I've got to see if I can't program for this thing... I kind of miss PocketC on Palm.. theoretically I can get a MSDN type thing from work, but I'm trying to find out where to start with that...
Sorry, didn't see any further contact info but your "geeks as teamsters" sig is thought-provoking...
as a geek i always thought we get treated pretty frickin' well, relatively, like salary wise and all that. But we provide criticial functions as well. which side of that does your.sig mostly mean to imply, or is there another angle I'm not thinking about?
Heheh, a few years ago I heard someone suggest how Saturn could have remained unique: by going ALL hybrid, and the focus of GM's pushes in that direction... they could have kept up their mandate of being a "different" car company, even if the management thing had dragged them back into the fold.
Not to bash MS but they wrote it. I think it sucked too.
Possibly the basic itself wasn't too bad... it was just that there weren't built-in BASIC commands for the graphics or music. (And it was maybe better than the Atari BASIC that used the syntax that other languages used for arrays for basic String manipulation.)
It was a tough conversion to the Amiga due to it being label based instead of line based. The Pet to C64 was easy. Just remove a line or two from the beginning.
Depending on the BASIC implementation, it can be trivial to go from line based to label based: just treat every line number as a label.
But I remember the first time I saw a program listing without line numbers, I think it was for a type-in "Star Trek" game for Amiga...what an eye-opener, I was just scratching my head, wondering "HOw can it work without line numbers?"
Dijkstra not withstanding, I think I got over my early exposure to BASIC, and can now do Java and Perl pretty damn well.
One thing I didn't realize how much I'd miss... there doesn't seem to be nearly as solid a community for Windows Mobile as there was for Palm back in the day. I haven't found a forum I like or even a great browsable software selection... sigh, maybe I shoulda stuck w/ Treo, though I find the slide out keyboard so much better than that blackberry -ish treo thing.
I just got a "pocket pc". I really wish I could get the PDA interface from my good old Palm on this hardware... that, plus the "today" view of this would be nearly ideal.
I don't entirely judge systems on what homebrewes can do, years after the fact... I've homebrewed a 2600 game, and have seen some awfully amazing stuff on that system (like Thrust) but modern coders get advantages that sometimes more than offset the resources people who were professionally coding back in the day received.
It's surprising, though, that some games would have been shoddy ports, like Mail Order Monsters, which is the one specific example that first comes to mind.
Anonymous Coward wrote: That barebones, pathetic BASIC made every C64 guy an ASM person moving to C later. Look at background of very advanced coders of this time, you will figure it too.
I admit an ASM book on the C=64 I tried kicked my ass back then.
I know a lot of the 2600 homebrewers of today cut their teeth on the old Atari 8bit ASM.
And it seems like a lot of people who got really smart about computers at low levels had Apple, which seems to have been very friendly in that direction.
In number of games available for piracy C=64 certainly took the cake:-)
I started with the 800XL but eventually longed for and got a C=64 for pretty much that reason.
I'm not sure if the C=64 *was* better, BUT... * you saw it pushed more... I don't think the Ataris could have done "Skate or Die", say... * on some EA games (back wheen they used that clever ECA logo and even more clever copy protection) ported between the two, IMO the 8bit games feel a little slower and more plodding.
Apple II seems to have been the best for hacking, Atari 8bits for light programming, and C=64 for games....
Empirically, the C=64 did much better at games than its rivals, the Apple II and the Atari 8bits (Hmm, I think it was a newer if not better designed machine.)
Its SID sound chip was certainly well-regarded, and its Sprite capabilities were nifty.
Unfortunately it had a terribley barebones BASIC.
So it wasn't a revolution for home machines, but an evolution.
It's not just the expense of "minutes", it's the expense of time and attention. Txting is nicely asynchronous, and less of a grab for attention than voicemail, and much less time consuming to check.
This seems to underscore Microsoft's focus on flashiness over function, to me. I would hope that far more development would go into security, efficiency, and reliability.
