Thanks for the link. Here's one from the jargon file about real programmers.
The Story of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather
(nather@astro.as.utexas.edu), on May 21, 1983.
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren't here to stay, anyway.
(That's why you haven't heard of the company,
or the computer.)
I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn't approve of compilers.
"If a program can't rewrite its own code",
he asked, "what good is it?"
Mel had written,
in hexadecimal,
the most popular computer program the company owned.
It ran on the LGP-30
and played blackjack with potential customers
at computer shows.
Its effect was always dramatic.
The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
and the IBM salesmen stood around
talking to each other.
Whether or not this actually sold computers
was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port? What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.
In modern parlance,
every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
Put that in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Mel loved the RPC-4000
because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
an "optimizing assembler",
but Mel refused to use it.
"You never know where it's going to put things",
he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".
It was a long time before I understood that remark.
Since Mel knew the numerical value
of every operation code,
and assigned his own drum addresses,
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
His code was not easy for someone else to modify.
I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs
with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
and Mel's always ran faster.
That was beca
No. It's not about trusting the relay point. It's about the fact that it can't be relayed. Pick up a copy of Scientific American Jan 2005 for more details. Or just read an article on quantum crypto.
so unless you have a fiber line or laser link directly to whoever it is you are communicating with [Last clause ommitted by WaterBreath]
Whooosh, it went straight over your head. The fiber line you use needs to go _directly_ to your recipient -- quantum encrypted data can't go through a relay or a router (read: go across the internet or any other packet switching network).
Er. You didn't get the joke, so I will explain. The lore is that "repeat" is a command to the artillery to fire again on their last target, so you never ever say "repeat" on the radio, instead you say "say again".
The lore also contains an interesting anectode about the '92 riots in LA. Apparently a group of Marines were dispatched to assist the police. Two officers were approaching a house when someone opened up with a shotgun at them. One officer shouted "cover me" -- so the Marines proceeded to lay down covering fire on the house -- more than two hundred rounds were fired into that house.
Did you even think about this before you asked the question? Consider googling for it? Jesus. They don't need to read the screen. Sure, they can't get balance information or whatever, but they can navigate the standard menus. Call your bank -- request a copy of instructions for using their ATMs in braille. Also, I don't know if this is still pending or if it's already been implemented, but I believe there's a 'disabled' flag that can be set on the strip on your card which will request all ATMs to use a standard sequence of menus.
why the heck do drive-up ATM's have braille on the keypads in the US? I used to think this was a joke until I actually saw one
OK, here are the reasons, in no particular order!
It provides work for comedians.
Mass production. Why would anyone take the cost of a special run of no-braille ATM keypads?
The Americans with Disabilities Act
Blind people use them too -- back seat, driver-side is where a blind friend of mine rides pretty much every time he gets in the car with us, and always when we're going to hit an ATM.
Whew. I hope I answered that fast enough. I'd hate for this to become another "Er. I'm too lazy to think about my question or do the least bit of research so I'll just make it into an 'Ask Slashdot'"
Wiccan religion?! Comon! There are probably more Buddists in the city of LA than there are Wiccans in Washington state!
For what it's worth, in the Seattle suburbs students practicing 'alternative religions' make up a larger piece of the student body than you might expect. Perhaps 2-5% of the student body at my highschool was "out of the broom closet" and openly Pagan, most of those Wiccan.
No. 95% of songs were used in the training set. The other 5% were not used to train it but put into the test set. When trying to determine why the system was not flagging the test set as hits after training the system on the training set, a senior engineer accidentally listened to the test set. He said, on the way to the emergency toom, that the reason was that those songs all sucked, if the machine vetoed more songs like them it would be for the good of humanity, and they decided it was good enough to ship.
Money much better spent on the little woman, I'm sure we'd both agree
Personally, I make enough money that although a $400 entertainment expenditure would be noticeable it wouldn't be any kind of a big deal either. Consider a nice dinner and a show -- throw in train and hotel if the show isn't playing in your city and that's a single night of entertainment. The console stays with you. But if you're in a different situation then get her one of these and you'll both appreciate it.
PS: the site is aimed at selling these to women, not to men buying it for women. Just think: after a week of exercising, her muscles will be toned enough to hold a pound of metal inside while she's standing up.
I still think of instant messaging software as a dumbed down version of IRC
I like to think I was there for the tail-end of the IRC glory days, and as cool as IRC was, today's IM software has a lot going for it. I haven't seen opwars on them. No problems with netsplits and nick collisions. No arms race while every server sets their clock back further and further in order to 'win' the above. No crapfloods. None of that "Hur. Hur. Our last OP just lost link -- everyone get out of the room so we can get OPs back!!" madness.
I still think of... webbased bulletin boards as poorly implemented frontends for usenet
I have no idea what the current state of usenet is, but man... When I stopped reading news regularly it was quite bad. SPAM cross-posted six ways from Sunday. Make.Money.Fast... No topical posts... In the.m groups, mod-fiat preventing any honest discussion of a subject if your views weren't in direct alignment with his. I'd say that things have come a long way...
Now pardon me, I need to go get a free iPod and there's a picture of a goat someone says I need to look at.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link. Here's one from the jargon file about real programmers.
The Story of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather
(nather@astro.as.utexas.edu), on May 21, 1983.
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren't here to stay, anyway.
(That's why you haven't heard of the company,
or the computer.)
I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn't approve of compilers.
"If a program can't rewrite its own code",
he asked, "what good is it?"
Mel had written,
in hexadecimal,
the most popular computer program the company owned.
