I have a bunch of Macs and I don't swear at my computers. I often swear at the software, though. Quickbooks is very frustrating. Microsoft Word irritates me all the time (I'm switching to Pages but people will send me Word documents.) Even the operating system sometimes comes in for a few choice words, but I don't swear at my computers. Ever.
The reason was that the keyed in bootloader didn't have the instructions to detect the end of tape signal (because that would have required more instructions to be entered with the switches). The short piece of tape with the "real" loader just kept going. In normal operation, when EOT was detected, the reader stopped and the trailer was enough to keep the tape from flying out.
I used machines where the inhibit line of the highest words of the core memory was wired to a switch to disallow overwriting the loader once it was read in from the tape. It limited usable memory by 128 16-bit words as I recall, which was over 1% of the 8k words, but the trade-off was almost always worthwhile. And if you really needed that memory, you got to shoot the bootloader tape across the room when you were done!
Despite the service issues, Comcast does provide broadband service (at least in the Portland area) without either cable TV or telephone services. I don't reach the data transfer caps (which are finally explicit) and I've solved the email alias problems by using gmail (Comcast frequently refuses mail from email forwarding services as spam). I'd love to have some true competition, but I do get relatively reliable broadband service from Comcast without any other services.
I suppose this is a dead thread by now, but speaking of more than two or three audio channels (and sitting in the middle of a group), Canadian artist Janet Cardiff has a great installation consisting of 40 speakers on stands, each reproducing (mostly) one of the 40 voices singing Thomas Tallis' 40-voice motet Spem in Alium nunquam habui in a 15 minute loop including about three minutes of quiet talking from the recording session. The speakers are arranged in a large oval and you can wander about in the gallery trying out different positions. A fascinating demonstration of multi-channel recording and playback that wouldn't have been possible not so many years ago (imagine syncing 20 2-track tape decks!)
Ken Thompson wrote the original sh. In Unix Version 7 sh was replaced with the Bourne shell, confusingly also called sh. Some of us never really adjusted to the Bourne shell and over time switched to csh or ksh (the Korn shell written by David Korn). In my maturity, I recognize that it was all as inconsequential as vi versus emacs. (No contest really, vi is better.)
A cursory look at a map shows that most of Africa is in the Northern Hemisphere--my eye says about two thirds. I didn't have a great map to look at, but some of Africa is more northerly than Texas or Florida.
My son is learning to program in high school. My wife began learning in high school and we met when we both worked as programmers. My father-in-law started programming in the '60s on an IBM 1620 (a decimal machine). Given how old we were when our son was born, there may well be fourth generation coders out there somewhere.
I guess my father-in-law's two other grandsons, age 10 and 13 are also third generation.
I lived for a few years in Los Alamos, NM which may have the highest concentration of Ph.Ds (mostly in physics and chemistry but quite a few in math and CS). Physicists in particular make terrible politicians, apparently because compromise isn't part of the scientific method. When you've spent your life searching for the verifiable truth, the concept of two correct points of view simply doesn't exist. From that perspective "If I'm right, you must be wrong, and because I'm arguing from the facts, you're ignorant to boot." Makes for stalemates--not that that's entirely different from what we have now, of course.
Islam is the only major religion...[which]...preaches that the penalty for leaving the religion is death
Islam is about six hundred years younger than christianism. Much more recently than six hundred years ago Roman Catholics were killing "heretics" who tried to practice a related form of christianism. In England, the reverse was happening, though on a smaller scale. And of course all the christianists were happily killing Jews, followers of a closely related religion. I think it's easy to imagine what would have happened to anyone trying to become a muslim in that environment. Let's just hope it doesn't take several hundred years for muslims to become as relatively civilized as the christianists seem to be today.
In my not especially humble opinion, you are completely wrong. Computer science is the mathematics of computers. It may indeed be mental masturbation some of the time, but again in my opinion, masturbation is sexual activity.
