No such thing existed at that time. In 1985, the networks were fragmented into dozens of incompatible protocols, the environment which could have made Hypercard into the first web browser simply didn't exist and therefore there was no opportunity to make it into such. Since you mention incompatible protocols, there's another related issue. Unlike the WWW, HyperCard was proprietary, and the hypothetical NetHyperCard would likely would have remained so to some extent.
Its open nature was (as far as I am aware) a major benefit of the WWW, and probably helped it take off pretty quickly. Thus, it's *not* a foregone conclusion that a proprietary NetHyperCard with very similar capabilities would have taken off in the same way.
In fact, it's quite probable that had NetHyperCard existed and been released in the mid-to-late 80s, it would have been been Mac only and tied specifically to AppleTalk networks (rather than TCP/IP). This is already partly implied by what you say above; but I also think that NetHyperCard would have *remained* proprietary and Apple-centric- and hence a niche product- until (or *if*) a clearly successful open product persuaded Apple to change their mind. Which likely would have been the WWW anyway!
But by the time it was visibly successful enough to force Apple's hand, the WWW would likely be the established standard. My guess is that- allowing time for the company to action it- Apple would have released a pseudo-open, multi-platform, TCP/IP-friendly version of NetHyperCard circa 1997-99. And since everyone would already be using the WWW, NetHyperCard would still be ignored.
To cut this long story short, even if it had been invented long before the WWW, I still think it's unlikely that we'd be using NetHyperCard instead of the WWW today.
Of course, had NetHyperCard been invented before the WWW, it's quite possible that Apple could have taken legal action against it in some form; but even if successful, I think that this would be more likely to stifle things overall than make NetHyperCard a success on the scale of the web. In that sense, I'm glad that it never came to fruition.
Apple is going to rule the Digital Home. Read the article and the title of this/. article again. You seem pretty sure of yourself, so what exactly constitutes what is and isn't a "digital" home? The article doesn't really pin that down.
By the standards of 25- or even arguably 10 years ago- most present-day homes are fairly "digital" and high-tech. Inevitably, those with money to splash out would have got their fancy toys first, biasing the market in the short term, but in the medium to long term the average home *has* become a digital home. Even if we raise the bar (cliche alert) for this future "digital" home, the same thing's going to happen. So....
Besides, the people that live without a microwave or a TV aren't even close to Apple's target customer. In fact, those people wouldn't be near many company's target customer. Apple does not produce products that "everybody" can afford. Neither do most companies. So what? We're talking about the "digital" home (whatever that is), not one specifically populated by Apple's "target customers"- unless you're defining them to be the same thing (which borders on a "no true Scotsman" style argument).
I think you may be a tad confused... or are just someone that has a very limited income that really wants a Mac. Either way, welcome to the real world! It's nice to have you... Smacks of an ad hominem attack against the GP to me.
I was thinking more along the lines of "intentionally screwing them out of their pension"- which is basically what Ford did. This would inevitably correlate with age, but isn't really the same thing per se.
He'd done bizarre things like declaring an array called "constants", which he initialized with 0 to 255, and everywhere in the code where you might ordinarily have an integer constant, he'd use "constants[whatever]" instead. Sounds strange, although perhaps it was some pseudo-optimisation of the type any decent compiler shouldn't need nowadays, but which may have been useful in the past (*) and may have been kept on; either because the guy thought it was still applicable, because he was trying to outsmart the compiler with optimisations (without being smart enough to realise that this was counterproductive), because of habit (his) or because when the code was written it was still useful.
I read elsewhere that old 8-bit BASICs used to run faster with variables, because they had to parse the numeric string which represented constant values within the program every time. (e.g. one = 1; two = 2;.... somevar = one + two; INSTEAD OF somevar = 1 + 2). Perhaps this is where it came from?
Now that we're on this subject(!), I also remember that type-in listings for the unexpanded Sinclair ZX81 (1KB RAM!) used to say things like
LET FOO = CODE 'A'
instead of
LET FOO = 37
or whatever, because CODE 'A' (the ZX81's equivalent of ASC(A)) took up less memory. Weird in today's context, sure.
Are you sure it was office politics? A similar thing happened to my dad too, except that it was more a case of him getting close to qualifying for a sizable pension, and the bank wanting to screw him (and all the other employees in the same situation) out of it. Didn't Ford try pulling something similar in the US and basically lose in court? (Note; I'm assuming that you (or rather your Dad) are in the US too, otherwise this wouldn't be legally relevant anyway).
