They weren't happy about it. They grudgingly accepted it as a limit on know-how. For engineers and crew, loss is never "acceptable" but acknowledged as a consequence of the trials involved in continually pushing the bounds of capability. Those involved know we are not infallible creatures, nor our works, and carry on despite the inevitability of loss.
In point of fact now that construction is complete (additional modules to be added as adjuncts), with full power generation, and with a full crew complement, much in the way of originally-proposed and added science experiments are now in full swing. Prototyping production for pharmaceuticals and materials is progressing also.
I think you are right in that what has been learned and is being learned regarding engineering has already given rich reward, with more to come. Add in knowledge being gained in long-term space occupancy - medical and sociological; and in closed environment design and maintenance. (That's closed, as distinct from self-sustaining - for the latter we'd need a good-sized Moon base or O'Neill colony.)
A thing to do would be to drain the lower Van Allen belt, boost the ISS to a higher orbit so's to avoid most debris risk and ease orbit sustaining, and then go from there. There is plenty of money to be made in re-fueling and doing simple repairs to satellites. There's also Gerald Drigger's sub-orbital rendezvous to try out as a cheaper and easier way of getting stuff to and fro.
One of the things we don't know is how long the material integrity of ISS will last. That's part of the experiment. Also, it remains to be seen how the U.S.'s refusal to allow Chinese participation will play out.
A carved whalebone circa 10,000 B.C., a cave painting circa 40,000 B.C.; both artists unknown but knowable.
The list goes on, a panoply of the sublime, elegant, beautiful; describing the Universe and reflecting the best of us.
By his works is a man known. Seems to me there is a long list of works worth saving, We're too close in time to more recent things to properly judge what to add. For all the ills the species gets up to it does manage to produce people worth saving, and perhaps in time, itself.
I've read plenty of dystopian stuff over time, and alternatives. Consider, if you will, that we may regard ourselves as an accidental experiment of genes; who's to say where that leads? For as much as some of the possibles give me the willies, I'm in favor of continuing the experiment. To do so requires surviving eventual catastrophe to Earth.
The OASDI "piggybank" was raided during the Nixon era by a Congress that refused to raise taxes and rein in spending. Among other things, bills for Vietnam were coming due so they basically floated a bond against the insurance fund and, IIRC, also skimmed some of the premiums, counting both towards general revenue. Congress, to my knowledge, has never acknowledged that debt nor paid it down. The oldest "baby boomers" were in their mid-twenties at the time; I don't know as a majority of them were Republicans.
Medicare is a separate program. Although it could serve most of the functions of a single-payer health system that's not allowed to happen by present circumstance. It's generally more efficient and cost-effective than any commercial health care.
(For those to whom it applies, please do take notice of the correct use of "rein", "were", and "their.")
'Grats on coming back. I'm not gonna get into 'the real reason' kind of thing, but agree there's a bunch of lame b.s. going down.
Sad that so many are so ignorant of things military so as to not know what 'taking point' means. Christ, does no one read any more? Or at least know how to search for a word or term?
Neo-cons, Bible thumpers - both rather totalitarian, actually. Sad.
Back then, when y'all got squeezed out like so much toe-jam through a dirty sock, the Republicans favored the shopkeeper and the Democrats favored the factory-worker, but neither at the expense of the other - there was basic respect for those that built the things and the businesses that we all used. Despite all the fine words this today is not the case; increasingly elitist bahstids, the lot of them.
You're on a roll, man.
But by-the-by, when has anyone ever called you a hippie?
These are really not bad ideas at all. Quite the opposite. I've espoused both for some time.
(Back in the Fifties a well-respected investor and financial advisor was asked his views on easing the impact of the succession of boom-bust cycles. His response was that one simple rule would be very useful in a number of respects: any stock bought must be held for no less than one year. It would make a significant change from milli-second arbitrage to expressing confidence in a company's prospects, which is what buying a stock was designed to be in the first place, a way to raise monies beyond the capability of an individual to finance a large endeavor in hopes of a good reward.)
What both your proposed changes do, each in their own way, is to take and to use a structural means to correct a social and political problem. Nifty, and overdue; petition signed, thanks for link.
I've been using the nVidia drivers (proprietary, tested) in Ubuntu for years, since I assembled the parts in July of '09 first with an 8800GT and now with a 460GTX (yeah, old gear, blame the budget), no problem.
