A few years ago I had a problem when I would use OS X TextEdit to edit code. Somehow, I never figured out how, it would occasionally insert a control-P character into the text. Of course it was invisible. Other than looking at the file in a hex editor, the only way that I could find it was to use the arrow keys and note when the cursor didn't move. Or the error message from trying to compile/assemble the code.
I haven't seen this in a long time, and I currently still use 10.6.8, so maybe it was a problem in 10.5 that got fixed in 10.6.
And I have had other times where I had to retype a visually good line of code more than once. Not to mention the times when the font and my less than perfect eyesight make commas and periods hard to tell apart.
Also, don't ignore the possibility of getting a used Mac. Though I wouldn't recommend any of the pre-unibody laptops for various reasons, including that the unibody design is so much more solid than the previous ones, plus most of them can be upgraded to OS X 10.10. Stuff from the 2010-2012 era is pretty good and can usually take a RAM upgrade to 8GB or 16GB, look up the specific model (such as MacBookPro8,3) to find out what can be done. The main problem with getting a used Mac is that they're useful for so much longer than the average PC, so even if you find one, you will probably still pay a premium for it.
It doesn't matter much if they download viruses when they're not running Windows. I would laugh inside every time I saw a malware file on the desktop of my mom's (PPC!) Mac. I think the whole point of most of the responses here is that there's no reason for them to need Windows. Sure, they can probably still get crapware toolbars installed into the web browser, but that's a lot easier to nuke and pave.
The recent fiasco with Microsoft desperately trying to push Windows 10 on everybody just shows how irrelevant they are becoming.
Really, if all they do is interwebs and e-mail and simple word-processing and Skype chats, there's no reason to stick with Windows. Even Linux could probably do all they need. I myself only use Windows for specific things, mostly playing games and embedded development.
I think the most annoying thing about "Ask Slashdot" is that the people who ask stuff never seem to consider that their status quo isn't as important as they think, and the real problem is that they're Doing It Wrong. What's the point of paying for tech support, when the main cause for needing tech support is that after all these years, Windows still has the security of swiss cheese?
PPC was better, until two things happened. One, the G5 replaced the G4 (way too big and hot because IBM designed it for minicomputers), and two, the Core series (Core Duo and Core 2 Duo, later i3/i5/i7) replaced the Pentium 4, also hurting AMD.
Though, to be fair, even the G4 wasn't all that great after a while, because Motorola wanted to make chips for the high end of the embedded market, and only Apple was using it for the desktop market. Embedded CPUs were okay for laptops because low power, but not for desktops, and the front-side bus was just too slow. (Amiga was out there too, but with production in the thousands, not millions.)
Basically, Motorola and IBM were the only sources of PPC chips, and each went in a direction that was not good for desktop use.
About the only true innovation I can see lately is in the "maker" culture. In particular, amateur 3D printing is making the average person (as in income more so than skills) create small custom parts. Likewise, cheap easy-to-program micro-controller boards (Arduino, mbed, etc.) allow small custom embedded control of stuff for the person of average means, even in these days where the individual parts are too small to easily assemble without specialized equipment.
Remember, when the refrigerator was new, people weren't exactly expecting it to cause a major change in society, so whatever might be disruptive from now might not be obvious for a few decades. And I would argue that the internet is quite valid as a candidate, even though it was "invented" in the 1970s. Refrigeration was available through the 1800s, but it wasn't until the early 20th century that average people could afford to have one at home.
The internet and mobile communications have really changed things over the past 20 years. I'm old enough to remember when TV drama plots used the lack of communication as a plot point, where a cell phone would have ended the story quickly. Now they have to use being out of range as a plot point, but you still can't justify that in a city setting.
My game / video player PC (with a Core 2 Duo motherboard) still runs XP, and I was forced to upgrade from W2K for one game. (Yes, I know it's a 64-bit CPU with a 32-bit OS.) With a modern (as in about three or four years ago) hard drive, I think it takes longer to get through the BIOS stuff than it does to actually boot XP.
I have a Windows 7 laptop that I use for playing a few games that require the GameOS from Redmond. Since I don't use it for e-mail or general web browsing (and when I do, I don't use one of the major three or four browsers), so my attack surface is a lot more limited than the average user.
That being said, I use it for playing games, and some of those games have problems with Windows 10. So after Windows Update "helpfully" downloaded SIX AND A HALF FUCKING GIGABYTES of Windows 10, and it took me two hours to remove it because it was stored under ACL permissions such that even an Administrator user couldn't delete the files without learning how to fix those ACLs... so yeah, last month I set updates to full manual. And since I can't trust them to not hide another one under some boring generic description like "This update improves the Windows user experience", I haven't yet bothered to check for updates since.
