Apple are just too expensive, elitist, and closed off.... If Apple don't rediscover their own roots (and I think it's almost certainly too late now) then Apple will have just become another corporate peddling cans of baked beans and handed the industry to Microsoft. Again.
I must agree. Apple is doing so badly that no matter what they do, they can't sell the crap they make any faster than they can make 'em.
Nobody buys an iPad / iPhone / iPod / MacbookPro anymore -- the demand is so low one has to wait weeks to get one.
Presumably things could be learned that have practical applications for powered aircraft.
How far is it from human powered to solar powered? Probably a lot closer than from internal combustion powered to solar powered... Didn't we just see an example of "perpetual flight" that used that result for fixed wing flight?
So, imagine a solar powered predator helicopter hovering silently over your home, just waiting... hmmm... I wonder if the size of the solar array might cause a noticeable shadow at ground level? Probably wouldn't have to be much larger than the afore-mentioned football field...
One key fact of what is necessary for one scientific paradigm to replace another, which many non-scientist seem not to understand, is that the new version must match the old (within experimental error) in at least those areas where the old has been tested. Furthermore, both versions must be able to match "reality" in appropriate ranges.
It was not pure imagination that allowed engineers / scientists to land instruments on the surface of Titan and to record transmissions from the lander. That is an amazing accomplishment.
It was a discussion of this kind that led Prof. Kefatos (Physics) and Prof. Nadeau (English) to write The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality. (I'm not sure they didn't go off the rails there, but at least in the first edition their explanation of how Kefatos helped Nadeau to recognize the difference between physics theories and arbitrary whimsy was very good.)
It always surprises me how badly Humanists have misinterpreted Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
So, they're relying on thermal inertia, right? The salt stays hot even after the heat's turned off. So it can be used after the sun goes down.
Next time the sun comes, up, the salt's all cooled down, right? So, can they start generating right away, or do they have to wait for the salt to heat up again?
I mean, what keeps it from just shifting the generation time from "sunup to sundown" to "(sunup to sundown) + N hours"?
How many such microbes normally roam the north atlantic, searching for ships to eat, I wonder.
My guess is some of the visitors to the wreck brought them from warmer climes. Some of those submersibles have probably visited other wrecks and/or sites where such iron-eating microbes are hard at work, and had a little colony of their own.
the first one is provably larger than the second, while both are infinite quantities. (In fact, the second is a provable subset of the first.)
Wrong. In fact, they are provably the same size -- there is a 1-1 correspondence between the elements of the two sets. if x is an even number, 2x is divisible by 4. Similarly if y is divisible by 4, y/2 is an even number. Thus, you could "line them up" side by side:
Let me guess, "The National Legal and Policy Center" is a non-profit organization able to accept donations without needing to reveal the donors, isn't it? Probably with absolutely no political agenda.
If you watch the celebrity chefs on TV, you should recognize the similarities with Jobs & Apple.
Charlie Trotter (in Chicago) could be dissed because his food is all elitist and you can't even get a good hamburger -- but he's not trying to compete with MacDonalds. I will guarantee you, you can get just as nutritious a meal at MacDonalds, far cheaper. Somehow, I don't think that bothers Mr. Trotter. He's an artist, with food as his medium. He has a staff of cooks that work with him -- but it's His responsibility to decide what's served. Don't be surprised if he's a control freak, or that most of his employees love working there and his customers are thrilled -- syncophants, even.
Some people prefer McDonald's to Charlie Trotters. That doesn't mean anyone involved is wrong.
Jobs is also an artist, with techno gadgets as his medium. He hires good people to work with him and realize his vision. His customers and employees are quite happy about it. No doubt, many will agree the man's a jerk , but they still like being associated with the company and its products.
The sequential / random access metaphor is interesting, but I believe a better explanation I've seen is that CLI systems require the user to RECALL the proper command -- they can read the manpage to see how to use it, if they can remember what its name is. (Trust me, even after almost 40 years as a Unix programmer, I still have trouble remembering what that command is called that does xxx). GUI systems, on the other hand, allow the user to RECOGNIZE the proper command -- by looking through menus and applications (or even help remember it for them).
I was just teaching my wife (non-techie) who learned to use the CLI on CP/M and DOS how she can just look at the menus and recognize what to do, instead of trying to recall it.