My laptop, from December of same year is all AMD w/integrated mobility Radeon 4250 works fine using the recommended Catalyst driver.
I guess that I've just had good luck. Maybe it helps that my video gear is bog-standard and that I don't push the envelope with using the latest/greatest drivers.
Run the game in a window - most will allow it although many will need editing of a config file; some, such as Civ V, have it as a setting in their options menu. There's not a game I play that runs full-screen unless I permit it to do so.
Play game while having OS and applications a click away.... works fine for me.
(Btw, installing classicmenu-indicator is a good thing to do if you use the default Unity DE/DM.)
Select driver in the additional drivers tab of software and updates. Unless you truly need the latest, go with tested.
Run nvidia-settings - type nvidia in the search thingy, up comes the right (and only) thing to click on. (If you really want to, type nvidia-settings in terminal, it's the same utility.)
Log out, log in - or reboot; either seems to work.
Done.
Look, I'm the guy from 1980 for whom the term PEBKAC was invented (not really,but it fits), and if I can do it, so can you.
Looks like it'd be a killer bachelor pad for up around the Big Sur, for instance, or some of the other coastal areas - from thirty, forty years ago. You'd want it on some good-sized parcel of land or in a very laid-back neighborhood with astoundingly low crime rates. It's a "pretty" design - and I mean that well.
I also like the emphasis on wood, based on my own preferences. My personal leanings are retro-fit of a Vic for existing home or build something based on concrete and steel structure, earth sheltered (hillsides are good), then finished out with lots of wood. I favor passive solar to add to the stable base thermal load, and would then add a good heat pump and my druther's would be to get a home-sized practical fuel cell when they're available. But go with best blend of what's available with an eye towards long-term availability and price. Of course everything varies depending on just where on the planet one happens to live. I've seen a few companies doing very interesting modular pre-builts for cold climes, Scandinavia particularly (and of course I can't find the frigging links, sorry...)
A mess? Well, that's one way to describe it. Meanwhile, generally it goes, "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." - not a hierarchy, but a troika. Some sects have 'difficulties' with the ghost bit. So that's a mess as well.
And yeah, there were all kinds conferences, interpretations, creeds, revisions, inclusions and exclusions, yadda, yadda. Historically, interesting, ranging from one's interest in a form of philosophy to cultural anthro, and a handful of other disciplines. Still a mess, wot?
If an outsider, then dive in as your curiosity dictates. Otherwise, I prefer the comics section. Or/.
"There is a very plain editorial stance here at slashdot...."
Yup, there is. I lurked for a handful of years before registering, and, apart from the now missing "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." the only plain stance I can see is that there is no stance. Unless it involves one of several in-house contests: most subtle grammatical error hidden amidst the obvious ones in a submission; most oddly-framed responses to a poll; or the pool for length of time it takes for a complaint against a pay-walled link. There might also be a yearly raffle for the oddest "Ask Slashdot..." but I wouldn't swear to it.
"And beyond that, the users that use Linux are likely far less interesting to the NSA...."
While Linux users are not particularly interesting to anyone (except an advertiser or demographer, e.g.), having a back door giving root would be handy should an individual end-user become a person of interest.
The attractive targets are servers, or more specifically machines used to run various networks, I should think. I doubt that a worthy enemy of the state would be conducting his core affairs on a machine connected to the 'Net; I would imagine that any machine under his control connected to the Internet would be part of the execution of some ploy and therefore backstopped and made anonymous (by cutouts and such) to a fare-thee-well.
Nope, came from some careless reporters working a story on the "411" phone phreakers in Milwaukee circa the Seventies. I had a link to the wire service stuff and the back story, which I can't now find - I hope it's still somewhere on an old drive. Still, one ought to be able to dig up the correct references and all.
And "hack" itself comes from WWII and the services (there may be earlier references; I can't recall.) If one could bear up under a load or circumstance, they could "hack it." Extended to "Can you manage this shit?" "Yeah, I can hack it." and went on to "Can you fix this goddam radio?" "Yeah, I can hack it." I've read enough examples from that time, if memory serves. Again, references ought to be findable. The Brits (with some bleed into Allied usage) had the "time hack" (and yes, they actually said "hack") when synchronizing timepieces; the U.S. often used "mark" for the same use, as they also did for denoting a time or position for one to make note of NOW, as when taking a bearing or azimuth.
I've read the whole thread, refreshed to the point I started reading about an hour ago. A fellow above gave the "1995" link to the Wikipedia article on Delphi which I read.
