Geeks who cut their teeth on it malign it?
on
KBasic
·
· Score: 3
I see that a lot of negative comments are being made about BASIC at this point. I don't know that I'd deploy my industrial strength e-commerce application on BASIC but I still think having BASIC around is a really good thing. A lot of people, myself included, cut our teeth and first aquired a desire to code on BASIC on our VIC 20s, Commodore 64s and Apple IIes. The easy to learn language and use language allowed many of us to learn from coding algorithms gleaned from the pages of BYTE (before it started to suck and didn't cater to the lowest common denominator it was closer to Doctor Dobb's Journal than just another IT rag).
Knowing Perl, C, C++ or the language du jour only makes you a well payed trained monkey. Understanding algorithms and how they effect efficiency is a lot more important. This can be gleaned using any language, BASIC had the advantage that it was simple to use, you didn't need to worry about syntax or memory allocation or pointers.
Maybe spending effort on a modern BASIC is misguided, but to bitch and moan about the language many geeks learned from is inane. I've thought for a while that PERL was the BASIC of the present era, I think its shameful that it's not included on every machine shipped, much like BASIC was not too long ago.
Having a BASIC or PERL that could do native GUI stuff on whatever box it exists on would be a great thing if it was shipped on every box regardless of OS. It'd get more people actually interested in computer science at an early age rather than the current state where most people seem to be in it for the money and have little or any talent.
I just wanted to state that I think it's King's right to charge whatever he wants, but he shouldn't be suprised if people start realizing the economics of his proposition suck.
I didn't download it because he's degraded as a writer. His earlier works were significantly better, but then he only did a novel every year or so. Now he does many novels per year, there's less text in them (though the number of pages has remained the same by using larger type) and the quality has suffered. I knew I wouldn't read it so I didn't want to negatively effect his experiment for no reason.
That's about half of what you'd pay for the book if it was
printed and distributed through a publisher.
This is only accurate if you're talking about hardcover books. A paperback is about 10 bucks, an electronic copy should be SIGNIFICANTLY less. There are no reproduction costs, only distribution costs.
I don't know how large the download was, but lets say it was 5 megabytes. The first chapter was downloaded 170K times that the author knew of (there was probably also person to person copying which would not effect distribution costs), thats 850 gigabytes of data.
Even if Steven King had to front the full costs and assuming the bulk of the downloads were in the first month but still had to pay for the bandwidth for the second month of the experiment we're still talking less than 10 grand of expense for distribution, or under 58 cents per copy.
The costs above are purposely on the high side (assuming I didn't totally flub my guess at the size of chapter 1).
There's reasons other than pirating movies for good CODECs. For instance I'd love to be able to download sequences from my digital camcorder, encode them and put them on the web for friends and family.
A C compiler can be said to aid and abet copywrite violation, so can a XEROX machine. They've both got legitimate purposes.
Apple didn't sue over all in one machines. They sued because certain companies made virtual duplicates of the visual appearance of their machines. It's a bit like if Ford came out with a Dodge Viper knockoff, they'd be sued into the ground and would deserve it. If they came up with a Viper competitor it would just be competition.
Umm... You can still open a terminal and run in that mode under OS X. Xfree86 doesn't mean "ability to use a terminal;" it's an
X-session driver/server.
I'm not talking about using a terminal. I'm talking about using a computer as an X terminal. There is a difference. A terminal is something you type commands or letters into. Maybe you want to run vi or something. An X terminal allows you to display X applications, such as a gui interface to it. MacOS X as released by Apple does not have this ability. It has a GUI but it is not compatible with X.
If you're going to be condescending to people at least try and have a clue.
No, its a requirement for a lot of people. The biggest use for a computer I've got is to work from home. In order to do that I need to be able to run as a terminal for X applications. There are many others in a similar position.
I do other things with computers, but the main one is to save me from dragging myself into work on a weekend or after hours.