Except that it's really hard to change the direction of an orbit. As in lots of fuel hard. If you send it up to dock with ISS, it's on the ISS orbit. To change it to, say, a polar orbit would require it to cancel much of the eastward orbital velocity, while adding velocity toward a polar orbit, and all the time still moving at the same "horizontal" speed to stay on orbit. (Going up and down in the same orbit isn't a problem, though.) So you have to choose your orbit while you go up, or bring a lot of extra fuel, orbital mechanics is a bitch that way.
And ISS is already in a pretty useless orbit for most other stuff, being so far off of the equator so that Russia can reach it more easily from Baikonur. So the "tug" will be useless for anything but "helping" less-capable capsules to dock, in a way that they shouldn't need help, because ISS already has an arm. Yeah, maybe their idea wasn't so great after all.
A few years back I re-coded the Star Trek game in C. Its lack of structure was not easy to convert, as it liked to do GOTO GAMEOVER type of stuff all over the place. It had to be changed to have a few global variables for the game state, and an outer loop to do one command/turn at a time. And then another outer loop to play the game multiple times.
BASIC's input and output was pretty free-form too, not just the control flow. I needed routines to input one or two integers or a float (sscanf just doesn't work as well as INPUT), and to print floats without those damn trailing zeros. And those line numbers everywhere, I had to create a version of the original code with all unused line numbers blanked out to see the control flow. And then there were those wonderfully descriptive two-character variable names, which I avoided changing when possible.
I should try doing more of those, and Hammurabi sounds like a nice challenge.
LabView is not only proprietary, it's a visual programming language (connect a bunch of boxes with lines) that stores its stuff in binary blobs. So you can't do version control on it, or even diff it. If someone changes one of those little boxes in a big LabView project, you will likely never know who did it or when it happened, and good luck finding where it was changed. Or you might not even know that it happened at all, just things start acting screwy.
Slashdot articles are generally taken from submissions. (Except for the Slashvertisements, of course, but they're still "submitted" from somewhere.) If you want more articles like this, someone will have to find them and submit them. Slashdot doesn't create these things out of thin air; a Slashdot article is basically a link with a blurb to an article somewhere on the interwebs that someone entered into the submission page.
Yesterday I saw something about Challenger and its O-rings in a show that my DVR caught. Video showed that an O-ring was leaking at launch time, but managed to re-seal shortly after launch. Then crosswinds put enough stress on the SRB to unseal it again. Ouch.
You do realize that this isn't the kind of ARM that you run Linux on, right? This is a Cortex-M microcontroller, and it's meant to do the kind of stuff that AVR does, only with a 32-bit processor and a single address space that doesn't confuse C compilers. There's plenty of sizes of Cortex-M from 2K-128K RAM and 4K-1M flash, and they run the gamut from low power to hardware floating point. As for cost, you're talking about a buck or two per chip average (the big number-crunching monsters might cost as much as ten bucks), with lots of low-end ones under a dollar.
The main disadvantage for hobbyists is that the one in TFA is the only ARM chip you can get in a DIP package. But these days the Arduino form factor is pretty common in typical ARM boards, and it sure beats trying to rig up the chip like in TFA every time. Such boards usually cost from $10-$25, literally as much or less than a genuine (non-bootleg) Arduino.
This is a Cortex-M0 chip. Cortex-M is intended for low-RAM embedded applications, so you generally won't find an MMU on them. In fact, this chip has only one or two MMU pages worth of RAM total. And they don't even run the classic ARM instruction set, they're Thumb-only, with the M3 and M4 using Thumb-2, and M0/M0+ using a Thumb-2 subset. It's Cortex-A that has an MMU and runs Linux.
But if you want to stay ten years in the past, go ahead.
I got turned on to mbed a few years ago when an NXP rep left behind a few boards after a sales meeting. I didn't care much about the Code Red based boards, but the NXP1768 was one of the first mbed boards. It changed the way I program after seeing how mbed uses C++. Nowadays I mostly use the Freescale mbed boards, and I have a couple of Teensy 3.1 boards that I'd like to get working with mbed.
That's the problem I have with their PSoC parts. How do you control the PSoC bits without using their IDE? I suppose somewhere behind all that there's a command-line tool, but you still have to somehow create the files that specify how stuff is hooked up. I mean, PSoC is a pretty cool idea, but I'd hate to have to use it professionally when the only choice is the manufacturer's IDE.
Slashdot Mirror
We just need to get Colossus and Guardian to work together!
A few years ago I had a problem when I would use OS X TextEdit to edit code. Somehow, I never figured out how, it would occasionally insert a control-P character into the text. Of course it was invisible. Other than looking at the file in a hex editor, the only way that I could find it was to use the arrow keys and note when the cursor didn't move. Or the error message from trying to compile/assemble the code.
