Email is kind of a special case. It's not necessarily something that I want preserved, though sometimes it is nice to be able to go back and check on an old email. If it was something I really cared about, I could and would save it to my computer.
What I can't see myself doing is depending on the cloud, or trusting the cloud. However, I'm a techie, not a layman. That gives me options that a lot of people don't have.
The guy who played Captain Marvel in that serial, stage name Tom Tyler, was an amateur weightlifter before the movies. According to the wikipedia, he could do a right hand clean and jerk of 213 pounds. Pretty impressive. I would never have guessed it from the way he looks in his movies, as I'm so used to the modern body builder types.
I'm barely old enough to remember the original version of Captain Marvel, with Billy Batson who would say "Shazam!" and turn in to Captain Marvel. As an adult I did eventually read one of the stories in the Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, and thought it was the best story in the collection. It was "Captain Marvel Battles The Plot Against The Universe" from Captain Marvel Adventures No 100, September 1949. Also, there was a movie serial made of Captain Marvel that is considered among the best movie serials ever made.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Captain_Marvel/
Yes, there are comments referencing Microsoft. It would be amazing if there weren't. But I would say they are the minority of comments. There are plenty of people with lots of expertise and experience who raise sound questions about systemd, and the whole process of how systemd got adopted is rather fishy.
Slack was my 1st linux distro, and I'm a long time admirer of it. But nowadays I use devuan, a systemd free fork of debian. There's also PClinuxOS that is systemd free. For me, the acid test is whether I can use me-tv to watch and record ATSC broadcast TV. Back in the pre-systemd days I could not get me-tv to work on ubuntu but I could get it to work on mint (something to do with the gui libraries). I really liked PCLinuxOS but, last time I tried, I couldn't get me-tv to work on it either, same problem as ubuntu I guess. (Maybe I'll try again with the latest distro). But me-tv does work with devuan so that has become my distro of choice, and I really like it.
We're lucky to live in the 400 or 500 million year window when Saturn's rings are spectacular huh? I think we're also lucky to live in a time when we get those nice solar eclipses. Our moon used to be closer, probably blotted out too much of the sun, and someday it'll be further away, only annular eclipses.
Truly, these are the best of times. Unless of course, Wolf-Rayet 104 blasts off or Yellowstone erupts or...
If I'd been writing the summary, I wouldn't have necessarily included the full techno description of what x32 ABI is, which might just be techo-babble for a lot of people, but I would have added "this has nothing to do with the old 32 bit architecture intel CPUs." somewhere early on.
Agreed. I understand there's a Public Relations consideration in these announcements, but the real, final, inarguable milestone would be connected to the gravitational influence. It will have escaped the solar system when it's at a place where an object couldn't be held in orbit around the Sun. (How far away is that anyway?)
I used to work with BSD 4.2 and 4.3 a lot back in the 1980s, and I have a CD of Dr Dobb's Journal's official 386 BSD Release 1.0 done by William and Lynne Jolitz. I never did anything but look at the source code for it as I was already in the linux camp. The big problem for me was lack of support for many devices with BSD. As I recall, there was one SCSI controller supported, and I didn't have it. My 1st linux was Slackware. It came on 50 diskettes and I was able to install it on my cheap, off-brand laptop. So yeah, that's how things went. I wanted to be a BSD guy, and tried out various flavors of NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD back in the late 90s early 00s, but linux always had more stuff. Those BSDs are still around aren't they? Particularly OpenBSD which has it's own dictator.
Supposedly BSD still lives in the MacOS. But I don't know the details. I reckon there's a lot of caveats about that.
In my day, Computer Science was a very new field. We learned the basic concepts of a multitasking OS but didn't look at actual, working systems. I presume that's different now. It means, of course, that everybody has to know C.
I'm just wondering what the exposure is for a typical computer science major nowadays.
As others have pointed out, it's a representative democracy. When the USA was started, neither the telegraph nor the railroad had been invented yet. Counties would elect representatives to go off to State Capitals, and States would elect representatives to go off to Washington, D.C. because that was the only practical way to get things done. We still have that system which was put in place with the adoption of our Constitution.
