No, I've never heard of CP/M; I'll look it up. Which I've just done, and although it may not exactly support MY standpoint, it in no way supports yours. http://www.maxframe.com/CPM.HTM has a quick synopsis.
What, then, is a "first mover"? According to http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid 19_gci509397,00.html , "In the business world, a first mover is a company that aims to gain an advantageous and perhaps insurmountable market position by being the first to establish itself in a given market."
Now, I'm the last person to assert that if a company, paradigm, orgamism, WHATEVER has an advantage, or even a HUGE advantage over its competitors, that it's ALWAYS going to be on top; "insurmountable" is never, or rarely, literally that. However, very few people are going to argue with Microsoft's huge dominance of software these days, or with Intel's position in microprocessors (embedded ones, too). You may argue with the fact that some of the companies in the list were actually not the VERY first to go into their respective markets (but some of them were!); however, as my links show, the companies were, in many cases, the first to popularize their technologies, and popularizing, whether through advertisement, word-of-mouth, or even by locking the market onto whatever "standard" you're working on is just as important as having a truly useful, innovative product (fortunately or unfortunately).
I apologize for the term "knee-jerk reaction" I used in my original posts, and realize that you have some good points. However, in your first post you gave no evidence to back up your "insight", which was, essentially, that the winners get to write the history books. I have the feeling that we'll not agree on these points, but thank goodness the internet is anonymous, eh? And truly, debates, even dumb ones, make life interesting.:)
I'm sorry, but I have to repost something I posted earlier, in this same thread. I don't deny that the phrase the real first movers have been wiped from the public mind might be (somewhat) insightful, but I'd like some actual refutation to the points which were quoted. Actually, the parent poster is correct (to the extent that I checked). Here are the facts I found (3 minutes, dudes -- not diffucult!):
Actually, Xerox WAS the first photocopier company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocopier ; TI seems to be a little ahead of Intel for microprocessors (but close!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor ; TI developed the transistor radio, but Sony very much popularized it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio; and so forth. (AOL was a direct competitor with CompuServe, and, in fact, did a lot to popularize it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL). The thing that clued me in was the Xerox comment (since I knew they were the first photocopier company), but, in fact it was mainly your knee-jerk reaction and lack of any real information that made me go look these up.
Actually, Xerox WAS the first photocopier company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocopier; TI seems to be a little ahead of Intel for microprocessors (but close!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor; TI developed the transistor radio, but Sony very much popularized it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio; and so forth. (AOL was a direct competitor with CompuServe, and, in fact, did a lot to popularize it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL). The thing that clued me in was the Xerox comment (since I knew they were the first photocopier company), but, in fact it was mainly your knee-jerk reaction and lack of any real information that made me go look these up.
Anyone else see that as "Solar-Powered Autonomous Underwear Vehicles"? 'cause, at least for me, that's talking about a spot where the sun don't normally shine...
Perhaps. But the problem with slang in general, and "urban slang" especially, is that it is *so* dependent on puns, knowledge of popular (or geek) culture in one particular part of the world, and so forth. I fear that if many of these slang words/phrases are translated, unless the translators are especially good at capturing all or most of the "background" things in a given definition, the whole impact of the slang term will be totally lost. Explaining a joke usually takes the point of the joke and totally chews it up.
Somewhat like translating haikus into English. The whole 5-7-5 thing is fun and challenging, I suppose (I personally hated having to write them in middle school, mainly because it was in lieu of worthwhile reading and writing), but (supposedly; I don't know Japanese) the poems in the parent language probably have a lot of import that the translated-to language may lack.
Then again, a woman at a party once told James Thurber that she'd read a French translation of his My Life and Hard Times, adding, "You know, the book is even better in French!" To which Thurber replied, "Yes---my work tends to lose something in the original."
Dude, that had better not be a rip on Richard Dean Anderson. Not only does he have way too many names, but he'll take you out with a wad of bubblegum and piece of grass.
w/o it [leadership, vision, direction, etc.?], [open-source will] remain as it is: stagnant.
Ouch. Somehow I really very much doubt that anyone who's followed an open-source project these days thinks they're stagnating.
In addition, how can one end up with a "Microsoft of the OSS"? That entity, whatever it is, would have to control almost all features of the product, which is virtually against the very definition of "open source".
Even if one argues that (for a perhaps less-than-apt -- ahem -- example; someone will correct me on this, I'm sure -- as they should; I release this post under no license) RedHat is somewhat of a controller of linux, there are a LOT of flavors of linux, in addition to BSD (dead or not:), etc. And, believe you me, these other distros aren't going to throw in with RedHat.
