My grandfather, in the late 1960's, said to me "the changes we saw between 1896 and 1914 were amazing. We looked back at time before then and thing 'that was the last century'. When (if) you get to 2014, you will look back on 1996 and say;that was the last millenium; the changes will appear 10 times bigger!".
In 1896, transport was horse drawn. There were no cars or aeroplanes, no radio, and few people had even seen a phone.
For those who can't remember, in 1996, few people had seen a computer (yes, I saw one in 1956, but I am talking about most people), no Internet (I had been using it since the 1980's, but few people knew about it), No mobile phones (I had one - it was the size of a car battery - cos it had one in it).
If anyone I had a device in my hand that would allow me (in the UK) to see and talk to almost anyone in Africa, allow people in Africa to "virtually" attend weddings of family members in the UK, allow me to navigate the streets of Lagos (Nigeria) using visual moving maps with spoken instructions, hear music from anywhere in the world, and any time since before 1900, for nothing, get training on how to do almost anything for nothing, or even compute complex maths without me even having to touch the keyboard, then I would ask them for something of what they were smoking!
Mobile phones with multi-core processors, touch screens, Skype and Youtube may appear obvious to us, but they surely were not in 1996 - when even land-line phone calls were so expensive we rarely called anyone, anywhere, if we could go there or write!
Yes, I have used Google Maps in Lagos, and attended a wedding in London which relatives attended from Zimbabwe and America by Skype. I have drawn pictures on my screen with a mouse and used the results to cut parts from wood with a Laser - like something from a James Bond film!
I remember solving differential equations using a mechanical calculator that, to divide, you wound a handle round to do repeated subtraction for each decimal place, and in 1996, I had seen military "moving map" displays, and had a good idea what they cost! I remember discussions of whether it was physically possible for memory to cost less than 1 cent per bit, and mainframes with a CPU clocked at one MHz! I remember watching the Beatles play live using 30 Watt amplifiers (1963), and going to the disco in 1970's clothes (look at the clothes in Soul Train videos).
My grandfather's prediction may not be absolutely accurate, but, emotionally, it is pretty close!
I am still waiting for my hover-board. Sharks with lasers, I can do without. Drones? I had a model plane in 1963 that flew by remote control. (Listening to DooWap as I write this).
An American child perhaps, although they are unlikely to encounter the problem. In Europe, a Letter is one character of the alphabet. We have never had so called "letter" sized paper. In the UK, we had foolscap prior to about 1970. And Imperial, Elephant, double elephant, Quarto and others.
"Letter" has never been a paper size in Europe, and is not an obvious name for a paper size (though I concede that "double elephant" isn't either).
This message was the ultimate in inappropriate messages, not least because there was no letter size paper in the whole country (Except perhaps Xerox Corp's test facility). The options should have been "Resize document to fit" or "Cancel". In practice, the only remedy was often to reboot both PC and printer. Or reboot PC, and buy printer from alternative supplier - given that inkjet printers are cheaper than ink cartridges.
I have just upgraded to 16.04 of Ubuntu-Gnome. I use "Gnome Classic", mostly because Mint never seems to work for me.
I now find the stupid workspace selection option on Window title bars not longer allows you to choose which workspace you want - you can go up or down, but not move strait to 6! WTF?
And you don't get to see a thumbnail of the workspaces on the panel at the bottom! WTF?
Why can we not have features that work LEFT THE FUCK ALONE.
Why is it not an arrestable offense to fuck with people's UIs without asking?
Can someone please stop Gnome from "developing", and leave it alone!
Come on - people have been moaning forever about Gnome developers ripping the arms and legs of productivity. When is it going to stop?
Will I have to revert to FVWM95?
Will this ranting never stop? Well, It will for now, as I need a very strong alcoholic drink before I continue.
It is not so much "backwards compatibility" as the fact that pronunciation had very strong regional differences before the invention of radio, and the spelling often reflects pronunciation still used in small regions of the world.
