32 kilobits of ROM is not a big field (much less, language), especially when it is divided up into byte chunks, and those bytes are divided up into op-code sequences.
Someone else mentioned that there were plenty of other options, faster, more compact, more expressive, whatever.
I'll admit that basic's print statement was a little less obscure to most new users than, say, FORTH's." word.
: hello-world." Hello World!" ; hello-world
as opposed to
print "Hello World!"
The FORTH interpreters tended to be a lot easier to understand and build on.
Lisp? Snobol? Lots and lots of good stuff.
I think part of the acceptability of BASIC to the business world was that the keywords were called "commands".
PRINT "You lousy machine!"
(Although, that's not quite what the PHB thought she wanted.)
Can't remember if the FOMA/MOVA phones are properly cell phones or some other kind of mobile. I suppose wikipedia might tell me something if I weren't more interested in sleep.
There is one-seg TV on the phone. I don't find it very fun to watch Japanese TV on a 3cm x 5cm screen. Radio would be more useful, make it possible to listen to their public radio language programs to improve my Japanese while I'm on the train.
What I really want to do is get a shell and amuse myself by writing and compiling simple C language programs on the train. Hopefully one of the open source phones will allow me to do that shortly.
My friend joudanzuki seems to want to dig deeper into his phone, but I doubt the UI is under the GPL. He hates the input methods and has some ideas how to improve them for using English.
I don't particularly care for the UI either, but I'd prefer to have a proper QWERTY keyboard. (Wouldn't turn my nose up at a Dvorak keyboard, of course.)
Nothing better than evaporative cooling in the desert. Refrigerated just doesn't do the job. I mean, it's quiet, and it feels nice near the A/C unit, but over by the other wall,...
Well, anyway, what I was going to say, if I end up going back to the desert, I'll run solar water heating in the roof to get a good start on cooling things down. What I'll do with all the extra hot water in the summer, I'm not sure. Since water goes bad in the desert quickly when it isn't moving, it would not be good to just store the heated water below something. (Below what, anyway? where on earth do you want heat radiating back up from the ground?)
One problem with solar water to run a steam cycle is that the rare storm often includes hail.
A certain amount of that is hype. (Testing techniques are known to not fully simulate all elements of the aging process -- vibration, light exposure, thermal variation, incidental scratching, torsion, come to mind pretty quickly.)
The greatest factor in aging of CDs and DVDs, IIRC, is oxidation. Poorly constructed CDs tended to let air and humidity in. But well constructed CDs tend not to have oxidation problems, at least not within about half of their rated life. (Think glues and paints.)
Theoretically, if these are well constructed, they should be at least as durable as the best we can expect from conventional CDs and DVDs. And, at the prices shown, it would be a reasonable approach to being sure your stuff is readable as long as you can find hardware/software that can handle the formats.
But if they are not well constructed, the other factors will come into play.
I'd like to see some independent testing, including tensile stress, vibration, incidental scratching, etc. More information on the construction would also help. Testing them myself might be fun and instructive, if I could break the time for it.
The religion of worshipping it just because it's big?
Let me turn your arguments around --
Do you want antibiotics built by a company that's too big to give you anything but antibiotics, when all you really needed was a cough drop?
You are an individual. You don't need a big company to tell you what medicine you need.
Your argument that only big companies could do all the things that supposedly make the modern world better are specious and self-referential. Personally, I could have waited a few more years for the internet, if waiting might have meant more CPU choices, more OS choices, more browser choices, etc.
And, no, I don't think it's a tragedy that there are (still) people dying of diseases that might be cured if we could only throw enough money at the big companies fast enough.
In part because I know the big companies have not been the ones actually solving the real problems.
And in part because I've lived long enough to know that many of the present solutions will turn out to be as bad as or worse than the original problems.
An if you ask me if I'd still say this if it were my cousin? It was.
(What use religion? Well, because I believe that death isn't the end, I can have patience while we work out real solutions. I don't feel compelled to buy the fastest answer, whether it's right or not.)
