I have a great idea. American's love feet and inches. But they are a pain to work with. So my proposal: the decimal foot.
That's right, ten inches in a foot. 100 inches in a yard and 1000 yards in a mile. What could possibly go wrong?
it's been in use for a long time. I have a ruler my dad used in the 1960s that is graduated this way. He called it an architect's ruler.
If we get enough small components they can be combined into any piece of software. Eventually we wouldn't need any more components and thus no more software developers.
the key is that phrase "can be combined" although my second pick is "eventually". your finding nemo system will have to be self-organizing because is too vast to have organization imposed from without. You already have that kind of system today anyway. So if you have a self organizing system, two questions are a) how does it arise and b) how do you get it to do what you want. The real-world analogy for this way of thinking is the garden and the gardener. you're thinking wouldn't it be real cool if we had "cells" which you could stack on top of one another and you could have any kind of plant you want, whereas what you want is to be the gardener instead and let the software plants grow by themselves (think of the order of magnitude in scale between a group of cells and the entire garden). And so I think your "eventually" is a really, really, really long time.
Stunning visual appearance.... check Elegant and simple user interface.... check(?)... Maybe 1 or 2 'minor' design flaws not caught during development.... check!
It's amazing. Anything coming out of Apple these days has great design, works well for the most part, but there's always something screwy- iPod batteries, hot laptops, etc.
Same thing happens to everyone else, excpet usually they're missing your first two items.
I've been responsible for a demo or two in the past and there is nothing like having things fall apart at the last second. If what we saw is true, I wouldn't doubt that there were engineers scrambling to save the demo. There could be many reaons for that. who knows.
All I wanted to say is how exactly is it anti-competetive for them to bundle apps?
You don't understand the terminology. bundling is another word for tying.
If they are in fact being anticompetetive...
They were, in fact, convicted of anticompetitive behavior. Web browsing was, at one time, exotic and unrelated to the function of a desktop operating system. Now, OEMs had - and need to have a lot of leeway with windows preinstalls on their PCs, and in the days when Microsoft was playing catchup to Netscape, they tied IE to Windows. They said to the OEMs: we will not sell Windows to you to ship with your PC unless you bundle IE. And at some point they also demanded that the OEM exclude Netscape Navigator. Threatening to not sell Windows to the OEM is in many cases a corporate death threat, which is not strictly illegal, but it is the condition - that they include this other product (IE) that made it anticompetitive. How could netscape - or anyone else - possibly compete if MS had the power to twist arms like this? Although Netscape was popular and OEMs wanted to include it, Microsoft prevented it. How? There was no viable alternative to Windows which a PC OEM could sell instead of Windows.
i'm writing it in ruby... it's kind of my 'let's learn ruby!' project...
Sounds cool. I think it would be exceptionally cool if it were a web application. Since you're not emulating hardware, it could be very fast. With ajax on the web, network operations would probably slow it down enough to feel like the real thing.
i haven't decided how to handle all the peek/poke/call stuff yet, since obviously the memory addresses are completely irrelevant... one option would be to give the more common peek/poke things named procedure statements, or i could just hardcode all the old apple ][ memory addresses to their functionality:)
yeah, well I guess it depends on what you want to run on it. peek and poke, probably functions that do a lookup table. some are just flags, others are more procedural triggers since you're probably not going to write a 60Hz vertical blanking interrupt routine to pick up those changes. or whatever it was.
good luck. if you get something working or want some ideas, send me an email.
Well as the article points out, it is the murky definition of "access" that is troublesome, such as the case where emailing a company was ruled as "unauthorized access" - not only to the company's email server, but to all the computers on the route. This is fear based on ignorance. The trouble is that there are no good analogies to the real world - it's all hidden, it's all geek magic. And of course the juries are composed of mostly regular joes with spyware-ridden computers and who hate the IT guy. And the lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, corporate executives were the ones who stuffed the geeks in the lockers back in school. There is not a lot of money to be made in just letting people do what they want. So there is a bright future for convictions.
Has it not sunk in yet that you simply can't intrude on systems or files without permission, however helpful your intentions? How freaking difficult is that for people to grasp?
I admire your idealism. But you had better keep your head up and pay attention to the motives of the people we are reading about. It has little to do with whether you are doing right or wrong, or "accessing" with or without "permission".
i've actually been getting back into it, and i'm writing a BASIC interpreter in my new language of choice, and i've been picking up old applesoft BASIC manuals on ebay... really fun
what language? is it working?