I've been addicted to the CLI for so long, I ran into a problem where I had trouble communicating with grad students using Linux, because I did everything from the command line, and didn't know how to do some things (like create a symbolic link) from the GUI, and they had no understanding of the command line, except how to type what they were told.
you don't have to buy a "coding" license to write hello world on a Mac box
...Unless it was for iPhone development.
I'm not trying to develop for iOS, so haven't looked at the details for that, but I have registered enough to get XCode for both MacOS X and iOS, and haven't paid a cent.
Registering as an Apple developer is every bit as difficult and expensive as registering on SourceForge. Fill out a web form. The only cost is time, unless you want more than to be able to download tools etc.
Don't bother arguing with the part of his misstatement that wasn't his point. You have to keep track of the input cursor (which he called the mouse arrow).
One of the problems I'm having as I type with a trackpad between my palms and emacs keystrokes is having the cursor suddenly jump somewhere else. Probably at least one cause is hitting the control/meta key when I meant to hit the shift key and then the letter causes the leaping cursor -- but whatever the cause, it totally disrupts the flow of text from my fingers when I notice it.
I suspect ed's not that much better than vi(m) for his purposes, but I will attest to ed's greatness. (As an ed then emacs user, I only ever learned to drive vi by making heavy use to the colon to escape to ed).
If all you've got to survey are college students, everybody is a college student!
I wonder how many of those college students were grandparents, which seem to be a huge subset of my Frenz on FaceBook! (Of course there's probably an even larger group of users who are grandchildren.)
Did you ever try to light it? Once it's going good, it's exothermic, no doubt. But spontaneous combustion while floating on water isn't as common as you might think.
Also, it seems unlikely the 100W skimmer is going to be doing much burning itself. So I presume it has to deliver the skimmed oil to some other location -- which takes time and power as well.
I was aware of the presence of nitrogen in organic compounds (but not, I think, in sugar?).
l may have misunderstood the intent of the original sentence, and simply reacted to the sentence itself. I suspect the intent was to suggest that N2 was created rather than NO2, but "organic matter is converted into harmless nitrogen gas" is not the same as "the nitrogen in organic matter is converted into harmless nitrogen gas" in my usage of the language -- I was, actually, expecting to see CO2 and water in the list, rather than the implied "nitrogen in".
Ah well, modern american english usage appears to include an implied "and whatever" somewhere in almost any sentence.
Still one of my favorite moments, 3x years later, is the stunned sputter from the summer student (who'd written a unix program to interpret an octal dump from 1ESS error messages) when, on my first run of it, I redirected a unix directory into it and it crashed immediately...
Usually, air is pumped into wastewater sludge to boost its oxygen content. This promotes aerobic bacteria that convert the sludge’s sugars and other organic materials into harmless nitrogen gas.
...
I presume at least one of those aerobic bacteria has a philosopher's stone in his pocket? Converting sugar, which is a carbohydrate, into harmless nitrogen gas, requires more than mere chemistry.
Struck me there were a couple of similar chemical faux pas(ii? -- how does one do pluralization on such imports?) in the article, making one wonder whether some parts of it can be believed...
It's pretty amazing just how much of the world is based on trust isn't it?
Especially since, at least in the US, we seem to have been making crime stories the prime entertainment for decades, and there's a lot of money made from fear mongering.
The presence of competition is not a necessary condition for a "free market".
Probably true -- and competition will certainly arise if the monopoly charges a lot more than it costs for a competitor to arise. And, as we've all seen, anybody with a basement can just buy a bunch of 1200 baud modems and set up their own ISP business, if they can convince their local phone company to connect them.
OH? That's been done -- and replaced?
Well, then, all you have to do to become a competitor is install fiber optic cables throughout some "reasonable" neighborhood, and convince Comcast / Verizon / ATT / other local monopoly to connect you.
We don't need no stinkin NN, we just need a couple of billion spare dollars.
We certainly don't want to trust the Government -- just trust our corporate overlords, who've been working for a long time to create mistrust and incompetence in a government that used to work fairly well.
I must say, my first reaction to the question was "Danny Goodman's Hypercard Handbook" (or whatever it was called). Hypercard really was a great program for the OP's interests. Too bad Hypercard isn't around any more.
I note that the OP did not say he wanted to become a programmer, merely to learn some technical skills.
