Re:OT, may the mods have mercy on my karma
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High Density CDs
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· Score: 1
I've soldered many things in my day. I don't even burn myself anymore. The leaked electrolyte had been on the boards for years. It had dissolved copper circuit board traces and corroded adjacent components. It was a total loss.
Re:OT, may the mods have mercy on my karma
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High Density CDs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember the existence of hard-sectored floppies, but I never had drives that used them, so I am not the guy to ask.
My dad and I built our first computer. It was an S-100 bus machine. Some boards he bought, some he wire wrapped, and, by the end of it, we were photo etching our own circuit boards. We first booted it in 1976. He was (obviously) an electrical engineer, and I was a budding programmer (I was 10 years old).
I'm not sure the typical/. "whipper-snapper" realizes how cheap computers have become. My dad died a few years back. Later, we started cleaning out his shop. The old aluminum monster was still there, and I got an urge to fire it up. Alas, the electrolytic capacitors on several boards had leaked (each card on a S-100 bus does its own power regulation), ruining them. But I did also find a catalog. The price of an S-100 bus card with 16k of static RAM in the mid-1970's? About $800.
Uh, ten $0.66 songs make a $6.60 album, I'm afraid. Eleven $0.66 songs would make a $7.26 album. Perhaps a discount on the 11th song to $0.06?
Re:OT, may the mods have mercy on my karma
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High Density CDs
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· Score: 4, Informative
Okay, let me really show my age. I used to punch extra index holes in my SSSD 8-inch floppy disks! Really. I'm not just doing one of those "I had to walk uphill to school both ways" things. The single sided drives had the index hole off to the side, so when you flipped the disk over, the hole didn't line up with the sensor, so you had to punch a second index hole.
Fun.
8-inch disks. CP/M. Punch-tape! Those were the days!
I used to side with the purists. I've seen operator overloading so badly abused in some C++ programs that it is terrible.
But I recently had to write a Java program that did financial calculations (more rare, even in business software, than you might think). You don't want to use floating point (for all the classic reasons), and, in this case, you don't want to use integers because you need power functions for interest calculations and so forth.
The classic solution appears to be to use the BigDecimal class. I decided to wrap this in my own Money class that would include the financial functions and would also do currency conversions.
This kind of spcialized or "value added" numeric type is exactly where operator overloading should be available. Java would take a huge leap forward in utility if you could just overload the =, +, -, *, and / operators (= being assignment).
I understand why Java's designers did what they did. If they don't want to do this, then for goodness sake, do a hack like "+" support for Strings and "," support in for statements to give at least BigDecimal the basic operator set!
Or bite the bullet and give us operator overloading. I'm come around 180 degrees on this issue. I want my overloaded operators!
While I'm at it, let me trot out my favorite Java rant. Sun should LGPL or BSD License the entire Java SDK and APIs. (I actually think they should GPL it, but I'd settle for this). They are their own worst enemy. Java has a strong market position, and I don't think its going to go away any time soon, but it could completely destroy C# and.NET if some of the nagging problems could be dealt with by those who care. They are so concerned about "control" of the "standard" that they are endangering their de facto standard. Sure, there's gcj and kaffe, but why not just get us all working right on the real thing?
I would say the same thing about IBM's Java SDK, but I believe (someone correct me if I am wrong) they have some licensed Sun intellectual property in their SDK.
I actually worry about C# because it does support operator overloading. It is the only thing tempting about it to me.
The "how" it is different are those little acronyms you see next to song credits on albums (for those of you who still buy your music), BMI and ASCAP. You see, the radio biz and the recording biz worked out a deal. Any radio station that wants to play music buys a license with one ore more of these rights adminstrators (BMI and ASCAP being the largest). They then get the rights to play music over the air under a contract.
In other words, when you listen to songs on the radio, the RIAA has already been paid (actually, the RIAA is a dues-based advocacy non-profit, funded by the very much for-profit record companies). If you time shift a radio broadcast (record it and play it later) for yourself and only for yourself, you are within the law (as it stands today, but watch for DMCA limits to come in once services are digital). But if you copy that recording, you are "retransmitting."
It's goofy, I'll admit. And I think the recording industry is completely screwing up, trying to maintain the status quo in the face of a disruptive technology, but I still wish all you file sharers would remember that you are giving ammunition to the DRM/DMCA/Palladium/Region Coding "its not your computer, its a licensed playback device" advocates and their "you can't have control of your own hardware" laws.