I still have all my apple ][ disks with all my basic programs from those days, and my beagle bros peeks & pokes chart. it was good, indeed. but those days are long gone, and all that work is hidden away on disk, on fading cheap fanfold paper, etc. I've been thinking over the years of ways to keep/store/present old projects. analogous to how you might hang a picture on a wall, or photograph an event. This, of course, is a perpetual ongoing problem.
It'd be cool to add an applesoft basic interpreter that doesn't require a hardware emulator to the options.
It is completely a hardware bug. Neither the keyboard, the traditional mouse, the PC gamepad nor joystick, nor the touchpad nor pointer nub has the behavior of recording clicks/presses with a finger lightly resting on it.
The only other thing that does - at least for me - is the laptop trackpack "tap to click" behavior. It must be some EM field about my body but I can cause a "click" behavior when that feature is turned on without even touching the trackpad. Just hovering my finger so it oh so gently barely but not even touches and - click! All trackpads that have that feature behave the same way - from the oldest sony vaios to the macbook pro.
But for the mighty mouse, it definitely does NOT register clicks when you're just resting slightly on it. All three (four actually) buttons need to be seriously depressed on mine. Regarding the behavior of resting the fingers on the left of the mouse while right-clicking, yes I have just verified that this does cause a left-click. I've not experienced it before since I don't rest my fingers on the mouse, actually at all except when clicking. I usually move the mouse with only two fingers - thumb and either middle or ring finger.
But I would not be surprised that apple would try to emulate the one button mouse in that way, while still allowing the right button behavior. It's a detail I wouldn't put past the Steve.
I like the mighty mouse but I'm not entirely happy about having a mechanical moving part to get dirty again. the ball has to be sprayed out with compressed air once in a while.
Re:Wow, what a great comparison of 70s-80s vs now
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
·
· Score: 1
Yah, back in the eighties we didn't have any of these fancy scroll wheel mice. we had to point and click.
cmon, even rms says 'free' isn't about price, it's about freedom. the freedom to redistribute the software and modify it, not the freedom from a salary to write the stuff. we're not socialists or communists. you might be. but whatever.
Universities should protect their students and tell the riaa to fuck off. IMHO.
Having just finished school, probably almost all of the filesharing is in copyrighted material which they have no right to "share". Therefore it is illegal and should be stopped. It was disgusting to me how much people were trading movies, games, and music which didn't belong.
I totally disagree with your conclusion. The recording industry is on the brink and they are scared, otherwise they wouldn't bring lawsuits against 13 year-olds and their grammas. They are trying set examples to intimidate the rest of us into propping up their outdated business model. Because their stuff is so easily copied, content industries have always been all about control. They're going to kill to protect their empire way of life, even if apple is dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
The question is not: is copying an mp3 from your buddy Right or Wrong. The question is: do you support corporations that bitchslap their customers, buy senators that let them draft legislation to artificially protect their turf. Everyone with a brain (not to mention research and statistics) knows that if you have money, file sharing leads to more purchases, not less. If you have money, that is. Money to pay for content. Unlike, you know, the typical student.
The trouble is that people want to share, it's easy to share, and there is obviously no inventory lost, therefore, people will share. You are the RIAA; you can: a) adapt to make it easy and fun for your customers to get what they want or b) threaten and sue them and work to prevent people from getting what they want.
The bigger problem is that as something becomes popular, it becomes a part of our culture. Can, or should such a thing be owned by a private corporation? Should they have the power to take it away and punish those who use it without authorization, even though it is those very people whose use of it made it valuable in the first place? George Lucas may think he owns star wars, but we all know that han shot first. It's ours.
It's up to you. Decide according to the outcome you want.
4. the New-ager/Far Left wing hippie types that believe the gov and science is out to get them. So they do not vacinate, even though it is irresonsible on their part.
Here's just one problem. Start with a healthy kid. He gets a vaccine. He falls into the small percentage of kids who get the side effects. Maybe he just gets sick. Or has seizures. Or even dies. The problem is that he was healthy, then the parents did what they were mandated to do by the government, and their kid suffered these things and is now disabled/dead.
The only responsible thing to do is to evaluate your own risk. We need to be free to make the choice. We can't be potential sacrifices for the greater good.
If you want to encourage kids to experiment, you need to give them a more constrained environment where the feedback cycle is far better(eg. Lego Mindstorms).
This is absolutely true, and that's the way it was back in the day. However, I don't agree with your suggestion that programming is harder today.
The amount of stuff you have to learn to program up a realistic alternative to XBox or whatever is too vast. It takes programming a game from being an afternoon's exercise to a 6 month learning course on 3d modelling etc.