I haven't seen this in a long time, and I currently still use 10.6.8, so maybe it was a problem in 10.5 that got fixed in 10.6.
And I have had other times where I had to retype a visually good line of code more than once. Not to mention the times when the font and my less than perfect eyesight make commas and periods hard to tell apart.
It's plenty of time to send up a B-ark, if you know what I mean.
Oooh, look, we've got this giant volcano about to explode! Quick, let's evacuate all the middle-management types first!
Windows 95 launched 20 years ago
And Microsoft keeps changing everything around every three or four years. So what was your point, again?
Also, don't ignore the possibility of getting a used Mac. Though I wouldn't recommend any of the pre-unibody laptops for various reasons, including that the unibody design is so much more solid than the previous ones, plus most of them can be upgraded to OS X 10.10. Stuff from the 2010-2012 era is pretty good and can usually take a RAM upgrade to 8GB or 16GB, look up the specific model (such as MacBookPro8,3) to find out what can be done. The main problem with getting a used Mac is that they're useful for so much longer than the average PC, so even if you find one, you will probably still pay a premium for it.
It doesn't matter much if they download viruses when they're not running Windows. I would laugh inside every time I saw a malware file on the desktop of my mom's (PPC!) Mac. I think the whole point of most of the responses here is that there's no reason for them to need Windows. Sure, they can probably still get crapware toolbars installed into the web browser, but that's a lot easier to nuke and pave.
The recent fiasco with Microsoft desperately trying to push Windows 10 on everybody just shows how irrelevant they are becoming.
Really, if all they do is interwebs and e-mail and simple word-processing and Skype chats, there's no reason to stick with Windows. Even Linux could probably do all they need. I myself only use Windows for specific things, mostly playing games and embedded development.
I think the most annoying thing about "Ask Slashdot" is that the people who ask stuff never seem to consider that their status quo isn't as important as they think, and the real problem is that they're Doing It Wrong. What's the point of paying for tech support, when the main cause for needing tech support is that after all these years, Windows still has the security of swiss cheese?
PPC was better, until two things happened. One, the G5 replaced the G4 (way too big and hot because IBM designed it for minicomputers), and two, the Core series (Core Duo and Core 2 Duo, later i3/i5/i7) replaced the Pentium 4, also hurting AMD.
Though, to be fair, even the G4 wasn't all that great after a while, because Motorola wanted to make chips for the high end of the embedded market, and only Apple was using it for the desktop market. Embedded CPUs were okay for laptops because low power, but not for desktops, and the front-side bus was just too slow. (Amiga was out there too, but with production in the thousands, not millions.)
Basically, Motorola and IBM were the only sources of PPC chips, and each went in a direction that was not good for desktop use.
Not mentioning The Story About Ping? Heathen.
Thousands of years ago they didn't have to worry about delta-vee and gravity wells. Orbital mechanics isn't as easy as having horses pull wagons.
Maybe not a dupe, but definitely deja-vu...
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/26/0050245/why-nasas-road-to-mars-plan-proves-that-it-should-return-to-the-moon-first
They also found a Novell Netware server behind the wall, still up and running after all these years.
About the only true innovation I can see lately is in the "maker" culture. In particular, amateur 3D printing is making the average person (as in income more so than skills) create small custom parts. Likewise, cheap easy-to-program micro-controller boards (Arduino, mbed, etc.) allow small custom embedded control of stuff for the person of average means, even in these days where the individual parts are too small to easily assemble without specialized equipment.
Remember, when the refrigerator was new, people weren't exactly expecting it to cause a major change in society, so whatever might be disruptive from now might not be obvious for a few decades. And I would argue that the internet is quite valid as a candidate, even though it was "invented" in the 1970s. Refrigeration was available through the 1800s, but it wasn't until the early 20th century that average people could afford to have one at home.
The internet and mobile communications have really changed things over the past 20 years. I'm old enough to remember when TV drama plots used the lack of communication as a plot point, where a cell phone would have ended the story quickly. Now they have to use being out of range as a plot point, but you still can't justify that in a city setting.
My game / video player PC (with a Core 2 Duo motherboard) still runs XP, and I was forced to upgrade from W2K for one game. (Yes, I know it's a 64-bit CPU with a 32-bit OS.) With a modern (as in about three or four years ago) hard drive, I think it takes longer to get through the BIOS stuff than it does to actually boot XP.
I have a Windows 7 laptop that I use for playing a few games that require the GameOS from Redmond. Since I don't use it for e-mail or general web browsing (and when I do, I don't use one of the major three or four browsers), so my attack surface is a lot more limited than the average user.
