Ok. So, technobabble aside. I'd like to know HOW? for a simple example, suppose we have 3 pixels horizontally. Pixel 1 is blue (RGB(0,0,255)), pixel 3 is green (RGB(0,255,0)). Tell me what pixel 2 should be?
Somehow, I'm always ahead of the curve but can't figure out how to get off of it. I was saying all of this shit 10 years ago and everyone was modding me flamebait and calling me a cynical ass. Fact is, bottom line - software engineers are BAD SALES PEOPLE. I used to be shocked when I found out that the people who wrote the code (the bright work) could and often made less than the dopey jocks that just push the products out the door. That was the old problem - we undersold ourselves. The new problem is that they're bringing in the foreigners who come from a lesser quality of life than most of us grew up with in the US. They're willing to work for less, sleep in bunk beds, and work long hours for shit pay.
The common theme here is that the weak minded ones bring us all down. If half the people are willing to bend to the wills of the unreasonable, then the other half of us are screwed, because we are either going to be treated the same or replaced.
The crazy thing is that half of the foreign workers that I've worked with can't code their way out of a paper bag. It's almost like - management can't understand them well and just assumes that they're doing bright dorky work because they're confused by them. Eventually I realized that engineering is so undervalued that they consider us mostly just a step above janitors. I worked my ass off for my EE degree - I said to myself, "Give me the hardest thing to do, because that HAS to be the most rewarding". Years later I realize my misunderstandings, but it doesn't piss me off any less.
Are you basically saying to make pixels by averaging the color of the adjacent ones?
Granted, human eyes at normal distances can't use the kind of detail that these new TVs can deliver, but I just don't see how you could get a "more accurate representation of the original real-world view" by adding things that aren't really there. I mean, our eyes would do the same work at the TV screen the same way they would if we were positioned where the camera was. Wouldn't they? I could be missing something...
yea... I'm all about real estate when it comes to my monitors. For real... I'm dying to get a new big monitor with something_x2160 pixels, but don't have the cash to fork over for it. As a software developer, resolution means a lot when using an IDE like visual studio - I like to have all my debugging side windows open.
Even for browsing the web, I like to have a lot of vertical resolution to be able to see full pictures, and not have to scroll a lot. Real estate baby, real estate..
Sounds like how they took the computer monitor screens and used "1080p" hype to reduce the average resolution of a screen from 1600x1200 to 1600x1080. Whenever I go looking for a monitor now, I spend lots of time to find the ones with 1200 vertical pixels versus 1080.
I'm curious as to what the bandwidth would be for uncompressed 4k video.
Also, I'm clueless as I don't have anything 4k - what's the Blu-ray equivalent for 4k? I guess you'd need that to truly see how good your TV is... I can't imagine that youtube is streaming anything that doesn't have a lot of loss... (Again, I'm speculating here...)
Back in 2009 I bought a beautiful 50" Panasonic 1080p plasma. I (still to this day) absolutely love that TV and the images that it renders. When I used a BluRay for the first time (Actually the only way to fully use the 1080p, as Comcast isn't 1080p), I realized that by standing a couple feet away from the TV I could see things that I wouldn't be able to see at a normal distance. 4k must be amazing - it's like a microscope, as you can see detail that you wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye if you were standing where the camera was.
About Upscaling - This is the biggest load of crap ever. You can NOT create detail beyond that which you started with. An upscaled picture, displayed at 4k, that was captured with a 1080p camera can't possibly be any more accurate than the same picture displayed on a 1080p TV. Of course, the masses don't understand this. This seems to be the "MO" of most technology these days, since non-tech-savvy people are using a lot of tech gadgets - you can say meaningless things that sound "good", and people will accept them as "good" since they don't know what the hell they've really got.
I really do care a lot about science... I just don't fully understand why information that is caught in a gravity well is relevant in any way - whether or not it retains it's order. Your explanation helps though, thanks for that.
Who cares if information is preserved in a black hole? What purpose does it serve? What can it teach us about the universe? I'd actually like to know the answers to these questions.
But... Hawking is undoubtedly a brilliant mind. Why has he been wasting his time for years trying to decide whether or not "information is preserved in a black hole"?
I'm admitting my ignorance here... Someone please explain to me what the relevance of this is...
I've always loved my wife. When I was younger, I still lusted after other women. I won't say if I ever followed through or not, but I never would have fallen in love. I'd always come home, love my wife and kids, love to have sex with my wife, everything would be the same.