It would take more than a gentle or even vicious prod to RAM chip developers. Processor speeds are getting faster because of pipelining and architecture first and process technology second. The pipelining allows the CPU to trade off additional latency for a higher clock rate. It takes a little longer for the first result to come out but after that there is only an incremental delay before the next one. The performance gained by process improvement (improvements in silicon) are miniscule compared to the improvements due to architecture... except that process improvements have enabled the archictectual improvements (designers can cram more transistors onto a die, more wire etc)
Unfortunately RAM doesn't work that way. People don't want to trade off latency for overall throughput. RAMBUS traded off latency for throughput. It has theoretically higher throughput than SDRAM but more latency, as a result in a certain class of performance measurements it does significantly worse than SDRAM.
From previous history applying for bad patents earns a boycott from a lot of people who read slashdot. Is everybody going to boycott cisco now, perhaps refuse to use the internet till cisco kills the patent (you may personally decide not to use cisco products, but any data you send out will surely pass through evil cisco products)?
Or will this be ignored because the boycott would actually inconvenience you?
Whether its a communal geek house or the prize home of a lone geek most geek homes are only geek wannabe homes. Pervasive network wiring throughout the house, more than the usual number of computers and a pretty well decked out entertainment system... *yawn*
There's plenty of opportunity to be a hacker in a home or make use of products designed by hackers. At the same time you can make a positive impact on the environment, or at least less negative one than your neighbours. Consider the homes at Entertia, they're designed to make it possible to live off the grid, they do their heating and cooling via non-photovoltaic solar energy. The designer of the concept behind these homes is somebody I'd be proud to see use the term 'hacker' to describe themselves. Much more proud than seeing the Kevin Mitnick's of the world describe themselves as such.
There are other alternative energy or renewable resource methods too, this just happens to be one I'm seriously considering for my own housing needs. A home is a system, there's got to be better systems than just a simple thermostat, or even standard electronic thermostats. Put your coding skills to good use and design a heating and cooling system with mechanically inclined friends.
If Apple wants to use one-click shopping it makes sense for them to license it from Amazon, whether they believe in the validity of the patent or not. Apple is a big enough target that Amazon's lawyers would be drooling over the chance at suing them in court, especially given the rather precarious financial position they're in. Even if Apple prevailed in the law suit it would take years, in the mean time they're out legal costs as well as potentially making investors scary.
Now, I don't understand why Apple's customers would want one click shopping. *click* I just ordered a two grand machine without even reviewing the price, or maybe my son did, or his friend, or...
Err... I said that I don't see how prohibitions on reverse engineering can be justified. Try reading is fundamental, maybe it will help.
I've used the AMD/Cyrix, or predating that, Phoenix and BIOS, cleanroom argument many many times as examples of how to legally do reverse engineering without poisoning the results.
With the CueCat the intention was originally to stop the parent company from making money. The original thinking seemed to have been "Ooh... nifty hardware, lets see how it works". This led to it being reverse engineered and released for other platforms without the parent company making a cent.
Reverse engineering shouldn't be illegal, at least as long as its not for profit, and I've got a hard time even arguing that reverse engineering for profit should be illegal. I would argue that the fruits of the process may be unusable given good i.p. protection laws, but the act of reverse engineering it should never be prohibited.
Businesses need to make it their business to protect themselves, rather than making it the governments business. In CueCat's case they needed to have a business plan which included the danger of people reverse engineering their interface. An occurence which was virtually guaranteed given the simplicity of it. Perhaps this means that there would be no free CueCat, some nominal fee would be attached. Is this really worse than giving up freedoms?
Now if people obviously want the CueCat, but only if its free, then people don't really want the CueCat.
As for the $10/mo charges for TiVo, that wasn't really the case. There were a few comments that in truth the 250 dollar TiVo was the same price as the 450 dollar Replay TV since the 200 dollar lifetime subscription made the prices identical.