I keylogged his ass, and 2 days latter he was let go. Heh, he a actually said "You can't fire me, know one else has my information" And had a smug ass look on his face. What's the legal position with something like that where you are? Or more specifically, if someone senior enough in the company (with the legal authority) had requested the passwords from this guy before he'd been sacked? Even if he'd chosen to quit rather than hand them over?
Bearing in mind that he would essentially be refusing access (on paid time) to work done for the company - again on paid time. I'm comparing this broadly to doing work for the company on paid time and then essentially refusing to hand it - or rather access to it - over on request. Even if the person leaves of their own volition there and then, this still sounds legally dubious to me.
Of course it wasn't until a couple of weeks later while we were out shopping that my girlfriend pointed out that it's meant to be five *portions* of fresh fruit and vegetables per day, not five *kilos*... Coincidentally, I'd bought some fruit today, and the bag of satsumas had a label attached saying that 2 of them had 50 calories. I remembered reading your comment earlier and calculated that there were 16 satsumas in the 1kg bag, so that's 400 calories.
So your 5kg of fruit would have 2000 calories; the recommended daily intake for a woman, and 500 short of that for a man.
Of course, these things vary; 5kg of grapes would probably be significantly higher (more sugar)- but since you mentioned veg, which is usually lower in calories, if you ate a mixture, you'd probably be closer to the 1500 calorie mark- and you *would* lose weight.
I wouldn't recommend that for digestive reasons, though:O
WTF? Im 165 and have been in IT for 15years. No problems here. Assuming you mean 165 pounds, that could still cover a multitude of sins.
You could be 5 foot tall, you could be 6 1/2 foot.
You could have a very skinny build, or you could be put together like a player for the New Zealand All Blacks. (Note that by build I mean your physical body shape, regardless of fat or muscle- although of course, your tendency to build fat or muscle easily or otherwise will also have an effect.)
How much of that weight is fat and how much is muscle?
This news just makes my surety to demand it off them go from 50% to 95%. I might be willing to take this seriously if you'd said it had gone from 50% to 100%; i.e. you actually showed how serious you were by committing to do something about it.
Leaving the 5% in just smacks of wriggle room so that you can complain about it here and imply you're almost definitely going to do something about it. Perhaps you've even kidded yourself, but deep inside you know you won't bother. Or let me put it this way- when you phrase it like that, it makes me think that the odds are really the other way round; 95% against you doing anything about it.
Sure, you'd be no worse than the rest of us in sucking it up, but it's the ten-a-penny easy-to-say-you'll-do-something-in-a-forum nonsense that gets me, just like the people who complain about WoW and how they're going to cancel their subscription then never do.
Perhaps you'll get even angrier and post the certainty up to 99.9% (strangely it works out with 0.1% probability that you do nothing!) But seriously, either commit to doing it or spare us this nonsense.
I code in AMOS!!! The research also showed that magnets- such as inappropriately placed subwoofers on PC systems- could also suppress the part of the brain responsible for programming skills.
Now linux had its chance and it is being forgotten by all but the most hardcore nerds. Even OLPC is getting Windows now. Just accept the failure, and work on other projects. I'd say the fact that OLPC and Eee PC went with Linux first and that MS released a cut-price version of XP in response (their *old* OS that they *were* trying to phase out) was an indication that you were incorrect.
Of course MS were going to fight back, and I'm not too surprised that OLPC is now running XP (though I'll admit to being disappointed).
Personally, I'm not convinced that Joe Public will ever be that bothered (or necessarily know) that he's running Linux on such-and-such a device- he may just use it without giving it a great amount of thought. And the question is whether there'll be a consistent interface (which *is* the OS in a lot of ways to most people); but they'll still be running Linux in such cases.
1995 was the linux "Year of the Desktop" for me. This phrase is different for each person, just as windows is. Then you've missed the point- the phrase refers to Linux making a breakthrough in the traditional desktop market, both in terms of general usability for the typical "desktop" user and also (as a result) in terms of numbers of actual desktop Linux users.
If you think that's a pointless discussion, or if you just don't care about Linux's market share in that segment, that's your choice, of course. But this question is distinct from a Slashdot-poll style question asking when individuals started using desktop Linux.