Analysis of algorithms, theory of computation, numerical analysis, syntax and semantics of computer languages . . . there is a long list of theoretical topics which sometimes aid in "practical implementation of complex concepts on limited physical computers" but which merit study even if they don't currently contribute directly to that end. Just like mathematics, there may be eventual applications which less limited computers will allow, or the process of studying these things will provide tools and insights into current problems.
Even in the "practical" world, the real question is "Which is the right tool for the job?" Interpretive languages are sometimes the right answer (though I'm not sure that Java is ever the right answer myself--I try to be open-minded on that). I think they are particularly the right answer in the early stages of learning computer programming and often in "exploratory" or prototype work. For a professional programmer it's important to have a repertoire. For a beginner or a non-professional, "Bus error: core dumped" is a little harsh. And no one should have to use the horror that is C++.
no one is "pining for the good old days of punch cards".
Drop the deck? Go back to start.
Insert an new level of indentation? Well, the first time, you can just indent by two instead of four, or one instead of two, but there's an obvious limit. Of course, Fortran doesn't need indentation because you have label numbers and Gotos!
And don't fold, spindle or mutilate--or let them get even a little damp. The accounting staff at the university kept the account data on cards because it was more "dependable" than tapes. Then the government asked to audit the computer charges for some research projects. The boxes of cards stacked like cordwood for a few years in the air-conditioned computer room repeatedly jammed the card readers. Someone learned a lesson and started keeping the data on tape.
My son's high school programming class starts in Python and finishes the year in Java. In previous years, they have started in Scheme. His instructor says that since they switched, he sees much more experimentation and "programming for fun".
I started (over 40 years ago) with an Algol variant and proceeded to Fortran. (C hadn't been invented yet.) As a professional programmer with a computer science style background (as opposed to the engineering style of today--an improvement I think), Scheme appealed to my aesthetic sensibility, but especially at the high school level, making it fun is much more important. Plenty of time to "graduate" to the drudge work of Java (yes, I've been paid to use it) and the painful bugs of C (used it since 1976, sworn bitterly at it, defended it valiantly against all detractors and it's still the one I'm most proficient in).
Basically, when I started programming, a high percentage of computer users were programmers. These days, that percentage is vanishingly small. High school and introductory college courses should reflect that and focus on basic computer concepts well-learned by being fun enough to just fiddle around with.
I have observed, both watching others and observing myself, that when people are on the phone (not just a cell, but any phone), they tend to take themselves out of the current environment: basically zone out and connect with the person they are conversing with. A passenger or anyone in the current environment remains part of the current environment. You feel no need to maintain the conversation when something untoward happens because the passenger can observe the same things you do. When you are on the phone, you are trying to maintain a separate existence shared with the other person.
Pay attention to your own responses in the two circumstances and I claim you will quickly notice the difference.
just go to Salon.com and enter "EFF" in their search box. The article actually comes up first (and yes, I use Firefox with NoScript, which another poster complained about.)
Actually, he moved to Oregon in 2004. I thought he lived in West Linn, but on at least one website, Dunthorpe claimed him. They're both suburbs of Portland.
The high schoolers don't do much with the automation side of things (their adult mentors sort most of that out usually)...
I would say that depends on the team. My son's team (which competed in the nationals--we've just been home an hour or so) did all the work--hardware, software, control systems. Their rule is "The coach doesn't touch the robot." They placed several rings in the autonomous period (at both regional and national competition) using only the camera (unlike teams whose adult advisors added ultrasonic sensors). They made it to nationals by winning the Chairman's Award at their regional.
I have heard that there are reasons why the rules allow adult "mentors" to essentially design and build the entire robot. As I understand it, actually driving the robot in competition is the only thing that adults can't do--they can even be the strategist on the field. I think they should get away from that. Kids that age really are young adults, and do have amazing capabilities if you give them some basic training and support. What's the best way to learn? Do it yourself!
