Gee, you might think that name stood for something... I heard about it many many years ago. Some programmer wrote it to be easy for newbs to learn to program with... Now what was it...
Oh yes, I remember now! Basic!
Sarcasm aside, Basic is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and yes, it was written to be used in teaching newcomers how to program, so it's absolutely no surprise that some people have found it useful for that purpose. (It's about as surprising as finding out that snakes slither...)
Just to stir the pot a little, one of the big Linux cultural things I hear thrown about is that of choice and freedom, something that Russia will no longer have.
That world record typist may be able to type 10 times faster than Stephen Hawking, maybe even a thousand times faster, but you know what, he probably only writes those high level physics papers at less than one millionth the speed of poor slow typing Stephen.
Same with programming. It's the development of what you are working on in your head, not so much how fast you can input pure text. If you are a moderate typist and at least an ok programmer, doubling your typing speed probably won't increase output by more than 2 or 3 %. If you have a lot of raw data in non-digital form to input, you get the intern or keyboard operator to do that, and hope they don't typo anything.
It's kind of like a taxi driver and being skilled at driving at high speeds. Even if you can take the corners at a thousand mph without flipping the taxi, it won't really speed up how fast you can get your fare to the destination, unless you are driving on an empty Nascar track, and you know that will never happen in real life.
I wonder if their new banknotes will survive the US money test.
Assuming it does and gets adopted by countries, it'll be time for the shielded wallets that are RFID proof. I figure a flame war will start over this somewhere:)
Here are just a few of those sites you can get those shielded wallets from for the more paranoid amongst you : )
Before "don't ask don't tell" the military could endeavor to find out if you were homosexual and kick you out if they thought you were. "Don't ask don't tell" made it so they could only target those that openly professed to be homosexual. I've seen nothing saying the military was not allowed to discriminate based on sexual preference. The repealing of this means the homophobes just got their hunting license back.:(
Actually almost everything of the past 50 years can easily be attributed directly or indirectly the the science and research that has been heavily funded by the government. Corporations/Private Companies do very little Hard or Abstract Science much less what's known as Pure Research, yet if it wasn't for that same thing having been done by somebody, they wouldn't have the sciences and techniques to have developed their products in the first place. Do you really think we'd have the internet, satellites (communication/weather/gps), advanced modeling tools, weather radar, numerous synthetics or alloys, and so many other things it would take hours to even dent the total list? Well, if you don't know, the answer is no. Many of them exist because of direct government funding of research, while the rest couldn't have even existed without the prior research that the government paid for.
Companies what research only on what they can immediately commercialize. The government gives grants to allow lots of research with no foreseeable immediate benefit. Did you know that when electricity was first being experimented with most people had no idea what use it was and would have happily stopped people from "wasting money" researching it if they could? Just imagine your life without electricity while you mull over that.
Ok, the 90s were a long time ago for software. I knew a guy who was such an addict for Ultima Online he played it at work until they started blocking it. His solution, PC-Anywhere to his home computer (which wasn't blocked) and run Ultima Online on his home computer.
Basically it wasn't a lot different from the ancient dumb terminals (or thin clients) remotely connecting to big iron to run your apps. So what if the app is a game or a word processor or even a molecular modeling program, it's all the same process, the only real difference is how much bandwidth you need going both ways for it to work without issues. (Though I can see some software patents on the compression systems, but that's all.)
Their limiting their patent by including some very specific junk doesn't make this any more new or innovative. But I don't read modern patent legalese worth a darn, so who knows what I missed or didn't understand before my eyes glazed over. : )
Hmmm.... I wonder if the patent examiners have glazed over eyes...
It's been a while, but my understanding is that anything that gets put on the media channels is compromised, and your response should always be the standard, "I can neither confirm nor deny that statement". Of course, trying to keep your own people in the dark about things that are now public knowledge, even if it was classified, is a really bad idea that is going to screw you over real quick.
True. Most of the USAF pilots I've talked to are pretty stupid. They are really good at flying their planes, but other than that, most of them are dumb as bricks. And they tent to have egos larger than their multi-ton planes.
It's like confiscating matchbooks but not lighters from the stable boys after THE ENTIRE TOWN HAS BURNED DOWN !
Yet considering what I saw when I was in the military I'm not that surprised. A plane buff I knew on base wrote to the Library of Congress (as a normal civilian using his civilian address) asking for info on the SR71 Blackbird. They sent him some cool media materials which included a poster sized drawing of the plane, all standard and unclassified press packet stuff. During an inspection of the barracks a stupid officer saw it and wanted him arrested for spying and stealing classified material.