I'm not gonna touch the whole mess about incompetence, malice, corruption, what have you.
I'm also not gonna touch the whole 'bestest cosmic uber language' to teach especially as it might relate to future employability, 'cuz I think it's irrelevant here.
What the students - high school and younger, if I read it correctly - are getting is a set of tools within a complete development package with all kinds add-ons and such available. This is something I would have given much to have when I took Fortran for Engineers classes in the Sixties.
The Delphi doodad provides for different processors - x86 and ARM anyway, and different OSes, Windows, OSX and GNU/Linux. The young'uns will be exposed to classes, objects, procedures, libraries, GUIs all while learning logic, branching, talking to databases and whatnot. Sounds pretty good to me. (They'll be able to write and test as they go, so getting valuable feed-back to their efforts - no keypunching your card deck and handing it to the priests at the computer center only to get a printout three days later of a failed run due to a mis-placed comma. This is half-way to magic, in my book, just as working with a good interpreted BASIC gave often very good feed-back when one was coding. One became a participant, not a supplicant.)
Programming is a skill (and a talent, for the really good ones.) Good programming is, I think, a state of mind as well. While one would have a lot of "fun" moving from Fortran to Python or Java, it's like learning any other language with a grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc. But it's the skill development, the exposure to that state of mind that marries creativity to the focus on logic, detail, and flow that's important - not the language. While there may indeed be better languages and environments at this early stage of a student's life I think it's not so important a consideration as the skill to be gained. It's for class, not trade prep school. Just because one takes a shop class or an algebra class doesn't mean he will become a machinist or mathematician. As others have pointed out, this thread and others, most good programmers learn on their own anyway.
I'm not a physicist at all but a layman with long avid interest in nuclear power generation; given your caveats, if what he proposes works it looks to be a more straightforward (or delightfully sideways) approach, simplifying a number of steps and their inefficiencies. It seems to me worth trying and I agree about the spare grand. Further, even if his method fails, the information will be useful both for science and engineering.
Haven't checked, sorry, but wonder if Wine would still have compatibility settings to run as 95 or 98. If one still had old disks/isos would it work in a virtual machine using, say, VirtualBox, maybe? I've still got a few 98 CDs from the store, haven't even gotten around to trying this, tho.
Just looked at Wine config settings in CrossOver - it's got settings going back to Windows 2.0... so that might be a way to try.
(I don't know fi I still have any of my stuff from that far back, what with moves and all, so have no way to check it out just now.)
Ah, gotcha, both bits, and thank you. I'm a little slow today. Well, not just today.
It's a funny thing; I find as I get older that it's more apparent the need to attend various viewpoints, even when they're unsupported opinion so as to see what un-thinking folks are, um, not thinking, but that the energy and fortitude to do so is not always easy to come by. Crap, it's trade-offs all the way down.
If I ever get anything figured out, I am not going to write a book. People who already know stuff won't need to read it and those who might could use it wouldn't believe me. I'd likely be wrong anyway, but at least have a chance to make a few bucks somewhere in there.
I know a local couple, nice, good people the both of them, own a high-end yet down-to-home cigar and regular bar; bought the business, later bought the building, expanded the bar, live music several nights, and a good and mixed clientèle, no false airs. He does real estate survey and appraisal and is quite good at it. His wife does the bulk of the bar management.
Guy is a stone un-examined, un-examining Republican somewhere in the vein of a Goldwater-McCain ore. Yet he gets the bulk of his political information from Fox. We've made several tries over the years to talk politics and gotten nowhere fast, to the point that a few times things have gotten stiff and stilted for a space. So we're left with commonalities in discussing local business and local politics in a collegial [yeah, the spell checker doesn't like it either] way - which is quite OK, whether we agree or not. I'm not judging here, don't want to anyway; it's that sometimes finding the mutual limits to discourse can have minefields. That, and seeing a good mind in there, it seems... wasteful. And if it makes sense, I'd rather hang around people who disagree for well-founded reasons than those who agree for unsupportable ones.
"Employees are free to sell their labor elsewhere."
That's the second time you've used this. Maybe you believe it's true. Simple fact is, if you bother to look at the jobs market for openings available to the people who for whatever reason or circumstance are fit for nothing more than a job at Walmart and the like, _there is no labor market_. There is no fine a la carte menu for jobs. There is a mad scramble to get something, anything, to pay the simplest of bills. There is only a very limited number of bottom jobs for a large number of applicants. There is no freedom to go elsewhere when no elsewhere exists. This is what keeps wages down.