Your actions have consequences, and the ability to do something has nothing to do with either its legality or its morality. "I want it" is neither a moral nor a legal argument.
The purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage production of culture and science. This has been true ever since the very first such law (the Statute of Anne in England) came into being. Works used to be protected primarily through the difficulty of copying. The printing press was the disruptive technology then. And copyright was the protection.
I've heard the argument advanced here that since a clear majority would like free file sharing, it is undemocratic to have laws that punish infringement. This is obvious nonsense. If you put out a ballot initiative that said "Would you like for milk to be free?" I believe you might get a majority behind it. But milk isn't free. Nor is it obvious that it should be free.
No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson points out the difference between intellectual property and milk, however, when he points out that someone who learns and idea from me in no way diminishes my possession of it, "as he who lights his taper from mine takes no light from me." (I think that's roughly what he said -- I don't have the quote in front of me). But intellectual property law is intended to make such a possession exclusive for a limited period of time. The original term of copyright in the US was 14 years. Just 14 years. Now it is life of the author +70 years! Im not sure how a dead person may be encouraged to produce new works of culture or science.
So, I see two problems. First, the effective extension of intellectual property into real property. Second, the complete refusal of the recording/publishing/film industries to recognize a fundamental change in the customer's desires from the market and in the nature of the market itself.
The first requires political action. I think we need to actually roll back IP law to shorter terms. The Commons is being plundered in the name of corporate profit. We can fight back. Join the EFF and keep an eye out for their action alerts (which you can watch right here on/.).
The second requires some entreprenurship and some vision on the part of the media companies. For example, a subscription based file sharing system. With student rates. $0.10/Megabyte, or $500/year unlimited, etc. (I haven't seriously tried to come up with reasoable prices there). But the industry and the artists deserve their compensation, and the consumer deserves what they want -- cheap, easy access to just the music they want when they want it.
Yes, but in many states, a judge can issue a "directed verdict" if s/he believes the jury decided contrary to fact and law. Not sure about federal courts on this...
I support the recording industry locating and suing and/or prosecuting people who illegally violate copyright on publications of all kinds. But that is the people engaged in the illegal activity. Peer to peer networks have legitimate functions and can be used in a non-infringing manner. They should have similar common carrier status to the phone companies.
If they were locating and prosecuting some students engaged in illegally copying copyrighted content, that would be different.
I think "Foundation" would be a tough sell. It is a "talky" story. It is mostly about ideas and vast social trends. It could be made into a fantastic series of movies, but science fiction hasn't been handled all that well in the movies. The tendency to have space battles, whooshing spaceships, explosions, and scantily-clad women (all of which I enjoy, but none of which really have anything to do with the genre, at least the book genre of science fiction) would ruin one of the richest and most thought-provoking set of books ever written.
Yeah, but do you remember those ads (was it General Electric) where all these applicances were being sent "to university" to become smart? I never did understand why anyone would want an internet-enabled 'fridge or microwave. Okay, so you fridge can tell you your milk is out of date. If it it can't take it and throw it away for me, just what the hell is the point?
So, funny as this story is, there are people seriously trying to give brains to applicances that are just fine as they are.
There's programming and there's Software Engineering. There are good programmers and there are bad software engineers. And vice-versa.
Most programmers are not engineers. Most software has not gone through anything that could be remotely called an engineering process. Most companies wouldn't be willing to pay the cost of developing software that did go through such a process.
There are programmers who in the course of their careers learn how to do and end up doing engineering. There are trained and qualified engineers who are "just" programming.
The me, engineering is a process that includes quantifiable measurements of success and processes of continuous improvement. No process is perfect, but deviations from expectations are measured and statistics are kept so that defect and failure rates can be determined, and moreover, analyzed to determine if they represent a problem to be fixed or are within normal variance of the present process, etc.
I'm not an engineer. I am a programmer. I'm not totally ignorant of the art and science of engineering, but I'd be posing (like many of my colleagues) if I claimed to be one.
Of programming and engineering, one is not "superior" to the other, any more than one could say a lawyer is "superior" to a dentist or an oncologist. They are different disciplines that provide different values and produce different goods.
I think it is a bit like psychologists and psychiatrists. Because the engineer (psychiatrist) has a longer education and a professional credentialing body with a longer history and more "power," the programmer (psychologist) is sometimes just the teensiest bit defensive about his status.
I don't think we have to be or should be.
