They're trying to pull a fast one, and they're asking you to believe a story that either paints them as utterly incompetent, AND impossibly small.
That's the one I want to say. I knew a guy who was trying to start some weird "consulting services" thing. He WAY overpaid on his T1, hired people on commision only to COLD call people. I was brought in when a friend recommended me to do a router job for some small business when one of those cold calls worked.
I was "technically" paid 2 years latter in a bankruptcy filing from him. He was GREAT at selling himself and marketing, but had not a clue on how to hire people or any business sense. So I can perfectly imagine this one guy, who thought "Hey, this gTLD will make a bunch of money easy for me!". Get some start up funds because he knows people, put the office in New York so it looks legit and sits at his desk for a year without a clue on how this works.
As the saying goes, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
PS- not sure the origin of the quote anymore. I always thought it was an old Heinlein book, but is it a quote from something else?
These types of glasses have been out in one form or another for a while. I have a pair of Epson BT-300. They work fine, but its like epson gave up on any software updates for the last few years. You can root atleast and its useful around the house. Hell, I could even get some cardboard apps to work with it. But other than the novelty, the interface is horrid and would never use it as a main device.
Granted its underpowered from what these guys want to do, but I just hope it will be open sourced enough for apps to get on it.
Yea, it just takes one time where the meat isn't cooked hot enough and your getting something pulled out of your ass at the doctors. Or worst, like my cousin, who had to have surgery.
I think the best way to test this is get a few people who have never read slashdot and see if they can come up with better headlines. I am sure they could, but be interesting to compare.
EME lets browsers play back DRM'ed video and audio. That's all.
You miss understand, this is the npapi all over again. The buggy flash plugins that infect pc's. The java pugin that formats your hard drive. My personal opinion, for as useless as long term DRM is, that just having DRM isn't a problem for the web. The problem is custom plugins that sit outside chrome/IE/firefox's walled garden that do whatever the fuck. Now its in the standard that says "open season". And if you think that its "just for DRM video", I already see them trying to design some kind of os system API.
Lucky or it wasn't that old. Dynamite will sweat nitroglycerin after as soon as a year in storage. It can accumulate into pools on the floor. A small as a half of an ounce can take an arm off if you drop a hammer.
It just replaced my grandpa's TV. He would spend hours watching Direct-TV. Then he found Netflix and the same thing. Now its browsing any random shit he finds on YouTube or Facebook.
There is no epidemic. He is just board. Being forced to use a smart phone, he uses this rather than his computer because its more daunting. Rather than reading a book or watching the TV, we now just shit post on the internet for fun.
Though, even as I say this, even I want to tell my grandpa to turn the TV on once in a while.
I had a VW GTI Jetta that I just turned in just 3 weeks ago. The process was way to simple. My original goal was to just trade it in for a new GTI but VW abandoned the diesal in the states.
So I got a Hyundi Ioniq Hybrid instead. VW is WAY behind on there interior electronics. Even looking at the newer non diesel Jetta had no options in the way of LCD controls. The first time I tried Android Auto, I wondered why the hell everyone doesn't just do this instead of getting some proprietary menu. As a hybrid I have been getting about same mileage as I was from my GTI (about 44mpg per tank) so I am happy with that.
I wanted the Model 3, but no way that's is happening in the next year till manufacturing catches up with the pre-orders and knowing Tesla, a bunch of early small recalls initially too. It just shows that some 3rd tier automaker and build a decent hybrid with an interesting interior. I really hope this is a wake up call for VW because all they seem to have is the bettle.
I thought the same thing till they started talking about a python autocomplete tool. They changed it so it defaults to use their "cloud" based engine instead of local. Supposedly there is no notification when you do an update either. Also, I have ad blocker on just because of all the hijacks out there. I can't imaging what someone could do with a built in tool that you "trusted"
The US Government MUST of, at-least internally, had discussions about this very subject before all the Russian hacking came around. I mean Kaspersky has been around for at-least a decade, plenty of time to root everyone PC. I am not saying Kaspershy is Putin's lap dog, but I want to know what the discussions were before this whole fiasco happened and what evidence shown that Kaspersky is dangerous now.
I mean it feels like Putin is having us run around in circles while all he is doing is sitting having a vodka:P/p?
The secret to being a great president is knowing when to keep your damn mouth shut.
