I've been using it since the bbs days (early 80's) and works fine for me. The only real improvement that it has ever had was inline addition of content so you don't have to manually uuencode everything yourself. Other than that, vax mail was as close to perfect as you can get.
The reason that I'm not buying a smartwatch is not because i do not have the money, but because I think they are pointless to the way I live m life. That really goes for almost everything else produced today. I'm not into conspicuous consumption, novelties or impulse buys. What else is there? As far as life convenience items, I think I own them all.
Not on the first shot, but paying off a $100k is easily achievable in 6-7 years. Sell, buy a $200k house. Repeat a couple of times. At least I've known people who did that. Requires discipline.
How much does it cost to build a robot? I have dozens laying around my house. Parts are only a few dollars, what are you buying? Sounds like your minimum wage job is the least of your problems.
Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000/yr income?
I did exactly this and by going mostly off grid and reducing my debt to zero was able to reduce my yearly expenses to less than $4k/year not counting insurance. That leaves $20k/year of free money to play with/on and you know, that's actually quite a bit. Over $50/day. It doesn't sound like much, but when you have no other expenses, it is.
My first computer took me two years and almost killed me to earn. Today computers a thousand times me capable are given away for free in cereal boxes. Also a nearly infinite amount of learning resources. Thirty years ago you could spend a week learning something or solving a problem that now takes 15 seconds of google, not to mention the hundreds of free online books. Try buying a $22 book on $3 minimum wage ignoring the fact that most bookstores did not even carry computer books.
My very first pascal program was about 700 lines long and was a score keeping application for a number of schools at a sports meet. I was given the disks (turbopascal + database) the night before and the software was done by the next morning. Prior to this, I'd been programming a few years in BASIC and three months of C. Using ftoc, I've converted and debugged thousands of lines of FORTRAN (and C). As far as procedural languages go, they seem the same to me, I just have to remember the syntax fr whatever I'm dealing in...abut a 15 minute exercise.
This kinda describes me, but more along the lines of understood programming better than most of the CS people rather than falling into it. How many CS grads understand scaled integers, IEEE754, memory alignment, pages, memory controllers, jtag, vhdl, DMA, interrupt nesting, tcb, som, abi, BDM, MISRA, deferred interrupts, wimg, cache lines, etc? About 4 in the last 30 years. Most of these you probably don't even get in ojt, but found by research and interest.
? All the self trained programmers that I know, program in asm, C, mathematica or FORTRAN. I don't know java or anyone who does. I'm sure I could write a java program if you gave me a book half an hour and a lot of money (as I have 0 interest in doing so).
Temple of Apshai on a trs80 was the very first time I ever saw a computer in person. It belonged to my friend's dad. We played that game all the time, then stated modifying it:)
No computer here when I started either. And while my school was only a two mile walk (really, the bus did not go all the way to my house), I did walk about ten miles to see my very first Amiga whose development I'd been following religiously for a couple of years. There was one shop at the opposite end of the city...and again the bus did not go that far. Oh how I remember that walk...and how disappointed I was when I saw it. Just sitting there with the desktop, no one knew how to use it and I wasn't allowed near it. I still felt I was in he presence of greatness. Jay Miner was one of my heroes.
Haahhhhahaahah. That's almost my one experience in programming in my C class. The professor was treating it as a weed out class and covered the whole language in the first four lectures (variables, control structures, libraries, libraries and pointers). Out of 400 people in the class, only about 8 of us had any clue what as going on and the prof was replaced by someone who spent the rest of the semester teaching what he had already taught. I assume because I stopped going.
I have great confidence that this is exactly what will happen. On the flip side, computers are so ubiquitous and free for all practical purposes today that anyone with motivation will know far more than the teacher years before they enter the class. When my high school got its first computer, a few students and I would spend all of our time in the computer lab and we taught the teacher what to teach in his class (I don't think we were actually in the class). To be fair he had a math degree but had never seen a computer before.
In grade school I bought a computer book from radio shack earned from doing jobs around the neighborhood, most of them very sucky. Even though I was not allowed to cross the street, I rode my bike ten miles from home to the radio shack. I spent maybe a year memorizing that book while earning the hundreds of dollars ($948+tax) an 8k computer cost in 1980.
The computer fad started in the early 80's, so vic 20, atari and ti-94s were sold at practically any place that sold anything (including the produce department at the local grocery store).