In my experience, the proportion of the highly skilled to the wastes of space is roughly equal in both professions. In other words, one may educated far beyond one's intelligence in any field.
Engineered software is very expensive. Most of the time, businesses are not willing to pay that price. In most cases, they feel, good enough is good enough. This is an economic decision. And a sound one. Cost-benefit. Classical economics.
I think another reason this comes up so much lately is that the Internet has changed the definition of "good enough." With virtually every computer in a business being in either direct or indirect contact with practically the entire world, risks that were remote before are commonplace now. Programmers have had to get a lot better all of a sudden. And how you improves processes is by applying the techniques of engineering.
So, the two are different but complimentary skills. Especially since, even today, businesses want their custom software sooner and cheaper. That doesn't encourage engineering.
I bought one of these too, and an inexpensive Ambicom wireless CF card. I'm writing this reply on the Zaurus right now. I had to flash to OpenZaurus 3.2 to get the features I want, but the thing is great. I will say that if a personal organizer is what you want, I'd stick with a Palm (I had a Palm V until I ran over it, and then had a Handspring Visor). I actually prefer graffiti to the handwriting recog. on the Sharp (although you can d/l graffitti). The built in keyboard is pretty good though. Konqueror works well. I wanted more than a PDA. I wanted a server in my hand, and the Sharp Zaurus is pretty close. I never bothered getting the USB working. I went straight to 802.11. The cheap Ambicom card worked out-of-the box with OZ (It might with the standard Sharp ROM too, but I haven't tried).
Anyways, the HSN deal brought the price to where I wanted.
Ultimately, if you want an organizer, go Palm. If you want a usable, tiny Linux box, go Zaurus.
I assume you must be trolling, but I'll feed ya. I've been programming in C and C++ for 16 years and I have seen code this bad in production systems every single year of my career.
There are many more bad programmers than good programmers, and even good programmers occasionally make stupid mistakes. One of the biggest problems are the large software consulting businesses. They staff up large development projects at large companies by bringing in a handful of well seasoned architects and lead programmers and then a legion of fresh, inexperienced, and relatively cheap novice programmers. They spend 6-12 months spewing out massive amounts of code of highly variable quality and then leave, allowing staff programmers and consultants from smaller firms to clean up the mess.
Memory leaks, unbounded stack accesses, and outright logic flaws abound in code you are using today. I guarantee it.
You *will* come across that code in the wild. The only way you won't is if you don't look.
Well, this movie did fairly well when it was released in the mid-1970's, but it is a movie more and more people should see: Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. For all of you who rail against the MPAA and the RIAA, for all of you who thought The Matrix had something to say about being uncomfortable in mass-market culture, Network says it all and says it all better (although it lacks guns and women in tight leather tops, so some people here will not be able to see the movie's merits).
Another movie that was surprisingly good and much overlooked was Fearless written by Rafael Yglasias (sp?) and directed by Peter Weir. This movie, about dealing with tragedy and the mental disarrangement caused by a near-death expereince is a wonderful and moving film that strikes home every time I see it. The only problem being that the DVD is available in pan-and-scan only, which I consider a crime. It is a great movie. See it.
Not that I doubt you, but how can you have 15 years coding experience on Win2k? IIRC, Windows 1.0 appeared in 1987/88 and it was nothing like what is known today as "Windows." (8086 memory model, with a 64k max text segment size for Windows applications). I still have my manuals from Windows 1.0 (but I've lost the 360k floppies).
I didn't buy another version of Windows until 3.0 (and neither did virtually anyone else). A handful of businesses used Windows/286/386 to replace dedicated word processing machines, but not many. It was 3.0, followed quickly by 3.1 that first started capturing market share.
Maybe I misunderstood you. Or maybe you really did code for Windows 1.0. I know I didn't. I fired it up, played reversi a few times (no Solitare yet -- the real first "killer app" for Windows), and went back to Turbo C (no C++ for DOS yet) and Pascal.
I had Osborne's Introduction to Microprocessors, and it is still a book a lot of today's "programmers" (who have never written a line of assembly code) could benefit from reading. A later book specifically on the Z80 is also a great read. They still hold a hallowed place on my shelf along with a couple of books by Rodney Zaks ("Programming the Z80" and his CP/M programming book).
I had an Osborne 1. It was the first computer my old man and I bought. (We built our first from scratch, doing S-100 bus wirewrap boards). My first significant piece of programming was the BIOS for CP/M for our homebrewed hardware. Couldn't have done it without Osborne and Zaks (southgoing, or northgoing I always wondered).
