Okay, I was introduced to Plato at Mayo HS in Rochester MN, where I was told it was a sort of dial-up to a UM system. No BBS or the like, just a simple programming environment. I wrote codes in a sort of basic-like language with line numbers and stuff, saved them on paper punch tapes. The terminal had cylindrical keys like an old teletype terminal (which it probably was), with only paper print out as the computer-to-human connection. This was the system where I wrote my first modeling program, an empirical solution to the diffraction pattern from a double slit experiment. Full disclosure, they told us a very high price per minute, so when I wrote my first infinite loop I panicked and just unplugged the system to force a reboot.
A very funny episode of Big Bang actually showed how to use a loop counter to break the loop, something I had not yet figured out back in '68, and obviously I was way ahead of the programming support at the high school at the time, so even if I were hiding from the sysadmin, he/she certainly did not live locally. Sigh, time to get out the suspenders and start talking like the Unix guru in Dilbert. I feel old.
Sorry if I offended the "True Believers" who insist that some other operating system is technically so so superior to XP/XP Pro. I know that, but so was betamax over VHS, and look where that got them! I myself work in Unix, so there.
May I suggest that a group of businesses and private citizens start a class action lawsuit to force MicroSoft to continue to support XP/XP Pro until the market place itself shows such support to be unwarranted. ("Would like like XP or Vista with that computer?", says the salesdroid.)
There is a well known (to contractor programmers) rule that says that even if you develop software on your own time to make your work at a company easier, if others at the company adopt your tools and the company becomes dependent on those tools, then you cannot claim ownership and take them with you when you are let go (learning this cost me about $800K, the company gibbeted another contract programmer so I'd get the message). Sort of an anti-addiction component, you can't hook 'em then run with the goods.
[information] We used ether (I think). It was whatever truckers use to prime their diesels (especially when cold). In convenient spray cans, it burned very cleanly indeed (no gummy residue).
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
John Adams
US diplomat & politician (1735 - 1826)
So, the Japanese are going to surpass us once again, first in manufacturing, now in Liberal Arts majors. Serves 'em right.
So, if I buy my new Beemer, and decide I don't want those fancy Pirellis that the manu. thought I needed, and I put on some "Hotspeeder 501s" cause I know I can make that Beemer dance on two wheels if I just have the right tread, am I supposed to get full bucks back on those "other tires"? No, I suppose I should be able to go to the dealer and ask for the car without tires, which costs the dealer more than selling me the car with tires that I have to dump. Unlike tires, though, used OSs are a dime a dozen and so I suppose the rebate is a reasonable way to reduce the pain. But on the other hand, most customers just want to get in, turn the key and be killed 50 klics down the road when the tires fail.
Note: no offense meant to Beemers, Beemer owners, their affiliates or their lawyers. Send flames to/dev/nul/marshmallows-on-a-weiner-stick.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not judge information by the color of the graphics, but by the content. A fancier interface that just lets me surf crap is still only letting me surf crap.
I agree with this, I have sometimes thought that if there was an honest broker where I could store my thumbprint, then I could simply publish (standard legalese public notice) that no credit application in my name was valid without a thumbprint showing that I had physically touched the paper with my signature. I mean, my local bank has such a system, for crying in the beer. I have much more to gain from being able to prove that I am me than I have to lose by the government or Walmart being able to tell that I am me.
Surely it's not a two-body, 10 body or 3000 body model? Be nifty if someone working the problem would share that insight, even the name of the model would let us (former orbital mechanics types) Google and perhaps understand a bit better what was up. In the meantime maybe f ~ m*mi/r^2 should not be using the old 1+1=2 version of "2". Then try summing that over i=1:20000, heck just try finding a quick list of 20,000 m's.
Ahhh, so the mullahs (Arabic for MFWIC, "Mutha who's in charge") want to isolate their flock so they can keep them stooopid. Sounds like a bad CIA plot... what's next, cell phones (ooops).
