Quite. All of my jobs since leaving the British nuclear industry back in 2000 (which was very anti-Free pro-Microsoft and closedness in general) have been because of my familiarity with and enthusiasm for Free and Open Source Software.
Most interesting projects are not done on Microsoft platforms any more. They're done on a free unix like Linux, Solaris or *BSD.
Microsoft Windows (and.NET) is a legacy desktop platform for "office" applications.
American Evangelicals don't go suicide bombing anyone that disagrees with their point of view. They also don't call for the execution of cartoonists that portray Jesus disrespectfully...
No, but they shoot doctors at abortion clinics, oppose stem cell research, put on white cloaks and dunce's hats and arbitrarily kill black people.
They also think destroying the environment is a good idea because it will bring about the End of the World sooner, and hence Jesus. And they're stocking up on guns, bombs and bullets to go to Israel when Jesus comes down to force-feed lead to the "towel-heads" and any other non-believers that get in their way.
They also believe in the death penalty, and that gay people should be killed.
Lucky you. I was still using a 16k ZX81 in 1986. My puritanical father thought anything better was decadent, and colour, sound and high-resolution graphics would turn me into a thug, waster and junke.
Er, um, common LISP has some "powerful features" that make programming in it hard, i.e. less practical. I suppose you think PERL is a good language for learners?
The BBC micro was also about 3 times as expensive as the ZX Spectrum. A 32k BBC B cost £399. At today's prices, that's about £1000 ($2000). So if you lived in Surrey or Berkshire, you had a BBC B. Everyone else had a Spectrum.
Yes, the BBC was more sophisticated in many ways (expansion busses, clever OS, many channel sound etc) the Spectrum had a far better processor (Z80) and more memory (48k).
This is a case of the BBC blowing their own trumpet, as it were.
Yes, it was a good machine. It would have been worth the money if they'd put a Z80 in instead of a 6510.
Dip into Ruby (it's not an extension to Java, but there is an implementation that runs on the JVM). The Ruby in Twenty Minutes guide is excellent. There is even a ruby interpreter that runs in your web browser.
Next, dip into scheme. It's a more practical kind of LISP than Common LISP. Get yourself a PLT Scheme with a friendly IDE and tutorials. Play for a while and then go and read about Lambda Calculus:-) Then you can start on Haskell and Erlang etc.
Postscript is a bit domain-specific. FORTH is its grandparent, and much simpler to learn. It's been about for years and there are hundreds of free FORTH systems about. I first learned it when I was 10 on my ZX81.
D looks interesting, but if you have already looked at C and C++, I would strongly recommend looking at Objective-C and contrast it with C++. It's smalltalk-inspired object orientation applied to C vs. Simlua-inspired C++. You will be astounded at the difference. You will also see some similarity with the design of Java...
Most of all, have fun and don't be afraid to start with a quick half hour looking at each one:-) Don't try to become an expert over night. It's taken me 20+ years and I'm still learning, and having more and more fun:-)
Hmm, don't know if it was ultra-clever fascist big brother police frobbing with my mind, or some kind of double-negative-must-be-OK-so-don't-worry-Mr-Liberal... but.
This morning, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the great Jockanese Luddite (from only a few miles up the road from where I was brought up) James Naughty broached this very subject with a Right Wing English police officer (wearing his Mr Reasonable guise).
Note than James Naughty presents programmes where they argue the toss over literature, but he parades his own ignorance with pride in matters of science. Yet he almost gets it right here.
It helps to treat the civilians with respect once you have liberated them, for example, treating them as human beings, not pointing guns at them and learning some of their language so that you can communicate with them effectively, thus not requiring the gun in all situations.
Well, I'm seeing an awful lot of logged in people with reasonable things to say being modded to -1. Luckily, I've had a lot of mod points this week, so I've been trying to redress the balance.
Yes, but the barely literate proletariat read the Sun, Daily Express and the Daily Mail which is all "OMG IMMIGRANTS, POLISH IMMIGRANTS, SINGLE MOTHERS, TERRORISTS, POOR PEOPLE, LIBERALS, PAEDOPHILES!!!!!"
The ones that can be bothered to vote do so according to what these "newspapers" tell them to, and since they vastly outnumber rational and intelligent human beings, we have the government we have.