However, the real problem is with human nature itself. You've probably heard expressions like "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely", or "Who watches the watchers." We have several TLA (Thee Letter Acronym) Agencies that we have to deal with; the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA are the biggest and best known, and each has plenty of scandals in its history. To some extent they watch each other, or maybe it's mostly the FBI watching the CIA. Check out Aldrich Ames for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames
Governments feel like they need these agencies, and maybe they do, but even if they start out with nothing but highly competent honorable people, they are bound to gradually go from being what historian Carroll Quigley called 'instruments' into what he called 'Institutions'.:
transformation of social arrangements functioning to meet real social needs into social institutions serving their own purposes regardless of real social needs
(Quote is from the wikipedia entery on Quigley.)
There's no easy simple solution to the problem because the problem is in human nature. The first amphibian that evolved to walk on dry land probably couldn't walk very well. The first bird that evolved flight probably couldn't fly very well. We're the first species to come up with this thing we call 'civilization'. How good do you think we are at it?
OK, I confess, there's a bit of ego involved. If I post a comment at 1, and it gets modded up to a 5, that's a bigger achievement than if it started out as a 2. A gold star vs a silver star. (Do they still give out gold and silver stars in elementary school or does anybody even know what I'm referring to?)
I agree that there's been some troubling developments recently. To some extent I suppose Linux is a victim of it's own success. Although I haven't delved deeply into the technical side of systemd, the mere fact that it was bulldozed into the eco-system was enough to make me shy away from it. So nowadays I mostly use devuan.
I read somewhere that in Europe during WW II there was an unwritten rule that we didn't shoot at their medics and they didn't shoot at ours. Maybe it's kind of the same thing. We don't shoot at your parachutes, and you don't shoot at ours. Maybe the Nazi commander was thinking to himself that maybe someday HE would be the one in the parachute.
I almost always post without Karma Bonus. I used to post with the bonus sometimes until someone modded me down as 'overrated', (I think it was because they did not understand the reference I was making to movie about Michelangelo that starred Charleton Heston. It never occurred to me that someone might have missed that movie.) That down mod cost me quite a bit of karma. I decided then and there that I would only post with karma bonus if I really felt it was important, which I don't think has ever happened. But I had a post once which was modded up by somebody, and then modded down again as 'overrated' and I still lost karma points. So, when I see a post of mine get modded up, I sort of cross my fingers that nobody's going to take aim at it.
My advice is, when you post on slashdot, don't take yourself too seriously, no matter how much karma you have.
You ask if I've used any software lately. Well, I'm a retired computer programmer who mostly worked in embedded systems or with Unix, programming in C and assembler. Since I came from a Unix background I went with Linux as soon as I heard about it back in the 90s. I don't want to come across as an obnoxious, haughty linux fanboy, particularly since I literally don't have much experience with anything else in the last 20 years so I can't compare it. And I also realize that not everybody has my background which made switching to linux so easy and natural for me. But after reading the responses to my question, maybe I'm living in a kind of bubble.
In the mid 1970s at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton Florida we shared a Univac 1106 with a couple of other colleges in Southern Florida and it used 36 bit words with 6 bit bytes. FIELDATA was a 6 bit character format that was used as it allowed 6 characters per word with no bits left over.
This was the first computer I learned to program in assembly. I remember how odd the stack architecture of the Intel 8080 seemed at first when I was learning its assembly language, especially for calling subroutines and returning from them. On the Univac you called a subroutine using the 'Store Location and Jump' instruction, which stored the address of the next sequential instruction in a specified location, so the subroutine would know where to return to.
'Nanotech' is a word that was used a lot a couple of decades ago, not so much anymore. (Replaced by AI and quantum computing?) But who knows? They could end up crafting microbes to eat up the plastic in the oceans maybe, or make a contribution to fighting global warming. Here's hoping.
The big question is, how many of those kids should be learning programming.
When I started out in the late 70s, you were busy coding solutions to problems, and writing real code. Later it became more about memorizing big function/class libraries, which got old pretty fast.
I asked a younger guy who is in the business about it recently, and he said nowadays what you learn are 'frameworks', whatever that is.
Even back in the 70s, when I was taking classes, the beginning classes were big for Comp Sci majors, but as I progressed, they got smaller and smaller as more and more people realized it wasn't for them.
And I wonder how good all those 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers actually are at teaching programming.
First of all, I wonder how widespread 'small talk' is among various cultures. The only country outside the USA I ever spent much time in was Japan, and the Japanese often greet each other with phrases like "Ogenki desu ka' (Are you 'genki' where genki means something like feeling good, the 'O' at the beginning means something like 'honorable' and is often dispensed with.) I also heard Japanese say 'Doko iku no?' a lot, a casual form of where are you going? So I guess they did have small talk. Actually the Japanese have a lot of levels of politeness and formality and the finer points take a lot of study, for instance how low one should bow when meeting each other and so on. So they may not be a good example.