With a company the size of Microsoft, it's not the zero-sum game you imply. Your sound team has very little if any overlap with the engineers who make the damn thing work.
Adding new and exciting sounds is pretty far down the list of what would make me want to run out and buy a new OS
I don't think it's going to be marketed as a selling point.
Especially since we've had the ability customize the sound scheme since what, Windows 3.0?
But very very few people do. (And I think many of the ones who would've back in the bad old Win3.1 days have probably moved on to OSX or Linux by now.) So the sound becomes an important "signature".
Seriously, if this were about OSX, no one would bat an eyelash. Apple gets huge kudos for thinking about the aesthetic elements of their UI, and for good reason. Now, Microsoft is generally much less graceful with this stuff (like the Fisher Price look of XP) but still, you can't really rip on them for sinking resources into this.
Well, I purposefully left it blank... I was thinking "The Arist Formerly Known as [unpronouncable symbol]", I knew he had dropped it, but wasn't sure if he went back to "Prince" or something else.
Actually I was kind of annoyed by his use of "4 u" etc, though a friend of mine claims it was a transcription of how he writes lyrics, where he might right "u" for regular emphasis, and "you" when the word should be sung more strongly.
Sometimes "text-speak" (surprised it's not "txt-spk") appears in odd places. Like 90% of the offshore folks from India I've interacted with, even in e-mail that was otherwise very professional and well written. Now some of these guys were bozos, but even for the ones that I knew were solid, smart workers...I just couldn't be sure if they even knew that "you" is not spelled "u"
Is "The Artist Formerly Know As" popular over there? I blame him for all this in general.
I know and love Perl (in fact it probably takes the case for "least looking things up" for me) but... I don't think it's as solid career foundation right now. It's a great supplement to the Java/J2EE that actually lands me jobs, but it's getting to be more and more of an esoteric kind of skill. (And I still haven't found a way of making a decent UI for a standalone app...)
I don't know if.Net is a "flash in the pan", but it seems to be the current plateau of a Microsofty-path. And it's not a terrible one. The mindset can be a little weird for a Perl-head, Microsoft tries to do too much and too little and sometimes it's hard to get the deep grokking that coders tend to like. But there are some upsides as well.
This isn't an evaluation of your life position and work-culture-based decisions, just my two cents about the technologies.
I gotta admit, I didn't really bond with the UI before my iBook (used cheap on Ebay) gave up the ghost. File manipulation operations never felt quite right, and there were some outright stupidities (like trying to figure out how to save to an arbitrary folder via the standard save dialog) that made the Switch harder than it should have been. Maybe I've been too corrupted by microsoft... I'm kind of a poweruser, not because I want to bem but because I've learned to get around vey quickly so the OS didn't get in my way...
Get a cheap older ibook on Ebay. 3G was great, ran very much cooler than the stuff that came later.
Werid Al as gateway drug to pop music
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 1
I think the aspect the article missed was the idea that Weird Al was also a bridge for geeks to mainstream themselves into some appreciation of popular music. I know for me, he was the bridge from "I'm convincing myself I love classical and jazz" to the music of the day.
S'funny... I make a fair amount of money programming in Java, but whenever there's a new and interesting site with ass-poor server response time, I look up at the URL and 2/3 of the time I see the extension.jsp....
I don't know if it's *poorly written* stuff that's the problem, or what (I mean if they're programming straisght JSP w/o putting the business logic in servlets or using some other framework, that might be an indicator that they took a few shortcuts, but still...)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, an exercise bike bottom, with a wii-mote top for handlebars, could make a killer version of Prop Cycle and really get geeks sweatin'...
I've got to see if I can't program for this thing...
I kind of miss PocketC on Palm..
theoretically I can get a MSDN type thing from work, but I'm trying to find out where to start with that...
My friend got me the console and a few games (yay Costco) but now I'm trying to figure out what our best bets for extra controllers will be...
Sorry, didn't see any further contact info but your "geeks as teamsters" sig is thought-provoking...