Well, I am not suggesting we all turn into Waco's, but it does make me glad that I have been supporting the NRA's defense of the 2nd amendment and the ACLU's support of free speech. Guess that makes me a strange bedfellow...
Just as A.C.Clarke predicted the use of satellites in global communications (did he get a patent?), so was this idea (supercapacitors replacing batteries) the science in an old science fiction story. Unfortunately, there was not room in the margins of my brain to write the full reference.
skeptical of claims that hundreds or thousands of supposedly respectable scientists hold a non-mainstream view but can't express it because some shadowy cabal is forcing them to stay quiet.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is the standard rule in science. And when most scientists accept the popular view of the causes of global warming, then a claim to the contrary is considered "extraordinary", and a scientist would be foolish to try to publish anything but 4-sigma or better results, which far exceeds the 2 (or 1 or 0.5)-sigma "results" that claim to prove global warming is caused by humans. So it is logical and unsurprising that most published articles support the popular view, which (by application of Goebbels Rule) leads to even more belief in the weak hypothosis.
On the other hand, the real debate is sort of like "nature vs. nurture", and the real answer is that there is an as yet unmeasured proportion of climate change that humans cause, and it looks like that change is global warming. The debate should be on (1) what that proportion is, then (2) how much of that is it possible to prevent (China's 1.2B all want to live like New Yorkers, near as I can tell).
As someone who used VB to launch a small company, I can tell you that while VB was cheap up front, it did have some long term costs that would have argued against its use (we in fact converted the whole shebang to C++ for Macs). But it is important to remember that we were a START-UP, and could not have afforded the "approved" solution language because as has been noted, the development costs skyrocket. True, the TCO is higher, but the payment schedule (low up front, balloon later) FITS the start-up company cash flow model.
Now, MSoft is not a start-up, and I'll bet their deep codes are not in VB. And the fact that their stuff is bloatware is partly a response to the "gotta sell another upgrade". And that is a different problem.
[Pet peeve alert]. Okay, so we whine that these are not "true" robots 'cause they are really just remote control (RC) machines, only a little firepower above those toy monster trucks the gearheads play with. Aren't there enough of us working as editors to get authors to use "[sic]" when quoting misinformed "experts". I think that "[sic]", meaning "hey, they said it, but that don't make it so", is greatly underused and should be brought back into usage, and I see no reason why we can't nit-pick this one. After all, as was pointed out, an AIM-7F/M Sparrow AMRAAM (guidance: "Raytheon Advanced Monopulse Seeker inverse-monopulse semi-active radar homing") is certainly robotic once it leaves the rail.
[/Pet peeve alert]
I ran across a neat quote that said that while the West treated religion as "tea room conversation", in the rest of the world religion was a contact sport. Of course, I immediately think of things in the "bible belt" and know that we are not immune here in the USNA.
I did have an interesting discussion with a Pakistani who works with me after he point-blank asked me what religion I was. I explained to him that such a question was considered improper in the West, at least based on my 30 years in the workplace.
On the other hand, I am about ready to found "Atheists in support of the Ayatollah Bush" as a signal of my mixed feelings about having a Prez who is doing the right things for the wrong reasons (at least in the arena of military and defense, which is where 20 years of my expertise lies as I once held the job title, "Chief Scientist, Strategic Air Command, Intelligence (HQ SAC/INTC)", which let me play in lots of interesting analyses).
Back to the point at hand, we may have some zealots, but many are like the Amish, quiet, polite and not particularly dangerous.
First, Kudos to ProfessorPuke for this comment. Very nicely done.
My own FWIW -- IRL, computer-driven systems are diffusing throughout the human-infected parts of the planet, think of them as being like a friendly and useful symbiote like those bug-eating birds that clean the backs of those water buffalo.