I also seem to remember a book about the collapse of Osborne that was essentially a "prequel" to the dot-bomb era. It was called "Hypergrowth" or something like that. Anyone remember that book?
Osborne's rep was gone after that.
He's an important figure, but more for fueling the hobbyist movement which really created the microprocessor market. Nobody took these devices seriously until people started making home computers, and that was largely a homebrew phenomenon for a brief shining moment.
That feeling is what Linux had that the other "free" OSes didn't. The hobbyist mentality. It fosters creativity. Between IBM and Microsoft it had almost ceased to exist. Hobbyist, entrepreneur, establishment, repeat. I wonder what it will be tomorrow.
They were heady days. Signetics catalogs, Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calesthenics and Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte) -- yes, that's what the magazine used to be called --, Heathkits (God! Heathkits! Does anyone else here remember the H11? Sure, they had the CP/M machines, but they had the kit clone of the PDP-11! Complete with paper tape mass storage!)
Of course I wouldn't want to go back. But sometimes, just sometimes, I miss the chomp of the sprockets and the subtle squeak of the pinch rollers. I miss front panels and "LOAD" switches.
When my dad died, I came across our homebrew S100 bus Z80 machine. Sadly, the electrolytic capacitors had leaked and ruined several of the boards. Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't rewind to load point again. He didn't put it exactly that way, but close enough.
Adam Osborne was an imprudent maverick. He was an egomaniac whose company failed. But, damn! It was fun while it lasted. I, too, say rest in peace.
If you think spending a couple of years in jail is comparable to state execution, then I'm less inclined to consider your position favorably.
I made no assertion that music piracy was in any way linked with or similar to terrorism or drug posession.
What I said was you have a choice: Respect a perfectly reasonable law (well, except for the term -- I think the original 14 year protection was more than enough) or have extralegal remedies (DRM/Palladium) shoved down your throat.
I have mp3 (well, ogg vorbis these days) files. Every SINGLE one of them was duplicated from CDs I purchased or downloaded from one of the self-publishing sites out there. I have them all legally. I rarely buy music these days, but not because I download any (I don't). Rather because I'm old and I think it all sucks.
But once in a while one of the crusty old fogies I like puts out an album and I buy it. Then I rip it to ogg files. There are serious moves afoot to put my computers and recording equipment under the control of the "content providers." Every single time someone illegally trades a song file, they provide ammunition to the companies that want those controls. Don't do it if you value your freedom.
Now, as to the subject of this article, would I rather have some people engaged in conduct that is and has been illegal since the founding of the Republic (actually, I think the act was amended in the first half of this century to include recordings, but you get my point) be punished by the law, or would I rather all of my legitimate fair-use rights be eliminated by extralegal technological means? I know my answer. Clang, bang! 36 months! Time off for good behavior.
I know I'm not exactly in the majority on this issue with the/. crowd, but I'm a mob-loving karma whore on every other issue, so why not tell the truth about this?
This is precisely what should be done. What do you want? Do you want a world of DRM and total corporate control of your computers and media players? Or do you want a world where ONLY the people who break the law run the risk of facing consequences while those who obey the law (and this isn't some NEW law; this is law that has been there since the founding of the republic) retain their complete freedom?
You don't have, never have had, nor should you ever have the right to steal copyrighted material. And only those who do steal should face the consequences. Why should my ability to use free software or copy a movie I purchased be limited because you don't want to pay for music?
None of this is meant to defend the RIAA or MPAA, who are pushing for these control technologies because they do not want to respond to a change in the economic structure of their business and the nature of their consumer's demand. They are definitely behind the times and their reaction is to ask for a slew of new laws and control technologies. The law on the books is more than enough.
I'm all for prosecuting under the existing laws. And I'm totally opposed to new laws to give control of my hardware to these "content corporations."
I'm also all for those who want to boycott these companies and I'm all for those artists who are finding new ways to release and finance their work. But I support neither your "right" to steal legally protected works, nor the corporation's "rights" to take over my machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me clue you in. The "<", ">", and "&" signs all have significance in HTML. Comments on /. are HTML. You must use "entities" for these characters.
Here are the substitutions:
< equals <
> equals >
& equals &
Use those next time and reach comment nirvana!
Otherwise, I like your post very much. Very funny.
Not in CP/M 1.2! No "user" numbers!