I still did not own a computer so would spend dozens of hours every week making demos in basic and pseudo assembly (via peek and pokes) until I got kicked out. About a year and a couple hundred yard cleanups (in 45degree heat) later I'd made enough to by an 8k atari computer, but my parents wouldn't let me buy it because they were afraid i would take it apart and break it. Back at that time, most people thought you could break a computer by typing some bad command into it. Anyway, after months of nagging, they let me buy it. After that i was rarely allowed to use it and it was a constant major fight because we had only one tv and I was at the bottom of the priority list. So I'd usually have to wait until everyone was asleep before i could use it. And that meant experimenting and typing in programs from magazines.
I originally wanted a computer to play video games, but discovered that i liked programming more than games and so never really got into gaming other than the technical aspects. I liked to create them, but not so much to play them.
While taking physics my freshman year in high school, I had the completely novel and original idea of using computers to solve physics problems. That's when I started getting really interested in simulations. With the help of my physics teacher, by the time I graduated HS I had written a program to fly a realistically simulated space shuttle running on a pdp-04. Not real time, but a second by second state simulation where every second you'd be presented with a state vector of a dozen parameters and my program would tell you the commands (attitude, oms thrust, thrust angles etc).
Oh, and i did lock myself in the bathroom one night and take the comuter apart, but went back together fine.
My freshman year of college, i was required to take a course in C, that was enough experience to get me into an internship with JPL where I got to with some of the very top people in the field (of rocket science, not computers). That got me into anther internship, and another and another and so on. I'm really more of an engineer with a science education and have never had a class in programming other than the C class and it was only 1/3rd of a 3 hour class, the other 2/3rds being drafting and visualization. I started engineering consulting straight out of college because of the non existent job market and recession of 1990. It was the only way around hiring freezes. Mostly do hard real time in operating systems, hardware drivers and system requirements. Started hacking around with linux @1.13, but now mostly a user
I never thought they were cool, but definitely very very popular. When you say 80's, it's one of the first things I think of along with Miami Vice, soft focus and Nagels.
Slashdot Mirror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What's the difference between a drone and a plane on autopilot?
I've been using it since the bbs days (early 80's) and works fine for me. The only real improvement that it has ever had was inline addition of content so you don't have to manually uuencode everything yourself. Other than that, vax mail was as close to perfect as you can get.
I thought this was going to be about vax.
something similar from that era
pets.com and their sock
Lighting: LED lighting is so inexpensive as to practically not be worth worrying over at this time.
Selling it is the hard part today.
The reason that I'm not buying a smartwatch is not because i do not have the money, but because I think they are pointless to the way I live m life. That really goes for almost everything else produced today. I'm not into conspicuous consumption, novelties or impulse buys. What else is there? As far as life convenience items, I think I own them all.
Not on the first shot, but paying off a $100k is easily achievable in 6-7 years. Sell, buy a $200k house. Repeat a couple of times. At least I've known people who did that. Requires discipline.
demographics is destiny
2.01, below replacement rate.
It's still below replace rate.
I'm guessing some foreign country.
finish us off as a nation.
Doing the math, this is the only end that I can see.
How much does it cost to build a robot? I have dozens laying around my house. Parts are only a few dollars, what are you buying? Sounds like your minimum wage job is the least of your problems.
Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
I did exactly this and by going mostly off grid and reducing my debt to zero was able to reduce my yearly expenses to less than $4k/year not counting insurance. That leaves $20k/year of free money to play with/on and you know, that's actually quite a bit. Over $50/day. It doesn't sound like much, but when you have no other expenses, it is.
My first computer took me two years and almost killed me to earn. Today computers a thousand times me capable are given away for free in cereal boxes. Also a nearly infinite amount of learning resources. Thirty years ago you could spend a week learning something or solving a problem that now takes 15 seconds of google, not to mention the hundreds of free online books. Try buying a $22 book on $3 minimum wage ignoring the fact that most bookstores did not even carry computer books.
I was born knowing how to code
My very first pascal program was about 700 lines long and was a score keeping application for a number of schools at a sports meet. I was given the disks (turbopascal + database) the night before and the software was done by the next morning. Prior to this, I'd been programming a few years in BASIC and three months of C. Using ftoc, I've converted and debugged thousands of lines of FORTRAN (and C). As far as procedural languages go, they seem the same to me, I just have to remember the syntax fr whatever I'm dealing in...abut a 15 minute exercise.
up primarily as a programmer as a career.