WWII (all fronts, including pacific) killed 72 million people, including 47 million civilians. [..] Millions were murdered in an industrial-scale project to displace, rob, and ship them to the east for "processing". Etcetera... yes, I'm well aware that WWII was a human tragedy. But since we were discussing the destruction of buildings, it should have been obvious to you (had you been paying attention instead of scribbling scatological insults) that I was talking about buildings.
Russia is geographically a part of Europe (and a part of Asia), though most people tend to treat it an entity in its own right. Undoubtedly it suffered a lot. The question is whether the overall across the whole of the continent constituted the destruction or "tearing down" of Europe. And the answer is "of course it fucking didn't, because a large proportion of European buildings today are still old, and many of those that *were* knocked down were knocked down *after* the war".
London may have been bombed 57 nights in a row; but it was far from completely destroyed. Saying that "x million houses were destroyed in such and such a place" has to be viewed in the context of the far greater number of old buildings that were left standing, particularly in the country overall.
Nuremberg's historic buildings may have been destroyed, but few of London's were. Can you give me any good examples of how many of its famous attractions were permanently damaged during the war?
By the way, smartass, I've lived in Glasgow (one of your examples), and while it may have suffered from bombing, it was hardly wiped out. There are still large swathes of old housing stock in the city, and most of the older houses that have been replaced were destroyed during the 1960s- typically because they were old, decrepit slums that were of unacceptably poor quality. Nothing directly to do with the War.
There was also this little thing called "the bomb". You mean "The Bomb", as in the atomic bomb that was never dropped on Europe?
Specifically its just the bootloader for GNU Emacs, the finest most complete operating system known to mankind. Albeit one without a decent text editor.
On second thoughts, disregard that... I just remembered that Emacs has a Vi emultation mode!
Then where would we get our free encyclopedia articles? Everything 2? Everything2 isn't (or wasn't) quite the same thing as Wikipedia- it never quite figured out what it was supposed to be, and I think that was part of its charm.
It wasn't totally objective, and it contained personal essays, ideas and thoughts as much as encyclopedia entries. It wasn't Wikipedia, even if some people might have thought that was the idea when it started.
Unfortunately, although E2 is still being added to, it's clearly a shadow of its former self. The majority of the articles were written around the turn of the millennium (going by the dates, I'd say that it peaked circa 1999-2001), and vastly outnumber the new stuff. That's long enough ago that the site feels more like a historical document of that time than a living, breathing entity.
Why did it decline? My guess is that the site was built around particular community biased towards people of student age and twentysomethings. Most moved on, and the remainder of the community became more insular and hostile to outsiders. That, and in their attempt to improve the quality of the site, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Shame; E2 was in a lot of respects interesting, but it's essentially preserved history now.
It's not every day that someone encourages me to lose my pants. So what you're actually saying is that as a basement-dwelling Slashdot troll, you typically don't drive members of the opposite sex mad with lust?
You're still confusing language with its implementation. All versions of BASIC are "implementations" of an abstract. And I believe that the designers of KidBASIC were using those implementations as the basis of their language, not some abstract ideal.
I'm not sure what the point you're making is either; I don't see how you think I'm confusing the two, nor how it would make much difference in any case.
I don't disagree that bad programming is bad but you never resopnded to my assertion that BASIC was designed as an *introduction* to programming. On the contrary, the criticisms I made were specifically in the context of it being an introductory language.
BASIC does not, as you assert, promote bad programming practices. It's just a language, a set of tools. The tools were designed with a specific purpose in mind, introducing beginners to programming. Since it's (in part at least) a teaching/introductory language, it's reasonable to blame it for design decisions (GOTOS, lack of structure or variable declarations) that encourage *learning* bad habits.
And even if that weren't the case (it is!), I would still blame the people who- in 2008- thought that using unstructured, obsolete BASIC to teach kids was a good idea.
And isn't getting your knickers in a twist over BASIC pointless? You forget that the reason I brought this up in the first place was that people were planning on using it to teach kids.
Who uses it for enterprise projects? Uh, no-one. I already made that point above. (Specifically that because it's obsolete and no longer used by many people, it doesn't even have the excuse of being standard nowadays).
Who even uses BASIC except as an educational tool BINGO! That was the point I'm making. It's a ******* horrible educational tool.
Your knowledge of BASIC also seems flawed. You appear not to be aware that MS strongly promoted it's own version of BASIC as a development platform for a number of years. Which version(s)? If you're talking about VB, then that does *not* count as one of the old-fashioned, non-structured BASICs ("old school BASIC") I repeatedly made clear I was referring to.
