someone had to write the first compiler, by hand, in machine code.
My guess is that the first compiler was written in assembly language. The first assembler was probably written in machine code, or, more accurately, was probably written in assembly language, and then hand-translated into machine code.
I'm of the opinion that writing code (I'm usually thinking computer code, but genetics works too) is about as close to playing god as mankind has come.
Well, humans have a way to go...
Let there be light? Yep, electric lights were done over a century ago, light from fusion (like the Sun) about fifty years ago.
Creating the Heavens and Earth? No, humans haven't done that yet, but humans have started research into terraforming (creating Earth-like environments on other worlds).
Creating plants and animals from scratch? Well, that's what humans are working on now. However humans have created subspecies through selective breeding, etc.
Taking part of some dude's body (Adam's rib) and making a whole other organism (Eve) from it? Well, with recent developments in stem-cell research, humans are getting close. Humans have also cloned various organisms, but there is a difference between making a twin of something and manipulating it to make what you want.
Resting? Yeah, well, humans are experts at that.
Destroying cities full of sinners? Oh, we can do that, too.
Sending people to Hell? DMV and IRS.
So, we're on our way, but still have a ways to go.
While I, for one, welcome our new complimenting overlords, I always thought that it was spelled "embiggen". (For a short time, my sig line was "Embiggen cromulency!".)
Maybe chimps are more violent than humans but we won't know for certain until we allow them the means to launch nukes with the push of a button.
Some species of ants do that.
I have lived on this planet most of my adult life, and I can honestly say that I have never witnessed any ants of any kind launching even one nuclear weapon of any type whatsoever, not even for testing purposes. However, I saw a documentary once where ants detonated a nuclear device underground in order to use the resultant radiation to increase their size tremendously. Unfortunately, it produced in them non-beneficial behavioural changes, including a prevalence for attacking white women, and an inability to outthink a small military strike team lead by, for some reason, a handsome scientist.
Oh, and on a slightly more serious note, how do you know that chimps haven't created new words? Perhaps they have, and humans just haven't recognized them. It's entirely possible that they have words for chimp concepts. For example, they probably have a simple verb that means "to fling my excrement at". So rather than saying/signing "I flung my excrement at the keeper this morning.", a chimp might say/sign, "I feced the keeper this morning.", where "feced" is a verb meaning "flung my excrement at". I think that more research should be done into this area, possibly by seeing what sorts of signs/sounds/facial expressions/etc. chimps make to each other shortly after they fling their excrement at people or do other chimp things.
Any person who has not created at least one new word in his/her lifetime lacks plachoritence, IMO. I know that that sounds entroniant, perhaps even bleavisome, but it had to be said.
Um, maybe it "sucked" because Sci-fi isn't in HD yet.
Yes, I know; I was watching it on a 27" NTSC TV, and it looked like crap. The point that I was trying to make is that if DirecTV uses similar crappy video encoding for its HD channels (at least, crappy compared to what it could be), then the increased resolution that HD offers will be nearly useless (for watching satellite channels).
there are cosmic rays passing through us every second anyway.
Oh, yeah? Well, I've spent over half of my adult life on this planet, and have yet to see a cosmic ray pass through me. I think that you're full of -- oh wait! There's one! Hey, there's another! Never mind.
I have a friend that has a HDTV and satellite and there's a demo channel that plays some very impressive demos, they blow your mind. When you switch from that to other "HD" channels you can tell that the content was not filmed in HD..
What's the point of having an HDTV?? There's just not enough content out there to warrant dropping the bucks on the bling.
It doesn't matter if the content is HD if the cable/sat provider uses a crappy codec (or crappy codec settings). I watched "The Triangle" on sci-fi earlier this week, and the quality of the night scenes just sucked, really, really, sucked, because DirecTV is cramming too many channels onto too small of a bandwidth. I've also noticed this with star scenes on astronomy programs on TDS, and with night scenes generally. If DirecTV et al do the same thing with their HD channels, then what's the point of having HD at all (except to watch DVDs)?
Anyone have any insight as to why these particular words might be popular?
shadow - used by Peeping Toms maggie - used by cartoon baby pedophiles monkey - used by primatophiles buster - used by obsolete-shoe-brand-ophiles bandit - used by Jonny-Quest-Canine-ophiles
terminal settings which convert "@" to a destructive backspace (seriously, wtf?)