For the few fit enough there is some competition for transient cash-only day labor, e.g., all of which require skills enough to get called back a second day. For instance, anyone who thinks hanging, taping and sanding drywall in a production environment is trivial has likely never done it. It's also not a "job" in the sense of steady employment; it's pick-up work, no more. Cutting brush or loading a demolished building into skips is less-skilled, but if you don't know how to use edged tools or how to lift and work around things that'll bite you, you're screwed. Medical coverage is by free clinic and charity ER, of course, and if it's serious you'll get billed for the ambulance and sometimes also for the EMT and whatever materials were used on you.
Obviously for those fit and experienced, there are boom areas - shale extraction and jobs in the trades and supporting infrastructure is one. Wages for many jobs thereabouts are now high but that'll even out soon enough as the market saturates, which is already happening. Yet all those openings don't begin to accommodate the surplus of low-end workers. Let's be clear: there is a limit to who and how many can be trained, and it's not near enough.
There is plenty of work to be done; I don't know if it's enough. Gleaning. Roadside trash needs picking up. Most of the nation's bridges need re-building or replacement. Rivers and harbors need cleaning up, and dredging here and there. A lot of the electrical distribution wiring needs repair or upgrade or outright replacement. Orchards need very careful pruning. Bees need a lot of help now. Trees need planting (a lot of it incidental, not amenable to machine planters.) A staggering number of houses could be upgraded viz. insulation, weather-stripping, and new windows. Millions of roof tops could use solar panels - electric and water. Many other roofs, particularly in cities, could benefit by strengthening and sprouting gardens or shade growth, with long-term savings in energy costs. That's some stuff; who pays? Most if not all that I've mentioned is not amenable to start-ups and entrepreneuring.
I understand that each of us as well as the labor department and others make a distinction between skilled and un-skilled labor. I understand that distinction; I know first-hand the difference between dishwasher and lab-technician, roofer and tool-and-die, washing down a boat and rigging it, sales clerk and software developer. Yet in my experience there is no such thing as an un-skilled job - at least if it's done with any kind of competence qua usefulness. I've dug ditches, hand excavated footings, cleaned sewers and pumped septic tanks, for example. Each required a range of skills to get the job done at all well or even "good enough". Through the wonder of self-promoting looking down noses elitism, we've deprecated all manner of honest days' work, so we have the freedom to lump them, sneeringly, as not only beneath us but the kind of thing done by those who really are not quite human, and certainly not like us. Once we've flushed the toilet the proceeds are somebody else's business; it out of sight and out of mind and after all, that's what servants are for. So many of the self-elevated haven't a fucking clue as to the huge pyramid of working people that are needed to support them in their exalted positions. "I'm so glad I'm a beta."
Not smart, poor. Unless you count smart as not getting in deeper straits than I am already in. Given some of the people I've met over the years, I can feature some of them hitting the check cashing places, but I know no one the past twenty years at my lowly rung of the demographic ladder who does so.
No, no helpful housing; an application is in, but with a felony on record it's iffy. Very iffy, as in usually not bloody likely. Yes, I get food stamps, only way I can make it. I'm still not fit enough to walk to any of the meal sites nor stand long enough at a bus stop, which puts a crimp on things even now.
I have no idea of what your comment on belief was about or in reference to regarding something I said. The last time I spent even a few minutes listening to a 'talking head' I found him to be just as shallow and un-insightful, just as dedicated to (or making money from) one of the usual transparent agendas as he and his ilk have tended to be, especially more so since the Reagan years when there seemed to me to be a shift towards greater polarization of what passes for political "discussion".
If it was a general reference to "the big lie" kind of thing, then sure, that's life in the information age where winnowing useful data, fact, and insight is often a non-trivial act.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't happy about it. They grudgingly accepted it as a limit on know-how. For engineers and crew, loss is never "acceptable" but acknowledged as a consequence of the trials involved in continually pushing the bounds of capability. Those involved know we are not infallible creatures, nor our works, and carry on despite the inevitability of loss.
In point of fact now that construction is complete (additional modules to be added as adjuncts), with full power generation, and with a full crew complement, much in the way of originally-proposed and added science experiments are now in full swing. Prototyping production for pharmaceuticals and materials is progressing also.