I've read and seen documentaries talking about how Americans in Arab Countries often appear rude and brash and have to learn the proper etiquette there.
Maybe this all goes back to times with a lot of war and feuding, and a sort of diplomatic protocol developed. Did the Finns ever have a tradition of feuds or tribal warfare in their history?
Even in the USA there are variations. Old fashioned country manners might be if you going to visit somebody about some business back in the days before telephones were common, when you first called on someone, you'd first spend some time talking about other things, each others health, the weather, whatever. I think this was to show respect, and the amount of time spent was small compared to the amount of time of actually getting to somebody else's farm house, and it wasn't like the person you were visiting had been watching the big game on TV and was anxious to get back to it.
There's also the notion of upward mobility. As immigrants became more prosperous and moved into the middle class, they wanted to act properly. Emily Post's book on etiquette was a big seller.
There may be an egalitarian vibe involved too. Well, as I say in the title, these are speculations.
My own favorite example of start and stop progress is aeronautics. As a kid, I remember seeing a Twilight Zone episode in which a World War I fighter pilot flew his plane into a cloud and came out in the present (which at the time the episode was made was the late 50s or maybe early 60s). So there was this scene of a World War I Biplane fighter taxing past Boeing B-52 stratofrotresses and other aircraft representing 30-40 years of progress in aviation, and the contrast was stark and amazing to my youthful mind. The pilot was an Englishman who thought he was still in World War I and commented to the first Americans he saw that he didn't realize we Americans were so advanced., That was circa 1960. Go forward 50-60 years and we're still flying B-52s. According to the wikipedia, they're expected to see use into 2050. What happened to all the initial progress in aviation tech?
Slashdot Mirror
Email is kind of a special case. It's not necessarily something that I want preserved, though sometimes it is nice to be able to go back and check on an old email. If it was something I really cared about, I could and would save it to my computer.
What I can't see myself doing is depending on the cloud, or trusting the cloud. However, I'm a techie, not a layman. That gives me options that a lot of people don't have.
The guy who played Captain Marvel in that serial, stage name Tom Tyler, was an amateur weightlifter before the movies. According to the wikipedia, he could do a right hand clean and jerk of 213 pounds. Pretty impressive. I would never have guessed it from the way he looks in his movies, as I'm so used to the modern body builder types.
I'm barely old enough to remember the original version of Captain Marvel, with Billy Batson who would say "Shazam!" and turn in to Captain Marvel. As an adult I did eventually read one of the stories in the Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, and thought it was the best story in the collection. It was "Captain Marvel Battles The Plot Against The Universe" from Captain Marvel Adventures No 100, September 1949. Also, there was a movie serial made of Captain Marvel that is considered among the best movie serials ever made.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Captain_Marvel/
Yes, there are comments referencing Microsoft. It would be amazing if there weren't. But I would say they are the minority of comments. There are plenty of people with lots of expertise and experience who raise sound questions about systemd, and the whole process of how systemd got adopted is rather fishy.
Slack was my 1st linux distro, and I'm a long time admirer of it. But nowadays I use devuan, a systemd free fork of debian. There's also PClinuxOS that is systemd free. For me, the acid test is whether I can use me-tv to watch and record ATSC broadcast TV. Back in the pre-systemd days I could not get me-tv to work on ubuntu but I could get it to work on mint (something to do with the gui libraries). I really liked PCLinuxOS but, last time I tried, I couldn't get me-tv to work on it either, same problem as ubuntu I guess. (Maybe I'll try again with the latest distro). But me-tv does work with devuan so that has become my distro of choice, and I really like it.
We're lucky to live in the 400 or 500 million year window when Saturn's rings are spectacular huh? I think we're also lucky to live in a time when we get those nice solar eclipses. Our moon used to be closer, probably blotted out too much of the sun, and someday it'll be further away, only annular eclipses.
Truly, these are the best of times. Unless of course, Wolf-Rayet 104 blasts off or Yellowstone erupts or ...
No Mr or Ms A. Coward, you are not the only one not understanding anything at all.
(Actually, if I want to be really precise, I think you and I both understand something, just not that much.)
