Actually, MOS Technology, and how the lawyers allowed those two companies to co-exist in the same market I'll never know.
I liked the 6502 instructions. There was an elegance to them, a symmetry that seemed missing in the 8080 and its ilk. When in doubt, Intel threw registers and special instructions at the problem (never mind the Z80's two complete register banks), whereas MOS seemed to favour soft solutions (don't need no stinking "multiply"), and of course memory-mapped I/O.
. Some bright individual had been using deadfalls to cross streams, and thought to himself - "hey, I could cut down a tree and lay it across *myself* instead of having to hike all the way up here". He was a theoretical physicists.
True. Let's throw it open to the people: who here has deleted a digital image? And who here has snipped out a particular frame from a roll and thrown it away?
See what I mean? You don't edit 35mm film, because there's absolutely no benefit (unless it's that one of you with the sheep or something.) Once you've shot the frame, you keep it, because it's more trouble to cut it out and discard it then it is to hang on to it. You can't reuse it, so you retain it. You might toss a whole roll, but not any specific frame.
Digital media might encourage you to shoot more, just as 35mm Leicas encouraged more frames than 4x5 Speed Graphics (and strobes vs. those insanely hot flashbulbs -- those guys must have had asbestos pockets, or just left a trail of fused glass everywhere they went), but they also encourage editing and discard. Hell, you can see it mentioned in the advertising for digital cameras.
There is a coment somewhere in this discussion that suggested little CD-R's. That would probably cover both ends of the problem.
Ah, but I would say, "Jordan's playing for whom?" -- damn illiterate shooters!:)
I was going on a friend of my sister's who shot for the local paper at about the same time (well, maybe 25 years ago.) I remember I was jealous, becaue he kept those blocks of Tri-X in the back of his Scout all the time, and I had to buy my film one roll at a time (the difference between taking pictures for the paper and delivering it.)
My high school rolled 'em, but I do recall once or twice when those little cassettes got dropped and fell open, which Kodak's never did. (Luckily I was a lousy photographer, so there was no great loss.) Maybe that's why the Sun preferred the yellow boxes.
"Let's see, go back to the truck and get more RAM cards, or stay here in the riot and take more pictures..."
They didn't used to keep them all because they wanted to, they kept them all because they had to, and it had the beneficial side effect of a greater historical record. Now that they don't need to keep the runts, they won't -- and we'll never see them.
Did you read as as far as, say, the third paragraph:
With digital image capture, the most pressing issue is that we are losing the past. We lose the sequence of images that captures the events leading up to whatever image is chosen for publication.
No, she's not talking about the manipulation of the image, she's talking about the destruction of unused images.
But, because of storage issues on the camera, he will have to delete some of those images as he goes along.
I'm not quite sure what she coulde have written to make her point more clear. Perhaps colorful talking animals could have explained it to you better?
...which isn't much at all for news shooter. Those guys crank through film. It's not like they buy it at the Rite Aid -- they get those shrink-wrapped blocks of what, 20 or 25 rolls? "Film is cheap, shots are expensive."
Point is that with film there was no choice in the matter. With 35mm film, nobody is going to develop just the good frames, and it's not even worth cutting the bad ones out of the strip. They stay in the archive because there's no reason to remove them -- you can't reuse the medium anyway.
Digital media are reusable, and will be reused as soon as there's an issue. Even if the media were free and weightless, shooters would still edit and make room just in case another shot comes along.
Re:MS-DOS is dead; long live AI-OS
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 2
Well, that's true as well -- nested directories were bolted on in 3 (IIRC). But the "/" for options was there from the getgo.
Thing was, CP/M was the business OS. A lot of places used Apples, it was true, and the Canadians fell in love with Commodores at work, but most offices ran CP/M, so the idea was to make the transition as easy as possible, both for users and programmers -- most of the 8080 instruction set mapped almost directly onto the 8086 set, and the OS API was almost identical. This is where com files came from, too -- simple 64K (or less) memory images of a program, just like a CP/M com file.
For some years all my DOS machines had a batch file so that I could still PIP.
Re:MS-DOS is dead; long live AI-OS
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My only real gripe about MS-DOS was the weirdness of Paul Allen in declaring that henceforth all users should use a backslash (e.g., C:\mind.html) path-separator instead of the Un*x forwards-slash separator, as in http://mind.sourceforge.net/alife.html -- the way G*d intended computers to work.
You must not have been a CP/M user -- that's Kildall's fault, not Allen's. CP/M used the "/" for options, as in "program/opt1/opt2", and DOS was first and foremost a CP/M workalike.