I think you are right in that what has been learned and is being learned regarding engineering has already given rich reward, with more to come. Add in knowledge being gained in long-term space occupancy - medical and sociological; and in closed environment design and maintenance. (That's closed, as distinct from self-sustaining - for the latter we'd need a good-sized Moon base or O'Neill colony.)
A thing to do would be to drain the lower Van Allen belt, boost the ISS to a higher orbit so's to avoid most debris risk and ease orbit sustaining, and then go from there. There is plenty of money to be made in re-fueling and doing simple repairs to satellites. There's also Gerald Drigger's sub-orbital rendezvous to try out as a cheaper and easier way of getting stuff to and fro.
One of the things we don't know is how long the material integrity of ISS will last. That's part of the experiment. Also, it remains to be seen how the U.S.'s refusal to allow Chinese participation will play out.
"how dare any of you say we are worth saving."
Mozart.
Einstein, Newton, Euler.
A carved whalebone circa 10,000 B.C., a cave painting circa 40,000 B.C.; both artists unknown but knowable.
The list goes on, a panoply of the sublime, elegant, beautiful; describing the Universe and reflecting the best of us.
By his works is a man known. Seems to me there is a long list of works worth saving, We're too close in time to more recent things to properly judge what to add. For all the ills the species gets up to it does manage to produce people worth saving, and perhaps in time, itself.
I've read plenty of dystopian stuff over time, and alternatives. Consider, if you will, that we may regard ourselves as an accidental experiment of genes; who's to say where that leads? For as much as some of the possibles give me the willies, I'm in favor of continuing the experiment. To do so requires surviving eventual catastrophe to Earth.
The OASDI "piggybank" was raided during the Nixon era by a Congress that refused to raise taxes and rein in spending. Among other things, bills for Vietnam were coming due so they basically floated a bond against the insurance fund and, IIRC, also skimmed some of the premiums, counting both towards general revenue. Congress, to my knowledge, has never acknowledged that debt nor paid it down. The oldest "baby boomers" were in their mid-twenties at the time; I don't know as a majority of them were Republicans.
Medicare is a separate program. Although it could serve most of the functions of a single-payer health system that's not allowed to happen by present circumstance. It's generally more efficient and cost-effective than any commercial health care.
(For those to whom it applies, please do take notice of the correct use of "rein", "were", and "their.")
"actual microgravity for ~90 seconds at a time"
Um, no. Average time of zero-g in free-fall parabola for those planes is around 20-25 seconds.
'Grats on coming back. I'm not gonna get into 'the real reason' kind of thing, but agree there's a bunch of lame b.s. going down.
Sad that so many are so ignorant of things military so as to not know what 'taking point' means. Christ, does no one read any more? Or at least know how to search for a word or term?
Neo-cons, Bible thumpers - both rather totalitarian, actually. Sad.
Back then, when y'all got squeezed out like so much toe-jam through a dirty sock, the Republicans favored the shopkeeper and the Democrats favored the factory-worker, but neither at the expense of the other - there was basic respect for those that built the things and the businesses that we all used. Despite all the fine words this today is not the case; increasingly elitist bahstids, the lot of them.
You're on a roll, man.
But by-the-by, when has anyone ever called you a hippie?
These are really not bad ideas at all. Quite the opposite. I've espoused both for some time.
(Back in the Fifties a well-respected investor and financial advisor was asked his views on easing the impact of the succession of boom-bust cycles. His response was that one simple rule would be very useful in a number of respects: any stock bought must be held for no less than one year. It would make a significant change from milli-second arbitrage to expressing confidence in a company's prospects, which is what buying a stock was designed to be in the first place, a way to raise monies beyond the capability of an individual to finance a large endeavor in hopes of a good reward.)
What both your proposed changes do, each in their own way, is to take and to use a structural means to correct a social and political problem. Nifty, and overdue; petition signed, thanks for link.
"The video drivers are fucking terrible."
Some video drivers are fucking terrible.
I've been using the nVidia drivers (proprietary, tested) in Ubuntu for years, since I assembled the parts in July of '09 first with an 8800GT and now with a 460GTX (yeah, old gear, blame the budget), no problem.
My laptop, from December of same year is all AMD w/integrated mobility Radeon 4250 works fine using the recommended Catalyst driver.
I guess that I've just had good luck. Maybe it helps that my video gear is bog-standard and that I don't push the envelope with using the latest/greatest drivers.