Because of things like that, do I get surprised when some military moron goes off half-cocked and without bullets? No, I've become convinced that most of them don't even understand the security rules or pretty much anything else that exists outside their egocentric imaginations. (And I'm pretty sure that 3 of the 5 generals I actually met were senile at the time. 4 of them were also complete assholes, but that's a different issue.)
Terrorists don't care about reliability, look how many suicide bombers die from premature detonation. (Feel free to laugh at the joke, both of them, but it's real and some statistics have been published on this.) They are very willing to send a half dozen or more people through in the hopes that one makes it to target.
Some places I worked at had sick days, and every now and then someone would call in sick and go to the movies or beach or something. As far as everyone was concerned, it was a mental health day, they were sick of work and needed some time to decompress. Funny how weekends tend to be filled with the stuff you've been putting off doing the rest of the week, like laundry, among others, especially when you don't have a stable schedule. Other places had Personal days instead of sick days, so it didn't really matter what your reason was most of the time.
I agree that any company that has the money to waste on a 'hooky detective' and to actually think it's a necessary thing really needs to re-evaluate their employee relationship situation because they've obviously screwed up somewhere.
Exactly. Part of the PSPGo's failure with existing customers is when Sony spit in their face by telling them they can't use any of their existing games on the go. Also, for far too long, a large chunk of the stuff you could buy online required you have a PS3 to download and transfer it to your PSP (all models), but they finally fixed that.
Sony got egotistical and stupid. They lost first place in the gamers heart and can't seem to stop being so full of themselves that they actually listen and help their customers and the few fans they have left. If they don't get a clue soon, it's going to be really ugly for them.
Last thing, I promise. I'm betting the zeus will be a failure with a lot of people declaring it a PSPGo (failed product) with a phone slapped on.
The DMCA has been ripe for abuse since before it was signed. Since then it's been used illegally many many times with little or no repercussions to those who abuse it.
I don't know if his game violates any rules, but it's possible. Of course, there are tons of similar games that don't, so who knows, other than ip lawyers.
If you imagine there is a great big interstate highway designed by the government that's called the Internet, and people like to drive on it, and order packages to be delivered to their homes by trucks using it we have a place to start.
This Internet didn't go everywhere, and to get on it, people needed a driveway from their garage to the onramps, so ISPs sprung up that provide those for people, for a price. Now some of the ISPs wanted to get the access fees from a lot more people, but the Internet was too far away, so they agreed to extend the Internet buy building a new portion from pre-existing part to where they needed it. Of course it had to be just as accessible to other traffic on the Internet as all the pre-existing stuff, because they have pretty good traffic control that automatically attempts to route traffic around congestion and damage. And for a while, things continued on.
Then some of the ISPs decided to get more money from their customers and said "Hey, give us more money per month, and we'll enlarge your driveway, maybe even make it two lanes and smooth enough to drag race on.". A while after that they decided for some reason (congestion, insufficient driveways, pure greed, whatever) that the existing traffic was too much for their resources to handle so they started making new rules. You can't drive anything larger than a subcompact, and No more trips than 2 per day, and if more than 6 delivery trucks come up your driveway per month, we're going to yank your driveway...
Move a bit further in time, and now the the ISP is getting pissed that some other ISP or delivery company is sending lots of big trucks over the portion of the Internet they built. Is it going to their customers, or someplace else on the Internet? My point is this, I don't F-N care! You joined the game of share the internet and get paid by your subscribers, you can't just decide to charge the traffic that goes over the backbone, and if it goes to your subscribers, they are responsible for it. So get your hypocritical greedy mitts off the traffic, and try to actually make your customers happy with your 'service'.
What if you are watching a streaming video? (Which of course means you don't know what size it actually is...) There are lots of data chugging activities on the net that don't tell you how large they are, combine that with a greedy provider that wants you to go over your limits so they can charge you more, and your wallet is going to be taking the hit sooner or later.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, you might think that name stood for something... I heard about it many many years ago. Some programmer wrote it to be easy for newbs to learn to program with... Now what was it...
Oh yes, I remember now! Basic!
Sarcasm aside, Basic is an acronym for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and yes, it was written to be used in teaching newcomers how to program, so it's absolutely no surprise that some people have found it useful for that purpose. (It's about as surprising as finding out that snakes slither...)
As long as China maintains it's 'firewall' and the Chinese people mostly stay in China, that integration will never happen.