The press want, no, NEED a spectacle daily. With Obama, all they had was who he was trying hire and the weekly Obamacare something. Otherwise there was nothing to talk about him. Hell, his entire platform when he was getting elected was "Vote for me, because I have no skeletons and I might change something..maybe"
Trump tweets constantly about stuff that even fourteen year old knows its stupid to do. Of course the media will jump on it, its easy filler and the media has ALWAYS been easy. CNN picks up the piece, FoxNews spins it, NPR/BBC pulls out some boring but relevant facts, and Youtube laughs at everyone bias's. Then everyone waits for the next stupid tweet and we got another news week fellas!
As Roosevelt said, "speak softly, and carry a big stick." He could be in the background using his money and connections to do anything he wants, but instead waists ALL that potential on his damn twitter.
As a side note, I did vote for Trump because I was hoping this was all a ruse and he would get serious when he came to power. If he had killed his twitter account, I wouldn't be so angry as I am now.
I would hope that the whole reason they are discontinuing these products is the realization on how they don't even compete with the arm products out there. Hell the ESP8266 showed that people will even tolerate a realistically unknown CPU instruction set, locked in firmware and a horrific manufacture SDK. It all doesn't matter if you just sell it cheap enough. So why, if Intel, wanted to compete, just slap on an atom and bare bones chips to make an IOT with a price that guarantees no one will use.
They NEED to make a RISC like chip using 3.3V using their fab plant tech and they can blow the lid off ARM. Hell, even just optimize the original Pentium core with some SIMD extensions would of been enough. If you keep in real mode, include a VGA compatible display core with drawing acceleration, you can be sure hackers will come out of the wood work do do all kinds of crazy stuff.
IoT might end up being in the hands of corporations, but it was the hobbyist that pushed it at the start.
PS As a side not, does anyone know the external component requirements for an Atom? Most arm chips, even A9's and the such require very little in the way of reset/clock circuits.
Not sure what's worse, managers who don't put in redundant power, or armchair engineers who just *assume* that they didn't because redundant power can't ever go out.
One word: Marketing
If a data center comes to you saying they have triple redundant power(battery-battery-generator> they can say to the manager, under the table, they have no need for rack UPS's. Orders to save money, no mater what the cost are the killer of IT.
Hell, it properly is even WORST if the airline owned the data-center. With airlines being as cheap as they are, using a good UPS/battery setup, except it being 20 years old and not able to handle power spikes because they have built out 2x its spec.
Data, is the biggest unaccounted for asset of a business.
I wish businesses realized this. I used to do these monthly all nighters for dell at this data center for a hospital. This data-center was one of those "legacy" ones,
built into a signal floor office off the side of a busy highway. They are at the ABSOLUTE LIMIT of power consumption and they cannot get more power. Just the act of switching on or off one rack is enough to pop the outside transformer but because they are THE hospital in the city, they get away with it.
The problem becomes that the UPS is the only thing keeping the whole thing falling app-art when load spikes. So every month, they do this "update/upgrade" where all the various vendors go in and we do firmware updates only on on machine, at a time. Make sure the ups doesn't melt down and replace/add any new systems
I mean, Christ, they still had a VAX-11/780 in there that I was oogling. This was 10 years ago but they told me then they only JUST shut it off. Not because they wanted to, but because they needed the extra power for a few more web app boxes. I never got a clear answer on why they can't move either.
On the otherwise, my grandpa owned a 30m a year distribution company. He knows nothing about IT, except that every time skipped 4 years of upgrades, he paid double the next 4 years. So he learned even from the 70['s. Do you only learn these lessons when your the single owner?:P
Hopefully somebody will be able to break this cycle, but it will probably take some very good marketing to convince consumers to be less price-sensitive with the initial purchase.
I doubt it will happen in our lifetime. Just look at the cell phone market. You buy a phone for near nothing and the only real change in 10 years is your paying for it over the course of 3 years rather than a "contract" fee for leaving the agreement early. I know its different in Europe but in the states its almost universal. HP and Cannon dug this hole and they will have to find some way out of it and I don't think any kind of marketing will change the way we buy printers for atleast 20 years.
