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User: ooloorie

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  1. Re:MS-DOS and Intel x86 cpus were a setback on Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com) · · Score: 1

    There was no reason to continue the Apple II line at that point. Computing had moved forward and it was time to use a new CPU.

    The Apple IIgs had a new CPU, plus up to 8M of RAM, a 15 voice sound card, and color graphics.

  2. Re:MS-DOS and Intel x86 cpus were a setback on Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't know about that. Apple DOS was very well designed considering the fact that most of the disk control was done in software instead of hardware. Apple formatted disks had significantly more data on them than standard MFM formatted disks, and the date was more reliably stored--most Apple II disks still work today after decades of age.

    I.e., it had a clever disk device driver.

    The one big flaw of Apple DOS was that the interface was through BASIC instead of a standalone shell, and the +D escape kludge to have programs access DOS commands was pretty clunky, but the underlying system code was very well implemented.

    I.e. the actual OS other than the disk driver was not so good.

  3. Re:MS-DOS and Intel x86 cpus were a setback on Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com) · · Score: 1

    I believe Intel had shortages of the 8086, and the 8 bit bus kept costs down.

  4. Re:let them pay you on New Web Site Will Team Journalists With Programmers (sfgate.com) · · Score: 1

    If you read carefully, what they want to get is hired into tech companies to "help" engineers "understand" the consequence of their creations

    True. What they don't seem to understand is that (1) engineers generally understand the consequences of their creations, whether it's a social media website or a nuclear bomb, and (2) when we don't like the consequences of our creations, we just change jobs.

    A lot of people want to get into these companies because there is a lot of money to be made

    Journalists are even more desperate, with the number of jobs decreasing several percent every year.

  5. Re:no respect for journalism, eh? on New Web Site Will Team Journalists With Programmers (sfgate.com) · · Score: 1

    Oh, okay, that' s pretty much how social media companies operate.

    It is, but it isn't what programmers are paid for. Programmers are paid for delivering correct, robust, scalable, secure code, and the better ones generally do that.

    Let's turn that around and see what that disrespect feels like pointed at us

    Journalists frequently disrespect programmers. But why would I care? It's not about anybody's "feelings", it's about objective facts: the profession of journalism is disappearing because their "skills" aren't needed anymore.

    If you hate and revile the press indiscriminately, though, you run the danger of destroying one of the pillars of liberty.

    The "pillars of liberty" is free speech and an informed populace. Those are two concepts that have been anathema to corporate media and the journalists they employ for more than a century. What newspapers care about is profits, and what journalists care about is personal advancement at any cost.

  6. Re:MS-DOS and Intel x86 cpus were a setback on Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com) · · Score: 1

    Android is Linux, C, and Java, with software architectures from the 1980's, and ARM is proprietary and low end.

  7. Re:MS-DOS and Intel x86 cpus were a setback on Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com) · · Score: 1

    There were much better alternatives, from a technical perspective, at a similar low price point, like Z80, M68000, CPM, AmigaOS, etc.

    The IBM PC came out in 1981, when the dominant personal computers were the Apple II+, the Atari, and the TRS-80. The 8088 actually was a significant improvement over the 6502 or the Z80-with-bank-switching. IBM wanted to go with CP/M but Kildall blew the negotiations and ended up with MS-DOS. For all its faults, MS-DOS was still a better disk operating system than Apple DOS.

    The 68000 looks nice, but AmigaOS and MacOS had a tough time dealing with its large flat address space without an MMU. And its architecture wasn't future proof anyway.

    IBM tried to design an Apple II replacement shortly after the Apple II came out, and they succeeded spectacularly at that; the rest is just the burden of backwards compatibility. Apple blew it when they threw their Apple IIgs line into the trash and started over, largely because of Steve Jobs and his office politics.

    We probably should start over at some point soon, not so much because of the x86 instruction set, but because the architecture of modern PCs is convoluted, hard to support, and insecure due to layers and layers of backwards compatibility.

