncle was a physicist who died when he was only about 49 years old
from a cardiac condition but while he was employed as a scientist for
the army he invented the fastest camera in the world and he used the
very first computer in the ballistics lab at the base, which was also
his research facility for developing munitions for the military.
In 1957 I enlisted in the army because a war was about to
start and I wanted to get in on it.
One of the most exciting days of my life however was when I saw the
world's first computer, the ENIAC in the 50s, which was built at the
Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland,
and was funded by the Ordnance Corps of the United States
Army.
My memory is admittedly a bit vague by now, because it was such a long
time ago, but I do remember, the ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes
and generated a lot of heat. Obviously there was very little memory and
it was extremely slow.
Later on a subsequent tour of duty in the War Room at the Pentagon, just
down the hall from where I worked they were using a newer generation
computer, which still used tubes - and I recall how huge it was also
and all those diode multipliers and bullion adders with their flashing
lights. I also remember the heat and an array of tubes which military
personnel were constantly replacing as they burned out. It seemed like
that was their only job. To this day I don't know what this equipment
was used for. But I do know the tubes were a problem and RCA had to
develop a new tube which had a longer life just for the application
there at the Pentagon.
I worked cryptology in the War Room and my equipment used mechanical
coding wheels and also used tubes. The wheels were metal rings which
had to be lined up in exactly the same configuration and started exactly
at the same time as those who we communicated with in the Six Fleet
or where-ever they were. Army Security Agency (ASA) kept trying to break
our codes but they couldn't.
These were not text devices. They generated synthesized speech which
did not sound at all like the person using them - and speech was encrypted.
We were armed with sawed off shotguns. And we not only guarded the equipment,
we swept the room for bugs and we monitored all of the speech.
My job was the same at the White House when I did a three year tour
there but included other things, a lot of other things and my training
was at Ft Monmouth and at NSA. I worked in all kinds of communications
including the first television hookups for the White House, which we
assisted in the engineering process. I taught single sideband and
various types of multiplexing, including packet communications when
it was new.
ENIAC was the first electronic computer which could compute a trajectory
in only one second (pretty damn fast when it took an hour before the
computer was developed). It was completed in 1945 and it was very BIG. It
was enormous. The system was 80 feet long and was 8 feet high. It
contained 18,000 vacuum tubes. The speed was 100,000 pulses per second.
It didn't really begin to calculate firing tables until the war was over
since it took so long to build. From the time it was imagined in 43 to the
time it was completed in 1945.
It became public in 1946. It was built at the Moore school and moved to
Aberdeen in 1947 where it was utilized until 1955.
When I finally left the military I went to school under the G.I.Bill and I
got an LL.B degree but I also studied programming and systems design. I
learned COBOL, RPG, Lisp, BASIC and various other languages, including
assembly code. I built and owned several computers and all of the first
ones I learned to program them using their individual machine language. In
those days that was not uncommon. COBOL was probably my favorite
programming language because although bulky it was plain English
and easy to use - but still no personal computers then and I had
to program main frames using punch cards. My very first personal
computer was a Commodore 4K and later a Commodore 2001. My first
hard drive cost me $1,700 for that Commodore. My next computer
was better; it was an IBM XT. Since then I have had more computers
than I can remember and the operating system for most of them has
been Linux. I cut my teeth on UNIX. And I still prefer DOS to
Windows (g).
Hank Roth
Go to the Worm Hole at http://up-yours.us/
More Article in The Crypt at http://inyourface.info/
Bio - http://pnews.org/bio/
- PNEWS - http://pnews.org/ (on the InterNUT since 1982) |
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