Who the hell's talking about rounding up all the Arabs in given area? I'm talking more about rounding up all the Klansmen.
Let's take the KKK as an example. Nobody's born in the Klan, they join. They take a positive step to sign up. They deliberately enroll in an organization with the publicly-stated and often-repeated goal of doing grevious harm to many innocent people. If we could export all our Klansmen I'd do it in a heartbeat, but I don't think there are any other countries looking for pimply crackers in sheets.
As it happens the KKK is home-grown, and we're stuck with them. Pin-headed as they are, they are entitled to the same treatment as any other American citizens.
Now let's consider the Provos. They, too, are not born into the Provisional IRA. They join. They go out of their way to sign on with an outfit that most Irishmen avoid. The difference is that they are not American citizens, and with them we have a choice. We can deny them visas if we choose, and we do, just as we can deny visas to people with felony records, or even simply because we decide that enough people have come from there lately and it's somebeody else's turn. We have, in fact, the legal authority to turn people away because they're blond, or too tall -- we just have more decency than that.
All we're talking about here is the legal authority to revoke a visa based on somebody's membership in a terrorist organization.
Look at it this way: we turn away thousands of Mexicans every year, simply because we feel that enough Mexicans have entered lately. Nothing wrong with the individuals in question, just too many of them. Well, we have enough murderous assholes too, so lets drop the quota to 0. Let's reduce the popukation of sworn killers.
(British extraction? No, but my parents were State Department [my Dad was actually PNG'ed by the Israelis for being a little too sympathetic with the Arabs], and although we came back to the States when I was 5 we had a legacy of Enid Blyton novels and such from various posts. Some of it seems to have stuck.
(Alas, I am merely a mildly Anglophilic American, who often spells things with a superfluous "u". Sheer pretension. )
When I mentioned stickers on his luggage I was being metaphorical (personal baggage and all that), not literal. The point I was trying to make is that a Provo does more than speak out about the British occupation -- he lashes out. Where there are Provo's there are often explosions, and while this may be a stunning coincidence, I think it probably has to do with the fact that blowing things up is what the Provos do.
The regular IRA is dodgy, but there are members of that organization who do not personally undertake acts of violence. There are even some who seek peaceful solutions. So far as I know, the same cannot be said of the Provo's -- they're rootin' tootin' urban guerillas with few other skills.
I guess I'm sort of weird in this, but I feel that when we permit people to enter the US it's because they will make a contribution, or at least try. Obviously most do, whether by artistic achievement, scientific prowess, driving a cab well, or working late at significant personal risk so that I can get a Slurpee at any time, day or night. There are, however, a few people whose intention is to do us harm after they get here. Some of them have joined groups that take it as their duty to do us harm. Others may join after they arrive. In either case, if someone takes an oath to kill Americans, this is more than a difference of opinion, and I think it's reasonable to ask them to go away. I don't think it's necessary to wait until a conspiracy to commit a particular act of violence can be proved of a member of bin Laden's group -- the whole damned outfit is one big conspiracy to commit violence.
I'm not suggesting that, for instance, Catholics are guilty of the violence in Ireland, and that therefore every Catholic should be expelled. I'm not even suggesting that every Irish Catholic somehows shares the guilt.
However, if somebody arrives here with "Provisional IRA" stickers on his luggage, I think we have the right to turn him away (and in fact I believe that legally we do), and if we find out that somebody is a member of an active terrorist organization only after he arrives, then I think we have the right to toss him out -- not bomb him, not arrest him, not exile him from his own country, but just ask him to leave ours. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here."
I do see your point, and in general I agree. At the very least I think we'd agree that any such organizations need to be chosen with extreme care and only under duress.
However, there is precedent. When a soldier shoot an enemy, he does so because the other is a member of the opposing army, an organization inimical to his country. I'm not suggesting that anybody be shot, or even imprisoned, merely that enemy soldiers be asked to leave.
I don't think the laws of hospitality are so stringent in our culture that our nation's guests must be allowed to conduct themselves destructively, or even rudely. The fact is that they are not our citizens, and while our morals as well as are laws impel us to extend ordinary human rights to all, regardless of citizenship, remaining in the US is not such a right.
Yes, I have heard the term, and when the association exists for a purpose I find reprehensible then I think the concept is valid.
Guy joins the Assocation of People Who Want to Kill BlueDemonX. You want him hanging around outside your house? The oath he took says, "I do solemnly swear that I will take out that BlueDemonX bastard first chance I get, and anything else blue that I see, including the sky. This I swear on my mother's grave."