I don't have scientific proof, but I think that women tend to fall in love with their affair. Suddenly, you're getting in fights and you don't even know why. Everything you do wrong blows up into a huge battle until... "He drove me away..."
I've observed this in reality somewhat over the years in other unsuccessful couples.
I agree with you, I do... But as a guy who has worked in tech for 20+ years now, there have been so many times where I realize that people can be so smart, yet so stupid at the same time. Specifically, tech people - suckers... So many time I've looked around the room for someone else to share a look of "what the fuck?" with me, but most of the time, no one dares. When they offer people "free pizza" to work past 8:00, I look around for people to say, "Yeah, thanks, but I'll go home now and buy my own $6.99 pizza thanks" - but no one does, and they work, and they eat the pizza like it's some incredible gift.
If everyone were like me, we'd probably get paid more than the sales guys, work less hours and have a hell of a lot more respect. The problem is that your average engineer is a moron. Since most are morons, we're all morons. If I'm the one guy that tells them to "shove the pizza up their ass cause I'm goin home on time", I'll get replaced with a fresh Chinese kid faster than you can say kung pao chicken.
I can say I'm a broken person now... I'm definitely not what I was 15 years ago when I was a smart mofo and ready to take on the world. THe tech industry has brought me to the ground - in so many ways. You can't win... We're all just cogs in a wheel... The industry has been turned into more of a manual labor type of gig, and it sucks.
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree (respectfully)... 1) Nothing says that the number of bits that a processor can address has anything to do with the number of bits in an IP address. For example, when you get down to the nitty gritty, 64-bit processors don't even fully address a full 64-bits of memory space address. x64 architecture currently uses only 48-bits of the 64 for storing data to memory. Kernel space is from 0xFFFF8000 00000000 to 0xFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF, and user space virtual addresses go from 0x00000000 00000000 - 0x00007FFF FFFFFFFF. Thus, I don't really see any reason why the processor bitness has anything to do with the amount of bits in an IP address. Also, any network drivers that I have ever written - I don't see where they'd care.
2) What I like about my solution is - you reserve one number - say zero, for IPv4 backward compatibility. Thus, the IPv4 address 10.136.77.139 would be the sane as the address 0.10.136.77.139. Any entity that knows that it's communicating with IPv4 only hardware would just drop the 0. If it were anything besides a 0, it'd be unroutable. Anyway, that leaves 255 usable multipliers to add on to IPv4 addresses,
I dunno - I haven't thought it out extraordinarily well, and i'm too tired to do so now... I _think_ it makes sense though, nite!.
Whatchoo talking about Willis? I read this a few days ago, but revisited it today... I have to comment. The max address that I'm talking about would be 255.255.255.255.255, just one octet is added, This effectively increases the number of available addresses by 255 times (not 256, because one is the same as the preexisting 4 octet addresses). So doing the math, 2^32 is approximately 4.3 x 10^9. That times 255 is: 1.1 x 10^12. if u ask me, that's more than we'll ever need
And you can't remember an IPv6 address. Why didn't they just add another octet to an IPv4 address and increase the number of addresses by a trillion? I could remember 10.10.122.136.188
I don't know about the rest of the country, but Mass has really become a police state. They have amassed complete power, and are able to basically arrest anyone at any time if they feel like doing so. The laws are made such that almost everyone is breaking the law on any given day. This gives the police the power to circumvent the law, human rights, innocent until proven guilty, etc - they can racially profile, or whatever they want. For example, Mass is the only state (FL has a similar law, but is only about a tenth the duration) where someone can go to the police station and say "I think my husband has a drinking problem". an hour later, they will walk right into your house and take you out in cuffs, bring you to the courthouse where upwards of 95% of the time they determine that you need help - with no proof whatsoever - and ship you off to Bridgewater prison for up to 90 days. Bridgewater is a cesspool of germs and filth, which makes even hardened criminals cringe - where you're treated worse than a rabid mutt in a kennel - completely devoid of human rights or care of any kind. I couldn't even describe it in a way that would convey the actual horror of the whole thing.
It's big business for the state - this is how we create jobs in MA. It's a vicious machine that chews often innocent people and shits them out with a shade of PTSD. Worse, people are catching on, and using this "section 35" to get rid of their husband as a precursor to stripping them of their money, family, children, career and anything else that you might have worked your whole life to create. Why choose between your cake and eating it too when you can have both - sponsored and encouraged by the state.