Just to stir the pot a little, one of the big Linux cultural things I hear thrown about is that of choice and freedom, something that Russia will no longer have.
:)
I just find it ironic.
That world record typist may be able to type 10 times faster than Stephen Hawking, maybe even a thousand times faster, but you know what, he probably only writes those high level physics papers at less than one millionth the speed of poor slow typing Stephen.
Same with programming. It's the development of what you are working on in your head, not so much how fast you can input pure text. If you are a moderate typist and at least an ok programmer, doubling your typing speed probably won't increase output by more than 2 or 3 %. If you have a lot of raw data in non-digital form to input, you get the intern or keyboard operator to do that, and hope they don't typo anything.
It's kind of like a taxi driver and being skilled at driving at high speeds. Even if you can take the corners at a thousand mph without flipping the taxi, it won't really speed up how fast you can get your fare to the destination, unless you are driving on an empty Nascar track, and you know that will never happen in real life.
hehe, Free Market is an economic utopia, that like all other utopias, doesn't exist.
I wonder if their new banknotes will survive the US money test.
:)
Assuming it does and gets adopted by countries, it'll be time for the shielded wallets that are RFID proof.
I figure a flame war will start over this somewhere
Here are just a few of those sites you can get those shielded wallets from for the more paranoid amongst you : )
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/security/8cdd/
http://www.idstronghold.com/
http://www.tamperseal.com/rfid-blocking-leather-wallet-p-332.html
http://rfidwallet.org/
When ever he wanted to post stuff himself, which has been pretty much since the beginning.
Before "don't ask don't tell" the military could endeavor to find out if you were homosexual and kick you out if they thought you were. :(
"Don't ask don't tell" made it so they could only target those that openly professed to be homosexual.
I've seen nothing saying the military was not allowed to discriminate based on sexual preference.
The repealing of this means the homophobes just got their hunting license back.
Actually almost everything of the past 50 years can easily be attributed directly or indirectly the the science and research that has been heavily funded by the government. Corporations/Private Companies do very little Hard or Abstract Science much less what's known as Pure Research, yet if it wasn't for that same thing having been done by somebody, they wouldn't have the sciences and techniques to have developed their products in the first place.
Do you really think we'd have the internet, satellites (communication/weather/gps), advanced modeling tools, weather radar, numerous synthetics or alloys, and so many other things it would take hours to even dent the total list? Well, if you don't know, the answer is no. Many of them exist because of direct government funding of research, while the rest couldn't have even existed without the prior research that the government paid for.
Companies what research only on what they can immediately commercialize. The government gives grants to allow lots of research with no foreseeable immediate benefit. Did you know that when electricity was first being experimented with most people had no idea what use it was and would have happily stopped people from "wasting money" researching it if they could? Just imagine your life without electricity while you mull over that.
Ok, the 90s were a long time ago for software. I knew a guy who was such an addict for Ultima Online he played it at work until they started blocking it. His solution, PC-Anywhere to his home computer (which wasn't blocked) and run Ultima Online on his home computer.
Basically it wasn't a lot different from the ancient dumb terminals (or thin clients) remotely connecting to big iron to run your apps. So what if the app is a game or a word processor or even a molecular modeling program, it's all the same process, the only real difference is how much bandwidth you need going both ways for it to work without issues. (Though I can see some software patents on the compression systems, but that's all.)
Their limiting their patent by including some very specific junk doesn't make this any more new or innovative. But I don't read modern patent legalese worth a darn, so who knows what I missed or didn't understand before my eyes glazed over. : )
Hmmm.... I wonder if the patent examiners have glazed over eyes...
It's been a while, but my understanding is that anything that gets put on the media channels is compromised, and your response should always be the standard, "I can neither confirm nor deny that statement". Of course, trying to keep your own people in the dark about things that are now public knowledge, even if it was classified, is a really bad idea that is going to screw you over real quick.
True. Most of the USAF pilots I've talked to are pretty stupid. They are really good at flying their planes, but other than that, most of them are dumb as bricks. And they tent to have egos larger than their multi-ton planes.
It's like confiscating matchbooks but not lighters from the stable boys after THE ENTIRE TOWN HAS BURNED DOWN !
Yet considering what I saw when I was in the military I'm not that surprised. A plane buff I knew on base wrote to the Library of Congress (as a normal civilian using his civilian address) asking for info on the SR71 Blackbird. They sent him some cool media materials which included a poster sized drawing of the plane, all standard and unclassified press packet stuff. During an inspection of the barracks a stupid officer saw it and wanted him arrested for spying and stealing classified material.