And if you're talking about some version of the original 1970s/1980s microcomputer MS BASICs, well... that was 25 years ago. Plus, just because MS might have been promoting the use of their own products, doesn't mean it was a good idea even then.
I get your point but consider that people write crap in the English language however that doesn't mean the English language is crap. Yes, but (as a general rule) it doesn't mean that a language- or whatever- *isn't* crap either.
The same is true of BASIC. I disagree...
He introduced a bunch of kids to the concept of computer programming. That was the original purpose of BASIC (and LOGO while I'm at it). The fact that BASIC was often misused is not the fault of the language. I'd suggest that if a language is *explicitly* aimed at beginners and has repeatedly (and by its very design) been shown to encourage bad design and damaging patterns/practices by those using it, then it is *certainly* the fault of the language.
I'm not saying that BASIC didn't have its good points. It was certainly accessible, and friendly, and that makes up for its clunkiness to some extent. However, certain things like easy and unlimited GOTOs and not having to define variables (which sound nice to beginners) are actually a PITA in the long run, getting the learner into bad practices and making their code hard to debug.
By the way, I'll point out that the designers of the *original* 1960s BASIC apparently disliked a lot of the bastardisations made when it appeared on the first microcomputers (i.e. the ones which essentially defined BASIC for a generation, and which I'm criticising here). I don't know enough about their BASIC to say if it was better, and it's ultimately irrelevant since what we're essentially discussing is "stereotypical microcomputer BASIC".
I started programming in FORTRAN, so BASIC seemed like a gift from the gods at the time. I've never used Fortran, so I can't comment on that, but even BASIC was better than the competition 30-40 years ago, it doesn't make it a good language today.
You're right, BASIC is pretty retro however if it encourages someone to get more interested in programming as a career what's the problem with that? Because there must exist today (or could exist, if someone were bothered) far more suitable languages for beginners to get into than old-school BASIC. Languages that would be built around structured programming, but were just as easy to use- if not easier- than BASIC.
The problem is that BASIC encourages all sorts of horrible programming habits that are hard to get out of and that don't reflect modern software development anyway. Not that they ever reflected *good* software development...
And even where some limitations of the language/implementation may have been forgivable on a low-powered, small-memory 8-bit home micro, there is no good reason for sticking with them on a modern high-powered PC! (Or anything at least as fast as a 286 for that matter...)
Old-style BASICs are no longer even remotely standard, so that doesn't come into play.
Such BASICs may have been *my* first computer language, but I can see- and agree with- why they were so criticised and damned now.
The most interesting thing during the tour: It's estimated that the work done at Bletchley Park shortened the length of the war by 18 months. If the war had run ~18 months longer, the target of the bomb would have been Berlin instead of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Something similar had occurred to me. I posted this comment a while back, which was essentially that- IMHO- Germany may have been lucky to have lost the war literally two months (three at a push) before the atomic bomb was ready. You can click the link if you like, so I'll avoid rehashing it here (note also some interesting responses to it).
I do find it strange that- despite all the discussion about use of the atomic bomb on Japan- people seem to forget that the weapon was developed primarily in response to Germany, and all that implies.
IMHO the war would *not* have gone on a further 18 months, because the atomic bomb would have been used against Germany long before then to force it to a conclusion.
Milton Keynes is an ugly town, and since people have heard of Turing why bother visiting Milton Keynes. [..] I see no point in visiting Bletchley Park (thats Milton Keynes) to visit a shed. Whether or not Bletchley Park is worth visiting, Milton Keynes is a red herring, and your rant is irrelevant.
MK didn't even exist when BP was doing its work, and its inclusion as part of modern MK is simply because it was swallowed up by the expansion of that city- architecturally and historically, it doesn't share the same origins.
And since BP isn't being sold by its surrounding location (either as part of MK or as something different), it's irrelevant. People who would have visited BP anyway will still visit it; it's not like they'll be expecting anonymous 1960s concrete architecture, and your attempt to tie in the two is silly.
Interesting fact; apparently parts of Superman IV were filmed in Milton Keynes (proper). Some people who've seen that film might think "figures"...:)
That written, I view the demise of Bletchley Park the same way I look at copyrights: Doing something great a long time ago shouldn't guarantee you a lifetime of financial benefits. Even if you saved the world.
Great you broke codes but a long time has passed since then. Figure out how to pay your own way. Perhaps you've been reading Slashdot too long and are starting to misapply (totally valid) arguments against the music industry elsewhere. Or perhaps you just view everything in terms of business.