  8. why not later versions? on Microsoft 'Re-Open Sources' MS-DOS on GitHub (microsoft.com) · · Score: 1

    Are there legal problems with open sourcing 3.3? Is there any third party code? Maybe that could be removed prior to open sourcing.

  9. let them pay you on New Web Site Will Team Journalists With Programmers (sfgate.com) · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Why team with journalists? Journalists don't know anything, can't do anything, and don't bring anything useful to the table. In fact, if anything, they taint your work and your message with their biases and ideologies. Journalists used to be a necessary evil as gatekeepers to a costly, limited bandwidth distribution medium (paper, TV), but that function has been made obsolete. And journalists work for for profit corporations that turn your knowledge into their profits. They get something out of teaming with you, you don't get anything out of teaming with them.

    If you have something to say or contribute, skip the middleman and publish it and distribute it yourself. If you develop tools for detecting bias or censorship in Google, put them in a Github repository, publish a couple of papers on it, and record YouTube videos.

    And if journalists want to take advantage of your expertise as a programmer, make them pay consulting fees. After all, it is their corporate masters that make money from your skills and expertise and they should pay for it.

  10. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It's actually a whole new standard of low-class.

    Seems like a perfect match for Facebook corporate culture.

  11. Re:Too bad his name wasn't Clinton on Ex-NSA Employee Gets 5 Years In Prison For Taking Home Top Secret Files (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Yeah, it's just now the rest of the world is laughing at you.

    "Now"? You are a bit unfamiliar with history, it seems. Politicians and intellectuals in the rest of the world have been laughing at the US since it was founded. It's not something Americans care about or should care about. Ordinary people (like myself) have voted with our feet.

  12. Re:Too bad his name wasn't Clinton on Ex-NSA Employee Gets 5 Years In Prison For Taking Home Top Secret Files (cnet.com) · · Score: 2

    If it's such a clown gathering why would he even show up?

    The UN may be a disreputable organization composed of mostly disreputable nations, but like it or not, we have to deal with the rest of the world, unpleasant as that may be.

  13. the best and the brightest at the NSA on Ex-NSA Employee Gets 5 Years In Prison For Taking Home Top Secret Files (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    b) The Kaspersky software would not let him run that generator because it considered it harmful

    c) He disabled Kaspersky, ran the key generator and got his PC infected

    I'm glad to see that the NSA is hiring "the best and the brightest" when it comes to computer security!

  14. Re:unintended consequences on Mosquitoes Genetically Modified To Crash Species That Spreads Malaria (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Which part of "I'm not passing judgment on whether it should or shouldn't be done," was too hard to understand?

    I don't care. Really. It's not my continent. It's not my backyard.

    What I care about is not getting blamed for the consequences, no matter what Africans, governments, and NGOs decide to do.

  15. Re:unintended consequences on Mosquitoes Genetically Modified To Crash Species That Spreads Malaria (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    To think that the elimination of mosquitoes would somehow spell calamity for the human race is pearl clutching at it's finest.

    Well, lucky for me then that I didn't claim that it "spells calamity for the human race". In fact, as I was saying, it will cause African human populations to grow massively and wreak much more ecological destruction on the African continent. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is for you to decide (personally, I don't really care either way). But it's not something that the US and Europe should be held responsible for.

  16. Google CEO Sundar Pichai Is Headed To Washington This Week To Promote Google Censorship Technologies to US politicians and to Lobby for China

    There, FTFY

  17. unintended consequences on Mosquitoes Genetically Modified To Crash Species That Spreads Malaria (npr.org) · · Score: 2

    The mosquitoes were created in the hopes of using them as a potent new weapon in the long, frustrating fight against malaria. Malaria remains one of the world's deadliest diseases, killing more than 400,000 people every year, mostly children younger than 5 years old.