One of the hardest things to learn in this regard is the unnatural precision required -- that is, speakers of natural languages are used to almost every word having multiple meanings, and having amazing flexibility in word choice and sentence structure in anything they want to say. Computers are much more structured and computer languages have much greater constraints. For the purpose of learning, it helps to think there's only one meaning and only one way to say something.
I think HTML (or perhaps better XHTML) and CSS is a good place to start, actually. Creating/copying a simple web page with HTML and then modifying it by adding a list and then using CSS to change the appearance of some simple elements will illustrate that precision. CSS has the "advantage" that any syntax error simply results in the statement being ignored, without causing the whole thing to "die". The "advantage" to XHTML over HTML is the same -- it's more tightly constrained, and errors simply result in NOTHING. That is, of course, also it's "disadvantage" because a "minor" error doesn't provide much in the way of a clue as to where it is.
I'm sorry I can't suggest a good book to start with for a total beginner, though.
I did take a brief look at "Scratch", and that might be a good place to start, too. Don't allow yourself to be put off by it being aimed at kids. If you're a beginner, you want something that's intended to be easy to use to do something "interesting" -- something where you can see the result quickly and easily. After you've changed the color of a fish sprite (a tutorial video I watched) and made a whirling butterfly you begin to see how the pieces fit together.
As someone else said, if you have a mac available, Automator may be a good place to start trying to do something actually useful.
Be prepared to ignore many of the remarks from programmers who frequently fail to recognize just how unnatural their normal way of thinking is.
Oh -- one more thought -- If you want to try something that doesn't require a computer, but will help you to learn to think like a techie, find a "good" book on Plane Geometry and learn to do the proofs and work the examples. Of all the HS math courses, this is the one most like programming -- you have some basic "facts" and ways of combining them and have to make something new.
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Apple are just too expensive, elitist, and closed off. ... If Apple don't rediscover their own roots (and I think it's almost certainly too late now) then Apple will have just become another corporate peddling cans of baked beans and handed the industry to Microsoft. Again.
I must agree. Apple is doing so badly that no matter what they do, they can't sell the crap they make any faster than they can make 'em.
Nobody buys an iPad / iPhone / iPod / MacbookPro anymore -- the demand is so low one has to wait weeks to get one.
I've never seen a bird rolling around on the ground playing with something before. What kind of bird is that?
Is that the same kind of bird as the group that's grooming each other later in the video?
Oh -- and am I correct that the lights streaking across the night view at various points are aircraft, and not meteors?
Presumably things could be learned that have practical applications for powered aircraft.
How far is it from human powered to solar powered? Probably a lot closer than from internal combustion powered to solar powered... Didn't we just see an example of "perpetual flight" that used that result for fixed wing flight?
So, imagine a solar powered predator helicopter hovering silently over your home, just waiting... hmmm... I wonder if the size of the solar array might cause a noticeable shadow at ground level? Probably wouldn't have to be much larger than the afore-mentioned football field...
Just thinkin...
One key fact of what is necessary for one scientific paradigm to replace another, which many non-scientist seem not to understand, is that the new version must match the old (within experimental error) in at least those areas where the old has been tested. Furthermore, both versions must be able to match "reality" in appropriate ranges.
It was not pure imagination that allowed engineers / scientists to land instruments on the surface of Titan and to record transmissions from the lander. That is an amazing accomplishment.
It was a discussion of this kind that led Prof. Kefatos (Physics) and Prof. Nadeau (English) to write The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality. (I'm not sure they didn't go off the rails there, but at least in the first edition their explanation of how Kefatos helped Nadeau to recognize the difference between physics theories and arbitrary whimsy was very good.)
It always surprises me how badly Humanists have misinterpreted Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
So, they're relying on thermal inertia, right? The salt stays hot even after the heat's turned off. So it can be used after the sun goes down.
Next time the sun comes, up, the salt's all cooled down, right? So, can they start generating right away, or do they have to wait for the salt to heat up again?
I mean, what keeps it from just shifting the generation time from "sunup to sundown" to "(sunup to sundown) + N hours"?
How many such microbes normally roam the north atlantic, searching for ships to eat, I wonder.
My guess is some of the visitors to the wreck brought them from warmer climes. Some of those submersibles have probably visited other wrecks and/or sites where such iron-eating microbes are hard at work, and had a little colony of their own.
All the Tesla owners I know have personal nuclear reactors in their basements to handle their power needs for the foreseeable future.
the first one is provably larger than the second, while both are infinite quantities. (In fact, the second is a provable subset of the first.)