Enter hackers. Programming is a fun exercise, and lots of hackers really enjoy playing with the tools of the trade. Unfortunately, if they make a mistake (like RTM apparently did), it is conceivable that those friendly birds could be corrupted by some virus/worm into giant mythical rocs (at least in the minds of the 99.99% of the world that does not understand exactly what is going on here).
At some level, the irrational fear is driven by the same poor education and innumeracy that makes otherwise rational people worry about nuclear power plants but not worry about coal-fired plants (in spite of the probability that a modern nuclear plant kills fewer people that the coal plant in a TCO sense).
All that having been said, we should expect more and more severe consequences to be levied upon "innocent hackers" who run their experiments in the real world, just as we would if they were high school chemists who accidently poisoned a city water supply during a prank. In the words of a once (15-minutes of fame) famous "Hill Street Blues" character, "Let's be careful out there!"
our word Algebra comes from the book Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala written by a Middle-Eastern man named Abu Abd-Allah ibn Musa al'Khwarizmi around 830
So?
One of our biggest strengths as a culture (the West, that is) is that even if you are a miserable patent clerk, if your idea stands up to scrutiny, you win.
Compare that with "science" as practiced in the former USSR, where "political correctness" supported, for example, the failed concept that animals inherited features given to their parents. Thus, to breed short-tailed mice, one only needed to cut the tails off the parents and eventually the baby mice would start coming out with shorter tails. Kind of slows up development of better strains of corn when you start from such a bad assumption, does it not?
One consequence of the Western view is that we do not care that al-jabr came from the Middle-East because:
it works, therefore it is correct and eventually (after the patent runs out) belongs to all of math and science,
(more importantly) that was yesterday, what can we learn today?
(finally) what your parents did (whether one or many generations removed) says nothing about you, you have neither claim nor blame for events you did not control.
Of course, this sentiment puts me in partial opposition to the famous comment...
"This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to Sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is Always in short supply."
maryesme is, of course, correct. The example exactly demonstrates a technique for inferring a 3 dimensional space from two dimensional observations. We infer at least four dimensions based on our three dimensional observations. On the other hand, the higher dimensions are just a mathematical convenience that seems to fit observation, this does not mean they exist.
I think that Yahoo shouldn't be changing any words in e-mails unless the users specifically choose to turn that "feature on"
Hmmm, Yahoo offers a free service, then tries to improve that free service in an awkward but cheapo way, no doubt because their lawyers said they were at risk, then we complain because this free service does not work like "for-pay" sites (if this sentence was too complex for you, try reading something more complex than the funny pages).
I am always amazed at the ability to bitch furiously of people who want free services, whether they be Slashdotters or welfare cheats. Remember, "He who has the gold, makes the rules.", or in its market equivalent, "He who spends the gold, makes the rules." You get what you pay for, and if you have taken the free @Yahoo mail route you already knew or suspected that you were open to: (1) having your email address sold to marketers, and (2) being shown advertisements whenever you read your email (Yahoo charges a fee to user who use POP).
IMNSHO, Yahoo's big mistake was in not telling all its users this was happening, and I suspect that 99% of those users did not even know or care that this was happening since they did not use HTML encoded email.
Before Yahoo filtered this, it contained a short but complete description of the Fermat solution to Fermat's last theorem, which, unlike the eventual proof, truly was short and clear, as well as the ultimate equation that defines the universe. I hope the filters did not change it too much.
this "fee" is essentially meaningless to those with enough money
as if it were a bad thing. If Susie D. Pockets wants to trade mere $$$ for the right to ride, let her. My question is "What the heck is so valuable about living in such urban hells that makes people want to spend their lives there?"
It's like the oil magnate said, "We will never run out of oil -- it will just get so expensive that most people won't be able to afford it." Same here. Congestion would be self-limiting if we would just tell people that we weren't going to "enable" their bad habits of:
Building businesses in already congested areas,
Living far from work,
Stealing from everyone to build public transit that only serves the people who live by these bad habits.