.sig mostly mean to imply, or is there another angle I'm not thinking about?
as a geek i always thought we get treated pretty frickin' well, relatively, like salary wise and all that. But we provide criticial functions as well. which side of that does your
Heheh, a few years ago I heard someone suggest how Saturn could have remained unique: by going ALL hybrid, and the focus of GM's pushes in that direction... they could have kept up their mandate of being a "different" car company, even if the management thing had dragged them back into the fold.
I thought it was a cool idea, anyway.
Not to bash MS but they wrote it. I think it sucked too.
Possibly the basic itself wasn't too bad... it was just that there weren't built-in BASIC commands for the graphics or music. (And it was maybe better than the Atari BASIC that used the syntax that other languages used for arrays for basic String manipulation.)
It was a tough conversion to the Amiga due to it being label based instead of line based. The Pet to C64 was easy. Just remove a line or two from the beginning.
Depending on the BASIC implementation, it can be trivial to go from line based to label based: just treat every line number as a label.
But I remember the first time I saw a program listing without line numbers, I think it was for a type-in "Star Trek" game for Amiga...what an eye-opener, I was just scratching my head, wondering "HOw can it work without line numbers?"
Dijkstra not withstanding, I think I got over my early exposure to BASIC, and can now do Java and Perl pretty damn well.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out.
One thing I didn't realize how much I'd miss... there doesn't seem to be nearly as solid a community for Windows Mobile as there was for Palm back in the day. I haven't found a forum I like or even a great browsable software selection... sigh, maybe I shoulda stuck w/ Treo, though I find the slide out keyboard so much better than that blackberry -ish treo thing.
I just got a "pocket pc".
I really wish I could get the PDA interface from my good old Palm on this hardware... that, plus the "today" view of this would be nearly ideal.
Alright, fair enough.
I don't entirely judge systems on what homebrewes can do, years after the fact... I've homebrewed a 2600 game, and have seen some awfully amazing stuff on that system (like Thrust) but modern coders get advantages that sometimes more than offset the resources people who were professionally coding back in the day received.
It's surprising, though, that some games would have been shoddy ports, like Mail Order Monsters, which is the one specific example that first comes to mind.
Curse Atari for droppin the 4 controller ports. It took Nintendo to bring that back as the standard.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
That barebones, pathetic BASIC made every C64 guy an ASM person moving to C later. Look at background of very advanced coders of this time, you will figure it too.
I admit an ASM book on the C=64 I tried kicked my ass back then.
I know a lot of the 2600 homebrewers of today cut their teeth on the old Atari 8bit ASM.
And it seems like a lot of people who got really smart about computers at low levels had Apple, which seems to have been very friendly in that direction.
In number of games available for piracy C=64 certainly took the cake :-)
I started with the 800XL but eventually longed for and got a C=64 for pretty much that reason.
I'm not sure if the C=64 *was* better, BUT...
* you saw it pushed more... I don't think the Ataris could have done "Skate or Die", say...
* on some EA games (back wheen they used that clever ECA logo and even more clever copy protection) ported between the two, IMO the 8bit games feel a little slower and more plodding.
Apple II seems to have been the best for hacking, Atari 8bits for light programming, and C=64 for games....
Empirically, the C=64 did much better at games than its rivals, the Apple II and the Atari 8bits (Hmm, I think it was a newer if not better designed machine.)
Its SID sound chip was certainly well-regarded, and its Sprite capabilities were nifty.
Unfortunately it had a terribley barebones BASIC.
So it wasn't a revolution for home machines, but an evolution.
It's kind of a dumb, overly snarky list, picking on some systems just because they never found their market.
3D0...they left out they did BattleTanx, which, sadly, was the last decent split screen tank games, all the way back on the N64 and PS1 days.
It's not just the expense of "minutes", it's the expense of time and attention.
Txting is nicely asynchronous, and less of a grab for attention than voicemail, and much less time consuming to check.
This seems to underscore Microsoft's focus on flashiness over function, to me. I would hope that far more development would go into security, efficiency, and reliability.