It ran on the LGP-30
and played blackjack with potential customers
at computer shows.
Its effect was always dramatic.
The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
and the IBM salesmen stood around
talking to each other.
Whether or not this actually sold computers
was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port? What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.
In modern parlance,
every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
Put that in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.
Mel loved the RPC-4000
because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
an "optimizing assembler",
but Mel refused to use it.
"You never know where it's going to put things",
he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".
It was a long time before I understood that remark.
Since Mel knew the numerical value
of every operation code,
and assigned his own drum addresses,
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
His code was not easy for someone else to modify.
I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs
with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
and Mel's always ran faster.
That was beca
Uh, yeah. Have you ever played DDR? You can burn a lot of calories that way. And it's a lot more fun than the bike.
No. It's not about trusting the relay point. It's about the fact that it can't be relayed. Pick up a copy of Scientific American Jan 2005 for more details. Or just read an article on quantum crypto.
so unless you have a fiber line or laser link directly to whoever it is you are communicating with [Last clause ommitted by WaterBreath] Whooosh, it went straight over your head. The fiber line you use needs to go _directly_ to your recipient -- quantum encrypted data can't go through a relay or a router (read: go across the internet or any other packet switching network).
The NAVY would turn out the lights and lock the doors.
The ARMY would surround the building with defensive fortifications, tanks and concertina wire.
The MARINE CORPS would assault the building, using overlapping fields of fire from all appropriate points on the perimeter.
The AIR FORCE would take out a three-year lease with an option to buy the building.
The lore also contains an interesting anectode about the '92 riots in LA. Apparently a group of Marines were dispatched to assist the police. Two officers were approaching a house when someone opened up with a shotgun at them. One officer shouted "cover me" -- so the Marines proceeded to lay down covering fire on the house -- more than two hundred rounds were fired into that house.
Like you never ask someone to "repeat" something ?
Did you even think about this before you asked the question? Consider googling for it? Jesus. They don't need to read the screen. Sure, they can't get balance information or whatever, but they can navigate the standard menus. Call your bank -- request a copy of instructions for using their ATMs in braille. Also, I don't know if this is still pending or if it's already been implemented, but I believe there's a 'disabled' flag that can be set on the strip on your card which will request all ATMs to use a standard sequence of menus.
OK, here are the reasons, in no particular order!
It provides work for comedians.
Mass production. Why would anyone take the cost of a special run of no-braille ATM keypads?
The Americans with Disabilities Act
Blind people use them too -- back seat, driver-side is where a blind friend of mine rides pretty much every time he gets in the car with us, and always when we're going to hit an ATM.
Whew. I hope I answered that fast enough. I'd hate for this to become another "Er. I'm too lazy to think about my question or do the least bit of research so I'll just make it into an 'Ask Slashdot'"
For what it's worth, in the Seattle suburbs students practicing 'alternative religions' make up a larger piece of the student body than you might expect. Perhaps 2-5% of the student body at my highschool was "out of the broom closet" and openly Pagan, most of those Wiccan.
Pssst. You're screwing up the googlebomb. It's supposed to be like this: inexcusable fuckup
My mom says you have to call it a Fireman or else you get a spanking.
No. 95% of songs were used in the training set. The other 5% were not used to train it but put into the test set. When trying to determine why the system was not flagging the test set as hits after training the system on the training set, a senior engineer accidentally listened to the test set. He said, on the way to the emergency toom, that the reason was that those songs all sucked, if the machine vetoed more songs like them it would be for the good of humanity, and they decided it was good enough to ship.
An interview Frank Lingua of Dissembling Associates
Heh. Not only is this 'news' more than 5 years old, this also ran on Fark today about 6 hours earlier.
Sorry
Why not the 503 error we've all come to know and love?
You do not understand. Space holds a terrible power. Please stand by the stairs so we can protect you.
Do you have stairs in your house?
Pushing is the answer.
Humans must be pushed.
Pushing will protect you.
Pushing will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Will this come in time to save us from the terrible secret of space?
Dude. That is the bomb. I love it. I freakin' love it. Thanks for the link!
Personally, I make enough money that although a $400 entertainment expenditure would be noticeable it wouldn't be any kind of a big deal either. Consider a nice dinner and a show -- throw in train and hotel if the show isn't playing in your city and that's a single night of entertainment. The console stays with you. But if you're in a different situation then get her one of these and you'll both appreciate it.
PS: the site is aimed at selling these to women, not to men buying it for women. Just think: after a week of exercising, her muscles will be toned enough to hold a pound of metal inside while she's standing up.
OK. I'm ignorant. Google doesn't help. Will you?
I like to think I was there for the tail-end of the IRC glory days, and as cool as IRC was, today's IM software has a lot going for it. I haven't seen opwars on them. No problems with netsplits and nick collisions. No arms race while every server sets their clock back further and further in order to 'win' the above. No crapfloods. None of that "Hur. Hur. Our last OP just lost link -- everyone get out of the room so we can get OPs back!!" madness.
I still think of... webbased bulletin boards as poorly implemented frontends for usenet
I have no idea what the current state of usenet is, but man... When I stopped reading news regularly it was quite bad. SPAM cross-posted six ways from Sunday. Make.Money.Fast... No topical posts... In the .m groups, mod-fiat preventing any honest discussion of a subject if your views weren't in direct alignment with his. I'd say that things have come a long way...
Now pardon me, I need to go get a free iPod and there's a picture of a goat someone says I need to look at.
No, I was just drunk last night.