I've soldered many things in my day. I don't even burn myself anymore. The leaked electrolyte had been on the boards for years. It had dissolved copper circuit board traces and corroded adjacent components. It was a total loss.
I remember the existence of hard-sectored floppies, but I never had drives that used them, so I am not the guy to ask.
/. "whipper-snapper" realizes how cheap computers have become. My dad died a few years back. Later, we started cleaning out his shop. The old aluminum monster was still there, and I got an urge to fire it up. Alas, the electrolytic capacitors on several boards had leaked (each card on a S-100 bus does its own power regulation), ruining them. But I did also find a catalog. The price of an S-100 bus card with 16k of static RAM in the mid-1970's? About $800.
My dad and I built our first computer. It was an S-100 bus machine. Some boards he bought, some he wire wrapped, and, by the end of it, we were photo etching our own circuit boards. We first booted it in 1976. He was (obviously) an electrical engineer, and I was a budding programmer (I was 10 years old).
I'm not sure the typical
Uh, ten $0.66 songs make a $6.60 album, I'm afraid. Eleven $0.66 songs would make a $7.26 album. Perhaps a discount on the 11th song to $0.06?
Okay, let me really show my age. I used to punch extra index holes in my SSSD 8-inch floppy disks! Really. I'm not just doing one of those "I had to walk uphill to school both ways" things. The single sided drives had the index hole off to the side, so when you flipped the disk over, the hole didn't line up with the sensor, so you had to punch a second index hole.
Fun.
8-inch disks. CP/M. Punch-tape! Those were the days!
pip a:=b:*.com
Ahhh!!
I used to side with the purists. I've seen operator overloading so badly abused in some C++ programs that it is terrible.
.NET if some of the nagging problems could be dealt with by those who care. They are so concerned about "control" of the "standard" that they are endangering their de facto standard. Sure, there's gcj and kaffe, but why not just get us all working right on the real thing?
But I recently had to write a Java program that did financial calculations (more rare, even in business software, than you might think). You don't want to use floating point (for all the classic reasons), and, in this case, you don't want to use integers because you need power functions for interest calculations and so forth.
The classic solution appears to be to use the BigDecimal class. I decided to wrap this in my own Money class that would include the financial functions and would also do currency conversions.
This kind of spcialized or "value added" numeric type is exactly where operator overloading should be available. Java would take a huge leap forward in utility if you could just overload the =, +, -, *, and / operators (= being assignment).
I understand why Java's designers did what they did. If they don't want to do this, then for goodness sake, do a hack like "+" support for Strings and "," support in for statements to give at least BigDecimal the basic operator set!
Or bite the bullet and give us operator overloading. I'm come around 180 degrees on this issue. I want my overloaded operators!
While I'm at it, let me trot out my favorite Java rant. Sun should LGPL or BSD License the entire Java SDK and APIs. (I actually think they should GPL it, but I'd settle for this). They are their own worst enemy. Java has a strong market position, and I don't think its going to go away any time soon, but it could completely destroy C# and
I would say the same thing about IBM's Java SDK, but I believe (someone correct me if I am wrong) they have some licensed Sun intellectual property in their SDK.
I actually worry about C# because it does support operator overloading. It is the only thing tempting about it to me.
Oh, give me a freakin' break!
Calling it an "uncontrolled descent into terrain" doesn't stop it being a flippin' plane crash!
I may want, in some of my darker delusions of grandeur, to be a "information systems architecture specialist," but what I am is a programmer.
"Systems administrator" is a perfectly clear, lucid, and honorable title. "Lord Emperor of the Packets" will just have to wait.
For the love of Pete, already! Get over yourself!
The "how" it is different are those little acronyms you see next to song credits on albums (for those of you who still buy your music), BMI and ASCAP. You see, the radio biz and the recording biz worked out a deal. Any radio station that wants to play music buys a license with one ore more of these rights adminstrators (BMI and ASCAP being the largest). They then get the rights to play music over the air under a contract.
/.).
In other words, when you listen to songs on the radio, the RIAA has already been paid (actually, the RIAA is a dues-based advocacy non-profit, funded by the very much for-profit record companies). If you time shift a radio broadcast (record it and play it later) for yourself and only for yourself, you are within the law (as it stands today, but watch for DMCA limits to come in once services are digital). But if you copy that recording, you are "retransmitting."
It's goofy, I'll admit. And I think the recording industry is completely screwing up, trying to maintain the status quo in the face of a disruptive technology, but I still wish all you file sharers would remember that you are giving ammunition to the DRM/DMCA/Palladium/Region Coding "its not your computer, its a licensed playback device" advocates and their "you can't have control of your own hardware" laws.