That being said, I use it for playing games, and some of those games have problems with Windows 10. So after Windows Update "helpfully" downloaded SIX AND A HALF FUCKING GIGABYTES of Windows 10, and it took me two hours to remove it because it was stored under ACL permissions such that even an Administrator user couldn't delete the files without learning how to fix those ACLs... so yeah, last month I set updates to full manual. And since I can't trust them to not hide another one under some boring generic description like "This update improves the Windows user experience", I haven't yet bothered to check for updates since.
They were given training in MUMPS to help them recover from the effects of JCL.
Except that it's really hard to change the direction of an orbit. As in lots of fuel hard. If you send it up to dock with ISS, it's on the ISS orbit. To change it to, say, a polar orbit would require it to cancel much of the eastward orbital velocity, while adding velocity toward a polar orbit, and all the time still moving at the same "horizontal" speed to stay on orbit. (Going up and down in the same orbit isn't a problem, though.) So you have to choose your orbit while you go up, or bring a lot of extra fuel, orbital mechanics is a bitch that way.
And ISS is already in a pretty useless orbit for most other stuff, being so far off of the equator so that Russia can reach it more easily from Baikonur. So the "tug" will be useless for anything but "helping" less-capable capsules to dock, in a way that they shouldn't need help, because ISS already has an arm. Yeah, maybe their idea wasn't so great after all.
A few years back I re-coded the Star Trek game in C. Its lack of structure was not easy to convert, as it liked to do GOTO GAMEOVER type of stuff all over the place. It had to be changed to have a few global variables for the game state, and an outer loop to do one command/turn at a time. And then another outer loop to play the game multiple times.
BASIC's input and output was pretty free-form too, not just the control flow. I needed routines to input one or two integers or a float (sscanf just doesn't work as well as INPUT), and to print floats without those damn trailing zeros. And those line numbers everywhere, I had to create a version of the original code with all unused line numbers blanked out to see the control flow. And then there were those wonderfully descriptive two-character variable names, which I avoided changing when possible.
I should try doing more of those, and Hammurabi sounds like a nice challenge.
LabView is not only proprietary, it's a visual programming language (connect a bunch of boxes with lines) that stores its stuff in binary blobs. So you can't do version control on it, or even diff it. If someone changes one of those little boxes in a big LabView project, you will likely never know who did it or when it happened, and good luck finding where it was changed. Or you might not even know that it happened at all, just things start acting screwy.
Slashdot articles are generally taken from submissions. (Except for the Slashvertisements, of course, but they're still "submitted" from somewhere.) If you want more articles like this, someone will have to find them and submit them. Slashdot doesn't create these things out of thin air; a Slashdot article is basically a link with a blurb to an article somewhere on the interwebs that someone entered into the submission page.
Yesterday I saw something about Challenger and its O-rings in a show that my DVR caught. Video showed that an O-ring was leaking at launch time, but managed to re-seal shortly after launch. Then crosswinds put enough stress on the SRB to unseal it again. Ouch.
You do realize that this isn't the kind of ARM that you run Linux on, right? This is a Cortex-M microcontroller, and it's meant to do the kind of stuff that AVR does, only with a 32-bit processor and a single address space that doesn't confuse C compilers. There's plenty of sizes of Cortex-M from 2K-128K RAM and 4K-1M flash, and they run the gamut from low power to hardware floating point. As for cost, you're talking about a buck or two per chip average (the big number-crunching monsters might cost as much as ten bucks), with lots of low-end ones under a dollar.
The main disadvantage for hobbyists is that the one in TFA is the only ARM chip you can get in a DIP package. But these days the Arduino form factor is pretty common in typical ARM boards, and it sure beats trying to rig up the chip like in TFA every time. Such boards usually cost from $10-$25, literally as much or less than a genuine (non-bootleg) Arduino.
This is a Cortex-M0 chip. Cortex-M is intended for low-RAM embedded applications, so you generally won't find an MMU on them. In fact, this chip has only one or two MMU pages worth of RAM total. And they don't even run the classic ARM instruction set, they're Thumb-only, with the M3 and M4 using Thumb-2, and M0/M0+ using a Thumb-2 subset. It's Cortex-A that has an MMU and runs Linux.
But if you want to stay ten years in the past, go ahead.
I got turned on to mbed a few years ago when an NXP rep left behind a few boards after a sales meeting. I didn't care much about the Code Red based boards, but the NXP1768 was one of the first mbed boards. It changed the way I program after seeing how mbed uses C++. Nowadays I mostly use the Freescale mbed boards, and I have a couple of Teensy 3.1 boards that I'd like to get working with mbed.
That's the problem I have with their PSoC parts. How do you control the PSoC bits without using their IDE? I suppose somewhere behind all that there's a command-line tool, but you still have to somehow create the files that specify how stuff is hooked up. I mean, PSoC is a pretty cool idea, but I'd hate to have to use it professionally when the only choice is the manufacturer's IDE.