Because of things like that, do I get surprised when some military moron goes off half-cocked and without bullets? No, I've become convinced that most of them don't even understand the security rules or pretty much anything else that exists outside their egocentric imaginations. (And I'm pretty sure that 3 of the 5 generals I actually met were senile at the time. 4 of them were also complete assholes, but that's a different issue.)
Or perhaps someone who wants to voice their opinion in public without having to dodge the shitflingers at home.
Terrorists don't care about reliability, look how many suicide bombers die from premature detonation.
(Feel free to laugh at the joke, both of them, but it's real and some statistics have been published on this.)
They are very willing to send a half dozen or more people through in the hopes that one makes it to target.
Some places I worked at had sick days, and every now and then someone would call in sick and go to the movies or beach or something. As far as everyone was concerned, it was a mental health day, they were sick of work and needed some time to decompress. Funny how weekends tend to be filled with the stuff you've been putting off doing the rest of the week, like laundry, among others, especially when you don't have a stable schedule.
Other places had Personal days instead of sick days, so it didn't really matter what your reason was most of the time.
I agree that any company that has the money to waste on a 'hooky detective' and to actually think it's a necessary thing really needs to re-evaluate their employee relationship situation because they've obviously screwed up somewhere.
Exactly. Part of the PSPGo's failure with existing customers is when Sony spit in their face by telling them they can't use any of their existing games on the go.
Also, for far too long, a large chunk of the stuff you could buy online required you have a PS3 to download and transfer it to your PSP (all models), but they finally fixed that.
Sony got egotistical and stupid. They lost first place in the gamers heart and can't seem to stop being so full of themselves that they actually listen and help their customers and the few fans they have left. If they don't get a clue soon, it's going to be really ugly for them.
Last thing, I promise. I'm betting the zeus will be a failure with a lot of people declaring it a PSPGo (failed product) with a phone slapped on.
The DMCA has been ripe for abuse since before it was signed. Since then it's been used illegally many many times with little or no repercussions to those who abuse it.
I don't know if his game violates any rules, but it's possible. Of course, there are tons of similar games that don't, so who knows, other than ip lawyers.
It is now the official 'Most Ignorant State In the Union'. Next year they're going for 'Most Bigoted State'.
Sounds both deceptive and illegal, but ianal. Let's get some actual lawyers that deal with consumer rights issues on this and see what they say.
If you imagine there is a great big interstate highway designed by the government that's called the Internet, and people like to drive on it, and order packages to be delivered to their homes by trucks using it we have a place to start.
This Internet didn't go everywhere, and to get on it, people needed a driveway from their garage to the onramps, so ISPs sprung up that provide those for people, for a price. Now some of the ISPs wanted to get the access fees from a lot more people, but the Internet was too far away, so they agreed to extend the Internet buy building a new portion from pre-existing part to where they needed it. Of course it had to be just as accessible to other traffic on the Internet as all the pre-existing stuff, because they have pretty good traffic control that automatically attempts to route traffic around congestion and damage. And for a while, things continued on.
Then some of the ISPs decided to get more money from their customers and said "Hey, give us more money per month, and we'll enlarge your driveway, maybe even make it two lanes and smooth enough to drag race on.". A while after that they decided for some reason (congestion, insufficient driveways, pure greed, whatever) that the existing traffic was too much for their resources to handle so they started making new rules. You can't drive anything larger than a subcompact, and No more trips than 2 per day, and if more than 6 delivery trucks come up your driveway per month, we're going to yank your driveway...
Move a bit further in time, and now the the ISP is getting pissed that some other ISP or delivery company is sending lots of big trucks over the portion of the Internet they built. Is it going to their customers, or someplace else on the Internet? My point is this, I don't F-N care! You joined the game of share the internet and get paid by your subscribers, you can't just decide to charge the traffic that goes over the backbone, and if it goes to your subscribers, they are responsible for it. So get your hypocritical greedy mitts off the traffic, and try to actually make your customers happy with your 'service'.
Just browsing? Of course not. Start hitting the music services or streaming video and it becomes a different game.
What if you are watching a streaming video? (Which of course means you don't know what size it actually is...)
There are lots of data chugging activities on the net that don't tell you how large they are, combine that with a greedy provider that wants you to go over your limits so they can charge you more, and your wallet is going to be taking the hit sooner or later.
Nope, it likes that too. Try massive amounts of nuclear radiation. Don't know if it will work, but I am curious about the results. : )
better yet, it swaps out phosphorus and arsenic depending on availability