You hit the nail on the head.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, outside of the already-initiated, even knows about dual-boot, let alone does it.
"The solution" if it works is to convert them to a Linux host OS and run any needed Windows apps in a virtual machine - IFF it's appropriate to do so.
One great lack is a stone-simple drop in replacement for Skype.
Run the game in a window - most will allow it although many will need editing of a config file; some, such as Civ V, have it as a setting in their options menu. There's not a game I play that runs full-screen unless I permit it to do so.
Play game while having OS and applications a click away.... works fine for me.
Huh? Sorry to hear of your troubles, but:
(Btw, installing classicmenu-indicator is a good thing to do if you use the default Unity DE/DM.)
Select driver in the additional drivers tab of software and updates. Unless you truly need the latest, go with tested.
Run nvidia-settings - type nvidia in the search thingy, up comes the right (and only) thing to click on. (If you really want to, type nvidia-settings in terminal, it's the same utility.)
Log out, log in - or reboot; either seems to work.
Done.
Look, I'm the guy from 1980 for whom the term PEBKAC was invented (not really,but it fits), and if I can do it, so can you.
Looks like it'd be a killer bachelor pad for up around the Big Sur, for instance, or some of the other coastal areas - from thirty, forty years ago. You'd want it on some good-sized parcel of land or in a very laid-back neighborhood with astoundingly low crime rates. It's a "pretty" design - and I mean that well.
I also like the emphasis on wood, based on my own preferences. My personal leanings are retro-fit of a Vic for existing home or build something based on concrete and steel structure, earth sheltered (hillsides are good), then finished out with lots of wood. I favor passive solar to add to the stable base thermal load, and would then add a good heat pump and my druther's would be to get a home-sized practical fuel cell when they're available. But go with best blend of what's available with an eye towards long-term availability and price. Of course everything varies depending on just where on the planet one happens to live. I've seen a few companies doing very interesting modular pre-builts for cold climes, Scandinavia particularly (and of course I can't find the frigging links, sorry...)
A mess? Well, that's one way to describe it. Meanwhile, generally it goes, "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." - not a hierarchy, but a troika. Some sects have 'difficulties' with the ghost bit. So that's a mess as well.
And yeah, there were all kinds conferences, interpretations, creeds, revisions, inclusions and exclusions, yadda, yadda. Historically, interesting, ranging from one's interest in a form of philosophy to cultural anthro, and a handful of other disciplines. Still a mess, wot?
If an outsider, then dive in as your curiosity dictates. Otherwise, I prefer the comics section. Or /.
"There is a very plain editorial stance here at slashdot...."
Yup, there is. I lurked for a handful of years before registering, and, apart from the now missing "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." the only plain stance I can see is that there is no stance. Unless it involves one of several in-house contests: most subtle grammatical error hidden amidst the obvious ones in a submission; most oddly-framed responses to a poll; or the pool for length of time it takes for a complaint against a pay-walled link. There might also be a yearly raffle for the oddest "Ask Slashdot..." but I wouldn't swear to it.
"And beyond that, the users that use Linux are likely far less interesting to the NSA...."
While Linux users are not particularly interesting to anyone (except an advertiser or demographer, e.g.), having a back door giving root would be handy should an individual end-user become a person of interest.
The attractive targets are servers, or more specifically machines used to run various networks, I should think. I doubt that a worthy enemy of the state would be conducting his core affairs on a machine connected to the 'Net; I would imagine that any machine under his control connected to the Internet would be part of the execution of some ploy and therefore backstopped and made anonymous (by cutouts and such) to a fare-thee-well.
Bill, Tonika looks interesting; not that I've looked all that much, but hadn't heard of it, so thanks for the link.
Nope, came from some careless reporters working a story on the "411" phone phreakers in Milwaukee circa the Seventies. I had a link to the wire service stuff and the back story, which I can't now find - I hope it's still somewhere on an old drive. Still, one ought to be able to dig up the correct references and all.
And "hack" itself comes from WWII and the services (there may be earlier references; I can't recall.) If one could bear up under a load or circumstance, they could "hack it." Extended to "Can you manage this shit?" "Yeah, I can hack it." and went on to "Can you fix this goddam radio?" "Yeah, I can hack it." I've read enough examples from that time, if memory serves. Again, references ought to be findable. The Brits (with some bleed into Allied usage) had the "time hack" (and yes, they actually said "hack") when synchronizing timepieces; the U.S. often used "mark" for the same use, as they also did for denoting a time or position for one to make note of NOW, as when taking a bearing or azimuth.