Wouldn't there need to be some wrapper in the form of source code around the linux kernel driver in order to make it work with Solaris? What I mean is that there would need to some means to translate hooks between the Solaris kernel and the linux driver. In that case wouldn't the resulting object could be considered a derived work?
If so, wouldn't it be legal to produce the object code but in violation of the GPL to distribute it since you can't distribute the source?
It seems to me like this would be similar to taking something such as a closed source Windows driver, making binary modifications, and releasing it to the public. Even if the end user agreements on Windows allowed me to make binary modifications (which I don't think they do, I'm not sure though, don't have Windows anyplace) I still couldn't distribute the results of the modification.
Sun's exploiting the GPL, but they're probably not violating it (except for potentially against Donald Becker's drivers, by including them as examples).
Sun isn't using any GPL'd code in a product, they're releasing a product that takes GPL'd code and modifies it such that their products can make use of it. It's not necessarily very nice, but nice means squat.
In order to close this loophole the GPL would have to be modified such that GPL'd works can't be used on closed source systems. If that were too happen then it would also close the possibilities to things like porting GPL'd file utilities to Windows.
In actual fact anybody who makes use of the tool, other than for personal use, is violating the GPL though. Source code has to be available for any derivitave works, and the GPL itself is written to not allow exceptions be made. What this means is that if your company has Solaris X86 boxes and purchases hardware that makes use of these translated drivers you are in violation of the GPL since there is some translation done to the source code and that code isn't made available to your clients.
Bad Karma, and a big mistake. The rumors sites are some of Apple's best advertising.
Advertising is good only if it entices people to buy product. The problem with rumors sites is that they often reveal news of products that are coming down the pipe with a price/performance metric significantly better than the current price/performance metric... and there's always a product coming down the pipe. Compound that with macosrumors.com and appleinsider.com's rather umm... unique... concept of truth (Apple will release a 16 processor G4 system for under 2 grand in January. What sayeth you Magic 8 Ball?) and the advertisement only hurts apple sales.
I'm not saying that Apple is right in what they're doing, it would be better for them to just leak ridiculous rumors and a) undermine their credibility and b) fire any paid employees who leak secrets.
The volume knob is really a variable resistor. You'll want to run it through an A/D convertor and sample the digital value periodically. I've not played with components for a while, but you don't need a very fast or high resolution A/D.
In a project I made several years ago I used an inexpensive Texas Instruments serial A/D convertor. It had 8 bit accuracy, which means it could sample 256 discrete volume levels. Way more than is necessary.
I'm assuming you want an actual knob (like I did, I hate push buttons for volume control)
They're both, I can understand the distributed effect somewhat, but some idiot-bots hang on hoping my robots.txt will just disappear. Others are distributed but seem to retry every day.
There have been several occasions where they've slowed my cable modem to a crawl. My favourites are the one that don't even appear in a DNS lookup. It's so tempting to denial of service them at that point.
If TiVo had a network jack the MPAA and other bastions of capitalism would take them to court for building a piracy device. The sad part is that they'd win.
If I were designing a device I expected to make money on, had a corporation relying on or even wouldn't be able to anonymize myself and isolate myself from legal problems my design would be much the same.
No matter how strongly I feel that the MPAA should be carved up like the monopoly it is I can't afford to waste the time I'd spend in court or possibly even incarcerated, especially since it would most likely lead to me getting the boot from the U.S.
I can feel your pain. There are a few robots that incessantly try to either index my web site or my ftp server. One of the worst offenders was mp3search.lycos.com but they removed my site (at the time) from their spider at my request.
With dynamic ip you're subject to be indexed because some retard at some point in time submitted their site for indexing despite the fact that their ip lease might only be around for a few hours/days/weeks.
I could handle it if they parsed robots.txt and read the "GO AWAY!" lines and didn't come back, but some of these poorly written programs check the robots.txt file every 5 minutes when they're in a spidering mood. Nice. You've got to wonder how much bandwidth is wasted due in part to moronic programming practice.