Modern spelling is not, in fact, historical spelling as is often claimed - a deliberate effort was made after the invention of printing to try to reflect the origins of words - French, German, Latin etc. Unfortunately, the people doing this were probably not well informed.
The Oxford Dictionary of the 1960's had little idea of the origin of words if it was not European. Some words of Indian origin were properly labelled, but very few of Arabic origin, for example.
C was the assembler of the PDP/11, which was, itself, a hardware Fortran machine!
If we want a pictogram language, then to hell with Emojis and icons, lets use Kanji - it has been tested over 4,000 years, works, and more than half the world is already using it.
The pollution from diesel engines is primarily in two parts:
Particulates: caused by poor burning of the diesel. Large particulates are soot. Particulates are smaller with modern engine design, and allegedly removed by a filter if fitted (they don't necessarily work well, and people often removed them). Older engines did not have filters. Unfortunately, smaller particulates are invisible, but much more dangerous. NOx: Caused by running the engine hot - which improves fuel efficiency, and reduces CO2 emissions. Newer engines run hot, but try to reduce NOx by Urea injection (SCR). This works in the lab, but there is no data as to whether it actually works on the road.
If it were down to me, I say ban the hot diesel engines, and fit particulate filters to the rest.
The politicians have already banned the cool burning engines from London.
Maybe the SCR does not work in the real world, and we are all stuffed (except European politicians getting backhanders from Urea vendors).
If you have nothing else to do, you might try and implement an ABS system with an 1980's CPU, and make it with 1980's components and machine tools. Best of luck with doing that on a commercial basis.
And warn me to stay the hell away while you are testing it!
They won't work, however, if there aren't any jobs. Which is the real problem.
Actually, here in the UK, in the 1960's the benefit system was close to UBI. Without computers, the system was completely unable to check what you told them, and (contrary to the press stories of the time) most teenagers were unemployed. However, you could always borrow a friend's baby and stand in the dole queue once a fortnight, and practice in your rock and roll band the rest of the time. On weekends, you could play in a pub for less than the cost of the fuel to drive the band's van to the gig.
Then, one day, you made it to the big time. (Or <speaking for myself> realised you were probably the worst base player in town, and decided to investigate these new fangled computers).
Of course some people got real jobs, and being poor was not really much fun. Eventually it was the 70's, the political environment changed, and computers made it more difficult to lie to the benefits system.
We have hit a plateau cos the manufacturers - perhaps at the behest of carriers, are wilfully failing to deliver what most people want (as opposed to the reviewers - who want iPhones).
Real people want:
Indestructible plastic backs that let the signal through - NOT aluminium ones that shield the signal, and get bent - as well as costing more. We put our phones in cases to protect them - cos we go out into the real world.
Replaceable batteries - when I leave the house, I change the battery. When I return, I change the battery. I keep spare batteries in the desk, the car. A lot of other people do the same.
Removable SD cards. We want one SD card for work, and one for home - and a lot of people have to take them out to move data to computers, cos some idiots, somewhere, have screwed up the USB protocols something wicked, and a lot of older versions of Android, still in use (Gee thanks, carriers), appear not to be thread safe and trash your SD card.
We want dual sim. UK carriers wont sell dual sim phones, and make them hard to get here, except ones with appalling performance (and pre MS Nokias).
We want waterproof, and dust proof, child proof, hell we WANT idiot proof and NSA proof (but I know we wont get it).
We want software that does not change the UI unless we decide to download a new one from the dark side of hell.
We dont give a stuff it the phone is 1.3mm thinner. We managed to use Bakelite housephones that weighed 2kg, and I had an analogue mobile that weighed about 10kg cos it had a car battery in it. At
least the bloody thing did not keep needing to be recharged.