Well that's exactly the current perception that is held by almost everyone - except me of course. There's a special ability that very few possess that makes them great coders - this is the ability to take an idea and turn it into code in a way that hasn't been done before, or in a way that is better than that which has been done before. Most people on the planet don't have the ability to make something "out of the blue" - meaning (I doubt I can phrase this in such a way that I get my idea across) that most people take a problem and solve it by using algorithms that have been written before for solving a similar problem. Take Einstein for example. What made him so brilliant - in my mind - was that he came up with the idea of special relativity by just thinking it up. The idea behind it - that we're trapped in a very small frame of reference compared to the vast scale of velocities - is brilliant because he had no example or physical hint that gave him the idea. He just thought it up. Afterwards, we were able to prove some of it through experimentation - but the initial idea, without any of that experimental evidence is a very rare and unique brain indeed. Some people use a bubble sort algorithm. I prefer to rethink the problem every time. When I was about 10, I realized that a nested loop resembles a square and is somewhat inefficient by a factor of 2. All you really need is a triangle. for a = 1 to 10; a++
for b = 1 to a; b++
if b is greater than a, switch a and b
I'm not saying that I'm Einstein or even nearly possess his intelligence or ability to perceive, but I excel at that part that you describe as a monkey - which I personally believe has a lot more value than most people think.
If I wasn't pissed off enough already by the dilution of the worth of writing code because of free software, now we're effectively turning this profession into some sort of chain gang related activity? This should really help my net worth. Another great idea!
Making something free turns it into shit quality. Look at music for a great example. I've never really thought that software should be free, because it cheapens what I do and makes my field pay less. It seems like it's easy to make it free because it's easy to copy. Hardware is not the same. no one is going to even give away the raw materials.
And I have to say - it seems crazy to me. Firstly, they seem to expect you to know everything about the technology that they happen to be working with. The thing is, the field has become so vast that I can't imagine that there is anyone who knows all of these things off the top of their head. Second, the interview process has become extremely stretched out. First you generally deal with a headhunter. Then you deal with HR. Then you spend a few hours on the phone talking with engineers - half of whom you can actually understand. Then if you make it past that, you go to the office and spend about 5 hours interviewing with another handful of people that are generally difficult to communicate with. All the while, the questions that people ask seem to be getting more and more obscure - presumably because the field itself continues to widen and the different technologies and tools continue to grow. People are using so many different languages, tools, OSs, etc... All the while, they seem to expect you to know everything that they're using right off the top of your head. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I see a lot of negative comments pertaining to teaching basic as a first step in understanding how to code. I respectfully disagree. I believe that basic removes all of the complexity that gets in the way of learning pure logic skills. I don't see any sense in teaching kids to program and having pointers or even compiling and linking when the best thing for them to learn is the purity of understanding how to create simple algorithms to solve problems. If they show an interest, they can figure out more complex things like compilers, and the complexities of lower level languages like C. I stated in another comment, I learned how to code on a TRS80 color computer, and I think it was invaluable to master that before moving on to more complex and real-world things...
I found the extended color basic book, but not the first one (TRS80 color computer basic) or the 3'rd one (TRS80 color computer disk basic) I remember saving up for years and buying the $600 floppy drive that came with the controller. I cried because the first few didn't work. I didn't know at the time, but putting the drive on a rug rendered it useless. Anyway, here's a link to a nicely done pdf of the extended basic:
http://www.classiccmp.org/cpma...
Remember if you put the semi-colon after the print you could get the print to go diagonal all across the screen?
10 PRINT "GIRLS KAN CODE 2, but poorly ";
20 GOTO 10
This is what I leaned on when I was 10 - and I can't think of anything better to teach kids basic programming skills. This was a operating system that had basic built in, and you just programmed right into the OS, and ran right from the OS. I can't think of anything simpler. The simplicity of it also allowed for the learner to just focus on logic and programming. I truly think it's the best possible learning tool. Even graphics were simple - nothing fancy - just lines and set/reset statements, paint statements... All this stuff was on a single page - the same one that the text was written on. I loved it - and I still do, perhaps for nostalgic purposes. But I swear by it. You can run it in an emulator, you just need the ROM, which is pretty easy to find. Get the "Extended Basic one". The real key here would be to find those original books - those things were gold and they taught in a step by step manner. Those - I have no idea how to find. I'm gonna look though, and if I find it, I'll put a link to it up here. I might even have the original books in my old bedroom at my parents' house. If I can find them, I'll scan them page by page and post a link to those as well... Anyone else think this is the ultimate tool for leaning programming or is it just me?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok. So, technobabble aside. I'd like to know HOW? for a simple example, suppose we have 3 pixels horizontally. Pixel 1 is blue (RGB(0,0,255)), pixel 3 is green (RGB(0,255,0)). Tell me what pixel 2 should be?