I guess technically, Klickitat County and the whole north side of the Columbia River is in Washington, not Oregon. I previewed for formatting but not content.
The only backups that do any good are the ones that you actually make. I've tried various things that require doing by hand, going back to mounting 9 track tapes on PDP-11 tape drives in the seventies. I've made floppy, CD-ROM and DVD-RW backups on an intermittent basis. In general, when the time came for disaster recovery, the backups were too old to do any good. Unless you are far more conscientious than I am, completely automatic is the way to go.
I use Retrospect 6.1 to run nightly incremental backups of four Macs to two separate Linux machines on alternate nights (Raid 1 on the cheap, I guess). I do have to check every week or two to be sure that Retrospect hasn't wedged. The user interface is way too complicated, but I've come to terms with it over the last six or seven years. I used to have full backups scheduled, but they take quite a long time and frequently either wedged or took so long that they interferred with the other backups. I don't have super regular "off-site" backup, but my house hasn't burned down yet. (We all use laptops as our main computers, so I do keep an external drive at our vacation home and run backups when we take our laptops out there. )
I've not only recovered indivudual files accidentally deleted or damaged but recovered from three complete drive meltdowns with no loss of work in two cases and only a few hours worth in the third, so I consider it worth the time and money.
In summary, if you don't actually do the backups, you're toast. If your work or your time is worth money, you can't afford not to do backups, and you shouldn't hesitate to spend some money. And finally, if you haven't done a restore from your backups, it is practically guaranteed that they don't work.
When we were just switching from terminals which printed letters on paper (not just teletypes, but IBM 2741, TI Silent 700s (thermal image printing) and various "daisy wheel" terminals), the first "glass teletypes" often had a artificial keyswitch "click" to reassure us that our typing was actually working. It was a big advance (for those who appreciate the silence) to get a programmable option to turn that sound off.
It may be true that, in the present day, no one codes in binary, but I have. On a machine with bit variable instruction length! Also in octal, hexadecimal and even (a very tiny bit) decimal on an old IBM 1620. (You could actually load data and instructions into memory by typing digits on the IBM Executive-style typewriter console.)
Most of my binary etc. code was patched into previously compiled program images which couldn't be recreated from source for some reason, but a small amount was entered through the switch panel of what were then called mini-computers, including the DEC PDP-8 and PDP-11 and the HP2116 (both A and B).
At the time (70s and early 80s), this wasn't even especially unusual.
Since I have never owned a television set, I really never watch at home at all. When I visit people who have TV, I try to avoid any room where it's on, mostly because the droning, non-stop sound irritates me. I watched an episode of the Simpsons at my parent's house sometime in the last decade because I had heard it was entertaining. It was, but not enough to have a television in the house. I haven't watched another full program or episode of anything since the early 1980s. The last time I wished I had access to a television was in 1987 when there was an earthquake in the Bay Area and I wanted to see some pictures without waiting for the next day's newspaper.
I can watch DVDs on my computer, and I've watched part of a couple, but I can acquire information so much more rapidly by reading than watching and listening to video sources. Video is too slow for my brain!
Banks gave up checking signatures decades ago. Individual tellers may occasionally make inquires about someone cashing a check (not very often) but there are simply too many checks in the system, and the rate of fraud is too low to make signature checking cost effective.
Over 10 years ago, a branch manager at one of the largest banks in the US politely but firmly asked me to remove the "two signatures required" option from a checking account before he would let me open a second one. The bank was no longer willing to assume the responsibility to ensure that the check had two signatures, much less match them with a signature card.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure I'm missing the "point" of your post, but the current values (market close 3/24/2011) for Microsoft and Apple are:
Microsoft 217 (not 317) billion
Apple 318 (not 168) billion
I believe that only Exxon (410 billion) has a larger market cap than Apple.