Whether Bletchley Park is worth preserving is, of course, open to discussion.
Regardless, to consider the question as if the place were nothing more than a business looking for handouts after it had been paid back is blinkered.
I don't know your nationality, but if (e.g.) the Statue of Liberty or the Alamo were to require more money than they were making, can you imagine even your average pro-business, anti-socialist American saying that they should pay their own way or be knocked down? Of course not- they're ******* historical monuments, and widely considered part of the shared history of the country. They're NOT sodding corporations!
As I said, whether or not Bletchley Park is worth preserving and putting money into is a reasonable discussion. However, unless you strongly believe- and have reasonable evidence- that those running the place are doing so for their own benefit, then it's stupid to judge it as something it isn't supposed to be.
I thought they did all the tearing down 60-70 years ago, during that little scuffle called World War II. In the overall scheme of things, I don't think that many buildings- ones of major historic importance or otherwise- were destroyed during WWII.
Yes, there were blitzes in the UK that caused quite a lot of damage to certain places (such as London). It's possible that Eastern Europe, caught in the middle, suffered even more. (I confess ignorance as to the relative damage). But overall, I don't think that Europe was destroyed by WWII.
I'm willing to bet that far more old buildings were knocked down or replaced during the post-war construction era, particularly the 1960s. Some of the buildings were probably damaged ones being replaced, but most of them were probably just old, poor-quality slums that were due for replacement- particularly in this bright new world. They may have been a delayed response to the war, but they mostly weren't a direct consequence of it.
Of course, most of those new buildings grew to be hated sooner rather than later (especially the stuff built during the 1960s when the boom of "modern" looking buildings was at its peak and before the backlash was in full swing). Many of them have in turn been knocked down(!)
I taught 9-year-olds "KidBasic" using Win98 boxes, and they had a blast! Alarm bells started ringing when I read this. I was happy to cut it some slack... perhaps it's a "modern" BASIC that doesn't encourage all those horrific programming practices that damaged a generation of programmers. So I Google it, get its home page and see...
BASIC-256 is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. No, it's the old-fashioned spaghetti BASIC.
I can't describe exactly what I felt when I read this, but I think downheartedness and indignation were mixed in there. I'm sure that the people running this project are well-meaning, but this is a FUCKING HORRIBLE thing to be teaching kids to program with. This isn't 25 years ago, you don't even have the excuse that you're using an underpowered late-70s/early-80s microcomputer.
Sure, trad BASICs probably mirror the underlying flow of the machine more than modern structured languages- but if that's what you're doing, I'd still use some pseudo-machine code tool. If you want to teach them programming in a fun way, I'm also damn sure that there must be modern languages that are easy to get into and use, but which don't rely on GOTO and GOSUB.
Old-school BASIC died years ago (even the last widely-used "modern" BASIC, VB, is dying). While I'm strongly in favour of teaching kids to program, I'm even more strongly opposed to using traditional BASIC for it.
I'm sorry if I sound like I'm flaming you or the people involved in the project personally- but I think this is a misguided and potentially *damaging* idea. It smacks of well-meaning adults wanting to get kids into programming the same way that they did, but assuming that BASIC is the best choice because it's what they used (and get nostalgic about).
Let me make clear again that I'm in favour of getting kids into programming... but in this day and age, there's absolutely no excuse for teaching them BASIC.
Slashdot Mirror
Its open nature was (as far as I am aware) a major benefit of the WWW, and probably helped it take off pretty quickly. Thus, it's *not* a foregone conclusion that a proprietary NetHyperCard with very similar capabilities would have taken off in the same way.
In fact, it's quite probable that had NetHyperCard existed and been released in the mid-to-late 80s, it would have been been Mac only and tied specifically to AppleTalk networks (rather than TCP/IP). This is already partly implied by what you say above; but I also think that NetHyperCard would have *remained* proprietary and Apple-centric- and hence a niche product- until (or *if*) a clearly successful open product persuaded Apple to change their mind. Which likely would have been the WWW anyway!
But by the time it was visibly successful enough to force Apple's hand, the WWW would likely be the established standard. My guess is that- allowing time for the company to action it- Apple would have released a pseudo-open, multi-platform, TCP/IP-friendly version of NetHyperCard circa 1997-99. And since everyone would already be using the WWW, NetHyperCard would still be ignored.
To cut this long story short, even if it had been invented long before the WWW, I still think it's unlikely that we'd be using NetHyperCard instead of the WWW today.