I know for SURE that region coding is optional. All you do is have the region code be at zero.... actually, just forget
about it. TOTALLY FORGET about it. It only really applies if you're using CSS to scramble the content; otherwise,
no need to unscramble it.
Actually, I've read that while a region code of zero is legit right now the MPAA is pressuring for players to refuse to play region 0 discs. I don't know if they'll be successful or not, but they've got boatloads of clout.
I realize its eleet and all to be in the first couple dozen posters but its obvious that nobody up to this point has even read the damned article.
The article is saying, and seems to show some evidence, that since Yahoo partnered with Google that the way Google ranks things has silently changed.
Previously ranking was done based on how often a particular site was linked to, which is why google was so powerful compared to most other search engines. It was great for finding lists of pointers in specialized areas since good lists of links (i.e. a web gloss on a particular subject) would often be linked to.
Since then lists-of-links that were previously in the top 10 can't even be found in the first 500 links. Instead Yahoo comes up more often.
This isn't necessarily a conspiracy between Google and Yahoo, there is a possibility that so many people link to Yahoo that it skews the results that way. The other possibility is that the results are skewed due to the relationship between the two companies. That's what the article is about, not that Yahoo is using Google for a search engine.
It's pretty simple. Microsoft sells positions in the 'default' bookmark set. They're not free. Either Microsoft uses them to keep tabs on the number of visits that result in this to 'justify' this revenue stream to Yahoo et al. or they're payed some small amount per visit.
This should not be suprising to anybody who hasn't been under a rock for the last few years, remember how much power Microsoft seemed to wield during the DOJ anti-trust trials just by being able to keep somebodies icon on or off of the desk top.
If what the RIAA says is true they should be showing a certian drop in sales for every 100 times that Napster
is downloaded. In fact Napster has consistently gotten more and more popular and CD and other music sales are at an
all time high.
Wow, inumeracy moderated up as insightful. I'm not arguing that the RIAA and its member companies are losing money overall. I'm arguing that there is no way that you can casually make a correlation between the events that a) more CDs were sold and b) Napster usage increased.
As I stated in my original post, I'd also argue that the RIAA could not prove that they've lost money due to Napster usage either. There are other more gross effects that reduce the impact of Napster to a negligible amount.
The RIAA is guilty of being an epsilon minus with respect to mathematics. That doesn't mean that misrepresenting statistics for the cause of the moment doesn't make you less of an epsilon minus.
The biggest problem with most of the advocacy I see for any agenda is that they resort to the same half truths and types of misinformation as the point of view they're opposing. Personally as somebody who despises being misled or lied to it raises my defensive barriers to the point where I can't tolerate being associated with any group. As I result I write off any attempts to gather signatures pro-Napster or pro-anything as just another bunch of charlatans who happen to represent a view I happen to agree with.
And since the record industry sold more CDs then
ever last year, that of course proves what all these lawsuits
are about *cough*
You're just as bad as every barely mathematically literate suit when you show such a blatant disregard for statistics. There may be a correlation but more likely other factors, mostly economic, reduce any positive or negative correlation into the noise floor. I would be very suprised that the 4.9 million Napster users (as opposed to the 250 million non-Napster users) significantly impacted CD sales.
Just because I had a diet Dr. Pepper for breakfast and the world hasn't ended today does not indicate a correlation.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing Perl, C, C++ or the language du jour only makes you a well payed trained monkey. Understanding algorithms and how they effect efficiency is a lot more important. This can be gleaned using any language, BASIC had the advantage that it was simple to use, you didn't need to worry about syntax or memory allocation or pointers.
Maybe spending effort on a modern BASIC is misguided, but to bitch and moan about the language many geeks learned from is inane. I've thought for a while that PERL was the BASIC of the present era, I think its shameful that it's not included on every machine shipped, much like BASIC was not too long ago.
Having a BASIC or PERL that could do native GUI stuff on whatever box it exists on would be a great thing if it was shipped on every box regardless of OS. It'd get more people actually interested in computer science at an early age rather than the current state where most people seem to be in it for the money and have little or any talent.