This kinda describes me, but more along the lines of understood programming better than most of the CS people rather than falling into it. How many CS grads understand scaled integers, IEEE754, memory alignment, pages, memory controllers, jtag, vhdl, DMA, interrupt nesting, tcb, som, abi, BDM, MISRA, deferred interrupts, wimg, cache lines, etc? About 4 in the last 30 years. Most of these you probably don't even get in ojt, but found by research and interest.
? All the self trained programmers that I know, program in asm, C, mathematica or FORTRAN. I don't know java or anyone who does. I'm sure I could write a java program if you gave me a book half an hour and a lot of money (as I have 0 interest in doing so).
Temple of Apshai on a trs80 was the very first time I ever saw a computer in person. It belonged to my friend's dad. We played that game all the time, then stated modifying it :)
No computer here when I started either. And while my school was only a two mile walk (really, the bus did not go all the way to my house), I did walk about ten miles to see my very first Amiga whose development I'd been following religiously for a couple of years. There was one shop at the opposite end of the city...and again the bus did not go that far. Oh how I remember that walk...and how disappointed I was when I saw it. Just sitting there with the desktop, no one knew how to use it and I wasn't allowed near it. I still felt I was in he presence of greatness. Jay Miner was one of my heroes.
Except I attended two lectures at most
Haahhhhahaahah. That's almost my one experience in programming in my C class. The professor was treating it as a weed out class and covered the whole language in the first four lectures (variables, control structures, libraries, libraries and pointers). Out of 400 people in the class, only about 8 of us had any clue what as going on and the prof was replaced by someone who spent the rest of the semester teaching what he had already taught. I assume because I stopped going.
most likely demotivate students
I have great confidence that this is exactly what will happen. On the flip side, computers are so ubiquitous and free for all practical purposes today that anyone with motivation will know far more than the teacher years before they enter the class. When my high school got its first computer, a few students and I would spend all of our time in the computer lab and we taught the teacher what to teach in his class (I don't think we were actually in the class). To be fair he had a math degree but had never seen a computer before.
The computer fad started in the early 80's, so vic 20, atari and ti-94s were sold at practically any place that sold anything (including the produce department at the local grocery store).
I still did not own a computer so would spend dozens of hours every week making demos in basic and pseudo assembly (via peek and pokes) until I got kicked out. About a year and a couple hundred yard cleanups (in 45degree heat) later I'd made enough to by an 8k atari computer, but my parents wouldn't let me buy it because they were afraid i would take it apart and break it. Back at that time, most people thought you could break a computer by typing some bad command into it. Anyway, after months of nagging, they let me buy it. After that i was rarely allowed to use it and it was a constant major fight because we had only one tv and I was at the bottom of the priority list. So I'd usually have to wait until everyone was asleep before i could use it. And that meant experimenting and typing in programs from magazines.
I originally wanted a computer to play video games, but discovered that i liked programming more than games and so never really got into gaming other than the technical aspects. I liked to create them, but not so much to play them.
While taking physics my freshman year in high school, I had the completely novel and original idea of using computers to solve physics problems. That's when I started getting really interested in simulations. With the help of my physics teacher, by the time I graduated HS I had written a program to fly a realistically simulated space shuttle running on a pdp-04. Not real time, but a second by second state simulation where every second you'd be presented with a state vector of a dozen parameters and my program would tell you the commands (attitude, oms thrust, thrust angles etc).
Oh, and i did lock myself in the bathroom one night and take the comuter apart, but went back together fine. My freshman year of college, i was required to take a course in C, that was enough experience to get me into an internship with JPL where I got to with some of the very top people in the field (of rocket science, not computers). That got me into anther internship, and another and another and so on. I'm really more of an engineer with a science education and have never had a class in programming other than the C class and it was only 1/3rd of a 3 hour class, the other 2/3rds being drafting and visualization. I started engineering consulting straight out of college because of the non existent job market and recession of 1990. It was the only way around hiring freezes. Mostly do hard real time in operating systems, hardware drivers and system requirements. Started hacking around with linux @1.13, but now mostly a user
I never thought they were cool, but definitely very very popular. When you say 80's, it's one of the first things I think of along with Miami Vice, soft focus and Nagels.