Sounds ridiculous, I know, but then I'm not Jewish, or black. I'm more or less Catholic, but then again I'm not Irish. Up until fairly recently nobody was making much of an organized effort to kill me.
Let me put it to you this way: plenty of people come to this country to get away from organizations, and I don't want them here either. We don't need Black September, we don't need the IRA, we don't need the Russian mob, we don't need the triads -- the list goes on. When some poor son of a bitch manages to get out of Haiti and get here, I think he deserves some confidence that we won't tolerate the Tonton Macoute (God help my spelling there)
In war, an enemy soldier is an enemy soldier because he has joined an organization. Some organizations are at war with the very concept of a civilized society. How about we don't invite them for sleepovers?
Nope, I'm advocating deporting people based on their memberships, not their beliefs. Joining an organization is an action, not a belief.
Those kids hanging around on your street corner wearing gang colors and trashing the place -- do you want them gone because of their creed, or because they're dangerous, they don't even live in this neighborhood, and maybe they should go piss on the walls of their own houses?
"Renounce" -- that's the word I was trying to remember earlier. Thank you.
Yes, as I said, I'm sure it could be done as an Act of Congress, in the same way that citizenship is granted under special circumstances. All I meant was that I don't know of any regular means of doing so. I don't know of any sentencing guideline that includes "stripping citizenship".
Actually, with regard to the original discussion, I'm not entirely against the idea of declaring certains organizations inimical to the US, and deporting their members who are guests in this country. That frankly seems pretty reasonable to me. If, for instance, Peruvians wish to be Shining Path at home, that's between them and their government, but I feel that the US should be free to deny them entrance, or expel them if their membership is discovered after their arrival. We don't need the grief. Frankly, I'd bet most Americans assume that the authority exists for that already.
The indefinite detainment, OTOH, is simply wrong. If we can't make a case we need to let people go -- expel them, perhaps, but let them go. Anything else simply encourages bad police work.
My admittedly very limited experience with performance artists has given me the impression that few people take them as seriously as they take themselves. Pilloried in the press I'm sure, but we are talking about the UK, who tolerated Jonathon Swift, George Orwell, and even Karl Marx without exile (hell, I imagine Marx was a resident alien, and they didn't even ask him to leave.)
Still, if he'd prefer to think that he was "exiled", who am I to argue? I gather that, like Warhol, he sees his life as art, and some Suffering and Oppression at the Hands of the Petty Middle Class is probably useful for atmosphere.:)
This has all rather caught my interest. Is there any official, or even semi-official (BBC, eg), description of his status? All I've come across are his own comments and some slightly breathless supporters.
Frankly, I'm trying to picture what would have pissed off the British government to this extent. You can beat a child to death and get out when you turn 18 on the one hand, and on the other hand they manage to shoot people in the streets of Belfast, so what in God's name did a musician do to earn such special treatment?
Well, it doesn't really sound like they have told him to leave and never come back, does it? What the hell -- lots of people are unpopular with their governments, but apparently nobody cares enough to stop him at the airport.
Of course, the original issue was the removal of citizenship, which is obviously a separate issue from residence, or even imprisonment. Does anybody know whether he still holds a UK passport, is entitled to vote, etc.? (The inability to vote doesn't equate with loss of citizenship -- felons and children in the US are still citizens -- but the ability to vote would be a pretty good indicator that one is a citizen.) I wonder how much of this is official and legal and how much is some London cop running people out of town on his own.
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I liked the 6502 instructions. There was an elegance to them, a symmetry that seemed missing in the 8080 and its ilk. When in doubt, Intel threw registers and special instructions at the problem (never mind the Z80's two complete register banks), whereas MOS seemed to favour soft solutions (don't need no stinking "multiply"), and of course memory-mapped I/O.
Well, these days most people can't read them anyway.
No, he was an Engineer, and probably proud of it.
See what I mean? You don't edit 35mm film, because there's absolutely no benefit (unless it's that one of you with the sheep or something.) Once you've shot the frame, you keep it, because it's more trouble to cut it out and discard it then it is to hang on to it. You can't reuse it, so you retain it. You might toss a whole roll, but not any specific frame.
Digital media might encourage you to shoot more, just as 35mm Leicas encouraged more frames than 4x5 Speed Graphics (and strobes vs. those insanely hot flashbulbs -- those guys must have had asbestos pockets, or just left a trail of fused glass everywhere they went), but they also encourage editing and discard. Hell, you can see it mentioned in the advertising for digital cameras.
There is a coment somewhere in this discussion that suggested little CD-R's. That would probably cover both ends of the problem.