Your actions have consequences, and the ability to do something has nothing to do with either its legality or its morality. "I want it" is neither a moral nor a legal argument.
The purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage production of culture and science. This has been true ever since the very first such law (the Statute of Anne in England) came into being. Works used to be protected primarily through the difficulty of copying. The printing press was the disruptive technology then. And copyright was the protection.
I've heard the argument advanced here that since a clear majority would like free file sharing, it is undemocratic to have laws that punish infringement. This is obvious nonsense. If you put out a ballot initiative that said "Would you like for milk to be free?" I believe you might get a majority behind it. But milk isn't free. Nor is it obvious that it should be free.
No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson points out the difference between intellectual property and milk, however, when he points out that someone who learns and idea from me in no way diminishes my possession of it, "as he who lights his taper from mine takes no light from me." (I think that's roughly what he said -- I don't have the quote in front of me). But intellectual property law is intended to make such a possession exclusive for a limited period of time. The original term of copyright in the US was 14 years. Just 14 years. Now it is life of the author +70 years! Im not sure how a dead person may be encouraged to produce new works of culture or science.
So, I see two problems. First, the effective extension of intellectual property into real property. Second, the complete refusal of the recording/publishing/film industries to recognize a fundamental change in the customer's desires from the market and in the nature of the market itself.
The first requires political action. I think we need to actually roll back IP law to shorter terms. The Commons is being plundered in the name of corporate profit. We can fight back. Join the EFF and keep an eye out for their action alerts (which you can watch right here on
The second requires some entreprenurship and some vision on the part of the media companies. For example, a subscription based file sharing system. With student rates. $0.10/Megabyte, or $500/year unlimited, etc. (I haven't seriously tried to come up with reasoable prices there). But the industry and the artists deserve their compensation, and the consumer deserves what they want -- cheap, easy access to just the music they want when they want it.
I want a world where my hardwa
Fewer!
Yes, but in many states, a judge can issue a "directed verdict" if s/he believes the jury decided contrary to fact and law. Not sure about federal courts on this...
That's the lovely thing about freedom, innit?
I support the recording industry locating and suing and/or prosecuting people who illegally violate copyright on publications of all kinds. But that is the people engaged in the illegal activity. Peer to peer networks have legitimate functions and can be used in a non-infringing manner. They should have similar common carrier status to the phone companies.
If they were locating and prosecuting some students engaged in illegally copying copyrighted content, that would be different.
This action may be legal, but it isn't right.
I think "Foundation" would be a tough sell. It is a "talky" story. It is mostly about ideas and vast social trends. It could be made into a fantastic series of movies, but science fiction hasn't been handled all that well in the movies. The tendency to have space battles, whooshing spaceships, explosions, and scantily-clad women (all of which I enjoy, but none of which really have anything to do with the genre, at least the book genre of science fiction) would ruin one of the richest and most thought-provoking set of books ever written.
It could be done, but it would be REALLY hard.
Yeah, but do you remember those ads (was it General Electric) where all these applicances were being sent "to university" to become smart? I never did understand why anyone would want an internet-enabled 'fridge or microwave. Okay, so you fridge can tell you your milk is out of date. If it it can't take it and throw it away for me, just what the hell is the point?
So, funny as this story is, there are people seriously trying to give brains to applicances that are just fine as they are.
There's programming and there's Software Engineering. There are good programmers and there are bad software engineers. And vice-versa.
Most programmers are not engineers. Most software has not gone through anything that could be remotely called an engineering process. Most companies wouldn't be willing to pay the cost of developing software that did go through such a process.
There are programmers who in the course of their careers learn how to do and end up doing engineering. There are trained and qualified engineers who are "just" programming.
The me, engineering is a process that includes quantifiable measurements of success and processes of continuous improvement. No process is perfect, but deviations from expectations are measured and statistics are kept so that defect and failure rates can be determined, and moreover, analyzed to determine if they represent a problem to be fixed or are within normal variance of the present process, etc.
I'm not an engineer. I am a programmer. I'm not totally ignorant of the art and science of engineering, but I'd be posing (like many of my colleagues) if I claimed to be one.
Of programming and engineering, one is not "superior" to the other, any more than one could say a lawyer is "superior" to a dentist or an oncologist. They are different disciplines that provide different values and produce different goods.