Wrong. In fact, they are provably the same size -- there is a 1-1 correspondence between the elements of the two sets. if x is an even number, 2x is divisible by 4. Similarly if y is divisible by 4, y/2 is an even number. Thus, you could "line them up" side by side:
2 _ 4 ...
4 _ 8
6 _ 12
8 _ 16
Let me guess, "The National Legal and Policy Center" is a non-profit organization able to accept donations without needing to reveal the donors, isn't it? Probably with absolutely no political agenda.
The reasoning appears to be that if we can't program violence, there's nothing worth doing, so everyone will quit...
What a strange world it is, where creative imagination can't come up with anything unless it involves mayhem and death.
If you watch the celebrity chefs on TV, you should recognize the similarities with Jobs & Apple.
Charlie Trotter (in Chicago) could be dissed because his food is all elitist and you can't even get a good hamburger -- but he's not trying to compete with MacDonalds. I will guarantee you, you can get just as nutritious a meal at MacDonalds, far cheaper. Somehow, I don't think that bothers Mr. Trotter. He's an artist, with food as his medium. He has a staff of cooks that work with him -- but it's His responsibility to decide what's served. Don't be surprised if he's a control freak, or that most of his employees love working there and his customers are thrilled -- syncophants, even.
Some people prefer McDonald's to Charlie Trotters. That doesn't mean anyone involved is wrong.
Jobs is also an artist, with techno gadgets as his medium. He hires good people to work with him and realize his vision. His customers and employees are quite happy about it. No doubt, many will agree the man's a jerk , but they still like being associated with the company and its products.
The sequential / random access metaphor is interesting, but I believe a better explanation I've seen is that CLI systems require the user to RECALL the proper command -- they can read the manpage to see how to use it, if they can remember what its name is. (Trust me, even after almost 40 years as a Unix programmer, I still have trouble remembering what that command is called that does xxx).
GUI systems, on the other hand, allow the user to RECOGNIZE the proper command -- by looking through menus and applications (or even help remember it for them).
I was just teaching my wife (non-techie) who learned to use the CLI on CP/M and DOS how she can just look at the menus and recognize what to do, instead of trying to recall it.
I've been addicted to the CLI for so long, I ran into a problem where I had trouble communicating with grad students using Linux, because I did everything from the command line, and didn't know how to do some things (like create a symbolic link) from the GUI, and they had no understanding of the command line, except how to type what they were told.
I love OSX because it works well both ways.
you don't have to buy a "coding" license to write hello world on a Mac box
...Unless it was for iPhone development.
I'm not trying to develop for iOS, so haven't looked at the details for that, but I have registered enough to get XCode for both MacOS X and iOS, and haven't paid a cent.
Registering as an Apple developer is every bit as difficult and expensive as registering on SourceForge. Fill out a web form. The only cost is time, unless you want more than to be able to download tools etc.
Guns rarely injure people while used properly.
Uh. I'm not sure what kind of guns you've been using, but if they're not injuring people you need to go ask for your money back.
Just like with axes, eh?
-- Lizzie
Don't bother arguing with the part of his misstatement that wasn't his point. You have to keep track of the input cursor (which he called the mouse arrow).
One of the problems I'm having as I type with a trackpad between my palms and emacs keystrokes is having the cursor suddenly jump somewhere else. Probably at least one cause is hitting the control/meta key when I meant to hit the shift key and then the letter causes the leaping cursor -- but whatever the cause, it totally disrupts the flow of text from my fingers when I notice it.
I suspect ed's not that much better than vi(m) for his purposes, but I will attest to ed's greatness. (As an ed then emacs user, I only ever learned to drive vi by making heavy use to the colon to escape to ed).
If all you've got to survey are college students, everybody is a college student!
I wonder how many of those college students were grandparents, which seem to be a huge subset of my Frenz on FaceBook! (Of course there's probably an even larger group of users who are grandchildren.)
And while most of the socks in the drawer are red, that one is blue!
What? Are we into non-sequitur foo? ;D
Did you ever try to light it? Once it's going good, it's exothermic, no doubt. But spontaneous combustion while floating on water isn't as common as you might think.
Also, it seems unlikely the 100W skimmer is going to be doing much burning itself. So I presume it has to deliver the skimmed oil to some other location -- which takes time and power as well.