But, yeah. Recursive is the way you build a monopoly. You go around to all the suits and you _sell_ them on the idea that you have the only product that does what they want.
All the other products, you tell them, are out of their market for some reason -- too artistic, too technical, too much of a toy, too easy to use, too hard to use, too hard to keep the serfs from using in some unplanned way, too something they are scared of.
It's a sell job. And it is recursive. You have to get the customers to believe you already, for all practical purposes, have the monopoly. (And you define all practical purposes as being whatever your product already does. Recursive, get it?)
And that is precisely what Gates did. I remember reading the trade magazines back in the mid-eighties and thinking things like, "What is that guy smoking? Is anyone really going to believe that?" And then being surprised when they did believe it.
People bought Microsoft's argument that their stuff did things the right way because it was them doing it. No one else's attempts to solve the difficult computing problems got any respect because Microsoft said they already had it solved in any way that mattered. (And any way that they didn't have it solved, by definition, didn't matter.)
And I remember having the wool pulled over my eyes, as well. One of the reasons I gave up on trying to build a PC-class machine to compete with IBM's PC is that IBM was selling the idea that anybody building and selling computers had to be able to properly support them, had to have the business resources to guarantee being able to provide service to the customer five years down the road, etc. Nobody, least of all IBM, was doing that.
But IBM handed that image to the Bill and Steve act, and they took it and ran with it. IBM gave them the one thing they could bootstrap their recursive sales arguments with, and they were "smart" enough to take it and run.
Actually, this is the archetype of a hero in western literature. Has something to do with how even religious people tend to view some of their Gods' demands.
(As a religious person, I have spent my time complaining to God, myself.)
One of the differences between religions is how much help the believer expects, and of what kind. This is definitely one of the concepts explored in Ulysses.
There is a kind of "intelligence" that can win at chess.
There is another kind of intelligence that knows when to play chess and when to play music.
You don't have to believe in God so much as simply eventually recognize that their are principles, outside of yourself, which do operate, which are not always amenable to your whims and passions.
Maybe the criminal never gets caught by the police, but being caught by the police is the least of the bad consequences of immoral behavior.
You do harm yourself by doing wrong. It's not a suggestion, it's an observation. The example is not far-fetched. Bill Gates has a lot of money, but the society he lives in has been seriously impoverished by his actions. No plot necessary, no ransom demands necessary. Or do you really think Vista is the best possible OS available, MSOffice is the best documents solution possible, etc.?
Ever wondered why the housing market went bust? Admitted, there are rules against encrypting someone's data for him without permission, and there are ways around the rules that should have been keeping the banks in check. Either way, immoral behavior is going to come around and bite you, sooner or later.
That mythical "everyone", by which teenagers and sophomores seek to excuse doing things they should (ahem) know better than to do.
And, yeah, at this point in time, real competition, competition which matches resources with needs, has been seriously throttled by government that is overly anxious to "prove its own value" by regulating, instead of competing in the real world of politics where politicians go out and get involved in their constituencies, not waiting for the spoilitical action committees to come to them. In a way, the whole world has become a special olympics, an artificial arena of competition of strained appropriateness. Of course, the non-special olympics is even less of a meaningful competition, these days, too.
I don't have anything against wheelchair basketball, but making an international spectacle of it seems it's sometimes a bit counter to the purpose.
And I don't have anything against artificially induced athletics, but I remember a time when the olympics were supposed to be about ordinary people with ordinary jobs pushing their own envelopes -- amateur sports. I think we should split the olympics organization in two.
One group goes back to amateur competition, gets rid of the media parade, drops the medals and returns to the laurel wreath, maybe even throws away the records of previous years.
The other group becomes the international showcase of professional sports.
Then we aren't all running the same race competing for the same prize that none of us really needed anyway.
I once had a dream at college. All the guys at the college I was attending were running a race on the indoor track, and all the women were competing in a beauty contest, and the winners of each competition would be married to each other, whether they wanted to or not. And all the rest were condemned to celibacy. Competition becomes meaningless pretty fast when it gets organized.
