``SO the artists themselves are "sharing" the material. If the people who are literally making the material feel they want to share it, why should we say its wrong?''
Mainly, because, as I understand it, the standard record company contract spells out that this is ``work for hire''. If a band then provides the recordings to the world as a collection of MP3s, it is the band that's doing the stealing. The people who download them could be said to be receiving stolen goods. Well, one could construe it that way, I guess. If I am hired by Company X to perform some programming services under a contract that states that the Company owns the results of my work, then I cannot take copies of the code with me and distribute it on my own to other people. If I don't like the terms of the contract, I tell them so and we either agree to modify the contract or somone else benefits from my programming services.
What about the moral problem in signing a legal agreement that you don't agree with? I don't have a lot of sympathy for bands that are stupid enough to sign such a contract. Sure they see $$$ in their eyes and sign. But, if you're not creating music that's going to sell well, then go it on your own and distribute the MP3s on your own; at least you've cut out the middle man. But I don't think the band has a legal basis for taking the recordings and distributing them via the internet on their own; even if the record company had failed to do a decent job of promoting and getting sales. (They could always say ``Hey we gambled on these guys and lost. Not our fault that the public doesn't like their songs.'') The band could always, in theory, buy the rights to the music back from the record company, right? Or maybe they could hunt around find a lawyer who could convince a jury that the record company was somehow guilty of fraud and duped the band into signing the contract. Maybe we should lobby for the legal community to provide pro bono legal assistance for recording artists that wish to get out from under the legal thumb of the recording companies?
Sorry to offer a (probably) unpopular opinion. (And, before you switch on the flamethrower, you need to know that I think most recording companies are pond scum and I buy most of my CDs either used, from indie label websites, or from the bands themselves at concerts. Oh yah, I think that 99% of MP3s sound like crap, too.)
``...which are legitimately permitted:... and not-for-profit music playing.''
What does that mean in the UK? In the U.S., you'd think that meant charging admission to hear music that was recorded on a CD. However, bars and other businesses have to worry about the ASCAP ``cops'' coming into their business and busting them for playing music. So over here, it appears that if anyone spends money on a beer (or anything) while some music is playing in the background it's ``for-profit'' use. (At least that's I remember discussing with a bar owner one day after asking him ``Why do you guys play the radio now and not those excellent collections of taped music like you used to?'' The owner's reply was that the music was allegedly being used to attract customers so it was not not-for-profit use. Wonder the way the law can wangle any desired result out of vague wording, isn't it?) Either that or it's, somehow, covered under the phrase ``public performance''. I can see it now: ``Hey you! Turn it down or roll up those car windows or we're gonna call ASCAP!''
``("See, if I copy your CD, you can still hear the music! We can both hear the music now! Do you feel like I've stolen anything from you?")''
That explains why many of my CDs are imprinted with a notice that states that I'm not allowed to lend my CD to anyone. As it turns out, those thoughtful record companies are just looking out for my being able to hear the music that I've paid for which, of course, I can't if I've lent it to you. God bless them one and all. I also noticed, during a rather cursory check on a number of my CDs, that this verbiage is present mainly on CDs that were produced by record companies based in the UK or other European countries. Interesting, eh? Soon, even lending will be immoral. At least in the UK.
``I'd want them to read books on critical thinking so...
You should know by now that today's capitalism has no need for critical thinking. (And Consumer Reports is probably a communist front organization as well.)
``Until a floating-point error causes it to bean Mike Piazza.''
Seeing as how I generally root against any New York teams, I want to say ``You say that as though it would be a bad thing.''. But that wouldn't be very nice. Oops! Too late!