I could not find a way to achieve "no fucus" in the GUI toolkit...
Ah, yes. The good old "fucus" problem in GUIs. Some programs are absolutely genius when it comes to the "fucu" part of it.
I don't know if it was meant to be that way, but I love the free-verse format of your post. Really, all/. posts and main article submissions! should be done that way. The editors might do something then.
For another such bit of trivia (and this one's much easier to work out), give this riddle to your friends:
Imagine a (perfect) sphere the size of Earth, with a rope tight around some equatorial line, circumnavigating it. If you wanted to have the rope one meter above the ground all the way around the sphere, how much rope would you have to tie on to the end to do so?
The answer, as it's very easy to see after knowing the answer, is 2Pi meters, or about 6.28 meters. Most people, without checking the math, are very surprised that it's such a small number.
If you have an nVidia card, there's a nice little perk in Mepis' "System Center": you just say "use the nVidia driver", and it works.
ATI can be a very different story. Wish they'd come out with some reasonable drivers for linux. But I've gotten it to work with my Radeon card -- it needed a kernel recompilation -- the first I've ever done -- but it worked splendidly after that.
For linux at this point, nVidia's the way to go for 3D, baby. And Mepis isn't a bad distro to get it working.
Heat-shrink tubing, baby. Of course, that's not a reversible contraction (it doesn't then get larger--at least appreciably--when the termperature it lowered again). But there are several materials (rubber bands) which also have this property and are quite useful.
In the case of long-chain molecules (think latex), the free energy (F=U-TS, where T is the temperature, S is the entropy, and U is the thermal energy of the system) is minimized when the entropy is *decreased* by stretching them out, thus aligning them more than they had been. That's why a rubber band will HEAT UP when you stretch it out, and COOL OFF (presuming it came to equilibrium with the environment) when allowed to go back to its unstretched conformation.
Sorry, I suppose I should have said, "TI-BASIC" code, rather than "pseudocode".
The Sierpinski triangle (or square, or what-have-you) was actually the first "project" I coded, on any computer. I saw a NOVA show on Chaos, and was fascinated that I could throw dice and produce this cool fractal. Then I realized I could code it. Because I had NO idea what was possible in the calculator, nor had any programming experience of any sort, it took me several days to figure the thing out. Then, when my friends got the first TI-82's, it really pissed me off that TI had put a Sierpinski generator in their instruction manuals. However, no one could explain how it worked, because it wasn't implemented in the "put a new point halfway between the previous point, and the randomly-chosen, fixed vertex". I should go back and see what that manual actually said.
Yeah, same here. But I screwed up the code at first, and instead of getting the Mandelbrot set, I got the bifurcation diagram. Since I'd read Gleick's _Chaos_, I was still pretty excited, and screwed around w/ the bifurcation program for a while until coding the thing better.
It used up batteries like a bitch, though (whatever that means), so I collected a bunch of old batteries and wired them in series, and just ran the calc off of those overnight. One screen per night was pretty cool.
Loved coding fractals on that dumb calculator. TI-Basic was an excellent platform for me to learn For() structures, and the dreaded GOTOs.
Mandelbrot set code, Julia set code, and fractal fern (and Feigenbaum attractor, Sierpinski triangle, etc.) are too long for me to pseudocode in here, but here's Henon's Attractor::Input "xStart:_", X:Input "yStart:_", y:While 1 z:0.3x->y:z->x:End
This is true. However, there may be much faster mechanisms for *die*-offs than radiation-induced mutations, such as if a species or superset of species specifically rely on Earth's magnetic field for migration, etc. If the field suddenly reduces in strenth or changes direction, the migration paths of these animals may be radically altered, with the result that they may migrate to low- (or higher-) food areas, into areas with fewer predators, into areas where parasites are able to take advantage of them, etc.
Did you ever watch that Meet My Folks shit? That's the sort of question they asked, the weird ones where you don't always know the answer because you can't recall every event in your life at that instant.
Like, have you ever whacked off 4 times in one 24 hour period. Who the hell can know the answer to that definativly.
That's probably one of the questions, if asked of a guy, that they expect the answer to to be "yes".
Slashdot Mirror
No, I've never heard of CP/M; I'll look it up. Which I've just done, and although it may not exactly support MY standpoint, it in no way supports yours. http://www.maxframe.com/CPM.HTM has a quick synopsis.d 19_gci509397,00.html , "In the business world, a first mover is a company that aims to gain an advantageous and perhaps insurmountable market position by being the first to establish itself in a given market."