Trying to get back on topic, yeah, the government (self-lamed) and business (self-blinded) are now competing with each other to see who can lead us into the ditch the fastest.
The whole purpose of business is supposed to be to benefit the customer. Cast your bread on the waters, etc.
Do it for yourself and you only cheat yourself. Do it for the other guy, and the benefits come back to you.
Cheat the other guy and even if he doesn't cheat you, he's likely to go somewhere else. Treat the other guy the way you would like to be treated if you were in his shoes, and he's going to treat you decent, too.
If the mutual benefit of moral behavior gets lost, the economy itself just wanders away.
But, hey, Bill and Steve were just carrying on in some pretty strong tradition.
IBM (for instance) has since somewhat reformed, as they have begun to understand, as a corporation, what defecating in your own economic stream does to your drinking water.
Of course, defecating in the water that goes to the fields where your crops grow can be a positive factor, if you process the water before it hits anywhere that grows stuff you'll eat raw, or anywhere you'll be walking barefoot. (And beefsteak plant and garlic can help in the case of walking barefoot in inprocessed sewage, to a certain extent.)
Nobody wants to think of the moral impact of what they they think they want to do, and nobody wants to recognize that bad moral practices in business can come around and get you, just like bad sewage practices with the crops.
But, no, iNTEL was not the first to produce a CISC front end for a RISC-like architecture, even if you say there's a difference between what iNTEL does and micro-coding (ergo, the scheduling, and such).
But, then again, back then, if you had four extra bits in any register, those four bits would tend to get used. (See the use of the upper byte of address space in the original Mac systems, for an example.)
A lot of projects got started on the x86 in the illusion that the 16 byte "paragraph" would somehow help them with fine-grained memory allocation. (And once they understood the reality of the thing, it was hard to believe it wasn't too late to switch.)
Would have been better to have just made the segment registers full-width base registers. Except that would have cost iNTEL a few pennies more per processor, and pennies seemed to count back then. If the segment registers had been full 20 bits wide (a0 to a19) to start with, it would have been a lot less troublesome to extend them. Of course, it would have been a lot clearer that the 68K made more sense, as well.
Now, I cannot convince myself that I am writing that least significant digit first. So, you are telling me that there is some implicit reason why numerics in memory should be stored backwards from the way we write them, right?
The implicit reason in the x86 architecture is that you can short-circuit addition and subtraction in some cases on a least-significant first arch. If you dare. But, remember, if you dig back into the literature, there were good shortcuts for the most-significant first order, as well.
Of course, unless we like look-ahead when calculating by pencil, we usually work the basic math least-significant first. And, for what it's worth, when computers work on numeric strings, they do too. But you have to either start or stop at an offset, so it really doesn't buy you much to do the same thing in RAM that you do on paper -- start with the offset motion.
Slashdot Mirror
32 kilobits of ROM is not a big field (much less, language), especially when it is divided up into byte chunks, and those bytes are divided up into op-code sequences.
Someone else mentioned that there were plenty of other options, faster, more compact, more expressive, whatever.
I'll admit that basic's print statement was a little less obscure to most new users than, say, FORTH's ." word.
: hello-world ." Hello World!" ;
hello-world
as opposed to
print "Hello World!"The FORTH interpreters tended to be a lot easier to understand and build on.
Lisp? Snobol? Lots and lots of good stuff.
I think part of the acceptability of BASIC to the business world was that the keywords were called "commands".
PRINT "You lousy machine!"
(Although, that's not quite what the PHB thought she wanted.)
You mean, like this or perhaps like this and this?
Can't remember if the FOMA/MOVA phones are properly cell phones or some other kind of mobile. I suppose wikipedia might tell me something if I weren't more interested in sleep.
There is one-seg TV on the phone. I don't find it very fun to watch Japanese TV on a 3cm x 5cm screen. Radio would be more useful, make it possible to listen to their public radio language programs to improve my Japanese while I'm on the train.