We enable these bad habits by:
Giving tax breaks to companies that locate in our cities,
Treating congestion as a problem to be solved by promising to build new roads,
Promising mass transit solutions when they are not able to pay their own way.
It is sort of like tuberculosis. We know how it spreads, but would rather spend beaucoup bucks on treatment ("drugs, drugs, drugs") rather than similar amounts on education ("don't spit in public, mo-fo"). As long as we treat the symptom (congestion) rather than the cause (stupid pro-big-city mentalities) we will never catch up.
Basically, the researcher is saying that people with ADD have a neurological problem that causes them to seek stimulation in the form of video games
True, but if you believe the brain is trainable, then the conclusion from the so-called half-videogame category, that
once they started playing, the beta waves rapidly decreased
strongly suggests that parents would be well advised to restrict their kids playing time until they are about 25 years old or so (when their brain has pretty much settled down on growth).
Then the FBI tech was "so upset" that he destroyed ALL of the collected email, not only the information that was not covered by
the warrant.
Yeah right. The fact that this even seemed credible is a stark reminder that the average FBI agent works for a boss who is
painfully politically correct,
anal-retentitive,
will hang yer ass out if you try to exercise your own good judgment instead of following my paranoid (after all, you are out to get everyone) rules designed to keep you from EVER using any form of common sense because you are, after all, a fekkin tool of an oppressive regime.
I refer, of course, to the common taxpayer as presented to the FBI by the press.
People, people, people. If you crucify and excoriate anyone in public service who uses the least bit of common sense, then do not come crying to me when all you get in government service are a bunch of timid drones who follow the rules flying in the face of what you think a reasonable person should do. You reap what you sew. Since the 60's we have sewn timid book following drones more than visionary risk takers. Of course, too many risk takers and you get too many Ruby Ridges, Waco's and Philadelphia's, the trick (which we have not learned) is to walk the line between the two. Unfortunately, there are institutions (like the ACLU) who dedicate themselves to preventing the risky behaviors, but none who are successful in de-neutering the resulting drones.
Slashdot Mirror
A very funny episode of Big Bang actually showed how to use a loop counter to break the loop, something I had not yet figured out back in '68, and obviously I was way ahead of the programming support at the high school at the time, so even if I were hiding from the sysadmin, he/she certainly did not live locally. Sigh, time to get out the suspenders and start talking like the Unix guru in Dilbert. I feel old.
Sorry if I offended the "True Believers" who insist that some other operating system is technically so so superior to XP/XP Pro. I know that, but so was betamax over VHS, and look where that got them! I myself work in Unix, so there.
May I suggest that a group of businesses and private citizens start a class action lawsuit to force MicroSoft to continue to support XP/XP Pro until the market place itself shows such support to be unwarranted. ("Would like like XP or Vista with that computer?", says the salesdroid.) There is a well known (to contractor programmers) rule that says that even if you develop software on your own time to make your work at a company easier, if others at the company adopt your tools and the company becomes dependent on those tools, then you cannot claim ownership and take them with you when you are let go (learning this cost me about $800K, the company gibbeted another contract programmer so I'd get the message). Sort of an anti-addiction component, you can't hook 'em then run with the goods.
[information] We used ether (I think). It was whatever truckers use to prime their diesels (especially when cold). In convenient spray cans, it burned very cleanly indeed (no gummy residue).
Note: no offense meant to Beemers, Beemer owners, their affiliates or their lawyers. Send flames to /dev/nul/marshmallows-on-a-weiner-stick.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not judge information by the color of the graphics, but by the content. A fancier interface that just lets me surf crap is still only letting me surf crap.
I agree with this, I have sometimes thought that if there was an honest broker where I could store my thumbprint, then I could simply publish (standard legalese public notice) that no credit application in my name was valid without a thumbprint showing that I had physically touched the paper with my signature. I mean, my local bank has such a system, for crying in the beer. I have much more to gain from being able to prove that I am me than I have to lose by the government or Walmart being able to tell that I am me.
