Oh, and Steve Ciarcia and his Circuit Cellar, of course. How could I have missed mentioning that? Still a great publication. Make: can only hope to be that good. I just don't see the 'genius' anywhere in it's pages.
The whole Make: phenomenon had greater promise than I have seen yielded. Being someone brought up in the era of Popular Electronics, I thought that it would herald a continuation of the hobbyist tradition. However, I have been somewhat disappointed in what I found. Fad gadgets and flashy toys are fine, but remain just an extension of the consumer culture. Where are the schematics? Where is the technical background? Too many Make: articles detail trivial novelty projects.
The spirit of Popular Electronics lives on in Bob Pease, Jim Williams, and yes in wonderful offbeat Don Lancaster.
O'Reilly, I had far greater hopes of thee. Still the best row on my bookcase, of course.
I'm not sure about that. Stallman's greatest work code-wise was completed more than 20 years ago now. My copy of the GNU Emacs manual was printed in 1986. The most important work he's done for the last 15 years is evangalization, which is also very important, and a valuable contribution, but it's not hacking code.
I'm pretty sure the Trs-80 Model II was the big 68000 machine, wasn't it? With the 8" floppy drives? It ran a weird CP/M if I remember correctly. It probably had a Pascal.
Us poor people had the Z-80 Model I or III. I had T-Bug on a Model I. A cassette drive. I had the Assembler too, but it took about twenty minutes to load off cassette tape. The little monitor (T-Bug) was the way to go. I wrote a full page "full screen" editor that would save that page to tape in a few minutes.
Modern companies, with their process-driven methodology, are terrified of real engineering. It's a dangerous destablizing thing that needs to be driven out of the company, pronto.
Is there a Work Instruction for what you're doing over there? No? You'd better get to work writing one. An auditor might see you doing whatever it is you're doing and then we're in trouble.
You're entirely correct. Sometimes the best ideas come when you're not expecting them. You jot them down on the back of an envelope or the proverbial dinner napkin.
Decades ago, really creative people didn't have to do a lot of the stuff that is now delegated broadly throughout an organization. They could turn their sketches in to drafting and let a drone formalize them. Now engineers are expected to waste their time doing the CAD themselves.
Speaking as an electronics hardware guy, I gave a small design to a new recent-grad and he spent hours entering it into Orcad and trying to simulate it. A simple one op-amp design that just needed a little parameter variation (decade box, please?) and evaluation on the bench.
The 'social' aspects of programming matter on a certain scale, but not always. Sometimes it's best just to throw it together with some assembly language and run it on the breadboard.
Oh, wait. You meant software that runs on an operating system??
The people wearing ski masks aren't just snatching iPods. They're targeting the people bouncing along without any connection to the outside world for much more. Now, if you were a ski-mask thug, wouldn't it make perfect sense to target the zoned out people walking along without any clue who is around them? For their wallet, their bag, all sorts of schwag.
But my 'USB stick with a headphone jack' only cost me $20 at Frys. And it has an SD slot on it, so I can create my 'Playlists' on inexpensive 2GB SD cards and swap them out at will. And aforementioned 2GB memory updates (SD cards) are getting to be really really cheap now.
I have no compulsion whasoever to spend much, much, more on a Zune or iPod.
The iPod brand is stale and fading away. Everybody knows it locks you to a syncing app. I can download Podcasts at work without having to get permission from IT to load any special software and put them on my inexpensive player to listen to at lunch. That, and there's no way I am gonna do iTunes anyway. Not never nohow.
I am mostly an Assembly Language programmer and it can teach some bad habits. I don't generally trust anybody else's code, so end up coding up everything from scratch. It's a solitary practice. That said, 'pointers' and other things that seem weird and remote to many people are painfully obvious if you started out in Assembly.
Bare hardware and real memory addresses rule. However, a bare-metal assembly language programmer will mostly work with embedded controllers in this day and age. Yay for the little 8 bitters and even the 4 bitters. There are still billions being deployed.