I didn't download it because he's degraded as a writer. His earlier works were significantly better, but then he only did a novel every year or so. Now he does many novels per year, there's less text in them (though the number of pages has remained the same by using larger type) and the quality has suffered. I knew I wouldn't read it so I didn't want to negatively effect his experiment for no reason.
I don't know how large the download was, but lets say it was 5 megabytes. The first chapter was downloaded 170K times that the author knew of (there was probably also person to person copying which would not effect distribution costs), thats 850 gigabytes of data.
Even if Steven King had to front the full costs and assuming the bulk of the downloads were in the first month but still had to pay for the bandwidth for the second month of the experiment we're still talking less than 10 grand of expense for distribution, or under 58 cents per copy.
The costs above are purposely on the high side (assuming I didn't totally flub my guess at the size of chapter 1).
A C compiler can be said to aid and abet copywrite violation, so can a XEROX machine. They've both got legitimate purposes.
If you're going to be condescending to people at least try and have a clue.
I do other things with computers, but the main one is to save me from dragging myself into work on a weekend or after hours.
Unfortunately RAM doesn't work that way. People don't want to trade off latency for overall throughput. RAMBUS traded off latency for throughput. It has theoretically higher throughput than SDRAM but more latency, as a result in a certain class of performance measurements it does significantly worse than SDRAM.
Or will this be ignored because the boycott would actually inconvenience you?
There's plenty of opportunity to be a hacker in a home or make use of products designed by hackers. At the same time you can make a positive impact on the environment, or at least less negative one than your neighbours. Consider the homes at Entertia, they're designed to make it possible to live off the grid, they do their heating and cooling via non-photovoltaic solar energy. The designer of the concept behind these homes is somebody I'd be proud to see use the term 'hacker' to describe themselves. Much more proud than seeing the Kevin Mitnick's of the world describe themselves as such.
There are other alternative energy or renewable resource methods too, this just happens to be one I'm seriously considering for my own housing needs. A home is a system, there's got to be better systems than just a simple thermostat, or even standard electronic thermostats. Put your coding skills to good use and design a heating and cooling system with mechanically inclined friends.
Now, I don't understand why Apple's customers would want one click shopping. *click* I just ordered a two grand machine without even reviewing the price, or maybe my son did, or his friend, or...
I've used the AMD/Cyrix, or predating that, Phoenix and BIOS, cleanroom argument many many times as examples of how to legally do reverse engineering without poisoning the results.
Reverse engineering shouldn't be illegal, at least as long as its not for profit, and I've got a hard time even arguing that reverse engineering for profit should be illegal. I would argue that the fruits of the process may be unusable given good i.p. protection laws, but the act of reverse engineering it should never be prohibited.
Businesses need to make it their business to protect themselves, rather than making it the governments business. In CueCat's case they needed to have a business plan which included the danger of people reverse engineering their interface. An occurence which was virtually guaranteed given the simplicity of it. Perhaps this means that there would be no free CueCat, some nominal fee would be attached. Is this really worse than giving up freedoms?
Now if people obviously want the CueCat, but only if its free, then people don't really want the CueCat.
As for the $10/mo charges for TiVo, that wasn't really the case. There were a few comments that in truth the 250 dollar TiVo was the same price as the 450 dollar Replay TV since the 200 dollar lifetime subscription made the prices identical.
Wouldn't there need to be some wrapper in the form of source code around the linux kernel driver in order to make it work with Solaris? What I mean is that there would need to some means to translate hooks between the Solaris kernel and the linux driver. In that case wouldn't the resulting object could be considered a derived work?
If so, wouldn't it be legal to produce the object code but in violation of the GPL to distribute it since you can't distribute the source?
It seems to me like this would be similar to taking something such as a closed source Windows driver, making binary modifications, and releasing it to the public. Even if the end user agreements on Windows allowed me to make binary modifications (which I don't think they do, I'm not sure though, don't have Windows anyplace) I still couldn't distribute the results of the modification.