Do you have a Citroen Saxo with blacked out windows, full bodykit and a wide exhaust? Yokohama shocks? Safe and sorted kicking ICE? Do you go larging it up down town on a Friday night? Hoping to get noticed by the orange birds in high heels, short skirts, silver handbags and hair extensions?
There are plenty of volunteers for suicide missions with much less lofty goals, as a quick review of the news will depressingly demonstrate.
Hmmm... First human on Mars: a suicide bomber waving the Qu'ran and shouting "God is great!"
Islam taken to Mars (just in case the Maritan infidels get any ideas), first human on the red planet, and no expensive return trip required. Everyone's a winner, as they say sarf of the rivva.
To a programmer, the world superstar implies massive overtime with little compensation (aka we want someone who loves programming so much that they won't worry about the fact that we under pay them and over work them).
Quite. I love programming, science and engineering.
I also love a work/life balance. I am good at my job.
I like to be paid for programming and engineering, but I like time to indulge myself in my own programming in my own time when I can do what I like, not what someone tells me to do.
1) I would upgrade the kernel and then the X server would get borked
because the Nvidia kernel module didn't match the new kernel
I too, have been an nVidia customer since 1999 for Linux (I don't do Windows at all). The nVidia driver package has an option to compile a new interface to match your current kernel. It leads you through the options 1 at a time with yes/no options.
The only time I had trouble was when I did a major kernel upgrade and forgot to install the headers for the new kernel. If you're installing as part of a distro (Ubuntu) that should already be done for you when you install the OS. All you need to do is to remember to say yes to the option in the nvidia installer.
I have 5 nvidia graphics cards going all the way back to 1999 and all of then still work. I don't play games nowadays, but for the likes of Stellarium they are very useful and very, very fast.
I bought an ATi card a few years ago and was extremely disappointed with the speed and the snowyness of the display. I'll be waiting a couple of years before I consider buying ATi again, when hopefully the drivers will be mature.
Say Reiser is found guilty, and the public get a vent for their derision, and he goes to the chair, noose or gas chamber. Then say Nina Reiser walks back into town.
What then? Is she guilty of his murder?
Please explain how the American legal system works. Thanks.
My point was that IBM's marketing is full of pointy-haired drivel as usual. Shouting about MIPS is completely useless to people who know about computers. That is why I compared their MIPS claims to my home-made pocket-money PeeCee.
How come they talk about thousands of MIPS instead of just saying GIPS?
Quite. My cheap crap dual core athlon 64 has a clock frequency of 2.6GHz and can do up to 8 instructions per clock per core. Let's say it does 2 instructions per clock per core. That's 4 per clock at 2.6GHz. That would be 10 400 MIPS, or 10.4 GIPs.
And don't give me that nonsense about PeeCee IO bandwidth. This is a NUMA machine with fast disks and memory.
So, IBM's fancy mainframe is about 3 times the speed of my PeeCee.
Mind you, to give them credit, my PeeCee runs Slackware, and IBM funds Slackware on their mainframes (just like RedHat and SuSE) so all three people who want to run Linux on their mainframe can.
If you're not with us, you're against us. Only those with something to hide could possibly even think of opposing. We are your Lords and Masters. Do as we say.
I have a deep deep distrust and hatred of MS. But look at the history of IBM. As I understand it they went through the same thing back in the day. People HATED IBM venomously but in time as IBM changed their ways people stopped caring about what they did in the past.
IBM hasn't really changed, it's just gone up to a new level of abstraction. It's no a services company, that happens to make its own computers and software.
IBM uses Linux and Open Source as a pawn in its war against Microsoft. IBM encompasses everything, except Solaris. AIX lost the unix wars to Solaris and now IBM uses Linux as a pawn against it.
IBM will sell you anything, and charge for support, whether it be Microsoft, IBM, Linux, Dell, RedHat, Oracle, Sun, SGI, Lenovo,...
Slashdot Mirror
Quite. All of my jobs since leaving the British nuclear industry back in 2000 (which was very anti-Free pro-Microsoft and closedness in general) have been because of my familiarity with and enthusiasm for Free and Open Source Software.
Most interesting projects are not done on Microsoft platforms any more. They're done on a free unix like Linux, Solaris or *BSD.
Microsoft Windows (and .NET) is a legacy desktop platform for "office" applications.