I was going on a friend of my sister's who shot for the local paper at about the same time (well, maybe 25 years ago.) I remember I was jealous, becaue he kept those blocks of Tri-X in the back of his Scout all the time, and I had to buy my film one roll at a time (the difference between taking pictures for the paper and delivering it.)
My high school rolled 'em, but I do recall once or twice when those little cassettes got dropped and fell open, which Kodak's never did. (Luckily I was a lousy photographer, so there was no great loss.) Maybe that's why the Sun preferred the yellow boxes.
"Let's see, go back to the truck and get more RAM cards, or stay here in the riot and take more pictures..."
They didn't used to keep them all because they wanted to, they kept them all because they had to, and it had the beneficial side effect of a greater historical record. Now that they don't need to keep the runts, they won't -- and we'll never see them.
No, she's not talking about the manipulation of the image, she's talking about the destruction of unused images.
I'm not quite sure what she coulde have written to make her point more clear. Perhaps colorful talking animals could have explained it to you better?
...which isn't much at all for news shooter. Those guys crank through film. It's not like they buy it at the Rite Aid -- they get those shrink-wrapped blocks of what, 20 or 25 rolls? "Film is cheap, shots are expensive."
Point is that with film there was no choice in the matter. With 35mm film, nobody is going to develop just the good frames, and it's not even worth cutting the bad ones out of the strip. They stay in the archive because there's no reason to remove them -- you can't reuse the medium anyway.
Digital media are reusable, and will be reused as soon as there's an issue. Even if the media were free and weightless, shooters would still edit and make room just in case another shot comes along.
Thing was, CP/M was the business OS. A lot of places used Apples, it was true, and the Canadians fell in love with Commodores at work, but most offices ran CP/M, so the idea was to make the transition as easy as possible, both for users and programmers -- most of the 8080 instruction set mapped almost directly onto the 8086 set, and the OS API was almost identical. This is where com files came from, too -- simple 64K (or less) memory images of a program, just like a CP/M com file.
For some years all my DOS machines had a batch file so that I could still PIP.
You must not have been a CP/M user -- that's Kildall's fault, not Allen's. CP/M used the "/" for options, as in "program/opt1/opt2", and DOS was first and foremost a CP/M workalike.
Edlin wished it had the intuitiveness and user friendliness of writing in your own blood using the stump of your foot for a pen.
Let's take the KKK as an example. Nobody's born in the Klan, they join. They take a positive step to sign up. They deliberately enroll in an organization with the publicly-stated and often-repeated goal of doing grevious harm to many innocent people. If we could export all our Klansmen I'd do it in a heartbeat, but I don't think there are any other countries looking for pimply crackers in sheets.
As it happens the KKK is home-grown, and we're stuck with them. Pin-headed as they are, they are entitled to the same treatment as any other American citizens.
Now let's consider the Provos. They, too, are not born into the Provisional IRA. They join. They go out of their way to sign on with an outfit that most Irishmen avoid. The difference is that they are not American citizens, and with them we have a choice. We can deny them visas if we choose, and we do, just as we can deny visas to people with felony records, or even simply because we decide that enough people have come from there lately and it's somebeody else's turn. We have, in fact, the legal authority to turn people away because they're blond, or too tall -- we just have more decency than that.
All we're talking about here is the legal authority to revoke a visa based on somebody's membership in a terrorist organization.
Look at it this way: we turn away thousands of Mexicans every year, simply because we feel that enough Mexicans have entered lately. Nothing wrong with the individuals in question, just too many of them. Well, we have enough murderous assholes too, so lets drop the quota to 0. Let's reduce the popukation of sworn killers.
(British extraction? No, but my parents were State Department [my Dad was actually PNG'ed by the Israelis for being a little too sympathetic with the Arabs], and although we came back to the States when I was 5 we had a legacy of Enid Blyton novels and such from various posts. Some of it seems to have stuck.
(Alas, I am merely a mildly Anglophilic American, who often spells things with a superfluous "u". Sheer pretension. )
The regular IRA is dodgy, but there are members of that organization who do not personally undertake acts of violence. There are even some who seek peaceful solutions. So far as I know, the same cannot be said of the Provo's -- they're rootin' tootin' urban guerillas with few other skills.
I guess I'm sort of weird in this, but I feel that when we permit people to enter the US it's because they will make a contribution, or at least try. Obviously most do, whether by artistic achievement, scientific prowess, driving a cab well, or working late at significant personal risk so that I can get a Slurpee at any time, day or night. There are, however, a few people whose intention is to do us harm after they get here. Some of them have joined groups that take it as their duty to do us harm. Others may join after they arrive. In either case, if someone takes an oath to kill Americans, this is more than a difference of opinion, and I think it's reasonable to ask them to go away. I don't think it's necessary to wait until a conspiracy to commit a particular act of violence can be proved of a member of bin Laden's group -- the whole damned outfit is one big conspiracy to commit violence.