:)
What, then, is a "first mover"? According to http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,si
Now, I'm the last person to assert that if a company, paradigm, orgamism, WHATEVER has an advantage, or even a HUGE advantage over its competitors, that it's ALWAYS going to be on top; "insurmountable" is never, or rarely, literally that. However, very few people are going to argue with Microsoft's huge dominance of software these days, or with Intel's position in microprocessors (embedded ones, too). You may argue with the fact that some of the companies in the list were actually not the VERY first to go into their respective markets (but some of them were!); however, as my links show, the companies were, in many cases, the first to popularize their technologies, and popularizing, whether through advertisement, word-of-mouth, or even by locking the market onto whatever "standard" you're working on is just as important as having a truly useful, innovative product (fortunately or unfortunately).
I apologize for the term "knee-jerk reaction" I used in my original posts, and realize that you have some good points. However, in your first post you gave no evidence to back up your "insight", which was, essentially, that the winners get to write the history books. I have the feeling that we'll not agree on these points, but thank goodness the internet is anonymous, eh? And truly, debates, even dumb ones, make life interesting.
I'm sorry, but I have to repost something I posted earlier, in this same thread. I don't deny that the phrase the real first movers have been wiped from the public mind might be (somewhat) insightful, but I'd like some actual refutation to the points which were quoted. Actually, the parent poster is correct (to the extent that I checked). Here are the facts I found (3 minutes, dudes -- not diffucult!):
Actually, Xerox WAS the first photocopier company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocopier ; TI seems to be a little ahead of Intel for microprocessors (but close!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor ; TI developed the transistor radio, but Sony very much popularized it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio; and so forth. (AOL was a direct competitor with CompuServe, and, in fact, did a lot to popularize it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL). The thing that clued me in was the Xerox comment (since I knew they were the first photocopier company), but, in fact it was mainly your knee-jerk reaction and lack of any real information that made me go look these up.
The original poster is vindicated.
Cheers!
Actually, Xerox WAS the first photocopier company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocopier; TI seems to be a little ahead of Intel for microprocessors (but close!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor; TI developed the transistor radio, but Sony very much popularized it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio; and so forth. (AOL was a direct competitor with CompuServe, and, in fact, did a lot to popularize it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL). The thing that clued me in was the Xerox comment (since I knew they were the first photocopier company), but, in fact it was mainly your knee-jerk reaction and lack of any real information that made me go look these up.
The original poster is vindicated.
Cheers!
...underwater, solar-powered, or autonomous!
Anyone else see that as "Solar-Powered Autonomous Underwear Vehicles"? 'cause, at least for me, that's talking about a spot where the sun don't normally shine...
Perhaps. But the problem with slang in general, and "urban slang" especially, is that it is *so* dependent on puns, knowledge of popular (or geek) culture in one particular part of the world, and so forth. I fear that if many of these slang words/phrases are translated, unless the translators are especially good at capturing all or most of the "background" things in a given definition, the whole impact of the slang term will be totally lost. Explaining a joke usually takes the point of the joke and totally chews it up.
Somewhat like translating haikus into English. The whole 5-7-5 thing is fun and challenging, I suppose (I personally hated having to write them in middle school, mainly because it was in lieu of worthwhile reading and writing), but (supposedly; I don't know Japanese) the poems in the parent language probably have a lot of import that the translated-to language may lack.
Then again, a woman at a party once told James Thurber that she'd read a French translation of his My Life and Hard Times, adding, "You know, the book is even better in French!" To which Thurber replied, "Yes---my work tends to lose something in the original."
Dude, that had better not be a rip on Richard Dean Anderson. Not only does he have way too many names, but he'll take you out with a wad of bubblegum and piece of grass.
AND THE GRASS IS *OPTIONAL*!
I'm sorry. I know that the word is "titles", but swear I kept (and still am) reading that as
"...so they could still release Blu-Ray titties."
I keep thinking of the Fem-Bots from the Austin Powers movie. Can you blame me?
Duh! You magically subtract 0 in the end!
w/o it [leadership, vision, direction, etc.?], [open-source will] remain as it is: stagnant.
:), etc. And, believe you me, these other distros aren't going to throw in with RedHat.
Ouch. Somehow I really very much doubt that anyone who's followed an open-source project these days thinks they're stagnating.
In addition, how can one end up with a "Microsoft of the OSS"? That entity, whatever it is, would have to control almost all features of the product, which is virtually against the very definition of "open source".
Even if one argues that (for a perhaps less-than-apt -- ahem -- example; someone will correct me on this, I'm sure -- as they should; I release this post under no license) RedHat is somewhat of a controller of linux, there are a LOT of flavors of linux, in addition to BSD (dead or not
Sorry. Won't work until all the if/thens are replaced by GOTOs. :P
Just imagine how people working for the Korean government must feel.