We need a camera that takes pictures. Most people are hopeless at taking pictures, and a better camera wont help them. We do not need 4M pixels, 8M Pixels, 16, 32, 64 - we know about binary arithmetic and exponential increases. Those that don't, never will, and, regardless of gamers and people who buy monster cables, 24 frames a second works fine for most people, and 60 fps for everybody else.
We also need the option not to have a camera. Some people actually work in places where you cannot take a camera for reasons of security or privacy.
There are probably loads of other features we could have all of which are better than 0.6mm thinnner and less than 150 hours of talk time.
But the reviewers keep saying the Android phones are not Apple! Hell, GM is not Ford, McLaren is not Mercedes, either.
And if I want a 44 ton truck, don't even bother trying to sell me a Volkswagen Caddy, even if it does have the same pollution ratings.
Slashdot Mirror
You can lead whores to water, but you can't make them think.
In 1896, transport was horse drawn. There were no cars or aeroplanes, no radio, and few people had even seen a phone.
For those who can't remember, in 1996, few people had seen a computer (yes, I saw one in 1956, but I am talking about most people), no Internet (I had been using it since the 1980's, but few people knew about it), No mobile phones (I had one - it was the size of a car battery - cos it had one in it).
If anyone I had a device in my hand that would allow me (in the UK) to see and talk to almost anyone in Africa, allow people in Africa to "virtually" attend weddings of family members in the UK, allow me to navigate the streets of Lagos (Nigeria) using visual moving maps with spoken instructions, hear music from anywhere in the world, and any time since before 1900, for nothing, get training on how to do almost anything for nothing, or even compute complex maths without me even having to touch the keyboard, then I would ask them for something of what they were smoking!
Mobile phones with multi-core processors, touch screens, Skype and Youtube may appear obvious to us, but they surely were not in 1996 - when even land-line phone calls were so expensive we rarely called anyone, anywhere, if we could go there or write!
Yes, I have used Google Maps in Lagos, and attended a wedding in London which relatives attended from Zimbabwe and America by Skype. I have drawn pictures on my screen with a mouse and used the results to cut parts from wood with a Laser - like something from a James Bond film!
I remember solving differential equations using a mechanical calculator that, to divide, you wound a handle round to do repeated subtraction for each decimal place, and in 1996, I had seen military "moving map" displays, and had a good idea what they cost! I remember discussions of whether it was physically possible for memory to cost less than 1 cent per bit, and mainframes with a CPU clocked at one MHz! I remember watching the Beatles play live using 30 Watt amplifiers (1963), and going to the disco in 1970's clothes (look at the clothes in Soul Train videos).
My grandfather's prediction may not be absolutely accurate, but, emotionally, it is pretty close!
I am still waiting for my hover-board. Sharks with lasers, I can do without. Drones? I had a model plane in 1963 that flew by remote control. (Listening to DooWap as I write this).
An American child perhaps, although they are unlikely to encounter the problem. In Europe, a Letter is one character of the alphabet. We have never had so called "letter" sized paper. In the UK, we had foolscap prior to about 1970. And Imperial, Elephant, double elephant, Quarto and others.
"Letter" has never been a paper size in Europe, and is not an obvious name for a paper size (though I concede that "double elephant" isn't either).
This message was the ultimate in inappropriate messages, not least because there was no letter size paper in the whole country (Except perhaps Xerox Corp's test facility). The options should have been "Resize document to fit" or "Cancel". In practice, the only remedy was often to reboot both PC and printer. Or reboot PC, and buy printer from alternative supplier - given that inkjet printers are cheaper than ink cartridges.
Before the sharks dispose of you?
I believe it is like triumphalism, but without the triumph!
MS definitely does not support Aurebesh (or Elvish).
Does Unicode support runes?
And how much does the fuel cost to fill up my station-wagon full of QIC24 tapes?
FTFY
I have just upgraded to 16.04 of Ubuntu-Gnome. I use "Gnome Classic", mostly because Mint never seems to work for me.