Somehow, I'm always ahead of the curve but can't figure out how to get off of it. I was saying all of this shit 10 years ago and everyone was modding me flamebait and calling me a cynical ass. Fact is, bottom line - software engineers are BAD SALES PEOPLE. I used to be shocked when I found out that the people who wrote the code (the bright work) could and often made less than the dopey jocks that just push the products out the door. That was the old problem - we undersold ourselves. The new problem is that they're bringing in the foreigners who come from a lesser quality of life than most of us grew up with in the US. They're willing to work for less, sleep in bunk beds, and work long hours for shit pay.
The common theme here is that the weak minded ones bring us all down. If half the people are willing to bend to the wills of the unreasonable, then the other half of us are screwed, because we are either going to be treated the same or replaced.
The crazy thing is that half of the foreign workers that I've worked with can't code their way out of a paper bag. It's almost like - management can't understand them well and just assumes that they're doing bright dorky work because they're confused by them. Eventually I realized that engineering is so undervalued that they consider us mostly just a step above janitors. I worked my ass off for my EE degree - I said to myself, "Give me the hardest thing to do, because that HAS to be the most rewarding". Years later I realize my misunderstandings, but it doesn't piss me off any less.
I agree with this... But we were never arguing "i" versus "p"
Are you basically saying to make pixels by averaging the color of the adjacent ones?
Granted, human eyes at normal distances can't use the kind of detail that these new TVs can deliver, but I just don't see how you could get a "more accurate representation of the original real-world view" by adding things that aren't really there. I mean, our eyes would do the same work at the TV screen the same way they would if we were positioned where the camera was. Wouldn't they? I could be missing something...
yea... I'm all about real estate when it comes to my monitors. For real... I'm dying to get a new big monitor with something_x2160 pixels, but don't have the cash to fork over for it. As a software developer, resolution means a lot when using an IDE like visual studio - I like to have all my debugging side windows open.
Even for browsing the web, I like to have a lot of vertical resolution to be able to see full pictures, and not have to scroll a lot. Real estate baby, real estate..
Sounds like how they took the computer monitor screens and used "1080p" hype to reduce the average resolution of a screen from 1600x1200 to 1600x1080. Whenever I go looking for a monitor now, I spend lots of time to find the ones with 1200 vertical pixels versus 1080.
What's the horizontal resolution on a 4k set?
I'm curious as to what the bandwidth would be for uncompressed 4k video.
Also, I'm clueless as I don't have anything 4k - what's the Blu-ray equivalent for 4k? I guess you'd need that to truly see how good your TV is... I can't imagine that youtube is streaming anything that doesn't have a lot of loss... (Again, I'm speculating here...)
Back in 2009 I bought a beautiful 50" Panasonic 1080p plasma. I (still to this day) absolutely love that TV and the images that it renders. When I used a BluRay for the first time (Actually the only way to fully use the 1080p, as Comcast isn't 1080p), I realized that by standing a couple feet away from the TV I could see things that I wouldn't be able to see at a normal distance. 4k must be amazing - it's like a microscope, as you can see detail that you wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye if you were standing where the camera was.
About Upscaling - This is the biggest load of crap ever. You can NOT create detail beyond that which you started with. An upscaled picture, displayed at 4k, that was captured with a 1080p camera can't possibly be any more accurate than the same picture displayed on a 1080p TV. Of course, the masses don't understand this. This seems to be the "MO" of most technology these days, since non-tech-savvy people are using a lot of tech gadgets - you can say meaningless things that sound "good", and people will accept them as "good" since they don't know what the hell they've really got.
I really do care a lot about science... I just don't fully understand why information that is caught in a gravity well is relevant in any way - whether or not it retains it's order. Your explanation helps though, thanks for that.
Who cares if information is preserved in a black hole? What purpose does it serve? What can it teach us about the universe? I'd actually like to know the answers to these questions.
But... Hawking is undoubtedly a brilliant mind. Why has he been wasting his time for years trying to decide whether or not "information is preserved in a black hole"?
I'm admitting my ignorance here... Someone please explain to me what the relevance of this is...
I've always loved my wife. When I was younger, I still lusted after other women. I won't say if I ever followed through or not, but I never would have fallen in love. I'd always come home, love my wife and kids, love to have sex with my wife, everything would be the same.