With a company the size of Microsoft, it's not the zero-sum game you imply. Your sound team has very little if any overlap with the engineers who make the damn thing work.
Adding new and exciting sounds is pretty far down the list of what would make me want to run out and buy a new OS
I don't think it's going to be marketed as a selling point.
Especially since we've had the ability customize the sound scheme since what, Windows 3.0?
But very very few people do. (And I think many of the ones who would've back in the bad old Win3.1 days have probably moved on to OSX or Linux by now.) So the sound becomes an important "signature".
Seriously, if this were about OSX, no one would bat an eyelash. Apple gets huge kudos for thinking about the aesthetic elements of their UI, and for good reason. Now, Microsoft is generally much less graceful with this stuff (like the Fisher Price look of XP) but still, you can't really rip on them for sinking resources into this.
Well, I purposefully left it blank... I was thinking "The Arist Formerly Known as [unpronouncable symbol]", I knew he had dropped it, but wasn't sure if he went back to "Prince" or something else.
Actually I was kind of annoyed by his use of "4 u" etc, though a friend of mine claims it was a transcription of how he writes lyrics, where he might right "u" for regular emphasis, and "you" when the word should be sung more strongly.
Sometimes "text-speak" (surprised it's not "txt-spk") appears in odd places. Like 90% of the offshore folks from India I've interacted with, even in e-mail that was otherwise very professional and well written. Now some of these guys were bozos, but even for the ones that I knew were solid, smart workers...I just couldn't be sure if they even knew that "you" is not spelled "u"
Is "The Artist Formerly Know As" popular over there? I blame him for all this in general.
I know and love Perl (in fact it probably takes the case for "least looking things up" for me) but... I don't think it's as solid career foundation right now. It's a great supplement to the Java/J2EE that actually lands me jobs, but it's getting to be more and more of an esoteric kind of skill. (And I still haven't found a way of making a decent UI for a standalone app...)
.Net is a "flash in the pan", but it seems to be the current plateau of a Microsofty-path. And it's not a terrible one. The mindset can be a little weird for a Perl-head, Microsoft tries to do too much and too little and sometimes it's hard to get the deep grokking that coders tend to like. But there are some upsides as well.
I don't know if
This isn't an evaluation of your life position and work-culture-based decisions, just my two cents about the technologies.
Cool enough.
I gotta admit, I didn't really bond with the UI before my iBook (used cheap on Ebay) gave up the ghost. File manipulation operations never felt quite right, and there were some outright stupidities (like trying to figure out how to save to an arbitrary folder via the standard save dialog) that made the Switch harder than it should have been. Maybe I've been too corrupted by microsoft... I'm kind of a poweruser, not because I want to bem but because I've learned to get around vey quickly so the OS didn't get in my way...
It runs garageband, right?
And throws out a lot less heat... my G3 seemed fine for web use and some coding.
Get a cheap older ibook on Ebay.
3G was great, ran very much cooler than the stuff that came later.
I think the aspect the article missed was the idea that Weird Al was also a bridge for geeks to mainstream themselves into some appreciation of popular music. I know for me, he was the bridge from "I'm convincing myself I love classical and jazz" to the music of the day.
The best way to get enough spam to swamp almost any filter is to fwd all mail for a domain to a single inbox.
Google has reported 60K spam over the last 30 days, and about 10 messages in hour still get through to my inbox.
Worse is these asscactuses start sending mail that looks like it was from my domain, so I get all the bounces, and look like an asshole myself.
That one Russian spammer who was savagely murdered... it's hard to drum up sufficient sympathy for that.
If all the world is bending over backwards to find new ways of plugging their ears, stop yelling.
S'funny... .jsp ....
I make a fair amount of money programming in Java, but whenever there's a new and interesting site with ass-poor server response time, I look up at the URL and 2/3 of the time I see the extension
I don't know if it's *poorly written* stuff that's the problem, or what (I mean if they're programming straisght JSP w/o putting the business logic in servlets or using some other framework, that might be an indicator that they took a few shortcuts, but still...)