I now find the stupid workspace selection option on Window title bars not longer allows you to choose which workspace you want - you can go up or down, but not move strait to 6! WTF?
And you don't get to see a thumbnail of the workspaces on the panel at the bottom! WTF?
Why can we not have features that work LEFT THE FUCK ALONE.
Why is it not an arrestable offense to fuck with people's UIs without asking?
Can someone please stop Gnome from "developing", and leave it alone!
Come on - people have been moaning forever about Gnome developers ripping the arms and legs of productivity. When is it going to stop?
Will I have to revert to FVWM95?
Will this ranting never stop? Well, It will for now, as I need a very strong alcoholic drink before I continue.
Get off my three blades of grass.
FTFY
FTFY
If Trump is winning, I suspect the problem lies with the Illiterati, rather than the Illuminati.
and disputes resolved by custard pie fights in a big top.
People who need Emojis should be using Fisher-Price toy phones, and kept away from the real ones.
Modern spelling is not, in fact, historical spelling as is often claimed - a deliberate effort was made after the invention of printing to try to reflect the origins of words - French, German, Latin etc. Unfortunately, the people doing this were probably not well informed.
The Oxford Dictionary of the 1960's had little idea of the origin of words if it was not European. Some words of Indian origin were properly labelled, but very few of Arabic origin, for example.
C was the assembler of the PDP/11, which was, itself, a hardware Fortran machine!
If you can't read, then Emojis wont help.
If we want a pictogram language, then to hell with Emojis and icons, lets use Kanji - it has been tested over 4,000 years, works, and more than half the world is already using it.
Particulates: caused by poor burning of the diesel. Large particulates are soot. Particulates are smaller with modern engine design, and allegedly removed by a filter if fitted (they don't necessarily work well, and people often removed them). Older engines did not have filters. Unfortunately, smaller particulates are invisible, but much more dangerous.
NOx: Caused by running the engine hot - which improves fuel efficiency, and reduces CO2 emissions. Newer engines run hot, but try to reduce NOx by Urea injection (SCR). This works in the lab, but there is no data as to whether it actually works on the road.
If it were down to me, I say ban the hot diesel engines, and fit particulate filters to the rest.
The politicians have already banned the cool burning engines from London.
Maybe the SCR does not work in the real world, and we are all stuffed (except European politicians getting backhanders from Urea vendors).
If you have nothing else to do, you might try and implement an ABS system with an 1980's CPU, and make it with 1980's components and machine tools. Best of luck with doing that on a commercial basis.
And warn me to stay the hell away while you are testing it!
Actually, here in the UK, in the 1960's the benefit system was close to UBI. Without computers, the system was completely unable to check what you told them, and (contrary to the press stories of the time) most teenagers were unemployed. However, you could always borrow a friend's baby and stand in the dole queue once a fortnight, and practice in your rock and roll band the rest of the time. On weekends, you could play in a pub for less than the cost of the fuel to drive the band's van to the gig.
Then, one day, you made it to the big time. (Or <speaking for myself> realised you were probably the worst base player in town, and decided to investigate these new fangled computers).
Of course some people got real jobs, and being poor was not really much fun. Eventually it was the 70's, the political environment changed, and computers made it more difficult to lie to the benefits system.
Real people want:
There are probably loads of other features we could have all of which are better than 0.6mm thinnner and less than 150 hours of talk time.
But the reviewers keep saying the Android phones are not Apple! Hell, GM is not Ford, McLaren is not Mercedes, either.
And if I want a 44 ton truck, don't even bother trying to sell me a Volkswagen Caddy, even if it does have the same pollution ratings.
EMV = Electric Motor Vehicle
FTFY
I think you will find that is called SEO!
The more shite on a page, the higher its Google rank. (Shite is worth LOADS. The value of shite is the reason bankers are paid so much).
There is something called a Dollar. You might want to Google it.
Everyone else's constitution says the same thing. Like any pissing contest, your piss will just splash back onto you.