    All other unintended ecological consequences aside, mosquitoes and malaria are the main factor that makes wide areas of Africa effectively uninhabitable. Controlling them will lead to widespread deforestation, massive population growth, and probably result in famine and political upheavals. I'm not passing judgment on whether it should or shouldn't be done, but this is another example of Western technology radically altering developing nations, and I'm afraid the West will get blamed for the consequences again.

  18. Re:just strip them of legal protections on Should The US Government Break Up Google, Twitter, and Facebook? (siliconvalley.com) · · Score: 1

    "Criminalizing", in case you didn't know, means that a prosecutor can put you in jail for saying or publishing things that the government doesn't like.

    I recognized after writing this that you may not understand hyperbole, so let me put this in plain English:

    "Criminalizing", in case you didn't know, means that government can define categories of speech that allow a government prosecutor to charge you, and a court of law to impose jail time on you, merely for what you say.

  19. Re:just strip them of legal protections on Should The US Government Break Up Google, Twitter, and Facebook? (siliconvalley.com) · · Score: 1

    Because? Oh, right. Because you want to punish entities that you disfavor regardless of whether it violates what you claim to be your principled stance in favor of free speech and against European-style regulation of speech via those same platforms.

    Europe criminalizes speech. "Criminalizing", in case you didn't know, means that a prosecutor can put you in jail for saying or publishing things that the government doesn't like.

    I'm saying that private publishers in the US should lose their protection from civil liability when they exercise editorial control based on political views. Civil lawsuits require actual damages, require a private party to initiate, and don't result in jail time.

    Ask a competent lawyer to explain the difference to you if that is still too difficult for you to follow.

    And those protections are a special exemption from civil liability; since free speech is already guaranteed by the 1A, these special protections obviously don't protect free speech; what they protect is the ability of companies like Google to grow very, very big and not worry about certain lawsuits.

  20. Re:just strip them of legal protections on Should The US Government Break Up Google, Twitter, and Facebook? (siliconvalley.com) · · Score: 1

    47 U.S.C. 230(c) [cornell.edu] gives them legal protection from civil liability even if they exorcise editorial control.

    That applies to "private blocking and screening of offensive material", not to politically motivated blocking.

    Idiot

    Your signature.

  21. Individuals cannot operate under private contracts that absolves them of financial and legal responsibility, and allows them to act as a single financial entity. A government has to do that.

    You haven't thought that through. In any case, as I was saying, I agree with you that "we should just get rid of the government-created idea of a corporation". We'll just have to agree to disagree on what the consequences would be.

  22. Re:Signal to Noise Ratio on Should The US Government Break Up Google, Twitter, and Facebook? (siliconvalley.com) · · Score: 1

    Editorial control does not mean removing spam postings, it means selecting human-generated content based on viewpoint. So, if you bother to take the time to remove postings containing false statements about Hillary, people expect that you also remove postings containing false statements about your neighbor or your competitors.

    And I'm not proposing changing the law, I'm saying that the laws that already apply to the small websites you are worried about should equally apply to Google, Facebook, and Twitter, sites that currently get exemptions.

  23. See, the "accusation of bigotry" language would refer to an earlier instance where you'd called someone a bigot.

    Well, and in the case of Jourova, there was no need to point out that my statement represented my opinion. In responding to you, I highlighted that neither of our statements about each other is a statement that represents an objective truth, something you seem to have forgotten.

    Try again.

  24. Given your comments, it's clear that your claims of being a lawyer are either a lie or that you are a incompetent. I think there is nothing more to say.

  25. Re:just strip them of legal protections on Should The US Government Break Up Google, Twitter, and Facebook? (siliconvalley.com) · · Score: 1

    The person criticizing the EU for "criminalizing speech" earlier this week is now advocating for criminalizing speech

    No, merely opening them up to civil lawsuits.

    Hint: remove legal protection from those companies and you must remove them from all companies

    No, I'm merely suggesting implementing what is already law: you enjoy those legal protections if you don't exercise editorial control.

    Google, Facebook, and Twitter should lose those legal protections because they have started exercising editorial control.

    Nothing changes for anybody else.