I think it is a bit like psychologists and psychiatrists. Because the engineer (psychiatrist) has a longer education and a professional credentialing body with a longer history and more "power," the programmer (psychologist) is sometimes just the teensiest bit defensive about his status.
I don't think we have to be or should be.
In my experience, the proportion of the highly skilled to the wastes of space is roughly equal in both professions. In other words, one may educated far beyond one's intelligence in any field.
Engineered software is very expensive. Most of the time, businesses are not willing to pay that price. In most cases, they feel, good enough is good enough. This is an economic decision. And a sound one. Cost-benefit. Classical economics.
I think another reason this comes up so much lately is that the Internet has changed the definition of "good enough." With virtually every computer in a business being in either direct or indirect contact with practically the entire world, risks that were remote before are commonplace now. Programmers have had to get a lot better all of a sudden. And how you improves processes is by applying the techniques of engineering.
So, the two are different but complimentary skills. Especially since, even today, businesses want their custom software sooner and cheaper. That doesn't encourage engineering.
I bought one of these too, and an inexpensive Ambicom wireless CF card. I'm writing this reply on the Zaurus right now. I had to flash to OpenZaurus 3.2 to get the features I want, but the thing is great. I will say that if a personal organizer is what you want, I'd stick with a Palm (I had a Palm V until I ran over it, and then had a Handspring Visor). I actually prefer graffiti to the handwriting recog. on the Sharp (although you can d/l graffitti). The built in keyboard is pretty good though. Konqueror works well. I wanted more than a PDA. I wanted a server in my hand, and the Sharp Zaurus is pretty close. I never bothered getting the USB working. I went straight to 802.11. The cheap Ambicom card worked out-of-the box with OZ (It might with the standard Sharp ROM too, but I haven't tried).
Anyways, the HSN deal brought the price to where I wanted.
Ultimately, if you want an organizer, go Palm. If you want a usable, tiny Linux box, go Zaurus.
I assume you must be trolling, but I'll feed ya. I've been programming in C and C++ for 16 years and I have seen code this bad in production systems every single year of my career.
There are many more bad programmers than good programmers, and even good programmers occasionally make stupid mistakes. One of the biggest problems are the large software consulting businesses. They staff up large development projects at large companies by bringing in a handful of well seasoned architects and lead programmers and then a legion of fresh, inexperienced, and relatively cheap novice programmers. They spend 6-12 months spewing out massive amounts of code of highly variable quality and then leave, allowing staff programmers and consultants from smaller firms to clean up the mess.
Memory leaks, unbounded stack accesses, and outright logic flaws abound in code you are using today. I guarantee it.
You *will* come across that code in the wild. The only way you won't is if you don't look.
Well, this movie did fairly well when it was released in the mid-1970's, but it is a movie more and more people should see: Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. For all of you who rail against the MPAA and the RIAA, for all of you who thought The Matrix had something to say about being uncomfortable in mass-market culture, Network says it all and says it all better (although it lacks guns and women in tight leather tops, so some people here will not be able to see the movie's merits).
Another movie that was surprisingly good and much overlooked was Fearless written by Rafael Yglasias (sp?) and directed by Peter Weir. This movie, about dealing with tragedy and the mental disarrangement caused by a near-death expereince is a wonderful and moving film that strikes home every time I see it. The only problem being that the DVD is available in pan-and-scan only, which I consider a crime. It is a great movie. See it.
You're thinking of methane. And it is ammonia, folks, not "amonia."
Yes it is, but Steve Ciarcia isn't.
Not that I doubt you, but how can you have 15 years coding experience on Win2k? IIRC, Windows 1.0 appeared in 1987/88 and it was nothing like what is known today as "Windows." (8086 memory model, with a 64k max text segment size for Windows applications). I still have my manuals from Windows 1.0 (but I've lost the 360k floppies).
I didn't buy another version of Windows until 3.0 (and neither did virtually anyone else). A handful of businesses used Windows/286/386 to replace dedicated word processing machines, but not many. It was 3.0, followed quickly by 3.1 that first started capturing market share.
Maybe I misunderstood you. Or maybe you really did code for Windows 1.0. I know I didn't. I fired it up, played reversi a few times (no Solitare yet -- the real first "killer app" for Windows), and went back to Turbo C (no C++ for DOS yet) and Pascal.