On a more serious note, (assuming that pitching machines with `Intel Inside' can actually be serious) wouldn't it be interesting to be able to program this thing to pitch like whatever pitcher you would be facing that day? Batting practice would more interesting. By the time you faced the real pitcher, you'd have already ``virtually'' batted against him instead of some third string reliever. Heck you could bat against pitchers who've long retired (spend the morning batting against Nolan Ryan v1.3.1). --
I heard that Motorola was looking at this kind of service back in the early '90s. And I never heard any more about it. Wonder whether they discovered something that made further development not worth pursuing. Wonder whether these companies will rediscover the same thing. On the other hand, these people pushing this now might be former Motorola employees who decided to take the idea and run with it after their former, short-sighted employer dropped it. Wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened.
--
If you are setting something up in your basement or even a spare bedroom, IMHO, they're the only way to go.
Get to know people who work in IT at large companies. You may find that they're dumping rack enclosures. I've picked up a 19-inch and a 24-inch for nothing. The 24-incher has shelves and both have fans and doors. These were being dumped during an equipment migration project and if I didn't take them they'd have actually paid someone to come and haul them away. If you have some money... I've seen some equipment racks for sale cheap (though not cheap enough for me:-) ) in the local classified ads, usually when some company goes under. With the recent death of some dot-com companies, I suspect that some hardware will be for sale fairly cheap.
I have been assembling my own systems since the late '80s and prefer getting rackmounted enclosures for most systems though I found that it's nice to have a smaller workstation that'll sit under the desk. You can keep most of your data on the rackmounted systems downstairs. Makes the system under your desk quieter when it doesn't have a half-dozen disks spinning in it.
The downside of racks are that, even if you strip them down to the skeleton (removing the side panels, doors, etc.), they're a bear to haul up and down the stairs if you move. I know... I just moved and my back wasn't the same for a couple of days. Tests the strength of your friendships as well though it helps to remind folks that there's beer in the fridge when you get done shlepping the rack up the stairs.
The other thing that's sometimes annoying is that you never have enough of the hardware for mounting equipment in the rack. As a result, you collect a bunch of incompatible clip-on nuts and screws. The one's I prefer are apparently only made by one company on the planet and available only to people representing a secret cabal of IT equipment manufacturers. And what ever screw/nut combinations you find... don't ever lose one of the screws. The local hardware store will not have exact replacements. It's incredibly annoying to have to have three different screw/nut/Torx drivers on hand to put in a pair of slide rails. Hint: if you find some mounting hardware that you like, buy a bunch of it.
Oh yeah, one more plus: Your friends and acquantances will be assured of your being a geek when they see your rackmounted computers. Of course, if you wish to be recognized as a total geek, you'll keep the racks in the living room.
Try more like at least 25 years. The guys in the CE department were making concrete canoes and competing with other schools' CE students back in the early-mid '70s. Us EE students thought they were daft but, then, we were amusing ourselves trying to do useful things with weird things called ``microprocessors''. (One guy was doing speech recognition on the department's Altair. Hand assembly anyone?). The CEs thought we were nuts.
...about the article was Microsoft's latest attempt to extend and extinguish by reusing an acronym that we've all come to know and love: ``CLI'' It will always mean Command Line Interface and not whatever it was that Microsoft is currently trying to push.
So, Dr. Thom appears to be annoyed that someone made a bit of a mockery of the flawed system. What do you think has been going on in the U.S. ever since software algorithms and business processes could be ``patented''? Better develop a thicker skin, Dr. Thom. People are going to be laughing at your process.
``Does that mean I'll need to protect my breaker panel in the basement with a firewall?''
I wouldn't want just anybody DDOSing my X10 devices.
``What effect will adding network signals to the power lines do to the overall RF noise levels?''
There was a lot of concern about this years ago when cable TV became widespread. Cable companies have a pretty poor record of performing good quality cable installs. ``Leaky'' connections were supposedly resulting in measurable amounts of RF noise. Even though that noise isn't in the same band as, say, an aircraft's landing system receiver, the added RF energy could generate interesting IM harmonics (either by swamping the receiver's front-end or just through combinations of the various RF signals that the receiver sees) that could affect the receiver's performance.