Actually, in UNIX, "@" was the destructive line delete; "#" was the destructive character delete. This was for hard-copy terminals (e.g., ASR-33 teletypes and DecWriters), where you didn't want to actually backspace and overtype, because it could get pretty messy. (In fact, IIRC, ASR-33s couldn't backspace at all.) However, I could sometimes get quite annoyed when typing in C preprocessing statements, especially when switching between a DecWriter, which used # for character delete, and a VT-100, which used backspace. (Really quite annoyed. Really, really, really quite annoyed.)
Make the filesystem a database, abstract away the notion of a "file" and instead everything is just something that lives in a giant database from which you can compose larger, concrete objects. Wrap it up nicely into discrete little packages and viola, I have revolutionized computing!
Yes, that's great! And we can call the "discrete little packages", uh, we can call them, uh, I know, "files"! And the "larger, concrete objects" can be called "directories"! What a revolutionary concept!
On a more serious note, a filesystem is a database; it's just accessed differently than, say, an SQL or ISAM database. In addition, there are some experimental filesystems whose underlying implementations are SQL or ISAM databases.
Take a look at a standard POSIX filesystem. It has records (i-nodes) indexed by i-numbers. The records have fields like "last-accessed-date", "number-of-links", etc., as well as a BLOB that is the i-node's content. For ordinary files, the BLOB contains the file's data. For directories, the BLOB contains a table of i-numbers and filenames corresponding to the contents of the directory. Essentially, a filesystem is an object-oriented database (or, at least, can be viewed that way). All of this is hidden by an abstraction layer (e.g. "creat" [sic], "open", "stat", etc.), but it's there, underneath the surface.
Journalling filesystems add a kind of transaction capability to filesystems. Other filesystem types (e.g., Reiser) aim to expose some of the lower-level functionality, or to add other "fields" (e.g., "mime-type", ACLs, etc.), or to add indexing methods other than i-numbers, to the filesystem database.
To get (somewhat) back on topic, a "save" can be considered to be a "change" of a record (file) in the database (filesystem). I don't know about others, but there are times that I don't want to save what I have done. The reason that vi has ":q!", "ZZ", and ":e!" is because sometimes I want to quit without saving, sometimes I want to save and quit, and somtimes I want to revert back to the last save and keep editing.
I have a similar setup, except that I did install all of the IE updates (but I also closed the loopholes like port 195 (or whatever it was (the DCOM external port)), etc., and I don't use IE itself to surf the web (Moz + Junkbuster)). Also, I have all scripting disabled, including JavaScript/ECMAScript, which appears to be responsible for 99.99999999% of Mozilla bugs. My machine has never been infected (well, I accidentally installed some spyware in 2001 or 2002, but I was able to remove it without any problems), and I have never had to reinstall MS-Windows 95.
It's entirely possible for you to have an infection-free machine running 20th-century software, as long as you don't do anything stupid, and as long as you have all of the risky bits (e.g., scripting) turned off.
The Australians didn't have anything good anyway, just a bunch of Kylie Minogue mp3s and Crocodile Dundee III.
What have you got against Crocodile Dundee III? I know that it wasn't as good as the first two, but it was all right. I confess that I felt a pang of pity for Ol' Croc, what with never being able to see his kid again (well at least until C. D. V: The Vegemite Strikes Back), and being confined forever in that life-support suit, in which it must get uncomfortably hot while searching for droids in the Outback, and which makes it unlikely that he will ever again be able to lift a glass with his mates.
The guy clearly knows C++ and is able to develop on an embedded OS which isn't an easy thing to do but yet can't write himself a simple web-server, which a lot of us learnt during our first few years of programming in something nooby like VBA or Java
I've been using C for over 25 years, and C++ for nearly 20, and I don't remember writing a web server when I was a newbie. (Of course, the web did not yet exist when I was a newbie, so that's probably why.) The point is, I've also written device drivers and other O.S. components, both for embedded and non-embedded systems, but have yet to write a web server (although I've written a client or two using high-level Python libraries), so for someone who went to college pre-WWW (or even pre-Internet), such a thing may not be so strange.
Also, my guess (based on my experience) is that it is much more difficult to write a web server in C (and in C++ without the STL, which may not be available for his "minimal embedded OS") than it is in the "nooby" languages that you mentioned (i.e., may take more than "a couple of hours").
Actually, the thing that threw me was the word "mostly". How can the elements be "mostly independent"? Either they're independent or they aren't, right? What do they mean by "mostly"?