There was a time when there were few or no commercial games, and in that period, yes, certainly newbies had no measure by which to judge their work. (and it is much more fun that way) but no newbie programmers were writing pac man. By 1982 it already required vast amounts of time to create anything commercial quality. I don't think it takes more today for the individual. No newbie will create realistic alternatives to commercial games. That's a ridiculous standard.
And yet we still had fun writing little programs that did nothing of consequence in between playing high quality commercial games. We weren't unhappy because we couldn't write, say, Lode Runner. Not much different than today on that front.
Most europeans don't consider national ID cards (let's stick to that terminology) evil in any way and wonder why you americans make such a big issue of it. We've had them for as long as anyone can remember.
Is that a serious statement? As in: you don't know why? Are you still living with the vestiges of monarchy, empire, and twentieth century totalitarianism over there in peaceful Europe? It's a simple American history question. America is a nation of immigrants who fled the statist structures and religious intolerance of Europe. The concept of Liberty in America has a deep meaning. Americans do not have a feudal legacy, we have never had titles in this country, and we don't have a parent-child relationship with our government. We really do believe in government by the people even if it doesn't look like it from time to time.
It may be out of place today, like the right to carry concealed handguns / stockpile assualt rifles, and you may disagree with it as a European (which I'm assuming you are), but it has an obvious historical explanation that you shouldn't ignore when you try to understand WTF Americans are thinking and why they are acting in certain ways.
Feminism is one front in the fight against stupor and self-centerdness.
People are deeply self-centered, often don't understand others, or even themselves, and don't reflect upon the meaning of their actions. Society has been owned and run by men, and women have been second class citizens. When you're self-centered you just don't know and don't think about how your actions, such as running society, affects others, such as women. It's every little thing from public restrooms to drug trials, not always obvious prejudice or misogyny. feminism puts these issues front and center. I think it still needs to be there. We need radicals sometimes to shake people out of their stupor.
20 Years ago I'm sure that phone tapping ordinary citizens without a warrant would have been quite a concern, today it's hardly an issue in the minds Joe Sixpack.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather lug a 20 inch iMac than one of these things.
Yep.
If we get enough small components they can be combined into any piece of software. Eventually we wouldn't need any more components and thus no more software developers.
the key is that phrase "can be combined" although my second pick is "eventually". your finding nemo system will have to be self-organizing because is too vast to have organization imposed from without. You already have that kind of system today anyway. So if you have a self organizing system, two questions are a) how does it arise and b) how do you get it to do what you want. The real-world analogy for this way of thinking is the garden and the gardener. you're thinking wouldn't it be real cool if we had "cells" which you could stack on top of one another and you could have any kind of plant you want, whereas what you want is to be the gardener instead and let the software plants grow by themselves (think of the order of magnitude in scale between a group of cells and the entire garden). And so I think your "eventually" is a really, really, really long time.
First lay out $200 for their proprietary player, then pay for a phone line for the damn thing, all for the pleasure of paying $2 - $4 a movie.
don't forget the autodisposable (self-destructing) discs
Stunning visual appearance.... check ...
Elegant and simple user interface.... check(?)
Maybe 1 or 2 'minor' design flaws not caught during development.... check!
It's amazing. Anything coming out of Apple these days has great design, works well for the most part, but there's always something screwy- iPod batteries, hot laptops, etc.
Same thing happens to everyone else, excpet usually they're missing your first two items.
The stuff hasn't aged well. So it needs to be rebuilt. And that pretty much means back to square one.
I've been responsible for a demo or two in the past and there is nothing like having things fall apart at the last second. If what we saw is true, I wouldn't doubt that there were engineers scrambling to save the demo. There could be many reaons for that. who knows.
...for an extra US$200. I can't help but think that most people will go with the white model.
who cares.
people who really want a black mac will get the black one. Others, who want to pay less or prefer white, will go with white.
All I wanted to say is how exactly is it anti-competetive for them to bundle apps?
...
You don't understand the terminology. bundling is another word for tying.
If they are in fact being anticompetetive
They were, in fact, convicted of anticompetitive behavior. Web browsing was, at one time, exotic and unrelated to the function of a desktop operating system. Now, OEMs had - and need to have a lot of leeway with windows preinstalls on their PCs, and in the days when Microsoft was playing catchup to Netscape, they tied IE to Windows. They said to the OEMs: we will not sell Windows to you to ship with your PC unless you bundle IE. And at some point they also demanded that the OEM exclude Netscape Navigator. Threatening to not sell Windows to the OEM is in many cases a corporate death threat, which is not strictly illegal, but it is the condition - that they include this other product (IE) that made it anticompetitive. How could netscape - or anyone else - possibly compete if MS had the power to twist arms like this? Although Netscape was popular and OEMs wanted to include it, Microsoft prevented it. How? There was no viable alternative to Windows which a PC OEM could sell instead of Windows.
i'm writing it in ruby... it's kind of my 'let's learn ruby!' project...