Something tells me that the power grid is not wired for clean transmission of hig speed data. I, for one, would sure as hell hate to find that I'm augering in because someone's downloading a collection of Metallica MP3s.
It's actually worse than the propietary characters. I had to go to an NT box and use IE in order to avoid seeing nothing but a page with an error message when I tried to follow the link to the roundtable.
``Inside the Tech Economy''? The tech economy is more than Microsoft and its cronies. I suppose one day there'll be a site that is more inclusive in the technologies that it allows to access its web pages but, hey, I'm a dreamer.
A current theory regarding Compaq's so-called marketing efforts for the Alpha platform was that it was headed up by the same people who ran Digital's crack marketing team.
``Do you know how many times I was "marketed" to? Like... maybe twice. I worked on a total of 10 alpha systems.''
Twice?! I could only dream of hearing from Compaq marketing that many times. I've been working with Alphas since, oh, around '94-'95. I have never received a call from anyone in Compaq's marketing group that wasn't a return call to one initiated by either myself or a co-worker. Salespeople who don't know how to sell. Unfortunately, that seems to have been one of the things that Compaq received when they bought Digital. Aside from some printed materials, I have found out about new offerings in Alphaservers either from the www or from local resellers. Mostly the latter, since almost immediately after Compaq's purchase of Digital, their web sites became intensely graphical and slow to the point of being unusable, links that point to nothing, pages that don't really tell you anything, etc. You become aware that there's something wrong when you cannot view pages on the official Alphaserver, and especially the Tru64, web site using a workstation running Tru64 and the browser that ships on the installation CDs. It's so nice having to use the Intel/NT box on your desk to research Alpha/Tru64 purchases. Compaq's marketing efforts are pathetic for anything that isn't Intel-based.
Even though Tru64 has been rumored to have already been ported to the Itanium processor, the comments around the office were NOT ``Well, that's a relief!'' but, rather, ``Why wouldn't we just run Linux?'' Why, indeed!
I'd seen interviews with Lenat and seen stories about his AI work, oh, must have been at least ten to fifteen years ago. I figured that the work had ended. Talk about your perserverence!
Let's just hope that the Russians haven't created their own Cyc project. If the two ever find each other on the Internet and talk to each other...
``Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), while joining Rep. Gephardt (D-MO) in a discussion of how Democrats are the "guardians of the New Economy," noted that opt-out is better, because it gives companies their first ammendment right to contact you.''
And to think the Republicans are the ones who are supposed to be so pro-business.
``And opt-out is a joke. I've opted out of countless things, but I still get a hundred+ spams a day.''
Bet you don't get any more spam from the companies that you ``opted out'' from. Only problem is that those companies probably accumulate a list of opt-outs and sell it to some other company so they can spam you. ``Hey, Ted, how's it going? Nah. Wish I could but I can't. I have a golf outing. Say, I gotta list here of people who don't want our junk emails any more. Maybe they won't mind hearing from you. How much will you give me for it?''
...this is such an Earth-shattering discovery. Anyone who'd been paying attention (if you're still able to, that is:-) ) could have seen this coming.
Television programming has been including more and more commercial content for years. Then there's infomercials. (Do people outside the U.S. have these oddities on their TVs?) Should ADD be blamed on Madison Avenue? MTV? Something in McDonald's hamburgers? Who knows. But the increasingly shrill nature of TV commercials (IMHO) and the number of ads you're seeing on most web pages nowadays, especially the increase in the number of those that are animated, seem to me to indicate that these folks seeking my attention are getting quite desperate. But we're tuning them out anyway. Perhaps our minds are erecting a protective barrier against the onslaught of information. If that's the case, greater efforts in making these attention getters more appealing (if one could use that word to describe a commercial) or memorable are just a waste of time.
As for adding technology to classrooms, as in Katz's posting:
``...outfitted with a panel of lights at the teacher's workstation, one light corresponding to each student's seat. When brain wave monitors not that a student is paying attention, his light will be green. If the student's attention lags and the light goes red, the teacher can engage the student by asking a question, focusing his voice in the student's direction, or using high-tech graphics or other tools.''