Surely it's not a two-body, 10 body or 3000 body model? Be nifty if someone working the problem would share that insight, even the name of the model would let us (former orbital mechanics types) Google and perhaps understand a bit better what was up. In the meantime maybe f ~ m*mi/r^2 should not be using the old 1+1=2 version of "2". Then try summing that over i=1:20000, heck just try finding a quick list of 20,000 m's.
Ahhh, so the mullahs (Arabic for MFWIC, "Mutha who's in charge") want to isolate their flock so they can keep them stooopid. Sounds like a bad CIA plot ... what's next, cell phones (ooops).
Oh this will really scare those Bulgarian/Cambodian/Russian hackers into behaving responsibly with respect to IP.
Well, I am not suggesting we all turn into Waco's, but it does make me glad that I have been supporting the NRA's defense of the 2nd amendment and the ACLU's support of free speech. Guess that makes me a strange bedfellow ...
Just as A.C.Clarke predicted the use of satellites in global communications (did he get a patent?), so was this idea (supercapacitors replacing batteries) the science in an old science fiction story. Unfortunately, there was not room in the margins of my brain to write the full reference.
On the other hand, the real debate is sort of like "nature vs. nurture", and the real answer is that there is an as yet unmeasured proportion of climate change that humans cause, and it looks like that change is global warming. The debate should be on (1) what that proportion is, then (2) how much of that is it possible to prevent (China's 1.2B all want to live like New Yorkers, near as I can tell).
Now, MSoft is not a start-up, and I'll bet their deep codes are not in VB. And the fact that their stuff is bloatware is partly a response to the "gotta sell another upgrade". And that is a different problem.
[Pet peeve alert]. Okay, so we whine that these are not "true" robots 'cause they are really just remote control (RC) machines, only a little firepower above those toy monster trucks the gearheads play with. Aren't there enough of us working as editors to get authors to use "[sic]" when quoting misinformed "experts". I think that "[sic]", meaning "hey, they said it, but that don't make it so", is greatly underused and should be brought back into usage, and I see no reason why we can't nit-pick this one. After all, as was pointed out, an AIM-7F/M Sparrow AMRAAM (guidance: "Raytheon Advanced Monopulse Seeker inverse-monopulse semi-active radar homing") is certainly robotic once it leaves the rail. [/Pet peeve alert]
I did have an interesting discussion with a Pakistani who works with me after he point-blank asked me what religion I was. I explained to him that such a question was considered improper in the West, at least based on my 30 years in the workplace.
On the other hand, I am about ready to found "Atheists in support of the Ayatollah Bush" as a signal of my mixed feelings about having a Prez who is doing the right things for the wrong reasons (at least in the arena of military and defense, which is where 20 years of my expertise lies as I once held the job title, "Chief Scientist, Strategic Air Command, Intelligence (HQ SAC/INTC)", which let me play in lots of interesting analyses).
Back to the point at hand, we may have some zealots, but many are like the Amish, quiet, polite and not particularly dangerous.
My own FWIW -- IRL, computer-driven systems are diffusing throughout the human-infected parts of the planet, think of them as being like a friendly and useful symbiote like those bug-eating birds that clean the backs of those water buffalo. Enter hackers. Programming is a fun exercise, and lots of hackers really enjoy playing with the tools of the trade. Unfortunately, if they make a mistake (like RTM apparently did), it is conceivable that those friendly birds could be corrupted by some virus/worm into giant mythical rocs (at least in the minds of the 99.99% of the world that does not understand exactly what is going on here).
At some level, the irrational fear is driven by the same poor education and innumeracy that makes otherwise rational people worry about nuclear power plants but not worry about coal-fired plants (in spite of the probability that a modern nuclear plant kills fewer people that the coal plant in a TCO sense).