What I really want to do is get a shell and amuse myself by writing and compiling simple C language programs on the train. Hopefully one of the open source phones will allow me to do that shortly.
My friend joudanzuki seems to want to dig deeper into his phone, but I doubt the UI is under the GPL. He hates the input methods and has some ideas how to improve them for using English.
I don't particularly care for the UI either, but I'd prefer to have a proper QWERTY keyboard. (Wouldn't turn my nose up at a Dvorak keyboard, of course.)
I were barned and rezzed ona niir dessert.
Nothing better than evaporative cooling in the desert. Refrigerated just doesn't do the job. I mean, it's quiet, and it feels nice near the A/C unit, but over by the other wall, ...
Well, anyway, what I was going to say, if I end up going back to the desert, I'll run solar water heating in the roof to get a good start on cooling things down. What I'll do with all the extra hot water in the summer, I'm not sure. Since water goes bad in the desert quickly when it isn't moving, it would not be good to just store the heated water below something. (Below what, anyway? where on earth do you want heat radiating back up from the ground?)
One problem with solar water to run a steam cycle is that the rare storm often includes hail.
A certain amount of that is hype. (Testing techniques are known to not fully simulate all elements of the aging process -- vibration, light exposure, thermal variation, incidental scratching, torsion, come to mind pretty quickly.)
The greatest factor in aging of CDs and DVDs, IIRC, is oxidation. Poorly constructed CDs tended to let air and humidity in. But well constructed CDs tend not to have oxidation problems, at least not within about half of their rated life. (Think glues and paints.)
Theoretically, if these are well constructed, they should be at least as durable as the best we can expect from conventional CDs and DVDs. And, at the prices shown, it would be a reasonable approach to being sure your stuff is readable as long as you can find hardware/software that can handle the formats.
But if they are not well constructed, the other factors will come into play.
I'd like to see some independent testing, including tensile stress, vibration, incidental scratching, etc. More information on the construction would also help. Testing them myself might be fun and instructive, if I could break the time for it.
14K is not such a big bonus.
At least, not according to some people.
I would definitely not turn my nose up at it, not with my current job.
Hmm. Not sure I have anything to say here, after all.
Should we say,
"They shouldn't have had access to the private keys of every server. And neither should you."
The religion of worshipping it just because it's big?
Let me turn your arguments around --
Do you want antibiotics built by a company that's too big to give you anything but antibiotics, when all you really needed was a cough drop?
You are an individual. You don't need a big company to tell you what medicine you need.
Your argument that only big companies could do all the things that supposedly make the modern world better are specious and self-referential. Personally, I could have waited a few more years for the internet, if waiting might have meant more CPU choices, more OS choices, more browser choices, etc.
And, no, I don't think it's a tragedy that there are (still) people dying of diseases that might be cured if we could only throw enough money at the big companies fast enough.
In part because I know the big companies have not been the ones actually solving the real problems.
And in part because I've lived long enough to know that many of the present solutions will turn out to be as bad as or worse than the original problems.
An if you ask me if I'd still say this if it were my cousin? It was.
(What use religion? Well, because I believe that death isn't the end, I can have patience while we work out real solutions. I don't feel compelled to buy the fastest answer, whether it's right or not.)
You admire Gates for what he did?
But, yeah. Recursive is the way you build a monopoly. You go around to all the suits and you _sell_ them on the idea that you have the only product that does what they want.
All the other products, you tell them, are out of their market for some reason -- too artistic, too technical, too much of a toy, too easy to use, too hard to use, too hard to keep the serfs from using in some unplanned way, too something they are scared of.
It's a sell job. And it is recursive. You have to get the customers to believe you already, for all practical purposes, have the monopoly. (And you define all practical purposes as being whatever your product already does. Recursive, get it?)
And that is precisely what Gates did. I remember reading the trade magazines back in the mid-eighties and thinking things like, "What is that guy smoking? Is anyone really going to believe that?" And then being surprised when they did believe it.