Looking past the outright stupidity of such a proposal, less, and not more (IMHO), technology in the classroom would be a far preferable solution to the attention problem. Some would say that the explosion of new technologies in peoples' lives may be the source of all the ADD that's being diagnosed. Who needs the teacher keeping one eye on a magic board to tell him who's bored? That's the last thing the students need is something providing a distraction from the teacher's primary job. I had a thermodynamics professor who had a quite a low-tech means of engaging student's attention: If he saw you weren't paying attention, or even busy taking notes when he thought you'd be better off listening more attentively, he'd merely fire off a piece of chalk in your general direction. Got your attention and you tried not to let any more chalk projectiles fly past your ear. No expensive electronic classroom gizmos were necessary. And the money that would have been wasted on such a silly piece of technology went to pay for better educators.
Wean children off the technology that's supposed to be making it easier for them to learn (but are actually just high-tech spoon feeding programs) and perhaps the occurances of ADD will decline. My family just moved and I haven't installed an antenna for the TV and we haven't wanted to pay for cable. I've actually seen a difference in my daughters behaviour in the few weeks that our house has been without the rapid-fire, designed-for-those-with-short-attention-span, programming. And, amazingly, we've all managed to remain sane, happy, and productive. Much to the consternation, I'm sure, of the advertising agencies. (And, No, I wouldn't consider us Luddites. I think the 100baseT network of seven computers would get us kicked out of that club.)
I remember reading it in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions collection (or was it in D. V. Again, I forget.) Very early Seventies, I think. I remember ROTFLMAO about the arguments on how to spell ``jism''.
You've probably never had to write cross-platform FORTRAN where one of the platforms used the Microsoft FORTRAN compiler. I would hope that it's gotten better but I remember how much trouble it used to be. Every single READ and WRITE statement had to be examined to see if it would need a rewrite before working under MS-FORTRAN.
``I almost started laughing like a madman when I realized that on one line, instead of a "'", I had typed a "`".''
Which is why, at most places where I knew people were writing FORTRAN, they had a utility that would check for those things. We had one called SCANCHAR that would check a source file and spit out any lines in a source file that contained characters that weren't acceptable. The students we had working for us loved it, since they grew tired of the look we'd give 'em when they came asking why something wouldn't compile and it turned out to be a bogus character. --
``performance doesn't matter 'cos the hardware's getting cheaper and faster?
We tend to train programmers how to program but not how to program well.''
Which is why you have software like Windows or Notes that brings even the fastest computer in the department to its knees. The hardware that runs these dogs with acceptable performance is never the cheaper hardware that these people have been talking about.
Well, I'd suspect your compiler would complain about all those FORMAT statements since the ``F'' is in the continuation column. Plus, it'd probably squawk about the lowercase ``x'' at the end of the lines. Lastly, there doesn't seem to be any actual, executable code in the program, like, say, a WRITE statement. But then, it's been a heck of a long time since I cranked out FORTRAN code so I may be wrong. I just remember that our convention was to keep column 1 for comments (or to begin debugging code on VAX FORTRAN), columns 2-5 for line numbers, column 6 for the continuation character (we always used ``&'' since it wasn't a valid language character and would help to find column violations), and then, finally, columns 7-72 for code. And, I'm surprised I remembered all that.
Of course, maybe your biggest problem is you just forgot to enclose it in <PRE></PRE>.:-)
I thought FORTRAN V was an enhanced version of FORTRAN IV and only available from certain vendors. I used it on a Sperry/Univac system back in the early '80s. On some of our other platforms we used a preprocessor call IFTRAN that let us write ``structured FORTRAN IV''. It generated some of the most gawd-awful intermediate FORTRAN IV code you could imagine. A terrible tool for writing high performance code too. On the PDP-11 it generated a CONTINUE statement at the end of every structured block of code. If you had nested blocks you got a series of CONTINUES in the generated FORTRAN. Doesn't sounds like a bad thing until the standard FORTRAN compiler kicked in and generated a NOP (or was that NOOP) for every CONTINUE in your intermediate code. Pretty funny in a way.