Sun isn't using any GPL'd code in a product, they're releasing a product that takes GPL'd code and modifies it such that their products can make use of it. It's not necessarily very nice, but nice means squat.
In order to close this loophole the GPL would have to be modified such that GPL'd works can't be used on closed source systems. If that were too happen then it would also close the possibilities to things like porting GPL'd file utilities to Windows.
In actual fact anybody who makes use of the tool, other than for personal use, is violating the GPL though. Source code has to be available for any derivitave works, and the GPL itself is written to not allow exceptions be made. What this means is that if your company has Solaris X86 boxes and purchases hardware that makes use of these translated drivers you are in violation of the GPL since there is some translation done to the source code and that code isn't made available to your clients.
I'm not saying that Apple is right in what they're doing, it would be better for them to just leak ridiculous rumors and a) undermine their credibility and b) fire any paid employees who leak secrets.
In a project I made several years ago I used an inexpensive Texas Instruments serial A/D convertor. It had 8 bit accuracy, which means it could sample 256 discrete volume levels. Way more than is necessary.
I'm assuming you want an actual knob (like I did, I hate push buttons for volume control)
There have been several occasions where they've slowed my cable modem to a crawl. My favourites are the one that don't even appear in a DNS lookup. It's so tempting to denial of service them at that point.
If I were designing a device I expected to make money on, had a corporation relying on or even wouldn't be able to anonymize myself and isolate myself from legal problems my design would be much the same.
No matter how strongly I feel that the MPAA should be carved up like the monopoly it is I can't afford to waste the time I'd spend in court or possibly even incarcerated, especially since it would most likely lead to me getting the boot from the U.S.
With dynamic ip you're subject to be indexed because some retard at some point in time submitted their site for indexing despite the fact that their ip lease might only be around for a few hours/days/weeks.
I could handle it if they parsed robots.txt and read the "GO AWAY!" lines and didn't come back, but some of these poorly written programs check the robots.txt file every 5 minutes when they're in a spidering mood. Nice. You've got to wonder how much bandwidth is wasted due in part to moronic programming practice.
The article is saying, and seems to show some evidence, that since Yahoo partnered with Google that the way Google ranks things has silently changed.
Previously ranking was done based on how often a particular site was linked to, which is why google was so powerful compared to most other search engines. It was great for finding lists of pointers in specialized areas since good lists of links (i.e. a web gloss on a particular subject) would often be linked to.
Since then lists-of-links that were previously in the top 10 can't even be found in the first 500 links. Instead Yahoo comes up more often.
This isn't necessarily a conspiracy between Google and Yahoo, there is a possibility that so many people link to Yahoo that it skews the results that way. The other possibility is that the results are skewed due to the relationship between the two companies. That's what the article is about, not that Yahoo is using Google for a search engine.
This should not be suprising to anybody who hasn't been under a rock for the last few years, remember how much power Microsoft seemed to wield during the DOJ anti-trust trials just by being able to keep somebodies icon on or off of the desk top.
As I stated in my original post, I'd also argue that the RIAA could not prove that they've lost money due to Napster usage either. There are other more gross effects that reduce the impact of Napster to a negligible amount.
The RIAA is guilty of being an epsilon minus with respect to mathematics. That doesn't mean that misrepresenting statistics for the cause of the moment doesn't make you less of an epsilon minus.
The biggest problem with most of the advocacy I see for any agenda is that they resort to the same half truths and types of misinformation as the point of view they're opposing. Personally as somebody who despises being misled or lied to it raises my defensive barriers to the point where I can't tolerate being associated with any group. As I result I write off any attempts to gather signatures pro-Napster or pro-anything as just another bunch of charlatans who happen to represent a view I happen to agree with.
Just because I had a diet Dr. Pepper for breakfast and the world hasn't ended today does not indicate a correlation.