IMHO Dijkstra is right and you are wrong. BASIC is a horrible language for learning to code and it is the wrong language to learn to code. It is not designed as a learning language. It takes the worst out of FORTRAN and mutilates it even further.
The point is that kids arwn't learning any programming language. Nor are their parents.
You could have fun programming in BASIC and interesting stuff could be found in the books and magazines available in every drugstore. No one knew or cared if they heading onto a career track.
Not just kids - article writers too. "Dearth of line programming languages" my arse. the original article itself was a "nothing to see here" filler by someone who needed to write *something* before deadline. Sheesh!
Master's in Applied Physics, 1973. Doctorate in Philosophy, 1981. Hugo and Nebula award winner. Author of The Postman.
While trawling through eBay, one day, (my son) came across listings for archaic 1980s-era computers like the Apple II. "Say, Dad, didn't you write your first novel on one of those?" he asked.
"Actually, my second. 'Startide Rising.' On an Apple II with Integer Basic and a serial number in five digits. It got stolen, pity. But my first novel, 'Sundiver,' was written on this clever device called a typewrit --"
No responsible studio or FX house would EVER destroy the material they began with.
MGM destroyed the unique sets and miniatures created for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The story goes that the studio was afraid of being preempted by cheap knock-offs.
We've lost much of the history of film and broadcasting through indifference, carelessness and false economies. I believe the only studio whose achieves are known be essentially complete is Disney.
I don't think anyone would think too much of it if Amazon went down. There's plenty of alternatives, including brick and mortar
It's a question of time. It won't matter much if the latest Harry Potter ships this week or next. Except to your kids. It will matter if your time-sensitive corporate calendars, collaborative documents, and inter-office posts, are sitting on a server you can't access.
The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system. Sure, losing power will also lose you the services on the cloud but your business most likely has bigger problems to worry about when the power goes."
There hasn't been a significant regional power outage here since the Northeast Blackout of 1965. There hasn't been a significant regional POTS failure here since the Northeast Hurricane of 1938.
When power does fail the generators kick in. We remain a going concern even when a backhoe cuts a cable. But what happens when The Big One flattens Mountain View and we lose our connection to Google?
In theory the Internet routes around disaster. In practice there can be many points of failure.
a better method would be to form a lobby group and buy off a few key politicians
The key politicians, the committee chairman, the party leaders, the presidential hopefuls, have bigger fish to fry.
Quickly, now:
Show me a conressional district in which the video game industry is important. as an employer. as a taxpayer. a cultural icon. a magnet for business.
Now show me a district where the anti-GTA vote is not strong. No evangelical churches, No soccer moms. No ethnic or racial inner-city minorities. No place where gang violence, teen violence, is not a concern.
A district that ranks somewhat higher on the fever charts than Nowhere, Nebraska.
Most elections in the last 14 years have been votes for the lesser of evils as I saw it.
Well, yeah.
If you want the candidate that is the perfect mirror image of your own views, the only solution is to run yourself.
Otherwise you go with what you have. You sign the petitions. You vote in the primaries. You join the party, You stuff envelopes and work the phones. You make a real commitment of time and money.
I think the idea of any piece of software costing $15,000 is absolutely ridiculous.
not when you are in the business of marketing custom embroidery to corporate clients like Disney. not when you have $150 grand invested in each machine in the shop.
# Luke and Leah would end up sisters (come on... would that kiss be in Empire? Note that the original theatrical trailers highlighted aspects of the movie as a love story)
# Knew Vader would be Luke's father (come on "from a certain point of view"?
In the pre-production art for Star Wars (I have the book) the character who becomes Luke is unmistakably female. I still believe that would have taken the story in a much more interesting and unexpected direction.
Etymology: Middle English fader, from Old English fæder; akin to Old High German fater father, Latin pater, Greek patEr Father
Darth Vader. Dark Father. The clues are there from the beginning.
There are teo and only two choices when you want content from the major providers. Protected content (aka DRM) or advertising. There is no third choice when the production budget for a movie like Cars is $90 million dollars.