Slashdot Mirror
First, the obligatory IANAL...
Mainly, because, as I understand it, the standard record company contract spells out that this is ``work for hire''. If a band then provides the recordings to the world as a collection of MP3s, it is the band that's doing the stealing. The people who download them could be said to be receiving stolen goods. Well, one could construe it that way, I guess. If I am hired by Company X to perform some programming services under a contract that states that the Company owns the results of my work, then I cannot take copies of the code with me and distribute it on my own to other people. If I don't like the terms of the contract, I tell them so and we either agree to modify the contract or somone else benefits from my programming services.
What about the moral problem in signing a legal agreement that you don't agree with? I don't have a lot of sympathy for bands that are stupid enough to sign such a contract. Sure they see $$$ in their eyes and sign. But, if you're not creating music that's going to sell well, then go it on your own and distribute the MP3s on your own; at least you've cut out the middle man. But I don't think the band has a legal basis for taking the recordings and distributing them via the internet on their own; even if the record company had failed to do a decent job of promoting and getting sales. (They could always say ``Hey we gambled on these guys and lost. Not our fault that the public doesn't like their songs.'') The band could always, in theory, buy the rights to the music back from the record company, right? Or maybe they could hunt around find a lawyer who could convince a jury that the record company was somehow guilty of fraud and duped the band into signing the contract. Maybe we should lobby for the legal community to provide pro bono legal assistance for recording artists that wish to get out from under the legal thumb of the recording companies?
Sorry to offer a (probably) unpopular opinion. (And, before you switch on the flamethrower, you need to know that I think most recording companies are pond scum and I buy most of my CDs either used, from indie label websites, or from the bands themselves at concerts. Oh yah, I think that 99% of MP3s sound like crap, too.)
--
What does that mean in the UK? In the U.S., you'd think that meant charging admission to hear music that was recorded on a CD. However, bars and other businesses have to worry about the ASCAP ``cops'' coming into their business and busting them for playing music. So over here, it appears that if anyone spends money on a beer (or anything) while some music is playing in the background it's ``for-profit'' use. (At least that's I remember discussing with a bar owner one day after asking him ``Why do you guys play the radio now and not those excellent collections of taped music like you used to?'' The owner's reply was that the music was allegedly being used to attract customers so it was not not-for-profit use. Wonder the way the law can wangle any desired result out of vague wording, isn't it?) Either that or it's, somehow, covered under the phrase ``public performance''. I can see it now: ``Hey you! Turn it down or roll up those car windows or we're gonna call ASCAP!''
--
That explains why many of my CDs are imprinted with a notice that states that I'm not allowed to lend my CD to anyone. As it turns out, those thoughtful record companies are just looking out for my being able to hear the music that I've paid for which, of course, I can't if I've lent it to you. God bless them one and all. I also noticed, during a rather cursory check on a number of my CDs, that this verbiage is present mainly on CDs that were produced by record companies based in the UK or other European countries. Interesting, eh? Soon, even lending will be immoral. At least in the UK.
You should know by now that today's capitalism has no need for critical thinking. (And Consumer Reports is probably a communist front organization as well.)
--
I think you actually meant to say:
Cheers...
--
Seeing as how I generally root against any New York teams, I want to say ``You say that as though it would be a bad thing.''. But that wouldn't be very nice. Oops! Too late!
On a more serious note, (assuming that pitching machines with `Intel Inside' can actually be serious) wouldn't it be interesting to be able to program this thing to pitch like whatever pitcher you would be facing that day? Batting practice would more interesting. By the time you faced the real pitcher, you'd have already ``virtually'' batted against him instead of some third string reliever. Heck you could bat against pitchers who've long retired (spend the morning batting against Nolan Ryan v1.3.1).
