6502s were much less of a kludge than the z80 which was an augmented 8080 instruction set.
Having coded for both Z80 and 6502, I feel that a key advantage of the Z80 was that it had more registers available for practical use (still not enough IMO, but that's another matter). The 6502 was extremely limited in that regard unless you had a significant amount of Page 1 free (not true on the machine I was using). Indeed, the 6502's Page 1 addressing mode was distinctly strange, almost as if the system had an extended set of registers that were kept in memory.
Mind you, I've done some very strange things with a Z80. My favourite was using the SP register to index into a table (or something like that)...
I learned to write machine code on the Speccy. This was because the manual came with a listing of all the X80 instruction set, and a printout of a disassembler in a magazine showed me how to put it together. Once you've written machine code (not assembler, honest direct machine code) for a while, you learn to really appreciate what a pointer is and high-level programming languages like C hold no great terrors. (Curiously, it took me a long time before I thought of writing an assembler...)
The Speccy was also an excellent platform for hardware hacking. That excellent manual gave you a complete description of the expansion slot, and that meant you could fabricate your own add-ons using an off-the-shelf connector, some veroboard, a simple TTL logic chip and plenty of solder. What better way to learn practical robotics?
Along came the ZX Spectrum, 48Kb (and later 128Kb)
For a short time, the base model of Speccy was a 16kB model, which was still large enough to be interesting. I know, because I had one (you always remember your first computer). Later upgraded to a 48k model, which I've still got somewhere in a box, and which still worked when I last tested it (OK, maybe 4-5 years ago now.) Take that, bit rot!
Speccy V C64 fanboim was SO much better than Windows V Apple fanboism.
Also remember that many of the people in those crowds "graduated" to being Amiga fanboys. (I also remember that there was a third group of fanboys, the BBC Micro crowd. They were regarded as being strange anoraks with far more money than sense, and a tendency to indulge in train-spotting when using a virtual train simulator...)
Those prices you see in jewellers? They are on the order of a thousand times larger than the actual value of diamond. Some of that pays for the expertise to cut diamonds into decorative shapes (which isn't easy), most of it is just an insanely huge markup.
The other thing you're paying for is the fact that jewellery requires large diamonds, as opposed to the cheap stuff (which is basically like very hard fine sand). This is a very important distinction.
Re:Could someone explain the closing of ports?
on
Botnet on Botnet Action
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· Score: 4, Informative
Could someone explain why it is important that ports are closed?
The only way to have a message received off the internet is to have a port open. Most ports on desktop computers are only opened to specific machines while you're uploading or downloading some data (whether web, email, or any of a myriad other things). But on server computers, ports have to be open for connections from client machines which are potentially anywhere. If the software behind those ports isn't careful, it's possible to attack the machine through them.
Desktop systems are usually not as highly protected on the inside as server systems (alas) so having a firewall that blocks off server ports "Just In Case" is a good plan.
(And yes, I've left out lots of detail from this potted explanation.)
[The] change from a "Prior-art has precedence" system to a "First to patent wins"
In a first-to-file system, prior art can still make a thing unpatentable. It's just that if you've got two competing patents for the same thing, the patent office can determine which one to grant based on their own (presumably accurate) records instead of the (possibly falsified) ones supplied by the applicants.
means the anybody that has loads of ideas but no money to patent them will loose against "Big corp with loadsa money for whom the costs of filling a patent are short change".
The real advantage that a big company has is that it can get a reasonable number of smart people together and support their inventing; that advantage doesn't go away under any fair system. OTOH, lots of small companies get patents now (under both systems - first-to-file is used elsewhere in the world) and lots will in the future. Next strawman argument, please!
One - school has no business regulating how students behave outside. They're students, not slaves.
Within reason. If students are taking actions outside the school to try to bully students or staff, there's a need to act anyway (though it might be that the right approach for things done outside the school that are bullying involves the police sooner; if students insist on acting like stupid adults, they run the risk of being punished like stupid adults too). On the other hand, many schools may well go to far. There's a balance to be drawn.
Two - most bullies have a second favourite game: Gaming the system. The more rules you create, the more interesting (and rewarding) you make it.
An important rule has always got to be "Do not game the system!"
It should be noted that the main purpose of anti-bullying rules has got to be the prevention of suicides by students. Any school principal who has a student kill themselves because of bullying is a miserable failure who ought to be kicked out (and tarred and feathered) for failure of duty.
So we should pay zero income tax, and maybe about 25% sales tax: a $16T economy should support a $4T expense at Federal, state and local budgets.
The problem with such a tax is that it is highly regressive, i.e. would hit the poor excessively hard. Doing that is a bad idea (unless you're a big fan of widespread food riots; I'm not.) Start exempting things from sales taxes and whoops! you've got the complexity back again, particularly as the things you have to exempt are often quite a large fraction of the total economy.
In reality, the middle classes are likely to continue to pay the majority of the overall tax take for the foreseeable future. This is because that's where you maximize the product of "income per head" and "number of people with that income". The rich have lots of money, but there's not that many of them. There are plenty of poor, but they've hardly any income. Guess who's in the middle? (No, I don't like being part of the majority-tax paying part of society either, but it makes mathematical sense. Damn you, mathematics!)