Of course, had NetHyperCard been invented before the WWW, it's quite possible that Apple could have taken legal action against it in some form; but even if successful, I think that this would be more likely to stifle things overall than make NetHyperCard a success on the scale of the web. In that sense, I'm glad that it never came to fruition.
By the standards of 25- or even arguably 10 years ago- most present-day homes are fairly "digital" and high-tech. Inevitably, those with money to splash out would have got their fancy toys first, biasing the market in the short term, but in the medium to long term the average home *has* become a digital home. Even if we raise the bar (cliche alert) for this future "digital" home, the same thing's going to happen. So.... Besides, the people that live without a microwave or a TV aren't even close to Apple's target customer. In fact, those people wouldn't be near many company's target customer. Apple does not produce products that "everybody" can afford. Neither do most companies. So what? We're talking about the "digital" home (whatever that is), not one specifically populated by Apple's "target customers"- unless you're defining them to be the same thing (which borders on a "no true Scotsman" style argument). I think you may be a tad confused... or are just someone that has a very limited income that really wants a Mac. Either way, welcome to the real world! It's nice to have you... Smacks of an ad hominem attack against the GP to me.
I was thinking more along the lines of "intentionally screwing them out of their pension"- which is basically what Ford did. This would inevitably correlate with age, but isn't really the same thing per se.
I read elsewhere that old 8-bit BASICs used to run faster with variables, because they had to parse the numeric string which represented constant values within the program every time. (e.g. one = 1; two = 2;
Now that we're on this subject(!), I also remember that type-in listings for the unexpanded Sinclair ZX81 (1KB RAM!) used to say things like
LET FOO = CODE 'A'
instead of
LET FOO = 37
or whatever, because CODE 'A' (the ZX81's equivalent of ASC(A)) took up less memory. Weird in today's context, sure.
Bearing in mind that he would essentially be refusing access (on paid time) to work done for the company - again on paid time. I'm comparing this broadly to doing work for the company on paid time and then essentially refusing to hand it - or rather access to it - over on request. Even if the person leaves of their own volition there and then, this still sounds legally dubious to me.
So your 5kg of fruit would have 2000 calories; the recommended daily intake for a woman, and 500 short of that for a man.
Of course, these things vary; 5kg of grapes would probably be significantly higher (more sugar)- but since you mentioned veg, which is usually lower in calories, if you ate a mixture, you'd probably be closer to the 1500 calorie mark- and you *would* lose weight.
I wouldn't recommend that for digestive reasons, though
You could be 5 foot tall, you could be 6 1/2 foot.
You could have a very skinny build, or you could be put together like a player for the New Zealand All Blacks. (Note that by build I mean your physical body shape, regardless of fat or muscle- although of course, your tendency to build fat or muscle easily or otherwise will also have an effect.)
How much of that weight is fat and how much is muscle?
My bad, sorry :-(
(Can I mod myself down now?!)
Leaving the 5% in just smacks of wriggle room so that you can complain about it here and imply you're almost definitely going to do something about it. Perhaps you've even kidded yourself, but deep inside you know you won't bother. Or let me put it this way- when you phrase it like that, it makes me think that the odds are really the other way round; 95% against you doing anything about it.
Sure, you'd be no worse than the rest of us in sucking it up, but it's the ten-a-penny easy-to-say-you'll-do-something-in-a-forum nonsense that gets me, just like the people who complain about WoW and how they're going to cancel their subscription then never do.
Perhaps you'll get even angrier and post the certainty up to 99.9% (strangely it works out with 0.1% probability that you do nothing!) But seriously, either commit to doing it or spare us this nonsense.
Of course MS were going to fight back, and I'm not too surprised that OLPC is now running XP (though I'll admit to being disappointed).
Personally, I'm not convinced that Joe Public will ever be that bothered (or necessarily know) that he's running Linux on such-and-such a device- he may just use it without giving it a great amount of thought. And the question is whether there'll be a consistent interface (which *is* the OS in a lot of ways to most people); but they'll still be running Linux in such cases.
If you think that's a pointless discussion, or if you just don't care about Linux's market share in that segment, that's your choice, of course. But this question is distinct from a Slashdot-poll style question asking when individuals started using desktop Linux.
Russia is geographically a part of Europe (and a part of Asia), though most people tend to treat it an entity in its own right. Undoubtedly it suffered a lot. The question is whether the overall across the whole of the continent constituted the destruction or "tearing down" of Europe. And the answer is "of course it fucking didn't, because a large proportion of European buildings today are still old, and many of those that *were* knocked down were knocked down *after* the war".