People bought Microsoft's argument that their stuff did things the right way because it was them doing it. No one else's attempts to solve the difficult computing problems got any respect because Microsoft said they already had it solved in any way that mattered. (And any way that they didn't have it solved, by definition, didn't matter.)
And I remember having the wool pulled over my eyes, as well. One of the reasons I gave up on trying to build a PC-class machine to compete with IBM's PC is that IBM was selling the idea that anybody building and selling computers had to be able to properly support them, had to have the business resources to guarantee being able to provide service to the customer five years down the road, etc. Nobody, least of all IBM, was doing that.
But IBM handed that image to the Bill and Steve act, and they took it and ran with it. IBM gave them the one thing they could bootstrap their recursive sales arguments with, and they were "smart" enough to take it and run.
Actually, this is the archetype of a hero in western literature. Has something to do with how even religious people tend to view some of their Gods' demands.
(As a religious person, I have spent my time complaining to God, myself.)
One of the differences between religions is how much help the believer expects, and of what kind. This is definitely one of the concepts explored in Ulysses.
There is a kind of "intelligence" that can win at chess.
There is another kind of intelligence that knows when to play chess and when to play music.
You don't have to believe in God so much as simply eventually recognize that their are principles, outside of yourself, which do operate, which are not always amenable to your whims and passions.
Maybe the criminal never gets caught by the police, but being caught by the police is the least of the bad consequences of immoral behavior.
You do harm yourself by doing wrong. It's not a suggestion, it's an observation. The example is not far-fetched. Bill Gates has a lot of money, but the society he lives in has been seriously impoverished by his actions. No plot necessary, no ransom demands necessary. Or do you really think Vista is the best possible OS available, MSOffice is the best documents solution possible, etc.?
Ever wondered why the housing market went bust? Admitted, there are rules against encrypting someone's data for him without permission, and there are ways around the rules that should have been keeping the banks in check. Either way, immoral behavior is going to come around and bite you, sooner or later.
(For the benefit of the irony impaired:)
"As everyone knows".
That mythical "everyone", by which teenagers and sophomores seek to excuse doing things they should (ahem) know better than to do.
And, yeah, at this point in time, real competition, competition which matches resources with needs, has been seriously throttled by government that is overly anxious to "prove its own value" by regulating, instead of competing in the real world of politics where politicians go out and get involved in their constituencies, not waiting for the spoilitical action committees to come to them. In a way, the whole world has become a special olympics, an artificial arena of competition of strained appropriateness. Of course, the non-special olympics is even less of a meaningful competition, these days, too.
I don't have anything against wheelchair basketball, but making an international spectacle of it seems it's sometimes a bit counter to the purpose.
And I don't have anything against artificially induced athletics, but I remember a time when the olympics were supposed to be about ordinary people with ordinary jobs pushing their own envelopes -- amateur sports. I think we should split the olympics organization in two.
One group goes back to amateur competition, gets rid of the media parade, drops the medals and returns to the laurel wreath, maybe even throws away the records of previous years.
The other group becomes the international showcase of professional sports.
Then we aren't all running the same race competing for the same prize that none of us really needed anyway.
I once had a dream at college. All the guys at the college I was attending were running a race on the indoor track, and all the women were competing in a beauty contest, and the winners of each competition would be married to each other, whether they wanted to or not. And all the rest were condemned to celibacy. Competition becomes meaningless pretty fast when it gets organized.
Trying to get back on topic, yeah, the government (self-lamed) and business (self-blinded) are now competing with each other to see who can lead us into the ditch the fastest.
I know I'm stating the obvious, but we don't have
mod+1 ironically informative
as an option.
The whole purpose of business is supposed to be to benefit the customer. Cast your bread on the waters, etc.
Do it for yourself and you only cheat yourself. Do it for the other guy, and the benefits come back to you.
Cheat the other guy and even if he doesn't cheat you, he's likely to go somewhere else. Treat the other guy the way you would like to be treated if you were in his shoes, and he's going to treat you decent, too.
If the mutual benefit of moral behavior gets lost, the economy itself just wanders away.