I have a bunch of Macs and I don't swear at my computers. I often swear at the software, though. Quickbooks is very frustrating. Microsoft Word irritates me all the time (I'm switching to Pages but people will send me Word documents.) Even the operating system sometimes comes in for a few choice words, but I don't swear at my computers. Ever.
Well, maybe once.
The reason was that the keyed in bootloader didn't have the instructions to detect the end of tape signal (because that would have required more instructions to be entered with the switches). The short piece of tape with the "real" loader just kept going. In normal operation, when EOT was detected, the reader stopped and the trailer was enough to keep the tape from flying out.
I used machines where the inhibit line of the highest words of the core memory was wired to a switch to disallow overwriting the loader once it was read in from the tape. It limited usable memory by 128 16-bit words as I recall, which was over 1% of the 8k words, but the trade-off was almost always worthwhile. And if you really needed that memory, you got to shoot the bootloader tape across the room when you were done!
Despite the service issues, Comcast does provide broadband service (at least in the Portland area) without either cable TV or telephone services. I don't reach the data transfer caps (which are finally explicit) and I've solved the email alias problems by using gmail (Comcast frequently refuses mail from email forwarding services as spam). I'd love to have some true competition, but I do get relatively reliable broadband service from Comcast without any other services.
I suppose this is a dead thread by now, but speaking of more than two or three audio channels (and sitting in the middle of a group), Canadian artist Janet Cardiff has a great installation consisting of 40 speakers on stands, each reproducing (mostly) one of the 40 voices singing Thomas Tallis' 40-voice motet Spem in Alium nunquam habui in a 15 minute loop including about three minutes of quiet talking from the recording session. The speakers are arranged in a large oval and you can wander about in the gallery trying out different positions. A fascinating demonstration of multi-channel recording and playback that wouldn't have been possible not so many years ago (imagine syncing 20 2-track tape decks!)
Google "Janet Cardiff Forty Part Motet"
Ken Thompson wrote the original sh. In Unix Version 7 sh was replaced with the Bourne shell, confusingly also called sh. Some of us never really adjusted to the Bourne shell and over time switched to csh or ksh (the Korn shell written by David Korn). In my maturity, I recognize that it was all as inconsequential as vi versus emacs. (No contest really, vi is better.)
A cursory look at a map shows that most of Africa is in the Northern Hemisphere--my eye says about two thirds. I didn't have a great map to look at, but some of Africa is more northerly than Texas or Florida.
My son is learning to program in high school. My wife began learning in high school and we met when we both worked as programmers. My father-in-law started programming in the '60s on an IBM 1620 (a decimal machine). Given how old we were when our son was born, there may well be fourth generation coders out there somewhere.
I guess my father-in-law's two other grandsons, age 10 and 13 are also third generation.
I lived for a few years in Los Alamos, NM which may have the highest concentration of Ph.Ds (mostly in physics and chemistry but quite a few in math and CS). Physicists in particular make terrible politicians, apparently because compromise isn't part of the scientific method. When you've spent your life searching for the verifiable truth, the concept of two correct points of view simply doesn't exist. From that perspective "If I'm right, you must be wrong, and because I'm arguing from the facts, you're ignorant to boot." Makes for stalemates--not that that's entirely different from what we have now, of course.
And, no, I don't have a Ph.D in anything.
Islam is the only major religion...[which]...preaches that the penalty for leaving the religion is death
Islam is about six hundred years younger than christianism. Much more recently than six hundred years ago Roman Catholics were killing "heretics" who tried to practice a related form of christianism. In England, the reverse was happening, though on a smaller scale. And of course all the christianists were happily killing Jews, followers of a closely related religion. I think it's easy to imagine what would have happened to anyone trying to become a muslim in that environment. Let's just hope it doesn't take several hundred years for muslims to become as relatively civilized as the christianists seem to be today.
In my not especially humble opinion, you are completely wrong. Computer science is the mathematics of computers. It may indeed be mental masturbation some of the time, but again in my opinion, masturbation is sexual activity.