:)
Sounds cool. I think it would be exceptionally cool if it were a web application. Since you're not emulating hardware, it could be very fast. With ajax on the web, network operations would probably slow it down enough to feel like the real thing.
i haven't decided how to handle all the peek/poke/call stuff yet, since obviously the memory addresses are completely irrelevant... one option would be to give the more common peek/poke things named procedure statements, or i could just hardcode all the old apple ][ memory addresses to their functionality
yeah, well I guess it depends on what you want to run on it. peek and poke, probably functions that do a lookup table. some are just flags, others are more procedural triggers since you're probably not going to write a 60Hz vertical blanking interrupt routine to pick up those changes. or whatever it was.
good luck. if you get something working or want some ideas, send me an email.
Well as the article points out, it is the murky definition of "access" that is troublesome, such as the case where emailing a company was ruled as "unauthorized access" - not only to the company's email server, but to all the computers on the route. This is fear based on ignorance. The trouble is that there are no good analogies to the real world - it's all hidden, it's all geek magic. And of course the juries are composed of mostly regular joes with spyware-ridden computers and who hate the IT guy. And the lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, corporate executives were the ones who stuffed the geeks in the lockers back in school. There is not a lot of money to be made in just letting people do what they want. So there is a bright future for convictions.
Has it not sunk in yet that you simply can't intrude on systems or files without permission, however helpful your intentions? How freaking difficult is that for people to grasp?
I admire your idealism. But you had better keep your head up and pay attention to the motives of the people we are reading about. It has little to do with whether you are doing right or wrong, or "accessing" with or without "permission".
i've actually been getting back into it, and i'm writing a BASIC interpreter in my new language of choice, and i've been picking up old applesoft BASIC manuals on ebay... really fun
what language? is it working?
I still have all my apple ][ disks with all my basic programs from those days, and my beagle bros peeks & pokes chart. it was good, indeed. but those days are long gone, and all that work is hidden away on disk, on fading cheap fanfold paper, etc. I've been thinking over the years of ways to keep/store/present old projects. analogous to how you might hang a picture on a wall, or photograph an event. This, of course, is a perpetual ongoing problem.
It'd be cool to add an applesoft basic interpreter that doesn't require a hardware emulator to the options.
government by the people, for the people. don't forget it.
It is completely a hardware bug. Neither the keyboard, the traditional mouse, the PC gamepad nor joystick, nor the touchpad nor pointer nub has the behavior of recording clicks/presses with a finger lightly resting on it.
The only other thing that does - at least for me - is the laptop trackpack "tap to click" behavior. It must be some EM field about my body but I can cause a "click" behavior when that feature is turned on without even touching the trackpad. Just hovering my finger so it oh so gently barely but not even touches and - click! All trackpads that have that feature behave the same way - from the oldest sony vaios to the macbook pro.
But for the mighty mouse, it definitely does NOT register clicks when you're just resting slightly on it. All three (four actually) buttons need to be seriously depressed on mine. Regarding the behavior of resting the fingers on the left of the mouse while right-clicking, yes I have just verified that this does cause a left-click. I've not experienced it before since I don't rest my fingers on the mouse, actually at all except when clicking. I usually move the mouse with only two fingers - thumb and either middle or ring finger.
But I would not be surprised that apple would try to emulate the one button mouse in that way, while still allowing the right button behavior. It's a detail I wouldn't put past the Steve.
I like the mighty mouse but I'm not entirely happy about having a mechanical moving part to get dirty again. the ball has to be sprayed out with compressed air once in a while.
Yah, back in the eighties we didn't have any of these fancy scroll wheel mice. we had to point and click.
and we liked it.
Change, if not progress.
cmon, even rms says 'free' isn't about price, it's about freedom. the freedom to redistribute the software and modify it, not the freedom from a salary to write the stuff. we're not socialists or communists. you might be. but whatever.
Universities should protect their students and tell the riaa to fuck off. IMHO.
Having just finished school, probably almost all of the filesharing is in copyrighted material which they have no right to "share". Therefore it is illegal and should be stopped. It was disgusting to me how much people were trading movies, games, and music which didn't belong.