Will they then make their own video streams more functional?
I think it's time for the cable companies to start building on the broadcast protocols.
But, I suppose they might be scared of scaring off their advertisers?
Microsoft, just for starters.
But, hey, Bill and Steve were just carrying on in some pretty strong tradition.
IBM (for instance) has since somewhat reformed, as they have begun to understand, as a corporation, what defecating in your own economic stream does to your drinking water.
Of course, defecating in the water that goes to the fields where your crops grow can be a positive factor, if you process the water before it hits anywhere that grows stuff you'll eat raw, or anywhere you'll be walking barefoot. (And beefsteak plant and garlic can help in the case of walking barefoot in inprocessed sewage, to a certain extent.)
Nobody wants to think of the moral impact of what they they think they want to do, and nobody wants to recognize that bad moral practices in business can come around and get you, just like bad sewage practices with the crops.
6809, and a very simple clock circuit. Maybe too simple.
But it made it nice for sharing the RAM with DMA video and stuff.
Strange dead ends in our industry.
arm? mcore? ...
n/t;
(Hmm. they tell me I've already said no text, even though that was under a different subject.)
But, no, iNTEL was not the first to produce a CISC front end for a RISC-like architecture, even if you say there's a difference between what iNTEL does and micro-coding (ergo, the scheduling, and such).
n/t;
16K was considered reasonable on the first IBM PCs. 64K was large.
(As I said somewhere above.)
Yeah, I do mean to imply that it was an illusion.
But, then again, back then, if you had four extra bits in any register, those four bits would tend to get used. (See the use of the upper byte of address space in the original Mac systems, for an example.)
A lot of projects got started on the x86 in the illusion that the 16 byte "paragraph" would somehow help them with fine-grained memory allocation. (And once they understood the reality of the thing, it was hard to believe it wasn't too late to switch.)
Would have been better to have just made the segment registers full-width base registers. Except that would have cost iNTEL a few pennies more per processor, and pennies seemed to count back then. If the segment registers had been full 20 bits wide (a0 to a19) to start with, it would have been a lot less troublesome to extend them. Of course, it would have been a lot clearer that the 68K made more sense, as well.
That's more or less what Motorola did. Said they didn't want to compete with there customers.
A lot of their customers did think a standard was something to sell for money, though.
You mean to tell me that there is some physical or metaphysical reason we should write numbers on paper opposite the way we write them in memory?
Let me check how I write things, just to be sure:
There are 11,000 people living in Takino.
Okay, string that out in memory, as ASCII text:
mymac: me$ hexdump -C
There are 11,000 people living in Takino.
00000000 54 68 65 72 65 20 61 72 65 20 31 31 2c 30 30 30 |There are 11,000|
00000010 20 70 65 6f 70 6c 65 20 6c 69 76 69 6e 67 20 69 | people living i|
00000020 6e 20 54 61 6b 69 6e 6f 2e 0a |n Takino..|
0000002a
mymac: me$
That wasn't clear enough:
mymac: me$ hexdump -C
12345 people
00000000 31 32 33 34 35 20 70 65 6f 70 6c 65 0a |12345 people.|
0000000d
mymac: me$
Or, in other words,
0000: 31 '1 * 10,000
0001: 32 '2 * 1,000
0002: 33 '3 * 100
0004: 34 '4 * 10
0005: 35 '5 * 1
Now, I cannot convince myself that I am writing that least significant digit first. So, you are telling me that there is some implicit reason why numerics in memory should be stored backwards from the way we write them, right?
The implicit reason in the x86 architecture is that you can short-circuit addition and subtraction in some cases on a least-significant first arch. If you dare. But, remember, if you dig back into the literature, there were good shortcuts for the most-significant first order, as well.
Of course, unless we like look-ahead when calculating by pencil, we usually work the basic math least-significant first. And, for what it's worth, when computers work on numeric strings, they do too. But you have to either start or stop at an offset, so it really doesn't buy you much to do the same thing in RAM that you do on paper -- start with the offset motion.