Analysis of algorithms, theory of computation, numerical analysis, syntax and semantics of computer languages . . . there is a long list of theoretical topics which sometimes aid in "practical implementation of complex concepts on limited physical computers" but which merit study even if they don't currently contribute directly to that end. Just like mathematics, there may be eventual applications which less limited computers will allow, or the process of studying these things will provide tools and insights into current problems.
Even in the "practical" world, the real question is "Which is the right tool for the job?" Interpretive languages are sometimes the right answer (though I'm not sure that Java is ever the right answer myself--I try to be open-minded on that). I think they are particularly the right answer in the early stages of learning computer programming and often in "exploratory" or prototype work. For a professional programmer it's important to have a repertoire. For a beginner or a non-professional, "Bus error: core dumped" is a little harsh. And no one should have to use the horror that is C++.
no one is "pining for the good old days of punch cards".
Drop the deck? Go back to start.
Insert an new level of indentation? Well, the first time, you can just indent by two instead of four, or one instead of two, but there's an obvious limit. Of course, Fortran doesn't need indentation because you have label numbers and Gotos!
And don't fold, spindle or mutilate--or let them get even a little damp. The accounting staff at the university kept the account data on cards because it was more "dependable" than tapes. Then the government asked to audit the computer charges for some research projects. The boxes of cards stacked like cordwood for a few years in the air-conditioned computer room repeatedly jammed the card readers. Someone learned a lesson and started keeping the data on tape.
My son's high school programming class starts in Python and finishes the year in Java. In previous years, they have started in Scheme. His instructor says that since they switched, he sees much more experimentation and "programming for fun".
I started (over 40 years ago) with an Algol variant and proceeded to Fortran. (C hadn't been invented yet.) As a professional programmer with a computer science style background (as opposed to the engineering style of today--an improvement I think), Scheme appealed to my aesthetic sensibility, but especially at the high school level, making it fun is much more important. Plenty of time to "graduate" to the drudge work of Java (yes, I've been paid to use it) and the painful bugs of C (used it since 1976, sworn bitterly at it, defended it valiantly against all detractors and it's still the one I'm most proficient in).
Basically, when I started programming, a high percentage of computer users were programmers. These days, that percentage is vanishingly small. High school and introductory college courses should reflect that and focus on basic computer concepts well-learned by being fun enough to just fiddle around with.
I have observed, both watching others and observing myself, that when people are on the phone (not just a cell, but any phone), they tend to take themselves out of the current environment: basically zone out and connect with the person they are conversing with. A passenger or anyone in the current environment remains part of the current environment. You feel no need to maintain the conversation when something untoward happens because the passenger can observe the same things you do. When you are on the phone, you are trying to maintain a separate existence shared with the other person.
Pay attention to your own responses in the two circumstances and I claim you will quickly notice the difference.
just go to Salon.com and enter "EFF" in their search box. The article actually comes up first (and yes, I use Firefox with NoScript, which another poster complained about.)
He lives in San Jose these days . . .
Actually, he moved to Oregon in 2004. I thought he lived in West Linn, but on at least one website, Dunthorpe claimed him. They're both suburbs of Portland.
The high schoolers don't do much with the automation side of things (their adult mentors sort most of that out usually)...
I would say that depends on the team. My son's team (which competed in the nationals--we've just been home an hour or so) did all the work--hardware, software, control systems. Their rule is "The coach doesn't touch the robot." They placed several rings in the autonomous period (at both regional and national competition) using only the camera (unlike teams whose adult advisors added ultrasonic sensors). They made it to nationals by winning the Chairman's Award at their regional.
I have heard that there are reasons why the rules allow adult "mentors" to essentially design and build the entire robot. As I understand it, actually driving the robot in competition is the only thing that adults can't do--they can even be the strategist on the field. I think they should get away from that. Kids that age really are young adults, and do have amazing capabilities if you give them some basic training and support. What's the best way to learn? Do it yourself!