I was aware of the presence of nitrogen in organic compounds (but not, I think, in sugar?).
l may have misunderstood the intent of the original sentence, and simply reacted to the sentence itself. I suspect the intent was to suggest that N2 was created rather than NO2, but "organic matter is converted into harmless nitrogen gas" is not the same as "the nitrogen in organic matter is converted into harmless nitrogen gas" in my usage of the language -- I was, actually, expecting to see CO2 and water in the list, rather than the implied "nitrogen in".
Ah well, modern american english usage appears to include an implied "and whatever" somewhere in almost any sentence.
"but, but, you're not supposed to do that".
Yeah, that one still makes my *hair* stand up.
Still one of my favorite moments, 3x years later, is the stunned sputter from the summer student (who'd written a unix program to interpret an octal dump from 1ESS error messages) when, on my first run of it, I redirected a unix directory into it and it crashed immediately...
His introduction to diabolical testing.
That's one way to make testing fun.
From the article:
Usually, air is pumped into wastewater sludge to boost its oxygen content. This promotes aerobic bacteria that convert the sludge’s sugars and other organic materials into harmless nitrogen gas.
...
I presume at least one of those aerobic bacteria has a philosopher's stone in his pocket? Converting sugar, which is a carbohydrate, into harmless nitrogen gas, requires more than mere chemistry.
Struck me there were a couple of similar chemical faux pas(ii? -- how does one do pluralization on such imports?) in the article, making one wonder whether some parts of it can be believed...
It's pretty amazing just how much of the world is based on trust isn't it?
Especially since, at least in the US, we seem to have been making crime stories the prime entertainment for decades, and there's a lot of money made from fear mongering.
Probably true -- and competition will certainly arise if the monopoly charges a lot more than it costs for a competitor to arise. And, as we've all seen, anybody with a basement can just buy a bunch of 1200 baud modems and set up their own ISP business, if they can convince their local phone company to connect them.
OH? That's been done -- and replaced?
Well, then, all you have to do to become a competitor is install fiber optic cables throughout some "reasonable" neighborhood, and convince Comcast / Verizon / ATT / other local monopoly to connect you.
We don't need no stinkin NN, we just need a couple of billion spare dollars.
We certainly don't want to trust the Government -- just trust our corporate overlords, who've been working for a long time to create mistrust and incompetence in a government that used to work fairly well.
I must say, my first reaction to the question was "Danny Goodman's Hypercard Handbook" (or whatever it was called). Hypercard really was a great program for the OP's interests. Too bad Hypercard isn't around any more.
I note that the OP did not say he wanted to become a programmer, merely to learn some technical skills.
One of the hardest things to learn in this regard is the unnatural precision required -- that is, speakers of natural languages are used to almost every word having multiple meanings, and having amazing flexibility in word choice and sentence structure in anything they want to say. Computers are much more structured and computer languages have much greater constraints. For the purpose of learning, it helps to think there's only one meaning and only one way to say something.
I think HTML (or perhaps better XHTML) and CSS is a good place to start, actually. Creating/copying a simple web page with HTML and then modifying it by adding a list and then using CSS to change the appearance of some simple elements will illustrate that precision. CSS has the "advantage" that any syntax error simply results in the statement being ignored, without causing the whole thing to "die". The "advantage" to XHTML over HTML is the same -- it's more tightly constrained, and errors simply result in NOTHING. That is, of course, also it's "disadvantage" because a "minor" error doesn't provide much in the way of a clue as to where it is.
I'm sorry I can't suggest a good book to start with for a total beginner, though.
I did take a brief look at "Scratch", and that might be a good place to start, too. Don't allow yourself to be put off by it being aimed at kids. If you're a beginner, you want something that's intended to be easy to use to do something "interesting" -- something where you can see the result quickly and easily. After you've changed the color of a fish sprite (a tutorial video I watched) and made a whirling butterfly you begin to see how the pieces fit together.
As someone else said, if you have a mac available, Automator may be a good place to start trying to do something actually useful.
Be prepared to ignore many of the remarks from programmers who frequently fail to recognize just how unnatural their normal way of thinking is.
Oh -- one more thought -- If you want to try something that doesn't require a computer, but will help you to learn to think like a techie, find a "good" book on Plane Geometry and learn to do the proofs and work the examples. Of all the HS math courses, this is the one most like programming -- you have some basic "facts" and ways of combining them and have to make something new.
Good luck