So ronery...
Gee, this would have saved the town of Springfield a huge amount of pain on May 21, 1995! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Shot_Mr._Burns%3F
I could not find a way to achieve "no fucus" in the GUI toolkit... Ah, yes. The good old "fucus" problem in GUIs. Some programs are absolutely genius when it comes to the "fucu" part of it.
I don't know if it was meant to be that way, /. posts
but I love the free-verse format of your post.
Really, all
and main article submissions!
should be done that way.
The editors might do something then.
Mel would've liked that.
For another such bit of trivia (and this one's much easier to work out), give this riddle to your friends:
Imagine a (perfect) sphere the size of Earth, with a rope tight around some equatorial line, circumnavigating it. If you wanted to have the rope one meter above the ground all the way around the sphere, how much rope would you have to tie on to the end to do so?
The answer, as it's very easy to see after knowing the answer, is 2Pi meters, or about 6.28 meters. Most people, without checking the math, are very surprised that it's such a small number.
Just a tid-bit.
If you have an nVidia card, there's a nice little perk in Mepis' "System Center": you just say "use the nVidia driver", and it works.
ATI can be a very different story. Wish they'd come out with some reasonable drivers for linux. But I've gotten it to work with my Radeon card -- it needed a kernel recompilation -- the first I've ever done -- but it worked splendidly after that.
For linux at this point, nVidia's the way to go for 3D, baby. And Mepis isn't a bad distro to get it working.
Heat-shrink tubing, baby. Of course, that's not a reversible contraction (it doesn't then get larger--at least appreciably--when the termperature it lowered again). But there are several materials (rubber bands) which also have this property and are quite useful.
In the case of long-chain molecules (think latex), the free energy (F=U-TS, where T is the temperature, S is the entropy, and U is the thermal energy of the system) is minimized when the entropy is *decreased* by stretching them out, thus aligning them more than they had been. That's why a rubber band will HEAT UP when you stretch it out, and COOL OFF (presuming it came to equilibrium with the environment) when allowed to go back to its unstretched conformation.
Sorry, I suppose I should have said, "TI-BASIC" code, rather than "pseudocode".
The Sierpinski triangle (or square, or what-have-you) was actually the first "project" I coded, on any computer. I saw a NOVA show on Chaos, and was fascinated that I could throw dice and produce this cool fractal. Then I realized I could code it. Because I had NO idea what was possible in the calculator, nor had any programming experience of any sort, it took me several days to figure the thing out. Then, when my friends got the first TI-82's, it really pissed me off that TI had put a Sierpinski generator in their instruction manuals. However, no one could explain how it worked, because it wasn't implemented in the "put a new point halfway between the previous point, and the randomly-chosen, fixed vertex". I should go back and see what that manual actually said.
Yeah, same here. But I screwed up the code at first, and instead of getting the Mandelbrot set, I got the bifurcation diagram. Since I'd read Gleick's _Chaos_, I was still pretty excited, and screwed around w/ the bifurcation program for a while until coding the thing better.
:Input "xStart:_", X :Input "yStart:_", y :While 1 z :0.3x->y :z->x :End
It used up batteries like a bitch, though (whatever that means), so I collected a bunch of old batteries and wired them in series, and just ran the calc off of those overnight. One screen per night was pretty cool.
Loved coding fractals on that dumb calculator. TI-Basic was an excellent platform for me to learn For() structures, and the dreaded GOTOs.
Mandelbrot set code, Julia set code, and fractal fern (and Feigenbaum attractor, Sierpinski triangle, etc.) are too long for me to pseudocode in here, but here's Henon's Attractor:
This is true. However, there may be much faster mechanisms for *die*-offs than radiation-induced mutations, such as if a species or superset of species specifically rely on Earth's magnetic field for migration, etc. If the field suddenly reduces in strenth or changes direction, the migration paths of these animals may be radically altered, with the result that they may migrate to low- (or higher-) food areas, into areas with fewer predators, into areas where parasites are able to take advantage of them, etc.
Best of luck on the proposal!
You really should move to The Twin Cities. Surely that cold clime would solve the twin prime problem...
Did you ever watch that Meet My Folks shit? That's the sort of question they asked, the weird ones where you don't always know the answer because you can't recall every event in your life at that instant.
Like, have you ever whacked off 4 times in one 24 hour period. Who the hell can know the answer to that definativly.
That's probably one of the questions, if asked of a guy, that they expect the answer to to be "yes".
Er... Maybe. Anyone? Where did everyone go?
A large chunk of the patients in hospitals in northern France have come from the UK for quite some time now.
Wow, that transplant stuff has really come a long way!