My mom sells books on eBay that she buys at book fairs, etc. Often, people will pay $25 or much more for what is as little as 8 pages. She's smart enough not to spend a great deal on these books, since they have no real world value...that is, if someone were to buy one each of a huge number of these and scan them, the digital versions would be just as useful as the physical books, but the value due to difficulty of finding them would be eliminated.
I assume your mom tracks the market value of the paper epherimerals and books she buys.
The pros here eye the charity sales as others would a gold mine. Collectors have no more interest in a scan of a book than they have in a snapshot of a porcelain vase.
Even though this goes against the principles of Slashdot, I did in fact RTFA.
When the Geek sees the word "embroidery" he sees Granny and Sylvester. He does not see small business. The embroidery machine as a $5000-$10000 commercial grade color printer.
Does this story not strike anyone else as to be so ridiculous that it must be one of those things set up just to see what community reaction is like? Like a researcher at a university doing a sociology experiment. I mean..."Embroidery Software Protection Coalition"...come on!
The Geek sees Granny in her rocking chair.
The reality is that embroidery has become a high-tech craft and small business. Here are three examples from Froogle:
You can spend thousands more for a commercial-grade freestanding machine.
The sewing machine as a Windows peripheral begins at $400-$600. Commercial designs for home craft work in fabrics have been big business for a very long time. Butterick, perhaps the most familiar name, has been around since 1863. Our History
By the way, that sinking sound you hear coming from Redmond is the hope of Microsoft in taking over the living room through Zune, the XBox 360, and Media Center PCs.
Microsoft has the living room, the den, the basement playroom and the kids' bedrooms upstairs. The Mac Geek has been trumpeting the death of Microsoft in the consumer market for twenty-five years. You will excuse me if I do not hold my breath.
Personally I don't see my government being very interested in media piracy, but the US government sure is.
How much do you think The Beatles. James Bond, and Harry Potter are worth to the UK? Now scale that up to the dimensions of the entertainment industry in the domestic and export markets of the US.
Slowly the vise closes in on all P2P... yet filesharing grows year by year...
The media congloms win lots of battles while losing the war.
But is filesharing really growing year by year?
More importantly, what is the file sharing demographic?
The labels aren't bound to a single artist or genre. They can market to the five year old, they can market to the eighty year old. I find as I grow older, P2P loses its appeal. I don't have the time. I don't have the patience.
What I do have are sound systems that benefit from something better than an amatuer's mp3 rip. What I am not is judgement proof and a plausible future poster child for the EFF. I'll get no free legal help, and not a word posted to the blogs.
The typical settlement with the RIAA is $4500. For which I could buy twenty-five years of a premium subscription and rental service like Rhapsody.
The so called "recording industry" is just not needed anymore. Just get your fortune and invest in another productive area, and get over it.
I'll take the odds on the proposition that P2P downloads track the Billboard charts with no significant statistical differences: in plain English, that what users want is music from the major labels and the not-so-small independents.
A fellow down the street is looking to buy a computer and was pleasantly surprised to
find several models for sale in the $399 price range. If OEM windows only costs $50, then
that's still 12% of his total computer cost. How can that not be significant?
Dell's Back-To-School special was a $279 Celeron XP Home system. Bundled with a 17" CRT monitor. Word Perfect. One-Year Warranty. Home Delivery.
There are enormous ecomonies of scale when you build for 96% of the PC market. That is how you get shelf space in retail and hit the sweet spot for the customer with a good-looking system that sells for under $500.
The biggest barrier for figuring out a computer in a random country is the language barrier. Do you speak Arabic? No? Then you'll probably have a difficult time with Arabic Windows
At the end of the day, the Microsoft "monopoly" exists because people keep buying Microsoft. It started with that and it will end with that.
Some bullet points from TFA:
IT dabbles with Linux. But the momoculture is here to saty.
The convenience of one platform means less management expense. The cost of ownership skyrockets with diversity. The ecomonics say to standardize, standardize, standardize.
What management looks for and likes in Vista is diversity within the monoculture of the Windows OS.
ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) a security feature that randomly arranges the positions of key data areas to prevent malicious hackers from predicting target addresses. The technique, known as memory-space randomization, will block the majority of buffer overflow tricks used in about two-thirds of all worm attacks.
Has anyone ever considered Jury Nullification to get folks to simply declare the concept of intellectual property and perpetual copyright invalid? If most folks agree (and I don't know if they do or not) that the law is broken, isn't the judge obliged to agree?
Jury Nullification is a refusal to convict in a criminal case which is against the evidence and the law. It has no relevance to a civil trial, in which verdicts can be set aside and double jeopardy does not apply.
The Jury never gets the chance to speak to the law itself. Murder remains Murder even when the defendant is Klu Klux Klan and the jury is white and southern, the victim is black, and the year is 1925.
To get to Nullification you need to get a jury that is overwealmingly on your side. That is damn tough to do even when you are an experienced trial attorney. The jury pool will be mostly middle class, mostly middle aged. Small-C or Large-C Conservative.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that kids arwn't learning any programming language. Nor are their parents.
You could have fun programming in BASIC and interesting stuff could be found in the books and magazines available in every drugstore. No one knew or cared if they heading onto a career track.
This is David Brtin.
Master's in Applied Physics, 1973. Doctorate in Philosophy, 1981. Hugo and Nebula award winner. Author of The Postman.
While trawling through eBay, one day, (my son) came across listings for archaic 1980s-era computers like the Apple II. "Say, Dad, didn't you write your first novel on one of those?" he asked.
"Actually, my second. 'Startide Rising.' On an Apple II with Integer Basic and a serial number in five digits. It got stolen, pity. But my first novel, 'Sundiver,' was written on this clever device called a typewrit --"
The Niagara region of upstate New York and southern Ontario (where the giant hydro plants are located) escaped the 2003 blackout.
MGM destroyed the unique sets and miniatures created for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The story goes that the studio was afraid of being preempted by cheap knock-offs.
We've lost much of the history of film and broadcasting through indifference, carelessness and false economies. I believe the only studio whose achieves are known be essentially complete is Disney.
Make of that what you will.
It's a question of time. It won't matter much if the latest Harry Potter ships this week or next. Except to your kids. It will matter if your time-sensitive corporate calendars, collaborative documents, and inter-office posts, are sitting on a server you can't access.
There hasn't been a significant regional power outage here since the Northeast Blackout of 1965. There hasn't been a significant regional POTS failure here since the Northeast Hurricane of 1938.
When power does fail the generators kick in. We remain a going concern even when a backhoe cuts a cable. But what happens when The Big One flattens Mountain View and we lose our connection to Google?
In theory the Internet routes around disaster. In practice there can be many points of failure.
The key politicians, the committee chairman, the party leaders, the presidential hopefuls, have bigger fish to fry.
Quickly, now:
Show me a conressional district in which the video game industry is important. as an employer. as a taxpayer. a cultural icon. a magnet for business.
Now show me a district where the anti-GTA vote is not strong. No evangelical churches, No soccer moms. No ethnic or racial inner-city minorities. No place where gang violence, teen violence, is not a concern.
A district that ranks somewhat higher on the fever charts than Nowhere, Nebraska.
Well, yeah.
If you want the candidate that is the perfect mirror image of your own views, the only solution is to run yourself.
Otherwise you go with what you have. You sign the petitions. You vote in the primaries. You join the party, You stuff envelopes and work the phones. You make a real commitment of time and money.
not when you are in the business of marketing custom embroidery to corporate clients like Disney. not when you have $150 grand invested in each machine in the shop.
Convenience trumps security. News at Eleven.
If the geek hasn't learned this lesson by now, it can only be because he has beem sleeping in class.
Star Wars isn't Sci-Fi, it is Space Opera. What you want is the sense of scale, the stage set that is worthy of your story and characters.
Physical laws are ignored whenever they get in the way.
# Knew Vader would be Luke's father (come on "from a certain point of view"?
In the pre-production art for Star Wars (I have the book) the character who becomes Luke is unmistakably female. I still believe that would have taken the story in a much more interesting and unexpected direction.