American Evangelicals don't go suicide bombing anyone that disagrees with their point of view. They also don't call for the execution of cartoonists that portray Jesus disrespectfully...
No, but they shoot doctors at abortion clinics, oppose stem cell research, put on white cloaks and dunce's hats and arbitrarily kill black people.
They also think destroying the environment is a good idea because it will bring about the End of the World sooner, and hence Jesus. And they're stocking up on guns, bombs and bullets to go to Israel when Jesus comes down to force-feed lead to the "towel-heads" and any other non-believers that get in their way.
They also believe in the death penalty, and that gay people should be killed.
Lucky you. I was still using a 16k ZX81 in 1986. My puritanical father thought anything better was decadent, and colour, sound and high-resolution graphics would turn me into a thug, waster and junke.
I obsessively collect computers nowadays.
Er, um, common LISP has some "powerful features" that make programming in it hard, i.e. less practical. I suppose you think PERL is a good language for learners?
The BBC micro was also about 3 times as expensive as the ZX Spectrum. A 32k BBC B cost £399. At today's prices, that's about £1000 ($2000). So if you lived in Surrey or Berkshire, you had a BBC B. Everyone else had a Spectrum.
Yes, the BBC was more sophisticated in many ways (expansion busses, clever OS, many channel sound etc) the Spectrum had a far better processor (Z80) and more memory (48k).
This is a case of the BBC blowing their own trumpet, as it were.
Yes, it was a good machine. It would have been worth the money if they'd put a Z80 in instead of a 6510.
Jumble sale? Village fete? Sponsored walk? Bob-a-job? Mother and toddlers coffee morning? Bring-and-buy sale?
Dip into Ruby (it's not an extension to Java, but there is an implementation that runs on the JVM). The Ruby in Twenty Minutes guide is excellent. There is even a ruby interpreter that runs in your web browser.
Next, dip into scheme. It's a more practical kind of LISP than Common LISP. Get yourself a PLT Scheme with a friendly IDE and tutorials. Play for a while and then go and read about Lambda Calculus :-) Then you can start on Haskell and Erlang etc.
Postscript is a bit domain-specific. FORTH is its grandparent, and much simpler to learn. It's been about for years and there are hundreds of free FORTH systems about. I first learned it when I was 10 on my ZX81.
D looks interesting, but if you have already looked at C and C++, I would strongly recommend looking at Objective-C and contrast it with C++. It's smalltalk-inspired object orientation applied to C vs. Simlua-inspired C++. You will be astounded at the difference. You will also see some similarity with the design of Java...
Most of all, have fun and don't be afraid to start with a quick half hour looking at each one :-) Don't try to become an expert over night. It's taken me 20+ years and I'm still learning, and having more and more fun :-)
How about a 12-foot tall flying Mohamed with laser cannon eyes, and a last-ditch explosive self-destruct mechanism?
Hmm, don't know if it was ultra-clever fascist big brother police frobbing with my mind, or some kind of double-negative-must-be-OK-so-don't-worry-Mr-Liberal ... but.
This morning, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the great Jockanese Luddite (from only a few miles up the road from where I was brought up) James Naughty broached this very subject with a Right Wing English police officer (wearing his Mr Reasonable guise).
You can hear the interview at this here link.
Note than James Naughty presents programmes where they argue the toss over literature, but he parades his own ignorance with pride in matters of science. Yet he almost gets it right here.
I wouldn't if I were you, you might catch something nasty.
It helps to treat the civilians with respect once you have liberated them, for example, treating them as human beings, not pointing guns at them and learning some of their language so that you can communicate with them effectively, thus not requiring the gun in all situations.
Well, I'm seeing an awful lot of logged in people with reasonable things to say being modded to -1. Luckily, I've had a lot of mod points this week, so I've been trying to redress the balance.
Yes, but the barely literate proletariat read the Sun, Daily Express and the Daily Mail which is all "OMG IMMIGRANTS, POLISH IMMIGRANTS, SINGLE MOTHERS, TERRORISTS, POOR PEOPLE, LIBERALS, PAEDOPHILES!!!!!"
The ones that can be bothered to vote do so according to what these "newspapers" tell them to, and since they vastly outnumber rational and intelligent human beings, we have the government we have.