I totally disagree with your conclusion. The recording industry is on the brink and they are scared, otherwise they wouldn't bring lawsuits against 13 year-olds and their grammas. They are trying set examples to intimidate the rest of us into propping up their outdated business model. Because their stuff is so easily copied, content industries have always been all about control. They're going to kill to protect their empire way of life, even if apple is dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
The question is not: is copying an mp3 from your buddy Right or Wrong. The question is: do you support corporations that bitchslap their customers, buy senators that let them draft legislation to artificially protect their turf. Everyone with a brain (not to mention research and statistics) knows that if you have money, file sharing leads to more purchases, not less. If you have money, that is. Money to pay for content. Unlike, you know, the typical student.
The trouble is that people want to share, it's easy to share, and there is obviously no inventory lost, therefore, people will share. You are the RIAA; you can: a) adapt to make it easy and fun for your customers to get what they want or b) threaten and sue them and work to prevent people from getting what they want.
The bigger problem is that as something becomes popular, it becomes a part of our culture. Can, or should such a thing be owned by a private corporation? Should they have the power to take it away and punish those who use it without authorization, even though it is those very people whose use of it made it valuable in the first place? George Lucas may think he owns star wars, but we all know that han shot first. It's ours.
It's up to you. Decide according to the outcome you want.
It's gotta be conan's tomb
4. the New-ager/Far Left wing hippie types that believe the gov and science is out to get them. So they do not vacinate, even though it is irresonsible on their part.
Here's just one problem. Start with a healthy kid. He gets a vaccine. He falls into the small percentage of kids who get the side effects. Maybe he just gets sick. Or has seizures. Or even dies. The problem is that he was healthy, then the parents did what they were mandated to do by the government, and their kid suffered these things and is now disabled/dead.
The only responsible thing to do is to evaluate your own risk. We need to be free to make the choice. We can't be potential sacrifices for the greater good.
If you want to encourage kids to experiment, you need to give them a more constrained environment where the feedback cycle is far better(eg. Lego Mindstorms).
This is absolutely true, and that's the way it was back in the day. However, I don't agree with your suggestion that programming is harder today.
The amount of stuff you have to learn to program up a realistic alternative to XBox or whatever is too vast. It takes programming a game from being an afternoon's exercise to a 6 month learning course on 3d modelling etc.
There was a time when there were few or no commercial games, and in that period, yes, certainly newbies had no measure by which to judge their work. (and it is much more fun that way) but no newbie programmers were writing pac man. By 1982 it already required vast amounts of time to create anything commercial quality. I don't think it takes more today for the individual. No newbie will create realistic alternatives to commercial games. That's a ridiculous standard.
And yet we still had fun writing little programs that did nothing of consequence in between playing high quality commercial games. We weren't unhappy because we couldn't write, say, Lode Runner. Not much different than today on that front.
Most europeans don't consider national ID cards (let's stick to that terminology) evil in any way and wonder why you americans make such a big issue of it. We've had them for as long as anyone can remember.
Is that a serious statement? As in: you don't know why? Are you still living with the vestiges of monarchy, empire, and twentieth century totalitarianism over there in peaceful Europe? It's a simple American history question. America is a nation of immigrants who fled the statist structures and religious intolerance of Europe. The concept of Liberty in America has a deep meaning. Americans do not have a feudal legacy, we have never had titles in this country, and we don't have a parent-child relationship with our government. We really do believe in government by the people even if it doesn't look like it from time to time.
It may be out of place today, like the right to carry concealed handguns / stockpile assualt rifles, and you may disagree with it as a European (which I'm assuming you are), but it has an obvious historical explanation that you shouldn't ignore when you try to understand WTF Americans are thinking and why they are acting in certain ways.
Feminism is one front in the fight against stupor and self-centerdness.
People are deeply self-centered, often don't understand others, or even themselves, and don't reflect upon the meaning of their actions. Society has been owned and run by men, and women have been second class citizens. When you're self-centered you just don't know and don't think about how your actions, such as running society, affects others, such as women. It's every little thing from public restrooms to drug trials, not always obvious prejudice or misogyny. feminism puts these issues front and center. I think it still needs to be there. We need radicals sometimes to shake people out of their stupor.
20 Years ago I'm sure that phone tapping ordinary citizens without a warrant would have been quite a concern, today it's hardly an issue in the minds Joe Sixpack.
a majority of americans support impeachment for illegal domestic wiretapping.
Obviously you should move to Bangalore. You'll make a killing managing all these developers doing outsourced jobs. American companies need you.