I guess technically, Klickitat County and the whole north side of the Columbia River is in Washington, not Oregon. I previewed for formatting but not content.
While we're collecting, there's Concretehenge here in Oregon:
http://www.maryhillmuseum.org/about.htm/
"...a full scale replica of England's famous neolithic Stonehenge."
(Scroll down to "Maryhill's Stonehenge".)
The only backups that do any good are the ones that you actually make. I've tried various things that require doing by hand, going back to mounting 9 track tapes on PDP-11 tape drives in the seventies. I've made floppy, CD-ROM and DVD-RW backups on an intermittent basis. In general, when the time came for disaster recovery, the backups were too old to do any good. Unless you are far more conscientious than I am, completely automatic is the way to go.
I use Retrospect 6.1 to run nightly incremental backups of four Macs to two separate Linux machines on alternate nights (Raid 1 on the cheap, I guess). I do have to check every week or two to be sure that Retrospect hasn't wedged. The user interface is way too complicated, but I've come to terms with it over the last six or seven years. I used to have full backups scheduled, but they take quite a long time and frequently either wedged or took so long that they interferred with the other backups. I don't have super regular "off-site" backup, but my house hasn't burned down yet. (We all use laptops as our main computers, so I do keep an external drive at our vacation home and run backups when we take our laptops out there. )
I've not only recovered indivudual files accidentally deleted or damaged but recovered from three complete drive meltdowns with no loss of work in two cases and only a few hours worth in the third, so I consider it worth the time and money.
In summary, if you don't actually do the backups, you're toast. If your work or your time is worth money, you can't afford not to do backups, and you shouldn't hesitate to spend some money. And finally, if you haven't done a restore from your backups, it is practically guaranteed that they don't work.
When we were just switching from terminals which printed letters on paper (not just teletypes, but IBM 2741, TI Silent 700s (thermal image printing) and various "daisy wheel" terminals), the first "glass teletypes" often had a artificial keyswitch "click" to reassure us that our typing was actually working. It was a big advance (for those who appreciate the silence) to get a programmable option to turn that sound off.
It may be true that, in the present day, no one codes in binary, but I have. On a machine with bit variable instruction length! Also in octal, hexadecimal and even (a very tiny bit) decimal on an old IBM 1620. (You could actually load data and instructions into memory by typing digits on the IBM Executive-style typewriter console.)
Most of my binary etc. code was patched into previously compiled program images which couldn't be recreated from source for some reason, but a small amount was entered through the switch panel of what were then called mini-computers, including the DEC PDP-8 and PDP-11 and the HP2116 (both A and B).
At the time (70s and early 80s), this wasn't even especially unusual.
Since I have never owned a television set, I really never watch at home at all. When I visit people who have TV, I try to avoid any room where it's on, mostly because the droning, non-stop sound irritates me. I watched an episode of the Simpsons at my parent's house sometime in the last decade because I had heard it was entertaining. It was, but not enough to have a television in the house. I haven't watched another full program or episode of anything since the early 1980s. The last time I wished I had access to a television was in 1987 when there was an earthquake in the Bay Area and I wanted to see some pictures without waiting for the next day's newspaper.
I can watch DVDs on my computer, and I've watched part of a couple, but I can acquire information so much more rapidly by reading than watching and listening to video sources. Video is too slow for my brain!
Banks gave up checking signatures decades ago. Individual tellers may occasionally make inquires about someone cashing a check (not very often) but there are simply too many checks in the system, and the rate of fraud is too low to make signature checking cost effective.
Over 10 years ago, a branch manager at one of the largest banks in the US politely but firmly asked me to remove the "two signatures required" option from a checking account before he would let me open a second one. The bank was no longer willing to assume the responsibility to ensure that the check had two signatures, much less match them with a signature card.
Her full name is Nelle Harper Lee, and she's been a woman all her life.