If I'd been writing the summary, I wouldn't have necessarily included the full techno description of what x32 ABI is, which might just be techo-babble for a lot of people, but I would have added "this has nothing to do with the old 32 bit architecture intel CPUs." somewhere early on.
Agreed. I understand there's a Public Relations consideration in these announcements, but the real, final, inarguable milestone would be connected to the gravitational influence. It will have escaped the solar system when it's at a place where an object couldn't be held in orbit around the Sun. (How far away is that anyway?)
I used to work with BSD 4.2 and 4.3 a lot back in the 1980s, and I have a CD of Dr Dobb's Journal's official 386 BSD Release 1.0 done by William and Lynne Jolitz. I never did anything but look at the source code for it as I was already in the linux camp. The big problem for me was lack of support for many devices with BSD. As I recall, there was one SCSI controller supported, and I didn't have it. My 1st linux was Slackware. It came on 50 diskettes and I was able to install it on my cheap, off-brand laptop. So yeah, that's how things went. I wanted to be a BSD guy, and tried out various flavors of NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD back in the late 90s early 00s, but linux always had more stuff. Those BSDs are still around aren't they? Particularly OpenBSD which has it's own dictator.
Supposedly BSD still lives in the MacOS. But I don't know the details. I reckon there's a lot of caveats about that.
In my day, Computer Science was a very new field. We learned the basic concepts of a multitasking OS but didn't look at actual, working systems. I presume that's different now. It means, of course, that everybody has to know C.
I'm just wondering what the exposure is for a typical computer science major nowadays.
As others have pointed out, it's a representative democracy. When the USA was started, neither the telegraph nor the railroad had been invented yet. Counties would elect representatives to go off to State Capitals, and States would elect representatives to go off to Washington, D.C. because that was the only practical way to get things done. We still have that system which was put in place with the adoption of our Constitution.
However, the real problem is with human nature itself. You've probably heard expressions like "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely", or "Who watches the watchers." We have several TLA (Thee Letter Acronym) Agencies that we have to deal with; the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA are the biggest and best known, and each has plenty of scandals in its history. To some extent they watch each other, or maybe it's mostly the FBI watching the CIA. Check out Aldrich Ames for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames
Governments feel like they need these agencies, and maybe they do, but even if they start out with nothing but highly competent honorable people, they are bound to gradually go from being what historian Carroll Quigley called 'instruments' into what he called 'Institutions'.:
(Quote is from the wikipedia entery on Quigley.)
There's no easy simple solution to the problem because the problem is in human nature. The first amphibian that evolved to walk on dry land probably couldn't walk very well. The first bird that evolved flight probably couldn't fly very well. We're the first species to come up with this thing we call 'civilization'. How good do you think we are at it?
OK, I confess, there's a bit of ego involved. If I post a comment at 1, and it gets modded up to a 5, that's a bigger achievement than if it started out as a 2. A gold star vs a silver star. (Do they still give out gold and silver stars in elementary school or does anybody even know what I'm referring to?)
I agree that there's been some troubling developments recently. To some extent I suppose Linux is a victim of it's own success. Although I haven't delved deeply into the technical side of systemd, the mere fact that it was bulldozed into the eco-system was enough to make me shy away from it. So nowadays I mostly use devuan.
I read somewhere that in Europe during WW II there was an unwritten rule that we didn't shoot at their medics and they didn't shoot at ours. Maybe it's kind of the same thing. We don't shoot at your parachutes, and you don't shoot at ours. Maybe the Nazi commander was thinking to himself that maybe someday HE would be the one in the parachute.
I almost always post without Karma Bonus. I used to post with the bonus sometimes until someone modded me down as 'overrated', (I think it was because they did not understand the reference I was making to movie about Michelangelo that starred Charleton Heston. It never occurred to me that someone might have missed that movie.) That down mod cost me quite a bit of karma. I decided then and there that I would only post with karma bonus if I really felt it was important, which I don't think has ever happened. But I had a post once which was modded up by somebody, and then modded down again as 'overrated' and I still lost karma points. So, when I see a post of mine get modded up, I sort of cross my fingers that nobody's going to take aim at it.
My advice is, when you post on slashdot, don't take yourself too seriously, no matter how much karma you have.