That isn't the 'lesson of OS/2' The lesson of OS/2 is that it ran Windows 3.1 applications well enough that no developers found it compelling to write native OS/2 apps. When Windows32 came out, OS/2 was stuck with the old 16 bit Windows apps, since none of the developers had built up a codebase to compile 32-bit OS/2 versions of their Win32 apps. The APIs had diverged too far by that time.
A somewhat parallel thing happened with Windows NT on the DEC Alpha. Digital produced a truly excellent simulation layer so people could run x86 apps on their Windows NT/Alpha boxes. So very few NT/Alpha apps were ever built.
Explorer is not a web browser. It is the replacement for the File Manager in Windows 3.1. With a lot of additions, including a partial merge with Internet Explorer (which happened with Active Desktop on Windows 95B)
Actually, you only hear about them here, and on Groklaw.
There's a funny video on the Onion right now about the plight of Obama supporters and what they will do with their lives now that the election is over. A similar video could be made (but almost nobody would understand it enough for it to be funny) about SCO haters.
And the best way to use PDF is to install one of the ghostscript-derived 'PDF Printers.' I like PDFCreator (freeware.) No need to do anything else. All your 1-8 year old Windows apps suddenly have the ability to print to PDF.
Don't make the mistake of using any of Adobe's PDF tools. They're doing the same suck-down-to-medicore ride as Microsoft.
Are there any further bullet points from the fax you want to copy and paste?
Ooooh! I've got a hot new PC (sticks 'turbo' sticker on front face of case.) Only Vista can do this baby righteously. (swings dick around, knocking various items off desktop in process)
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My main criticism of Make: is it's heavy reliance on kitch. There's some robotics in there, sometimes, but mostly it's kitch.
Oh, and Steve Ciarcia and his Circuit Cellar, of course. How could I have missed mentioning that? Still a great publication. Make: can only hope to be that good. I just don't see the 'genius' anywhere in it's pages.
The whole Make: phenomenon had greater promise than I have seen yielded. Being someone brought up in the era of Popular Electronics, I thought that it would herald a continuation of the hobbyist tradition. However, I have been somewhat disappointed in what I found. Fad gadgets and flashy toys are fine, but remain just an extension of the consumer culture. Where are the schematics? Where is the technical background? Too many Make: articles detail trivial novelty projects.
The spirit of Popular Electronics lives on in Bob Pease, Jim Williams, and yes in wonderful offbeat Don Lancaster.
O'Reilly, I had far greater hopes of thee. Still the best row on my bookcase, of course.
The Red Army?
The People's Liberation Army?
(or do we go into particulars of specific heavy industries in Eastern Block Countries?)
you don't appreciate the importance of user-facing design.
I don't understand buzzword phrases??
Sorry. It worked for a while back in the Guy Kawasaki era. We figured it out. Stale.
Reminds me of the end of the Simpsons' episode where Bart is seen sleeping in his room, with Crusty the Clown everything.
Do you have an Apple sticker on your car??
I don't think apple equipment is crap. I just don't think it deserves the love and devotion it gets.
It's called astroturfing.
I'm not sure about that. Stallman's greatest work code-wise was completed more than 20 years ago now. My copy of the GNU Emacs manual was printed in 1986. The most important work he's done for the last 15 years is evangalization, which is also very important, and a valuable contribution, but it's not hacking code.
So what you're saying is that the COBOL compiler for the IBM 650 has a bug in it. It's gonna crash one day soon, too.
On a PDP-8 a byte would be 12 bits.
I'm pretty sure the Trs-80 Model II was the big 68000 machine, wasn't it? With the 8" floppy drives? It ran a weird CP/M if I remember correctly. It probably had a Pascal.
Us poor people had the Z-80 Model I or III. I had T-Bug on a Model I. A cassette drive. I had the Assembler too, but it took about twenty minutes to load off cassette tape. The little monitor (T-Bug) was the way to go. I wrote a full page "full screen" editor that would save that page to tape in a few minutes.
Modern companies, with their process-driven methodology, are terrified of real engineering. It's a dangerous destablizing thing that needs to be driven out of the company, pronto.
Is there a Work Instruction for what you're doing over there? No? You'd better get to work writing one. An auditor might see you doing whatever it is you're doing and then we're in trouble.