You hosers from the previous game/art article want to know the definition of art? I can give you *one* of them:
Picaso never embedded a Wendy's ad in a painting."
If you think that advertising can't appear in art, here's three words for you: "Mr. Sixteen Minutes".
If you don't get that reference, here's another three words for you: "Andy Freaking Warthog" (who once said that that everyone would be famous for sixteen minutes, even Martin Short (or was it Pauly Shore? I don't remember, but it was some guy whose last name starts with "Shor"), and then went on to paint a "Poppy Art" picture of Misty Mundae doing it with an empty Coke bottle, which lead to a 30% increase in the sales of empty Coke bottles in the month after the painting appeared in the world-famous Newark Metropolitan Art Gallery, followed shortly after that by a 35% increase in visits to hospital emergency rooms by women with Coke bottles lodged in their weepies).
I know that all of the above information is absolutely true and factual because I found it in various articles on Wikipedia.
If you lost a leg, you can always say you lost in the war or something and get sympathy, but if you had an arm growing instead it would gross people out
Dr. Nick Riviera ("Hello, everybody!" "Hi, Dr. Nick!"): "Well if it isn't my old friend, Mr. McLegg, with a leg for an arm and an arm for a leg!"
Slashdot Mirror
The first assembler was probably written in machine code, or, more accurately, was probably written in assembly language, and then hand-translated into machine code.
- Let there be light? Yep, electric lights were done over a century ago, light from fusion (like the Sun) about fifty years ago.
- Creating the Heavens and Earth? No, humans haven't done that yet, but humans have started research into terraforming (creating Earth-like environments on other worlds).
- Creating plants and animals from scratch? Well, that's what humans are working on now. However humans have created subspecies through selective breeding, etc.
- Taking part of some dude's body (Adam's rib) and making a whole other organism (Eve) from it? Well, with recent developments in stem-cell research, humans are getting close. Humans have also cloned various organisms, but there is a difference between making a twin of something and manipulating it to make what you want.
- Resting? Yeah, well, humans are experts at that.
- Destroying cities full of sinners? Oh, we can do that, too.
- Sending people to Hell? DMV and IRS.
So, we're on our way, but still have a ways to go.While I, for one, welcome our new complimenting overlords, I always thought that it was spelled "embiggen".
(For a short time, my sig line was "Embiggen cromulency!".)
However, I saw a documentary once where ants detonated a nuclear device underground in order to use the resultant radiation to increase their size tremendously.
Unfortunately, it produced in them non-beneficial behavioural changes, including a prevalence for attacking white women, and an inability to outthink a small military strike team lead by, for some reason, a handsome scientist.
Oh, and on a slightly more serious note, how do you know that chimps haven't created new words?
Perhaps they have, and humans just haven't recognized them.
It's entirely possible that they have words for chimp concepts.
For example, they probably have a simple verb that means "to fling my excrement at".
So rather than saying/signing "I flung my excrement at the keeper this morning.", a chimp might say/sign, "I feced the keeper this morning.", where "feced" is a verb meaning "flung my excrement at".
I think that more research should be done into this area, possibly by seeing what sorts of signs/sounds/facial expressions/etc. chimps make to each other shortly after they fling their excrement at people or do other chimp things.
I know that that sounds entroniant, perhaps even bleavisome, but it had to be said.
(I was using the term "DVD" in the general sense.)
The point that I was trying to make is that if DirecTV uses similar crappy video encoding for its HD channels (at least, crappy compared to what it could be), then the increased resolution that HD offers will be nearly useless (for watching satellite channels).
Well, I've spent over half of my adult life on this planet, and have yet to see a cosmic ray pass through me.
I think that you're full of -- oh wait! There's one!
Hey, there's another!
Never mind.
I watched "The Triangle" on sci-fi earlier this week, and the quality of the night scenes just sucked, really, really, sucked, because DirecTV is cramming too many channels onto too small of a bandwidth.
I've also noticed this with star scenes on astronomy programs on TDS, and with night scenes generally.
If DirecTV et al do the same thing with their HD channels, then what's the point of having HD at all (except to watch DVDs)?
maggie - used by cartoon baby pedophiles
monkey - used by primatophiles
buster - used by obsolete-shoe-brand-ophiles
bandit - used by Jonny-Quest-Canine-ophiles
This was for hard-copy terminals (e.g., ASR-33 teletypes and DecWriters), where you didn't want to actually backspace and overtype, because it could get pretty messy.
(In fact, IIRC, ASR-33s couldn't backspace at all.)