London may have been bombed 57 nights in a row; but it was far from completely destroyed. Saying that "x million houses were destroyed in such and such a place" has to be viewed in the context of the far greater number of old buildings that were left standing, particularly in the country overall.
Nuremberg's historic buildings may have been destroyed, but few of London's were. Can you give me any good examples of how many of its famous attractions were permanently damaged during the war? By the way, smartass, I've lived in Glasgow (one of your examples), and while it may have suffered from bombing, it was hardly wiped out. There are still large swathes of old housing stock in the city, and most of the older houses that have been replaced were destroyed during the 1960s- typically because they were old, decrepit slums that were of unacceptably poor quality. Nothing directly to do with the War. There was also this little thing called "the bomb". You mean "The Bomb", as in the atomic bomb that was never dropped on Europe?
On second thoughts, disregard that... I just remembered that Emacs has a Vi emultation mode!
It wasn't totally objective, and it contained personal essays, ideas and thoughts as much as encyclopedia entries. It wasn't Wikipedia, even if some people might have thought that was the idea when it started.
Unfortunately, although E2 is still being added to, it's clearly a shadow of its former self. The majority of the articles were written around the turn of the millennium (going by the dates, I'd say that it peaked circa 1999-2001), and vastly outnumber the new stuff. That's long enough ago that the site feels more like a historical document of that time than a living, breathing entity.
Why did it decline? My guess is that the site was built around particular community biased towards people of student age and twentysomethings. Most moved on, and the remainder of the community became more insular and hostile to outsiders. That, and in their attempt to improve the quality of the site, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Shame; E2 was in a lot of respects interesting, but it's essentially preserved history now.
This is a major surprise.
I'm not sure what the point you're making is either; I don't see how you think I'm confusing the two, nor how it would make much difference in any case. I don't disagree that bad programming is bad but you never resopnded to my assertion that BASIC was designed as an *introduction* to programming. On the contrary, the criticisms I made were specifically in the context of it being an introductory language. BASIC does not, as you assert, promote bad programming practices. It's just a language, a set of tools. The tools were designed with a specific purpose in mind, introducing beginners to programming. Since it's (in part at least) a teaching/introductory language, it's reasonable to blame it for design decisions (GOTOS, lack of structure or variable declarations) that encourage *learning* bad habits.
And even if that weren't the case (it is!), I would still blame the people who- in 2008- thought that using unstructured, obsolete BASIC to teach kids was a good idea. And isn't getting your knickers in a twist over BASIC pointless? You forget that the reason I brought this up in the first place was that people were planning on using it to teach kids. Who uses it for enterprise projects? Uh, no-one. I already made that point above. (Specifically that because it's obsolete and no longer used by many people, it doesn't even have the excuse of being standard nowadays). Who even uses BASIC except as an educational tool BINGO! That was the point I'm making. It's a ******* horrible educational tool. Your knowledge of BASIC also seems flawed. You appear not to be aware that MS strongly promoted it's own version of BASIC as a development platform for a number of years. Which version(s)? If you're talking about VB, then that does *not* count as one of the old-fashioned, non-structured BASICs ("old school BASIC") I repeatedly made clear I was referring to.
And if you're talking about some version of the original 1970s/1980s microcomputer MS BASICs, well... that was 25 years ago. Plus, just because MS might have been promoting the use of their own products, doesn't mean it was a good idea even then.
I'm not saying that BASIC didn't have its good points. It was certainly accessible, and friendly, and that makes up for its clunkiness to some extent. However, certain things like easy and unlimited GOTOs and not having to define variables (which sound nice to beginners) are actually a PITA in the long run, getting the learner into bad practices and making their code hard to debug.
By the way, I'll point out that the designers of the *original* 1960s BASIC apparently disliked a lot of the bastardisations made when it appeared on the first microcomputers (i.e. the ones which essentially defined BASIC for a generation, and which I'm criticising here). I don't know enough about their BASIC to say if it was better, and it's ultimately irrelevant since what we're essentially discussing is "stereotypical microcomputer BASIC". I started programming in FORTRAN, so BASIC seemed like a gift from the gods at the time. I've never used Fortran, so I can't comment on that, but even BASIC was better than the competition 30-40 years ago, it doesn't make it a good language today. You're right, BASIC is pretty retro however if it encourages someone to get more interested in programming as a career what's the problem with that? Because there must exist today (or could exist, if someone were bothered) far more suitable languages for beginners to get into than old-school BASIC. Languages that would be built around structured programming, but were just as easy to use- if not easier- than BASIC.