3. It is possible. It's not trivial, but it's possible with reasonable effort. But doing so would require overturning ignorance, stupidity and laziness. That is, (most) programmers don't know that there are better alternatives, refuse to listen to those who tell them that they don't have to put up with this sort of thing, and even when they've heard that it might be so, can't be bothered to learn how to avoid these sorts of problems because that would take some actual effort. OK, these attributes are not in any way unique to open source programmers, or even just programmers.
(The solution? Use one of the scripting languages that's been designed for high-integrity work. The advantage of them is that the implementations are tested very thoroughly, often by total paranoiacs. When it comes to computer security, paranoia is good! Building on such languages lets you avoid worrying about virtually all the attacks that home-rolled C or C++ code is prone to.)
I don't know how many spammers would have the patience to get 15 posts approved for an account to get in a handful of spam posts before their account would be suspended.
If they know it's just 15? Quite a few, alas. Best way to fix that problem is to not publicise the number of posts that need to be approved before approving the account. (It's probably also a good idea to offer a virtual view of the site to non-approved accounts so that people see their own changes, even if nobody else does except moderators. That encourages fools to rush in and show themselves up to be the spammers that they are, rather than playing the careful-careful game.)
Yes, but your suggested alternative (absolute positioning) sucks in different ways. In particular, if your app really has to deal with different sizes of fonts (some people need that sort of thing in order to be able to read the text at all) then absolute positioning is a disaster as it tends to either overlay components on each other unexpectedly or to clip text nastily. Flow-oriented layouts are much better in this respect.
The stupid thing is: desktop apps have much better ways of laying out components. (Indeed, some are not that far off being a full linear algebra solver under the hood, and can do very fancy things even with components whose sizes are continually changing in real time. Not that this is a nice thing to do to a poor GUI.:-))
Even more, I wasn't even a customer of their bank but still got the e-mail, so that raised an alert before even reading that text through.
I take this a step further by instructing even those financial institutions that I do business with to not contact me by email. That lets me safely junk all financial stuff without thinking about it; either it's an organization going directly against my written instructions or it's a phishing attempt, but neither is welcome.
BSD: I buy everyone a round because hell, I am just a nice guy and I want everyone to have a beer even if that means I will end up paying for all the beer being drunk.
Closed source company: Hell, I like you BSD, keep them coming.Eh, my round? I left my wallet at home, say BSD, how about a napeleon brandy mate?
BSD: Sure, we are all mates.
GPL: You are an idiot BSD. But hey, make mine a double.
You missed out an important bit. What happens is that BSD notices that neither the CSC is being quite as generous as they ought to be, and buys them Bud Light instead of the brandy.
The GPL people get a double Bud Light, since they asked for that.:-)
Get it?
The true BSD approach is very strongly based on the concept of a gift economy, and egregious freeloaders get shunned. But give freely and you receive a lot more in return. It's actually a very old economic concept, and means that much of actual BSD practice is remarkably close to the way that the GPL-based community works. Just with a somewhat different emphasis. (I write BSD-licensed code because it suits me philosophically; what you do with code you write is your own business.)
Yes it is quite legal for M$ to read Open Source code, deduce the protocols and write closed source software - just as long as they don't copy the code.
Actually, the last part depends on the license. Anyone (MS included) can use BSD-licensed code in their closed source software. (They can also try to just sell plain builds of it too, of course, though it's a bit tricky when someone else can undercut them for nothing. It's easier to build a business when you're adding some value.) By comparison, the GPL prohibits this sort of thing, which some people like and some people don't. YMMV.
So do you think that people shouldn't be allowed to talk to other people on airplanes?
That would be very nice, yes. Speaking as someone who's been on far too many flights in the past few years, making a long flight more peaceful is a good goal indeed. (I'd also like to ban the person in front of me from jamming his or her seat back into my knees. That would help a lot making *me* feel more peaceful...)
It's not another one. It's just REST with a custom security layer on top (and not even done so entirely transparently; ick!) Moreover, you still need either an XML parser or a JSON security hole, err, parser. To cap it off, facebook don't use it with HTTPS so who knows what mischief some man-in-the-middle could cause?
The Dutch do not have a fundamental right to play with the U.S.'s ball, and their rights are not being violated if the U.S. decides to take the ball away.
On the other hand, remember that you have to consider things the other way round when it comes to inter-country relations too. Thus: "The US does not have a fundamental right to play with the Dutch ball, and their rights are not being violated if the Dutch decide to take the ball away." Just as true.
Now, justify again why you believe the US should dictate drug policy in the Netherlands or IPR policy in Sweden? Should Sweden be able to dictate nudity policy in the USA? Or the Netherlands tell them how to regulate firearms?
You use Lua for your in-game scripting of your computer games.
A potential competitor here is Tcl, which, like Lua, has an embedding background.
Can you fit your Perl/Python/Ruby interpreter in 150 kilobytes? I didn't think so.