However, I could sometimes get quite annoyed when typing in C preprocessing statements, especially when switching between a DecWriter, which used # for character delete, and a VT-100, which used backspace.
(Really quite annoyed.
Really, really, really quite annoyed.)
And we can call the "discrete little packages", uh, we can call them, uh, I know, "files"!
And the "larger, concrete objects" can be called "directories"!
What a revolutionary concept!
On a more serious note, a filesystem is a database; it's just accessed differently than, say, an SQL or ISAM database.
In addition, there are some experimental filesystems whose underlying implementations are SQL or ISAM databases.
Take a look at a standard POSIX filesystem.
It has records (i-nodes) indexed by i-numbers.
The records have fields like "last-accessed-date", "number-of-links", etc., as well as a BLOB that is the i-node's content.
For ordinary files, the BLOB contains the file's data.
For directories, the BLOB contains a table of i-numbers and filenames corresponding to the contents of the directory.
Essentially, a filesystem is an object-oriented database (or, at least, can be viewed that way).
All of this is hidden by an abstraction layer (e.g. "creat" [sic], "open", "stat", etc.), but it's there, underneath the surface.
Journalling filesystems add a kind of transaction capability to filesystems.
Other filesystem types (e.g., Reiser) aim to expose some of the lower-level functionality, or to add other "fields" (e.g., "mime-type", ACLs, etc.), or to add indexing methods other than i-numbers, to the filesystem database.
To get (somewhat) back on topic, a "save" can be considered to be a "change" of a record (file) in the database (filesystem).
I don't know about others, but there are times that I don't want to save what I have done.
The reason that vi has ":q!", "ZZ", and ":e!" is because sometimes I want to quit without saving, sometimes I want to save and quit, and somtimes I want to revert back to the last save and keep editing.
So, no, "Save" is not obsolete.
I have a similar setup, except that I did install all of the IE updates (but I also closed the loopholes like port 195 (or whatever it was (the DCOM external port)), etc., and I don't use IE itself to surf the web (Moz + Junkbuster)).
Also, I have all scripting disabled, including JavaScript/ECMAScript, which appears to be responsible for 99.99999999% of Mozilla bugs.
My machine has never been infected (well, I accidentally installed some spyware in 2001 or 2002, but I was able to remove it without any problems), and I have never had to reinstall MS-Windows 95.
It's entirely possible for you to have an infection-free machine running 20th-century software, as long as you don't do anything stupid, and as long as you have all of the risky bits (e.g., scripting) turned off.
I couldn't even get to the site; I got a "max number of redirects (302) exceeded", probably because I have cookies diabled by default.
I know that it wasn't as good as the first two, but it was all right.
I confess that I felt a pang of pity for Ol' Croc, what with never being able to see his kid again (well at least until C. D. V: The Vegemite Strikes Back), and being confined forever in that life-support suit, in which it must get uncomfortably hot while searching for droids in the Outback, and which makes it unlikely that he will ever again be able to lift a glass with his mates.
(Of course, the web did not yet exist when I was a newbie, so that's probably why.)
The point is, I've also written device drivers and other O.S. components, both for embedded and non-embedded systems, but have yet to write a web server (although I've written a client or two using high-level Python libraries), so for someone who went to college pre-WWW (or even pre-Internet), such a thing may not be so strange.
Also, my guess (based on my experience) is that it is much more difficult to write a web server in C (and in C++ without the STL, which may not be available for his "minimal embedded OS") than it is in the "nooby" languages that you mentioned (i.e., may take more than "a couple of hours").
Actually, the thing that threw me was the word "mostly".
How can the elements be "mostly independent"?
Either they're independent or they aren't, right?
What do they mean by "mostly"?
If you don't get that reference, here's another three words for you: "Andy Freaking Warthog" (who once said that that everyone would be famous for sixteen minutes, even Martin Short (or was it Pauly Shore? I don't remember, but it was some guy whose last name starts with "Shor"), and then went on to paint a "Poppy Art" picture of Misty Mundae doing it with an empty Coke bottle, which lead to a 30% increase in the sales of empty Coke bottles in the month after the painting appeared in the world-famous Newark Metropolitan Art Gallery, followed shortly after that by a 35% increase in visits to hospital emergency rooms by women with Coke bottles lodged in their weepies).
I know that all of the above information is absolutely true and factual because I found it in various articles on Wikipedia.
There's nothing more romantic than worms.
Thirty or forty years ago, the opposite was true.