I've read the whole thread, refreshed to the point I started reading about an hour ago. A fellow above gave the "1995" link to the Wikipedia article on Delphi which I read.
I'm not gonna touch the whole mess about incompetence, malice, corruption, what have you.
I'm also not gonna touch the whole 'bestest cosmic uber language' to teach especially as it might relate to future employability, 'cuz I think it's irrelevant here.
What the students - high school and younger, if I read it correctly - are getting is a set of tools within a complete development package with all kinds add-ons and such available. This is something I would have given much to have when I took Fortran for Engineers classes in the Sixties.
The Delphi doodad provides for different processors - x86 and ARM anyway, and different OSes, Windows, OSX and GNU/Linux. The young'uns will be exposed to classes, objects, procedures, libraries, GUIs all while learning logic, branching, talking to databases and whatnot. Sounds pretty good to me. (They'll be able to write and test as they go, so getting valuable feed-back to their efforts - no keypunching your card deck and handing it to the priests at the computer center only to get a printout three days later of a failed run due to a mis-placed comma. This is half-way to magic, in my book, just as working with a good interpreted BASIC gave often very good feed-back when one was coding. One became a participant, not a supplicant.)
Programming is a skill (and a talent, for the really good ones.) Good programming is, I think, a state of mind as well. While one would have a lot of "fun" moving from Fortran to Python or Java, it's like learning any other language with a grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc. But it's the skill development, the exposure to that state of mind that marries creativity to the focus on logic, detail, and flow that's important - not the language. While there may indeed be better languages and environments at this early stage of a student's life I think it's not so important a consideration as the skill to be gained. It's for class, not trade prep school. Just because one takes a shop class or an algebra class doesn't mean he will become a machinist or mathematician. As others have pointed out, this thread and others, most good programmers learn on their own anyway.
I'm not a physicist at all but a layman with long avid interest in nuclear power generation; given your caveats, if what he proposes works it looks to be a more straightforward (or delightfully sideways) approach, simplifying a number of steps and their inefficiencies. It seems to me worth trying and I agree about the spare grand. Further, even if his method fails, the information will be useful both for science and engineering.
In 1981 a very smart friend told me that for small projects - games and simple business applications, for instance, that a helpful approach was:
top down
inside out
along with check input and trap errors
all stupidly simple enough that even I could do it; for the few things I did I got reasonably clean, clear, maintainable stuff
Haven't checked, sorry, but wonder if Wine would still have compatibility settings to run as 95 or 98. If one still had old disks/isos would it work in a virtual machine using, say, VirtualBox, maybe? I've still got a few 98 CDs from the store, haven't even gotten around to trying this, tho.
Just looked at Wine config settings in CrossOver - it's got settings going back to Windows 2.0... so that might be a way to try.
(I don't know fi I still have any of my stuff from that far back, what with moves and all, so have no way to check it out just now.)
Ah, gotcha, both bits, and thank you. I'm a little slow today. Well, not just today.
It's a funny thing; I find as I get older that it's more apparent the need to attend various viewpoints, even when they're unsupported opinion so as to see what un-thinking folks are, um, not thinking, but that the energy and fortitude to do so is not always easy to come by. Crap, it's trade-offs all the way down.
If I ever get anything figured out, I am not going to write a book. People who already know stuff won't need to read it and those who might could use it wouldn't believe me. I'd likely be wrong anyway, but at least have a chance to make a few bucks somewhere in there.
I know a local couple, nice, good people the both of them, own a high-end yet down-to-home cigar and regular bar; bought the business, later bought the building, expanded the bar, live music several nights, and a good and mixed clientèle, no false airs. He does real estate survey and appraisal and is quite good at it. His wife does the bulk of the bar management.
Guy is a stone un-examined, un-examining Republican somewhere in the vein of a Goldwater-McCain ore. Yet he gets the bulk of his political information from Fox. We've made several tries over the years to talk politics and gotten nowhere fast, to the point that a few times things have gotten stiff and stilted for a space. So we're left with commonalities in discussing local business and local politics in a collegial [yeah, the spell checker doesn't like it either] way - which is quite OK, whether we agree or not. I'm not judging here, don't want to anyway; it's that sometimes finding the mutual limits to discourse can have minefields. That, and seeing a good mind in there, it seems... wasteful. And if it makes sense, I'd rather hang around people who disagree for well-founded reasons than those who agree for unsupportable ones.