All that having been said, we should expect more and more severe consequences to be levied upon "innocent hackers" who run their experiments in the real world, just as we would if they were high school chemists who accidently poisoned a city water supply during a prank. In the words of a once (15-minutes of fame) famous "Hill Street Blues" character, "Let's be careful out there!"
I see San Fran with its own Mutual Assured Destruction arsenal.
What? Oh, they already have one.
One of our biggest strengths as a culture (the West, that is) is that even if you are a miserable patent clerk, if your idea stands up to scrutiny, you win.
Compare that with "science" as practiced in the former USSR, where "political correctness" supported, for example, the failed concept that animals inherited features given to their parents. Thus, to breed short-tailed mice, one only needed to cut the tails off the parents and eventually the baby mice would start coming out with shorter tails. Kind of slows up development of better strains of corn when you start from such a bad assumption, does it not?
One consequence of the Western view is that we do not care that al-jabr came from the Middle-East because:
- it works, therefore it is correct and eventually (after the patent runs out) belongs to all of math and science,
- (more importantly) that was yesterday, what can we learn today?
- (finally) what your parents did (whether one or many generations removed) says nothing about you, you have neither claim nor blame for events you did not control.
Of course, this sentiment puts me in partial opposition to the famous commentmaryesme is, of course, correct. The example exactly demonstrates a technique for inferring a 3 dimensional space from two dimensional observations. We infer at least four dimensions based on our three dimensional observations. On the other hand, the higher dimensions are just a mathematical convenience that seems to fit observation, this does not mean they exist.
I am always amazed at the ability to bitch furiously of people who want free services, whether they be Slashdotters or welfare cheats. Remember, "He who has the gold, makes the rules.", or in its market equivalent, "He who spends the gold, makes the rules." You get what you pay for, and if you have taken the free @Yahoo mail route you already knew or suspected that you were open to: (1) having your email address sold to marketers, and (2) being shown advertisements whenever you read your email (Yahoo charges a fee to user who use POP).
IMNSHO, Yahoo's big mistake was in not telling all its users this was happening, and I suspect that 99% of those users did not even know or care that this was happening since they did not use HTML encoded email.
It's like the oil magnate said, "We will never run out of oil -- it will just get so expensive that most people won't be able to afford it." Same here. Congestion would be self-limiting if we would just tell people that we weren't going to "enable" their bad habits of:
- Building businesses in already congested areas,
- Living far from work,
- Stealing from everyone to build public transit that only serves the people who live by these bad habits.
We enable these bad habits by:- Giving tax breaks to companies that locate in our cities,
- Treating congestion as a problem to be solved by promising to build new roads,
- Promising mass transit solutions when they are not able to pay their own way.
It is sort of like tuberculosis. We know how it spreads, but would rather spend beaucoup bucks on treatment ("drugs, drugs, drugs") rather than similar amounts on education ("don't spit in public, mo-fo"). As long as we treat the symptom (congestion) rather than the cause (stupid pro-big-city mentalities) we will never catch up.- painfully politically correct,
- anal-retentitive,
- will hang yer ass out if you try to exercise your own good judgment instead of following my paranoid (after all, you are out to get everyone) rules designed to keep you from EVER using any form of common sense because you are, after all, a fekkin tool of an oppressive regime.
I refer, of course, to the common taxpayer as presented to the FBI by the press.People, people, people. If you crucify and excoriate anyone in public service who uses the least bit of common sense, then do not come crying to me when all you get in government service are a bunch of timid drones who follow the rules flying in the face of what you think a reasonable person should do. You reap what you sew. Since the 60's we have sewn timid book following drones more than visionary risk takers. Of course, too many risk takers and you get too many Ruby Ridges, Waco's and Philadelphia's, the trick (which we have not learned) is to walk the line between the two. Unfortunately, there are institutions (like the ACLU) who dedicate themselves to preventing the risky behaviors, but none who are successful in de-neutering the resulting drones.