Etymology: Middle English fader, from Old English fæder; akin to Old High German fater father, Latin pater, Greek patEr Father
Darth Vader. Dark Father. The clues are there from the beginning.
There are teo and only two choices when you want content from the major providers. Protected content (aka DRM) or advertising. There is no third choice when the production budget for a movie like Cars is $90 million dollars.
I assume your mom tracks the market value of the paper epherimerals and books she buys.
The pros here eye the charity sales as others would a gold mine. Collectors have no more interest in a scan of a book than they have in a snapshot of a porcelain vase.
When the Geek sees the word "embroidery" he sees Granny and Sylvester. He does not see small business. The embroidery machine as a $5000-$10000 commercial grade color printer.
The Geek sees Granny in her rocking chair.
The reality is that embroidery has become a high-tech craft and small business. Here are three examples from Froogle:
Quantum® XL-6000 Embroidery Machine by Singer $3000
Melco EP1B Portable Commercial 5.5x9.5" Single-Needle Embroidery Machine (Head by Janome) & Design Shop Lite $5000
Brother PR-600 Single Head 6 Needle Embroidery Machine # PR600, P-R-600, P-R600, PR 600 $7000
You can spend thousands more for a commercial-grade freestanding machine.
The sewing machine as a Windows peripheral begins at $400-$600. Commercial designs for home craft work in fabrics have been big business for a very long time. Butterick, perhaps the most familiar name, has been around since 1863. Our History
Microsoft has the living room, the den, the basement playroom and the kids' bedrooms upstairs. The Mac Geek has been trumpeting the death of Microsoft in the consumer market for twenty-five years. You will excuse me if I do not hold my breath.
How much do you think The Beatles. James Bond, and Harry Potter are worth to the UK? Now scale that up to the dimensions of the entertainment industry in the domestic and export markets of the US.
But is filesharing really growing year by year?
More importantly, what is the file sharing demographic?
The labels aren't bound to a single artist or genre. They can market to the five year old, they can market to the eighty year old. I find as I grow older, P2P loses its appeal. I don't have the time. I don't have the patience.
What I do have are sound systems that benefit from something better than an amatuer's mp3 rip. What I am not is judgement proof and a plausible future poster child for the EFF. I'll get no free legal help, and not a word posted to the blogs.
The typical settlement with the RIAA is $4500. For which I could buy twenty-five years of a premium subscription and rental service like Rhapsody.
You do understand that the decision to prosecute a criminal case is made by the state?
I'll take the odds on the proposition that P2P downloads track the Billboard charts with no significant statistical differences: in plain English, that what users want is music from the major labels and the not-so-small independents.
Dell's Back-To-School special was a $279 Celeron XP Home system. Bundled with a 17" CRT monitor. Word Perfect. One-Year Warranty. Home Delivery.
There are enormous ecomonies of scale when you build for 96% of the PC market. That is how you get shelf space in retail and hit the sweet spot for the customer with a good-looking system that sells for under $500.
Windows is, for all for practical purposes, multiligual. Introduction to MUI (Multilingual User Interface)
Some bullet points from TFA:
IT dabbles with Linux. But the momoculture is here to saty.
The convenience of one platform means less management expense. The cost of ownership skyrockets with diversity. The ecomonics say to standardize, standardize, standardize.
What management looks for and likes in Vista is diversity within the monoculture of the Windows OS.
ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) a security feature that randomly arranges the positions of key data areas to prevent malicious hackers from predicting target addresses. The technique, known as memory-space randomization, will block the majority of buffer overflow tricks used in about two-thirds of all worm attacks.
Jury Nullification is a refusal to convict in a criminal case which is against the evidence and the law. It has no relevance to a civil trial, in which verdicts can be set aside and double jeopardy does not apply.
The Jury never gets the chance to speak to the law itself. Murder remains Murder even when the defendant is Klu Klux Klan and the jury is white and southern, the victim is black, and the year is 1925.
To get to Nullification you need to get a jury that is overwealmingly on your side. That is damn tough to do even when you are an experienced trial attorney. The jury pool will be mostly middle class, mostly middle aged. Small-C or Large-C Conservative.