"Employees are free to sell their labor elsewhere."
That's the second time you've used this. Maybe you believe it's true. Simple fact is, if you bother to look at the jobs market for openings available to the people who for whatever reason or circumstance are fit for nothing more than a job at Walmart and the like, _there is no labor market_. There is no fine a la carte menu for jobs. There is a mad scramble to get something, anything, to pay the simplest of bills. There is only a very limited number of bottom jobs for a large number of applicants. There is no freedom to go elsewhere when no elsewhere exists. This is what keeps wages down.
For the few fit enough there is some competition for transient cash-only day labor, e.g., all of which require skills enough to get called back a second day. For instance, anyone who thinks hanging, taping and sanding drywall in a production environment is trivial has likely never done it. It's also not a "job" in the sense of steady employment; it's pick-up work, no more. Cutting brush or loading a demolished building into skips is less-skilled, but if you don't know how to use edged tools or how to lift and work around things that'll bite you, you're screwed. Medical coverage is by free clinic and charity ER, of course, and if it's serious you'll get billed for the ambulance and sometimes also for the EMT and whatever materials were used on you.
Obviously for those fit and experienced, there are boom areas - shale extraction and jobs in the trades and supporting infrastructure is one. Wages for many jobs thereabouts are now high but that'll even out soon enough as the market saturates, which is already happening. Yet all those openings don't begin to accommodate the surplus of low-end workers. Let's be clear: there is a limit to who and how many can be trained, and it's not near enough.
There is plenty of work to be done; I don't know if it's enough. Gleaning. Roadside trash needs picking up. Most of the nation's bridges need re-building or replacement. Rivers and harbors need cleaning up, and dredging here and there. A lot of the electrical distribution wiring needs repair or upgrade or outright replacement. Orchards need very careful pruning. Bees need a lot of help now. Trees need planting (a lot of it incidental, not amenable to machine planters.) A staggering number of houses could be upgraded viz. insulation, weather-stripping, and new windows. Millions of roof tops could use solar panels - electric and water. Many other roofs, particularly in cities, could benefit by strengthening and sprouting gardens or shade growth, with long-term savings in energy costs. That's some stuff; who pays? Most if not all that I've mentioned is not amenable to start-ups and entrepreneuring.
I understand that each of us as well as the labor department and others make a distinction between skilled and un-skilled labor. I understand that distinction; I know first-hand the difference between dishwasher and lab-technician, roofer and tool-and-die, washing down a boat and rigging it, sales clerk and software developer. Yet in my experience there is no such thing as an un-skilled job - at least if it's done with any kind of competence qua usefulness. I've dug ditches, hand excavated footings, cleaned sewers and pumped septic tanks, for example. Each required a range of skills to get the job done at all well or even "good enough". Through the wonder of self-promoting looking down noses elitism, we've deprecated all manner of honest days' work, so we have the freedom to lump them, sneeringly, as not only beneath us but the kind of thing done by those who really are not quite human, and certainly not like us. Once we've flushed the toilet the proceeds are somebody else's business; it out of sight and out of mind and after all, that's what servants are for. So many of the self-elevated haven't a fucking clue as to the huge pyramid of working people that are needed to support them in their exalted positions. "I'm so glad I'm a beta."
Not smart, poor. Unless you count smart as not getting in deeper straits than I am already in. Given some of the people I've met over the years, I can feature some of them hitting the check cashing places, but I know no one the past twenty years at my lowly rung of the demographic ladder who does so.
No, no helpful housing; an application is in, but with a felony on record it's iffy. Very iffy, as in usually not bloody likely. Yes, I get food stamps, only way I can make it. I'm still not fit enough to walk to any of the meal sites nor stand long enough at a bus stop, which puts a crimp on things even now.
I have no idea of what your comment on belief was about or in reference to regarding something I said. The last time I spent even a few minutes listening to a 'talking head' I found him to be just as shallow and un-insightful, just as dedicated to (or making money from) one of the usual transparent agendas as he and his ilk have tended to be, especially more so since the Reagan years when there seemed to me to be a shift towards greater polarization of what passes for political "discussion".
If it was a general reference to "the big lie" kind of thing, then sure, that's life in the information age where winnowing useful data, fact, and insight is often a non-trivial act.