Do you have a Citroen Saxo with blacked out windows, full bodykit and a wide exhaust? Yokohama shocks? Safe and sorted kicking ICE? Do you go larging it up down town on a Friday night? Hoping to get noticed by the orange birds in high heels, short skirts, silver handbags and hair extensions?
Why doesn't everyone just take their clothes off? I mean, it would be much easier, cheaper and fairer. Nothing to hide? Nothing to fear.
Everyone saw everything, so no privacy to worry about.
There are plenty of volunteers for suicide missions with much less lofty goals, as a quick review of the news will depressingly demonstrate.
Hmmm... First human on Mars: a suicide bomber waving the Qu'ran and shouting "God is great!"
Islam taken to Mars (just in case the Maritan infidels get any ideas), first human on the red planet, and no expensive return trip required. Everyone's a winner, as they say sarf of the rivva.
To a programmer, the world superstar implies massive overtime with little compensation (aka we want someone who loves programming so much that they won't worry about the fact that we under pay them and over work them).
Quite. I love programming, science and engineering.
I also love a work/life balance. I am good at my job.
I like to be paid for programming and engineering, but I like time to indulge myself in my own programming in my own time when I can do what I like, not what someone tells me to do.
Many PHBs don't seem to understand this.
Get off my lawn. My first computer came with 1k of RAM. I still have it.
1) I would upgrade the kernel and then the X server would get borked because the Nvidia kernel module didn't match the new kernel
I too, have been an nVidia customer since 1999 for Linux (I don't do Windows at all). The nVidia driver package has an option to compile a new interface to match your current kernel. It leads you through the options 1 at a time with yes/no options.
The only time I had trouble was when I did a major kernel upgrade and forgot to install the headers for the new kernel. If you're installing as part of a distro (Ubuntu) that should already be done for you when you install the OS. All you need to do is to remember to say yes to the option in the nvidia installer.
I have 5 nvidia graphics cards going all the way back to 1999 and all of then still work. I don't play games nowadays, but for the likes of Stellarium they are very useful and very, very fast.
I bought an ATi card a few years ago and was extremely disappointed with the speed and the snowyness of the display. I'll be waiting a couple of years before I consider buying ATi again, when hopefully the drivers will be mature.
You have a lot to learn about human relationships.
Say Reiser is found guilty, and the public get a vent for their derision, and he goes to the chair, noose or gas chamber. Then say Nina Reiser walks back into town.
What then? Is she guilty of his murder?
Please explain how the American legal system works. Thanks.
My point was that IBM's marketing is full of pointy-haired drivel as usual. Shouting about MIPS is completely useless to people who know about computers. That is why I compared their MIPS claims to my home-made pocket-money PeeCee.
How come they talk about thousands of MIPS instead of just saying GIPS?
Quite. My cheap crap dual core athlon 64 has a clock frequency of 2.6GHz and can do up to 8 instructions per clock per core. Let's say it does 2 instructions per clock per core. That's 4 per clock at 2.6GHz. That would be 10 400 MIPS, or 10.4 GIPs.
And don't give me that nonsense about PeeCee IO bandwidth. This is a NUMA machine with fast disks and memory.
So, IBM's fancy mainframe is about 3 times the speed of my PeeCee.
Mind you, to give them credit, my PeeCee runs Slackware, and IBM funds Slackware on their mainframes (just like RedHat and SuSE) so all three people who want to run Linux on their mainframe can.
IBM - Same old bovine excrement.
Woosh!
If you're not with us, you're against us. Only those with something to hide could possibly even think of opposing. We are your Lords and Masters. Do as we say.
I have a deep deep distrust and hatred of MS. But look at the history of IBM. As I understand it they went through the same thing back in the day. People HATED IBM venomously but in time as IBM changed their ways people stopped caring about what they did in the past.
IBM hasn't really changed, it's just gone up to a new level of abstraction. It's no a services company, that happens to make its own computers and software.
IBM uses Linux and Open Source as a pawn in its war against Microsoft. IBM encompasses everything, except Solaris. AIX lost the unix wars to Solaris and now IBM uses Linux as a pawn against it.
IBM will sell you anything, and charge for support, whether it be Microsoft, IBM, Linux, Dell, RedHat, Oracle, Sun, SGI, Lenovo, ...
"You got a wallet? We got a Hoover!" - IBM