I don't have scientific proof, but I think that women tend to fall in love with their affair. Suddenly, you're getting in fights and you don't even know why. Everything you do wrong blows up into a huge battle until... "He drove me away..."
I've observed this in reality somewhat over the years in other unsuccessful couples.
I agree with you, I do... But as a guy who has worked in tech for 20+ years now, there have been so many times where I realize that people can be so smart, yet so stupid at the same time. Specifically, tech people - suckers... So many time I've looked around the room for someone else to share a look of "what the fuck?" with me, but most of the time, no one dares. When they offer people "free pizza" to work past 8:00, I look around for people to say, "Yeah, thanks, but I'll go home now and buy my own $6.99 pizza thanks" - but no one does, and they work, and they eat the pizza like it's some incredible gift.
If everyone were like me, we'd probably get paid more than the sales guys, work less hours and have a hell of a lot more respect. The problem is that your average engineer is a moron. Since most are morons, we're all morons. If I'm the one guy that tells them to "shove the pizza up their ass cause I'm goin home on time", I'll get replaced with a fresh Chinese kid faster than you can say kung pao chicken.
I can say I'm a broken person now... I'm definitely not what I was 15 years ago when I was a smart mofo and ready to take on the world. THe tech industry has brought me to the ground - in so many ways. You can't win... We're all just cogs in a wheel... The industry has been turned into more of a manual labor type of gig, and it sucks.
I see what you're saying, but I don't agree (respectfully)...
1) Nothing says that the number of bits that a processor can address has anything to do with the number of bits in an IP address. For example, when you get down to the nitty gritty, 64-bit processors don't even fully address a full 64-bits of memory space address. x64 architecture currently uses only 48-bits of the 64 for storing data to memory. Kernel space is from 0xFFFF8000 00000000 to 0xFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF, and user space virtual addresses go from 0x00000000 00000000 - 0x00007FFF FFFFFFFF. Thus, I don't really see any reason why the processor bitness has anything to do with the amount of bits in an IP address. Also, any network drivers that I have ever written - I don't see where they'd care.
2) What I like about my solution is - you reserve one number - say zero, for IPv4 backward compatibility. Thus, the IPv4 address 10.136.77.139 would be the sane as the address 0.10.136.77.139. Any entity that knows that it's communicating with IPv4 only hardware would just drop the 0. If it were anything besides a 0, it'd be unroutable. Anyway, that leaves 255 usable multipliers to add on to IPv4 addresses,
I dunno - I haven't thought it out extraordinarily well, and i'm too tired to do so now... I _think_ it makes sense though, nite!.
Whatchoo talking about Willis? I read this a few days ago, but revisited it today... I have to comment. The max address that I'm talking about would be 255.255.255.255.255, just one octet is added, This effectively increases the number of available addresses by 255 times (not 256, because one is the same as the preexisting 4 octet addresses). So doing the math, 2^32 is approximately 4.3 x 10^9. That times 255 is: 1.1 x 10^12. if u ask me, that's more than we'll ever need
And you can't remember an IPv6 address. Why didn't they just add another octet to an IPv4 address and increase the number of addresses by a trillion? I could remember 10.10.122.136.188
I don't know about the rest of the country, but Mass has really become a police state. They have amassed complete power, and are able to basically arrest anyone at any time if they feel like doing so. The laws are made such that almost everyone is breaking the law on any given day. This gives the police the power to circumvent the law, human rights, innocent until proven guilty, etc - they can racially profile, or whatever they want. For example, Mass is the only state (FL has a similar law, but is only about a tenth the duration) where someone can go to the police station and say "I think my husband has a drinking problem". an hour later, they will walk right into your house and take you out in cuffs, bring you to the courthouse where upwards of 95% of the time they determine that you need help - with no proof whatsoever - and ship you off to Bridgewater prison for up to 90 days. Bridgewater is a cesspool of germs and filth, which makes even hardened criminals cringe - where you're treated worse than a rabid mutt in a kennel - completely devoid of human rights or care of any kind. I couldn't even describe it in a way that would convey the actual horror of the whole thing.