--
I heard that Motorola was looking at this kind of service back in the early '90s. And I never heard any more about it. Wonder whether they discovered something that made further development not worth pursuing. Wonder whether these companies will rediscover the same thing. On the other hand, these people pushing this now might be former Motorola employees who decided to take the idea and run with it after their former, short-sighted employer dropped it. Wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened.
--
If you are setting something up in your basement or even a spare bedroom, IMHO, they're the only way to go.
Get to know people who work in IT at large companies. You may find that they're dumping rack enclosures. I've picked up a 19-inch and a 24-inch for nothing. The 24-incher has shelves and both have fans and doors. These were being dumped during an equipment migration project and if I didn't take them they'd have actually paid someone to come and haul them away. If you have some money... I've seen some equipment racks for sale cheap (though not cheap enough for me :-) ) in the local classified ads, usually when some company goes under. With the recent death of some dot-com companies, I suspect that some hardware will be for sale fairly cheap.
I have been assembling my own systems since the late '80s and prefer getting rackmounted enclosures for most systems though I found that it's nice to have a smaller workstation that'll sit under the desk. You can keep most of your data on the rackmounted systems downstairs. Makes the system under your desk quieter when it doesn't have a half-dozen disks spinning in it.
The downside of racks are that, even if you strip them down to the skeleton (removing the side panels, doors, etc.), they're a bear to haul up and down the stairs if you move. I know... I just moved and my back wasn't the same for a couple of days. Tests the strength of your friendships as well though it helps to remind folks that there's beer in the fridge when you get done shlepping the rack up the stairs.
The other thing that's sometimes annoying is that you never have enough of the hardware for mounting equipment in the rack. As a result, you collect a bunch of incompatible clip-on nuts and screws. The one's I prefer are apparently only made by one company on the planet and available only to people representing a secret cabal of IT equipment manufacturers. And what ever screw/nut combinations you find... don't ever lose one of the screws. The local hardware store will not have exact replacements. It's incredibly annoying to have to have three different screw/nut/Torx drivers on hand to put in a pair of slide rails. Hint: if you find some mounting hardware that you like, buy a bunch of it.
Oh yeah, one more plus: Your friends and acquantances will be assured of your being a geek when they see your rackmounted computers. Of course, if you wish to be recognized as a total geek, you'll keep the racks in the living room.
--
...go back at least 14 years?
Try more like at least 25 years. The guys in the CE department were making concrete canoes and competing with other schools' CE students back in the early-mid '70s. Us EE students thought they were daft but, then, we were amusing ourselves trying to do useful things with weird things called ``microprocessors''. (One guy was doing speech recognition on the department's Altair. Hand assembly anyone?). The CEs thought we were nuts.
--
...something along the lines of:
``Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and I'm on the lookout for students cooking in their rooms. I'm so depressed...''
--
...about the article was Microsoft's latest attempt to extend and extinguish by reusing an acronym that we've all come to know and love: ``CLI'' It will always mean Command Line Interface and not whatever it was that Microsoft is currently trying to push.
--
So, Dr. Thom appears to be annoyed that someone made a bit of a mockery of the flawed system. What do you think has been going on in the U.S. ever since software algorithms and business processes could be ``patented''? Better develop a thicker skin, Dr. Thom. People are going to be laughing at your process.
--
I wouldn't want just anybody DDOSing my X10 devices.
There was a lot of concern about this years ago when cable TV became widespread. Cable companies have a pretty poor record of performing good quality cable installs. ``Leaky'' connections were supposedly resulting in measurable amounts of RF noise. Even though that noise isn't in the same band as, say, an aircraft's landing system receiver, the added RF energy could generate interesting IM harmonics (either by swamping the receiver's front-end or just through combinations of the various RF signals that the receiver sees) that could affect the receiver's performance.