The problem is that BASIC encourages all sorts of horrible programming habits that are hard to get out of and that don't reflect modern software development anyway. Not that they ever reflected *good* software development...
And even where some limitations of the language/implementation may have been forgivable on a low-powered, small-memory 8-bit home micro, there is no good reason for sticking with them on a modern high-powered PC! (Or anything at least as fast as a 286 for that matter...)
Old-style BASICs are no longer even remotely standard, so that doesn't come into play.
Such BASICs may have been *my* first computer language, but I can see- and agree with- why they were so criticised and damned now.
I do find it strange that- despite all the discussion about use of the atomic bomb on Japan- people seem to forget that the weapon was developed primarily in response to Germany, and all that implies.
IMHO the war would *not* have gone on a further 18 months, because the atomic bomb would have been used against Germany long before then to force it to a conclusion.
MK didn't even exist when BP was doing its work, and its inclusion as part of modern MK is simply because it was swallowed up by the expansion of that city- architecturally and historically, it doesn't share the same origins.
And since BP isn't being sold by its surrounding location (either as part of MK or as something different), it's irrelevant. People who would have visited BP anyway will still visit it; it's not like they'll be expecting anonymous 1960s concrete architecture, and your attempt to tie in the two is silly.
Interesting fact; apparently parts of Superman IV were filmed in Milton Keynes (proper). Some people who've seen that film might think "figures"...
Whether Bletchley Park is worth preserving is, of course, open to discussion.
Regardless, to consider the question as if the place were nothing more than a business looking for handouts after it had been paid back is blinkered.
I don't know your nationality, but if (e.g.) the Statue of Liberty or the Alamo were to require more money than they were making, can you imagine even your average pro-business, anti-socialist American saying that they should pay their own way or be knocked down? Of course not- they're ******* historical monuments, and widely considered part of the shared history of the country. They're NOT sodding corporations!
As I said, whether or not Bletchley Park is worth preserving and putting money into is a reasonable discussion. However, unless you strongly believe- and have reasonable evidence- that those running the place are doing so for their own benefit, then it's stupid to judge it as something it isn't supposed to be.
Yes, there were blitzes in the UK that caused quite a lot of damage to certain places (such as London). It's possible that Eastern Europe, caught in the middle, suffered even more. (I confess ignorance as to the relative damage). But overall, I don't think that Europe was destroyed by WWII.
I'm willing to bet that far more old buildings were knocked down or replaced during the post-war construction era, particularly the 1960s. Some of the buildings were probably damaged ones being replaced, but most of them were probably just old, poor-quality slums that were due for replacement- particularly in this bright new world. They may have been a delayed response to the war, but they mostly weren't a direct consequence of it.
Of course, most of those new buildings grew to be hated sooner rather than later (especially the stuff built during the 1960s when the boom of "modern" looking buildings was at its peak and before the backlash was in full swing). Many of them have in turn been knocked down(!)
I can't describe exactly what I felt when I read this, but I think downheartedness and indignation were mixed in there. I'm sure that the people running this project are well-meaning, but this is a FUCKING HORRIBLE thing to be teaching kids to program with. This isn't 25 years ago, you don't even have the excuse that you're using an underpowered late-70s/early-80s microcomputer.
Sure, trad BASICs probably mirror the underlying flow of the machine more than modern structured languages- but if that's what you're doing, I'd still use some pseudo-machine code tool. If you want to teach them programming in a fun way, I'm also damn sure that there must be modern languages that are easy to get into and use, but which don't rely on GOTO and GOSUB.
Old-school BASIC died years ago (even the last widely-used "modern" BASIC, VB, is dying). While I'm strongly in favour of teaching kids to program, I'm even more strongly opposed to using traditional BASIC for it.
I'm sorry if I sound like I'm flaming you or the people involved in the project personally- but I think this is a misguided and potentially *damaging* idea. It smacks of well-meaning adults wanting to get kids into programming the same way that they did, but assuming that BASIC is the best choice because it's what they used (and get nostalgic about).
Let me make clear again that I'm in favour of getting kids into programming... but in this day and age, there's absolutely no excuse for teaching them BASIC.
Sorry, I feel like an asshole now.