It's big business for the state - this is how we create jobs in MA. It's a vicious machine that chews often innocent people and shits them out with a shade of PTSD. Worse, people are catching on, and using this "section 35" to get rid of their husband as a precursor to stripping them of their money, family, children, career and anything else that you might have worked your whole life to create. Why choose between your cake and eating it too when you can have both - sponsored and encouraged by the state.
lol, I didn't think... for b = 1 to (10 - (a-1)); b++
Well that's exactly the current perception that is held by almost everyone - except me of course. There's a special ability that very few possess that makes them great coders - this is the ability to take an idea and turn it into code in a way that hasn't been done before, or in a way that is better than that which has been done before. Most people on the planet don't have the ability to make something "out of the blue" - meaning (I doubt I can phrase this in such a way that I get my idea across) that most people take a problem and solve it by using algorithms that have been written before for solving a similar problem. Take Einstein for example. What made him so brilliant - in my mind - was that he came up with the idea of special relativity by just thinking it up. The idea behind it - that we're trapped in a very small frame of reference compared to the vast scale of velocities - is brilliant because he had no example or physical hint that gave him the idea. He just thought it up. Afterwards, we were able to prove some of it through experimentation - but the initial idea, without any of that experimental evidence is a very rare and unique brain indeed. Some people use a bubble sort algorithm. I prefer to rethink the problem every time. When I was about 10, I realized that a nested loop resembles a square and is somewhat inefficient by a factor of 2. All you really need is a triangle.
for a = 1 to 10; a++
for b = 1 to a; b++
if b is greater than a, switch a and b
I'm not saying that I'm Einstein or even nearly possess his intelligence or ability to perceive, but I excel at that part that you describe as a monkey - which I personally believe has a lot more value than most people think.
If I wasn't pissed off enough already by the dilution of the worth of writing code because of free software, now we're effectively turning this profession into some sort of chain gang related activity? This should really help my net worth. Another great idea!
Making something free turns it into shit quality. Look at music for a great example. I've never really thought that software should be free, because it cheapens what I do and makes my field pay less. It seems like it's easy to make it free because it's easy to copy. Hardware is not the same. no one is going to even give away the raw materials.
And I have to say - it seems crazy to me. Firstly, they seem to expect you to know everything about the technology that they happen to be working with. The thing is, the field has become so vast that I can't imagine that there is anyone who knows all of these things off the top of their head. Second, the interview process has become extremely stretched out. First you generally deal with a headhunter. Then you deal with HR. Then you spend a few hours on the phone talking with engineers - half of whom you can actually understand. Then if you make it past that, you go to the office and spend about 5 hours interviewing with another handful of people that are generally difficult to communicate with. All the while, the questions that people ask seem to be getting more and more obscure - presumably because the field itself continues to widen and the different technologies and tools continue to grow. People are using so many different languages, tools, OSs, etc... All the while, they seem to expect you to know everything that they're using right off the top of your head. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I see a lot of negative comments pertaining to teaching basic as a first step in understanding how to code. I respectfully disagree. I believe that basic removes all of the complexity that gets in the way of learning pure logic skills. I don't see any sense in teaching kids to program and having pointers or even compiling and linking when the best thing for them to learn is the purity of understanding how to create simple algorithms to solve problems. If they show an interest, they can figure out more complex things like compilers, and the complexities of lower level languages like C. I stated in another comment, I learned how to code on a TRS80 color computer, and I think it was invaluable to master that before moving on to more complex and real-world things...
I found the extended color basic book, but not the first one (TRS80 color computer basic) or the 3'rd one (TRS80 color computer disk basic) I remember saving up for years and buying the $600 floppy drive that came with the controller. I cried because the first few didn't work. I didn't know at the time, but putting the drive on a rug rendered it useless. Anyway, here's a link to a nicely done pdf of the extended basic: http://www.classiccmp.org/cpma...
Remember if you put the semi-colon after the print you could get the print to go diagonal all across the screen? 10 PRINT "GIRLS KAN CODE 2, but poorly "; 20 GOTO 10
This is what I leaned on when I was 10 - and I can't think of anything better to teach kids basic programming skills. This was a operating system that had basic built in, and you just programmed right into the OS, and ran right from the OS. I can't think of anything simpler. The simplicity of it also allowed for the learner to just focus on logic and programming. I truly think it's the best possible learning tool. Even graphics were simple - nothing fancy - just lines and set/reset statements, paint statements... All this stuff was on a single page - the same one that the text was written on. I loved it - and I still do, perhaps for nostalgic purposes. But I swear by it. You can run it in an emulator, you just need the ROM, which is pretty easy to find. Get the "Extended Basic one". The real key here would be to find those original books - those things were gold and they taught in a step by step manner. Those - I have no idea how to find. I'm gonna look though, and if I find it, I'll put a link to it up here. I might even have the original books in my old bedroom at my parents' house. If I can find them, I'll scan them page by page and post a link to those as well... Anyone else think this is the ultimate tool for leaning programming or is it just me?