Something tells me that the power grid is not wired for clean transmission of hig speed data. I, for one, would sure as hell hate to find that I'm augering in because someone's downloading a collection of Metallica MP3s.
--
It's actually worse than the propietary characters. I had to go to an NT box and use IE in order to avoid seeing nothing but a page with an error message when I tried to follow the link to the roundtable.
``Inside the Tech Economy''? The tech economy is more than Microsoft and its cronies. I suppose one day there'll be a site that is more inclusive in the technologies that it allows to access its web pages but, hey, I'm a dreamer.
--
A current theory regarding Compaq's so-called marketing efforts for the Alpha platform was that it was headed up by the same people who ran Digital's crack marketing team.
Twice?! I could only dream of hearing from Compaq marketing that many times. I've been working with Alphas since, oh, around '94-'95. I have never received a call from anyone in Compaq's marketing group that wasn't a return call to one initiated by either myself or a co-worker. Salespeople who don't know how to sell. Unfortunately, that seems to have been one of the things that Compaq received when they bought Digital. Aside from some printed materials, I have found out about new offerings in Alphaservers either from the www or from local resellers. Mostly the latter, since almost immediately after Compaq's purchase of Digital, their web sites became intensely graphical and slow to the point of being unusable, links that point to nothing, pages that don't really tell you anything, etc. You become aware that there's something wrong when you cannot view pages on the official Alphaserver, and especially the Tru64, web site using a workstation running Tru64 and the browser that ships on the installation CDs. It's so nice having to use the Intel/NT box on your desk to research Alpha/Tru64 purchases. Compaq's marketing efforts are pathetic for anything that isn't Intel-based.
Even though Tru64 has been rumored to have already been ported to the Itanium processor, the comments around the office were NOT ``Well, that's a relief!'' but, rather, ``Why wouldn't we just run Linux?'' Why, indeed!
--
I'd seen interviews with Lenat and seen stories about his AI work, oh, must have been at least ten to fifteen years ago. I figured that the work had ended. Talk about your perserverence!
Let's just hope that the Russians haven't created their own Cyc project. If the two ever find each other on the Internet and talk to each other...
--
And to think the Republicans are the ones who are supposed to be so pro-business.
Bet you don't get any more spam from the companies that you ``opted out'' from. Only problem is that those companies probably accumulate a list of opt-outs and sell it to some other company so they can spam you. ``Hey, Ted, how's it going? Nah. Wish I could but I can't. I have a golf outing. Say, I gotta list here of people who don't want our junk emails any more. Maybe they won't mind hearing from you. How much will you give me for it?''
--
...this is such an Earth-shattering discovery. Anyone who'd been paying attention (if you're still able to, that is :-) ) could have seen this coming.
Television programming has been including more and more commercial content for years. Then there's infomercials. (Do people outside the U.S. have these oddities on their TVs?) Should ADD be blamed on Madison Avenue? MTV? Something in McDonald's hamburgers? Who knows. But the increasingly shrill nature of TV commercials (IMHO) and the number of ads you're seeing on most web pages nowadays, especially the increase in the number of those that are animated, seem to me to indicate that these folks seeking my attention are getting quite desperate. But we're tuning them out anyway. Perhaps our minds are erecting a protective barrier against the onslaught of information. If that's the case, greater efforts in making these attention getters more appealing (if one could use that word to describe a commercial) or memorable are just a waste of time.
As for adding technology to classrooms, as in Katz's posting:
Looking past the outright stupidity of such a proposal, less, and not more (IMHO), technology in the classroom would be a far preferable solution to the attention problem. Some would say that the explosion of new technologies in peoples' lives may be the source of all the ADD that's being diagnosed. Who needs the teacher keeping one eye on a magic board to tell him who's bored? That's the last thing the students need is something providing a distraction from the teacher's primary job. I had a thermodynamics professor who had a quite a low-tech means of engaging student's attention: If he saw you weren't paying attention, or even busy taking notes when he thought you'd be better off listening more attentively, he'd merely fire off a piece of chalk in your general direction. Got your attention and you tried not to let any more chalk projectiles fly past your ear. No expensive electronic classroom gizmos were necessary. And the money that would have been wasted on such a silly piece of technology went to pay for better educators.