You're entirely correct. Sometimes the best ideas come when you're not expecting them. You jot them down on the back of an envelope or the proverbial dinner napkin.
Decades ago, really creative people didn't have to do a lot of the stuff that is now delegated broadly throughout an organization. They could turn their sketches in to drafting and let a drone formalize them. Now engineers are expected to waste their time doing the CAD themselves.
Speaking as an electronics hardware guy, I gave a small design to a new recent-grad and he spent hours entering it into Orcad and trying to simulate it. A simple one op-amp design that just needed a little parameter variation (decade box, please?) and evaluation on the bench.
The 'social' aspects of programming matter on a certain scale, but not always. Sometimes it's best just to throw it together with some assembly language and run it on the breadboard.
Oh, wait. You meant software that runs on an operating system??
The people wearing ski masks aren't just snatching iPods. They're targeting the people bouncing along without any connection to the outside world for much more. Now, if you were a ski-mask thug, wouldn't it make perfect sense to target the zoned out people walking along without any clue who is around them? For their wallet, their bag, all sorts of schwag.
Obama represents a bare majority of the people.
But my 'USB stick with a headphone jack' only cost me $20 at Frys. And it has an SD slot on it, so I can create my 'Playlists' on inexpensive 2GB SD cards and swap them out at will. And aforementioned 2GB memory updates (SD cards) are getting to be really really cheap now.
I have no compulsion whasoever to spend much, much, more on a Zune or iPod.
The iPod brand is stale and fading away. Everybody knows it locks you to a syncing app. I can download Podcasts at work without having to get permission from IT to load any special software and put them on my inexpensive player to listen to at lunch. That, and there's no way I am gonna do iTunes anyway. Not never nohow.
Also, you can't code in Python.
Maybe he's had to touch somebody else's perl code too much.
I am mostly an Assembly Language programmer and it can teach some bad habits. I don't generally trust anybody else's code, so end up coding up everything from scratch. It's a solitary practice. That said, 'pointers' and other things that seem weird and remote to many people are painfully obvious if you started out in Assembly.
Bare hardware and real memory addresses rule. However, a bare-metal assembly language programmer will mostly work with embedded controllers in this day and age. Yay for the little 8 bitters and even the 4 bitters. There are still billions being deployed.
That isn't the 'lesson of OS/2' The lesson of OS/2 is that it ran Windows 3.1 applications well enough that no developers found it compelling to write native OS/2 apps. When Windows32 came out, OS/2 was stuck with the old 16 bit Windows apps, since none of the developers had built up a codebase to compile 32-bit OS/2 versions of their Win32 apps. The APIs had diverged too far by that time.
A somewhat parallel thing happened with Windows NT on the DEC Alpha. Digital produced a truly excellent simulation layer so people could run x86 apps on their Windows NT/Alpha boxes. So very few NT/Alpha apps were ever built.
Explorer is not a web browser. It is the replacement for the File Manager in Windows 3.1. With a lot of additions, including a partial merge with Internet Explorer (which happened with Active Desktop on Windows 95B)
Her fifteen minutes is up. Unfortunately law clerks don't usually get to re-up.
She should take the bar exam and 'step up' (as my brother in law says to his parrot.)
Actually, you only hear about them here, and on Groklaw.
There's a funny video on the Onion right now about the plight of Obama supporters and what they will do with their lives now that the election is over. A similar video could be made (but almost nobody would understand it enough for it to be funny) about SCO haters.
And the best way to use PDF is to install one of the ghostscript-derived 'PDF Printers.' I like PDFCreator (freeware.) No need to do anything else. All your 1-8 year old Windows apps suddenly have the ability to print to PDF.
Don't make the mistake of using any of Adobe's PDF tools. They're doing the same suck-down-to-medicore ride as Microsoft.
Thank you, thank you.
Are there any further bullet points from the fax you want to copy and paste?
Ooooh! I've got a hot new PC (sticks 'turbo' sticker on front face of case.) Only Vista can do this baby righteously. (swings dick around, knocking various items off desktop in process)