I'm not suggesting that, for instance, Catholics are guilty of the violence in Ireland, and that therefore every Catholic should be expelled. I'm not even suggesting that every Irish Catholic somehows shares the guilt.
However, if somebody arrives here with "Provisional IRA" stickers on his luggage, I think we have the right to turn him away (and in fact I believe that legally we do), and if we find out that somebody is a member of an active terrorist organization only after he arrives, then I think we have the right to toss him out -- not bomb him, not arrest him, not exile him from his own country, but just ask him to leave ours. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here."
However, there is precedent. When a soldier shoot an enemy, he does so because the other is a member of the opposing army, an organization inimical to his country. I'm not suggesting that anybody be shot, or even imprisoned, merely that enemy soldiers be asked to leave.
I don't think the laws of hospitality are so stringent in our culture that our nation's guests must be allowed to conduct themselves destructively, or even rudely. The fact is that they are not our citizens, and while our morals as well as are laws impel us to extend ordinary human rights to all, regardless of citizenship, remaining in the US is not such a right.
Where's that come from? It sounds like bigfoot's kid brother.
Jeez, just reread my own comment and realized that this was badly phrased. What I meant to say was:
I welcome the refugees.
Well, yeah, because real core dumps go to the line printer. Everybody knows that.
Guy joins the Assocation of People Who Want to Kill BlueDemonX. You want him hanging around outside your house? The oath he took says, "I do solemnly swear that I will take out that BlueDemonX bastard first chance I get, and anything else blue that I see, including the sky. This I swear on my mother's grave."
Sounds ridiculous, I know, but then I'm not Jewish, or black. I'm more or less Catholic, but then again I'm not Irish. Up until fairly recently nobody was making much of an organized effort to kill me.
Let me put it to you this way: plenty of people come to this country to get away from organizations, and I don't want them here either. We don't need Black September, we don't need the IRA, we don't need the Russian mob, we don't need the triads -- the list goes on. When some poor son of a bitch manages to get out of Haiti and get here, I think he deserves some confidence that we won't tolerate the Tonton Macoute (God help my spelling there)
In war, an enemy soldier is an enemy soldier because he has joined an organization. Some organizations are at war with the very concept of a civilized society. How about we don't invite them for sleepovers?
Those kids hanging around on your street corner wearing gang colors and trashing the place -- do you want them gone because of their creed, or because they're dangerous, they don't even live in this neighborhood, and maybe they should go piss on the walls of their own houses?
Yes, as I said, I'm sure it could be done as an Act of Congress, in the same way that citizenship is granted under special circumstances. All I meant was that I don't know of any regular means of doing so. I don't know of any sentencing guideline that includes "stripping citizenship".
Actually, with regard to the original discussion, I'm not entirely against the idea of declaring certains organizations inimical to the US, and deporting their members who are guests in this country. That frankly seems pretty reasonable to me. If, for instance, Peruvians wish to be Shining Path at home, that's between them and their government, but I feel that the US should be free to deny them entrance, or expel them if their membership is discovered after their arrival. We don't need the grief. Frankly, I'd bet most Americans assume that the authority exists for that already.
The indefinite detainment, OTOH, is simply wrong. If we can't make a case we need to let people go -- expel them, perhaps, but let them go. Anything else simply encourages bad police work.
Still, if nailing yourself to a cross isn't self-concious suffering, I'm not quite sure what is.
Taking yourself seriously is pretty consistent
Still, if he'd prefer to think that he was "exiled", who am I to argue? I gather that, like Warhol, he sees his life as art, and some Suffering and Oppression at the Hands of the Petty Middle Class is probably useful for atmosphere. :)
Is his music any good?
Frankly, I'm trying to picture what would have pissed off the British government to this extent. You can beat a child to death and get out when you turn 18 on the one hand, and on the other hand they manage to shoot people in the streets of Belfast, so what in God's name did a musician do to earn such special treatment?
Of course, the original issue was the removal of citizenship, which is obviously a separate issue from residence, or even imprisonment. Does anybody know whether he still holds a UK passport, is entitled to vote, etc.? (The inability to vote doesn't equate with loss of citizenship -- felons and children in the US are still citizens -- but the ability to vote would be a pretty good indicator that one is a citizen.) I wonder how much of this is official and legal and how much is some London cop running people out of town on his own.