Wean children off the technology that's supposed to be making it easier for them to learn (but are actually just high-tech spoon feeding programs) and perhaps the occurances of ADD will decline. My family just moved and I haven't installed an antenna for the TV and we haven't wanted to pay for cable. I've actually seen a difference in my daughters behaviour in the few weeks that our house has been without the rapid-fire, designed-for-those-with-short-attention-span, programming. And, amazingly, we've all managed to remain sane, happy, and productive. Much to the consternation, I'm sure, of the advertising agencies. (And, No, I wouldn't consider us Luddites. I think the 100baseT network of seven computers would get us kicked out of that club.)
--
Dawg-gone-it. Someone beat me to it.
I remember reading it in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions collection (or was it in D. V. Again, I forget.) Very early Seventies, I think. I remember ROTFLMAO about the arguments on how to spell ``jism''.
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Aahh! I remember RAD50...
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You've probably never had to write cross-platform FORTRAN where one of the platforms used the Microsoft FORTRAN compiler. I would hope that it's gotten better but I remember how much trouble it used to be. Every single READ and WRITE statement had to be examined to see if it would need a rewrite before working under MS-FORTRAN.
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Sure. I had a coworker that thought it was clever to write code like:
DO10I=1,2,100
He actually thought this was an important thing to do in order to save disk space.
When he left to work elsewhere, the first thing folks had to do with his code was to edit it and insert spaces so that you could read it more easily:
DO 10 I=1,2,100
or even
DO 10 I = 1, 2, 100
Whitespace is important if a human has to read and maintain the code. Sorry, but you'll never convince me otherwise.
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Which is why, at most places where I knew people were writing FORTRAN, they had a utility that would check for those things. We had one called SCANCHAR that would check a source file and spit out any lines in a source file that contained characters that weren't acceptable. The students we had working for us loved it, since they grew tired of the look we'd give 'em when they came asking why something wouldn't compile and it turned out to be a bogus character.
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We tend to train programmers how to program but not how to program well.''
Which is why you have software like Windows or Notes that brings even the fastest computer in the department to its knees. The hardware that runs these dogs with acceptable performance is never the cheaper hardware that these people have been talking about.
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Well, I'd suspect your compiler would complain about all those FORMAT statements since the ``F'' is in the continuation column. Plus, it'd probably squawk about the lowercase ``x'' at the end of the lines. Lastly, there doesn't seem to be any actual, executable code in the program, like, say, a WRITE statement. But then, it's been a heck of a long time since I cranked out FORTRAN code so I may be wrong. I just remember that our convention was to keep column 1 for comments (or to begin debugging code on VAX FORTRAN), columns 2-5 for line numbers, column 6 for the continuation character (we always used ``&'' since it wasn't a valid language character and would help to find column violations), and then, finally, columns 7-72 for code. And, I'm surprised I remembered all that.
Of course, maybe your biggest problem is you just forgot to enclose it in <PRE></PRE>. :-)
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I thought FORTRAN V was an enhanced version of FORTRAN IV and only available from certain vendors. I used it on a Sperry/Univac system back in the early '80s. On some of our other platforms we used a preprocessor call IFTRAN that let us write ``structured FORTRAN IV''. It generated some of the most gawd-awful intermediate FORTRAN IV code you could imagine. A terrible tool for writing high performance code too. On the PDP-11 it generated a CONTINUE statement at the end of every structured block of code. If you had nested blocks you got a series of CONTINUES in the generated FORTRAN. Doesn't sounds like a bad thing until the standard FORTRAN compiler kicked in and generated a NOP (or was that NOOP) for every CONTINUE in your intermediate code. Pretty funny in a way.
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