You can't fit Tcl into that space either these days. But you do get more functionality out of the box, and it's trivial to profile that functionality for specific application usage too (very useful for embedded use).
Can you get it under a MIT license? I don't think you can.
Tcl uses the advertizing-free BSD license, which is well-known to play well with others.
Should you use it for your online web application backend, or your system administration scripts? Probably not.
Agreed. Lua's base functionality is just too sparse for that sort of use, and it's not a market segment that the language ever addressed. But Tcl (especially with one or two extensions) does very nicely in that space. And many others too.
Oracle likes Linux (or were certainly doing so through their public advertising one month ago) but their main problem with it is the lack of real long-term ABI stability at the level of things like libc. (FWIW, many other commercial software vendors have exactly the same problem.) Having to rebuild and relink all your software every time someone does a patch release to some core library is horrible. It's not fun even for free/open software projects, and they're usually smaller and more agile than commercial codes. Being held hostage to someone else's development cycle is not nice, whoever you are.
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Mind you, I've done some very strange things with a Z80. My favourite was using the SP register to index into a table (or something like that)...
I learned to write machine code on the Speccy. This was because the manual came with a listing of all the X80 instruction set, and a printout of a disassembler in a magazine showed me how to put it together. Once you've written machine code (not assembler, honest direct machine code) for a while, you learn to really appreciate what a pointer is and high-level programming languages like C hold no great terrors. (Curiously, it took me a long time before I thought of writing an assembler...)
The Speccy was also an excellent platform for hardware hacking. That excellent manual gave you a complete description of the expansion slot, and that meant you could fabricate your own add-ons using an off-the-shelf connector, some veroboard, a simple TTL logic chip and plenty of solder. What better way to learn practical robotics?
Desktop systems are usually not as highly protected on the inside as server systems (alas) so having a firewall that blocks off server ports "Just In Case" is a good plan.
(And yes, I've left out lots of detail from this potted explanation.)
Yeah, it should have been 'Informative'.
It should be noted that the main purpose of anti-bullying rules has got to be the prevention of suicides by students. Any school principal who has a student kill themselves because of bullying is a miserable failure who ought to be kicked out (and tarred and feathered) for failure of duty.
In reality, the middle classes are likely to continue to pay the majority of the overall tax take for the foreseeable future. This is because that's where you maximize the product of "income per head" and "number of people with that income". The rich have lots of money, but there's not that many of them. There are plenty of poor, but they've hardly any income. Guess who's in the middle? (No, I don't like being part of the majority-tax paying part of society either, but it makes mathematical sense. Damn you, mathematics!)
3. It is possible. It's not trivial, but it's possible with reasonable effort. But doing so would require overturning ignorance, stupidity and laziness. That is, (most) programmers don't know that there are better alternatives, refuse to listen to those who tell them that they don't have to put up with this sort of thing, and even when they've heard that it might be so, can't be bothered to learn how to avoid these sorts of problems because that would take some actual effort. OK, these attributes are not in any way unique to open source programmers, or even just programmers.
(The solution? Use one of the scripting languages that's been designed for high-integrity work. The advantage of them is that the implementations are tested very thoroughly, often by total paranoiacs. When it comes to computer security, paranoia is good! Building on such languages lets you avoid worrying about virtually all the attacks that home-rolled C or C++ code is prone to.)
The other difference: the superhacker wears a grubby t-shirt made out of spandex!
The stupid thing is: desktop apps have much better ways of laying out components. (Indeed, some are not that far off being a full linear algebra solver under the hood, and can do very fancy things even with components whose sizes are continually changing in real time. Not that this is a nice thing to do to a poor GUI.
1. Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Soviet Russia Jokes.
2. ???
3. Profit... in Space!
The GPL people get a double Bud Light, since they asked for that.
Get it?
The true BSD approach is very strongly based on the concept of a gift economy, and egregious freeloaders get shunned. But give freely and you receive a lot more in return. It's actually a very old economic concept, and means that much of actual BSD practice is remarkably close to the way that the GPL-based community works. Just with a somewhat different emphasis. (I write BSD-licensed code because it suits me philosophically; what you do with code you write is your own business.)
It's not another one. It's just REST with a custom security layer on top (and not even done so entirely transparently; ick!) Moreover, you still need either an XML parser or a JSON security hole, err, parser. To cap it off, facebook don't use it with HTTPS so who knows what mischief some man-in-the-middle could cause?
Now, justify again why you believe the US should dictate drug policy in the Netherlands or IPR policy in Sweden? Should Sweden be able to dictate nudity policy in the USA? Or the Netherlands tell them how to regulate firearms?
Oracle likes Linux (or were certainly doing so through their public advertising one month ago) but their main problem with it is the lack of real long-term ABI stability at the level of things like libc. (FWIW, many other commercial software vendors have exactly the same problem.) Having to rebuild and relink all your software every time someone does a patch release to some core library is horrible. It's not fun even for free/open software projects, and they're usually smaller and more agile than commercial codes. Being held hostage to someone else's development cycle is not nice, whoever you are.