I had Osborne's Introduction to Microprocessors, and it is still a book a lot of today's "programmers" (who have never written a line of assembly code) could benefit from reading. A later book specifically on the Z80 is also a great read. They still hold a hallowed place on my shelf along with a couple of books by Rodney Zaks ("Programming the Z80" and his CP/M programming book).
I had an Osborne 1. It was the first computer my old man and I bought. (We built our first from scratch, doing S-100 bus wirewrap boards). My first significant piece of programming was the BIOS for CP/M for our homebrewed hardware. Couldn't have done it without Osborne and Zaks (southgoing, or northgoing I always wondered).
I also seem to remember a book about the collapse of Osborne that was essentially a "prequel" to the dot-bomb era. It was called "Hypergrowth" or something like that. Anyone remember that book?
Osborne's rep was gone after that.
He's an important figure, but more for fueling the hobbyist movement which really created the microprocessor market. Nobody took these devices seriously until people started making home computers, and that was largely a homebrew phenomenon for a brief shining moment.
That feeling is what Linux had that the other "free" OSes didn't. The hobbyist mentality. It fosters creativity. Between IBM and Microsoft it had almost ceased to exist. Hobbyist, entrepreneur, establishment, repeat. I wonder what it will be tomorrow.
They were heady days. Signetics catalogs, Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calesthenics and Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte) -- yes, that's what the magazine used to be called --, Heathkits (God! Heathkits! Does anyone else here remember the H11? Sure, they had the CP/M machines, but they had the kit clone of the PDP-11! Complete with paper tape mass storage!)
Of course I wouldn't want to go back. But sometimes, just sometimes, I miss the chomp of the sprockets and the subtle squeak of the pinch rollers. I miss front panels and "LOAD" switches.
When my dad died, I came across our homebrew S100 bus Z80 machine. Sadly, the electrolytic capacitors had leaked and ruined several of the boards. Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't rewind to load point again. He didn't put it exactly that way, but close enough.
Adam Osborne was an imprudent maverick. He was an egomaniac whose company failed. But, damn! It was fun while it lasted. I, too, say rest in peace.
If you think spending a couple of years in jail is comparable to state execution, then I'm less inclined to consider your position favorably.
/. crowd, but I'm a mob-loving karma whore on every other issue, so why not tell the truth about this?
I made no assertion that music piracy was in any way linked with or similar to terrorism or drug posession.
What I said was you have a choice: Respect a perfectly reasonable law (well, except for the term -- I think the original 14 year protection was more than enough) or have extralegal remedies (DRM/Palladium) shoved down your throat.
I have mp3 (well, ogg vorbis these days) files. Every SINGLE one of them was duplicated from CDs I purchased or downloaded from one of the self-publishing sites out there. I have them all legally. I rarely buy music these days, but not because I download any (I don't). Rather because I'm old and I think it all sucks.
But once in a while one of the crusty old fogies I like puts out an album and I buy it. Then I rip it to ogg files. There are serious moves afoot to put my computers and recording equipment under the control of the "content providers." Every single time someone illegally trades a song file, they provide ammunition to the companies that want those controls. Don't do it if you value your freedom.
Now, as to the subject of this article, would I rather have some people engaged in conduct that is and has been illegal since the founding of the Republic (actually, I think the act was amended in the first half of this century to include recordings, but you get my point) be punished by the law, or would I rather all of my legitimate fair-use rights be eliminated by extralegal technological means? I know my answer. Clang, bang! 36 months! Time off for good behavior.
I know I'm not exactly in the majority on this issue with the
This is precisely what should be done. What do you want? Do you want a world of DRM and total corporate control of your computers and media players? Or do you want a world where ONLY the people who break the law run the risk of facing consequences while those who obey the law (and this isn't some NEW law; this is law that has been there since the founding of the republic) retain their complete freedom?
You don't have, never have had, nor should you ever have the right to steal copyrighted material. And only those who do steal should face the consequences. Why should my ability to use free software or copy a movie I purchased be limited because you don't want to pay for music?
None of this is meant to defend the RIAA or MPAA, who are pushing for these control technologies because they do not want to respond to a change in the economic structure of their business and the nature of their consumer's demand. They are definitely behind the times and their reaction is to ask for a slew of new laws and control technologies. The law on the books is more than enough.
I'm all for prosecuting under the existing laws. And I'm totally opposed to new laws to give control of my hardware to these "content corporations."
I'm also all for those who want to boycott these companies and I'm all for those artists who are finding new ways to release and finance their work. But I support neither your "right" to steal legally protected works, nor the corporation's "rights" to take over my machines.