You ask if I've used any software lately. Well, I'm a retired computer programmer who mostly worked in embedded systems or with Unix, programming in C and assembler. Since I came from a Unix background I went with Linux as soon as I heard about it back in the 90s. I don't want to come across as an obnoxious, haughty linux fanboy, particularly since I literally don't have much experience with anything else in the last 20 years so I can't compare it. And I also realize that not everybody has my background which made switching to linux so easy and natural for me. But after reading the responses to my question, maybe I'm living in a kind of bubble.
C++ programmers at $15/hr? Written at home or in a cafe? What kind of software is it? Where is the demand for that kind of stuff?
In the mid 1970s at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton Florida we shared a Univac 1106 with a couple of other colleges in Southern Florida and it used 36 bit words with 6 bit bytes. FIELDATA was a 6 bit character format that was used as it allowed 6 characters per word with no bits left over.
This was the first computer I learned to program in assembly. I remember how odd the stack architecture of the Intel 8080 seemed at first when I was learning its assembly language, especially for calling subroutines and returning from them. On the Univac you called a subroutine using the 'Store Location and Jump' instruction, which stored the address of the next sequential instruction in a specified location, so the subroutine would know where to return to.
'Nanotech' is a word that was used a lot a couple of decades ago, not so much anymore. (Replaced by AI and quantum computing?) But who knows? They could end up crafting microbes to eat up the plastic in the oceans maybe, or make a contribution to fighting global warming. Here's hoping.
At the time I more or less retired, that kind of support was in its infancy. I'm glad to hear that things have gotten better in some respects.
The big question is, how many of those kids should be learning programming.
When I started out in the late 70s, you were busy coding solutions to problems, and writing real code. Later it became more about memorizing big function/class libraries, which got old pretty fast.
I asked a younger guy who is in the business about it recently, and he said nowadays what you learn are 'frameworks', whatever that is.
Even back in the 70s, when I was taking classes, the beginning classes were big for Comp Sci majors, but as I progressed, they got smaller and smaller as more and more people realized it wasn't for them.
And I wonder how good all those 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers actually are at teaching programming.
First of all, I wonder how widespread 'small talk' is among various cultures. The only country outside the USA I ever spent much time in was Japan, and the Japanese often greet each other with phrases like "Ogenki desu ka' (Are you 'genki' where genki means something like feeling good, the 'O' at the beginning means something like 'honorable' and is often dispensed with.) I also heard Japanese say 'Doko iku no?' a lot, a casual form of where are you going? So I guess they did have small talk. Actually the Japanese have a lot of levels of politeness and formality and the finer points take a lot of study, for instance how low one should bow when meeting each other and so on. So they may not be a good example.
I've read and seen documentaries talking about how Americans in Arab Countries often appear rude and brash and have to learn the proper etiquette there.
Maybe this all goes back to times with a lot of war and feuding, and a sort of diplomatic protocol developed. Did the Finns ever have a tradition of feuds or tribal warfare in their history?
Even in the USA there are variations. Old fashioned country manners might be if you going to visit somebody about some business back in the days before telephones were common, when you first called on someone, you'd first spend some time talking about other things, each others health, the weather, whatever. I think this was to show respect, and the amount of time spent was small compared to the amount of time of actually getting to somebody else's farm house, and it wasn't like the person you were visiting had been watching the big game on TV and was anxious to get back to it.
There's also the notion of upward mobility. As immigrants became more prosperous and moved into the middle class, they wanted to act properly. Emily Post's book on etiquette was a big seller.
There may be an egalitarian vibe involved too. Well, as I say in the title, these are speculations.
Venus has a weak magnetic field compared to earth. Current scientific opinion seems to be that earth's magnetic field is what kept earth from losing its atmosphere the way Mars did.
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/10189/why-did-venus-not-lose-its-atmosphere-without-magnetic-field
My own favorite example of start and stop progress is aeronautics. As a kid, I remember seeing a Twilight Zone episode in which a World War I fighter pilot flew his plane into a cloud and came out in the present (which at the time the episode was made was the late 50s or maybe early 60s). So there was this scene of a World War I Biplane fighter taxing past Boeing B-52 stratofrotresses and other aircraft representing 30-40 years of progress in aviation, and the contrast was stark and amazing to my youthful mind. The pilot was an Englishman who thought he was still in World War I and commented to the first Americans he saw that he didn't realize we Americans were so advanced., That was circa 1960. Go forward 50-60 years and we're still flying B-52s. According to the wikipedia, they're expected to see use into 2050. What happened to all the initial progress in aviation tech?