It took that long for me to accept that its easier to buy a printer for 100 bucks than keep refining my LaserJet 5P:P
What I want to know is the maximum amount of joules per cm this thing can hold "safely". Like if yo take a hammer to it fully charged will it just return a large voltage spike or turn into a small emp explosion. The Samsung already showed us what a 3500 mAh can do if improperly designed. I don't expect him to answer these questions in this teaser paper, I just thing rather than storage we just need a faster way to charge.
HA! Not that easy, What he means is that it comes up as an AP "Vizio-RandomLettersHere" so you can easily connect up to it with your phone. All unencrypted of course and cannot be turned off EVEN when you have it plugged into a wired network. It was annoying enough for me that I opened the back scratched off the antenna trace of the pcb. I like getting Netflix of it, but freaking hate open WiFi points like that.
I can somewhat agree but look at the stupid competition. Can't buy a cheaper android phone from china without a 60% chance of some kind of backdoor. Also, given how Apple doesn't just discard updates for their phone after 6 months and trying to make the iPhone a black box really appeals to me.
The constant interface between devices. A safer app store, abit shitty search for years. Its really REALLY hard for me to look at an alternative
Hell, it was a Samsung phone I was looking to upgrade my iPhone 5 from, just because it seemed to have all these features above. They blew that one. There really aren't that many smart phone companies out there that keep this kind of quality. I am looking at the Google pixel too, but it's just too new and doesn't look that impressive to be honest. Its still $600+ too.
I very much doubt anything is going to change in the next few years and both Apple and Samsung can charge insane prices for the phones because of it
I am confused. Yes it is scalping but you kill the dealer, not the customers. At this point its giving me second thoughts about keeping backups on their cloud if they decide a phone I bought off eBay is illegal by just the mac address.
Atleast use a shell company to go after customers, like Microsoft does when checking on business software licences
After faithfully repeating President Obama's promise, any "undocumented citizens" who vote will not be prosecuted for such fraud, the site declared the claim, that he made such a promise "False" anyway.
That's when even my industrial strength bullshit-meter blew up...
You rail on snoops about this article but did you even look at any of the evidence they presented? Did you watch the video or even READ the short transcript where the quote comes from? They were debunking a short "out-of-context" video posted somewhere on Facebook by showing the entire interview. I don't see anywhere in the transcript or video where he encourages illegal aliens to vote. At most, he tells any of their family that are citizens to vote in their place.
I am not saying the interview was some great piece of journalism, its more of a polticial ad than anything. I am just saying its not what was presented on Fox News.
Maybe some kind of simple programming language elementary dealing with turtles? A command based system where you tell it to go 5 spaces, draw a line and turn and have the students predict where it goes?
Seriously, high-school= C. Maybe stripped down without any of that pointer stuff or, make that a separate class, and that covers the basic syntax of every other major language out there. I learned fucking pascal off a Mac LC and it nearly failed me in programming 101 in college cause no one used that stuff. But elementary students who can't spell and you want to teach algebra? Go with Logo. I might not remember much about pascal (till recently at-least) but I sure as hell remember spending hours in front of an Apple 2, trying to draw little people, then running them over with my turtle.
And YES. Strip out all that pointer stuff. To pass references, tell students to use &. I KNOW its not in the C spec, but anyone who as ever sat down and actually tried to teach someone programming realizes that people have problems with what a pointer is. I don't know why, but peoples eyes just glaze over. Its a complicated subject especially when you start throwing operator presidence in there like like *ptr++ or *(ptr-4). Those are just the basic examples. If you can get them to comprehend what a references are, then you are half way there.
If you can just get them to sit down and program something because they wanted to and not needed to, then they will learn themselves. Getting to that point is what everyone is trying to do. Just don't try to teach people flavor-of-the-month languages.
This is pretty neat progress, but IMO it's pretty disheartening that after several decades we're still not anywhere near understanding their language. If we can't figure out how to communicate with fellow mammals sharing a common lineage, it really challenges the common sci-fi trope of having any kind of meaningful discourse with a creature from the other side of the galaxy.
The problem is context. You have to assume that a dolphin, if they have a language, has hundreds of words for fish. But without semantics, all you can do is guess. For all anyone knew, Egyptian's hieroglyphs were just pretty pictures till the Rosetta Stone came around. Even then it took 20 years before anyone could confidently say what were drawn on those walls. We still aren't confident on how you say some of the phonemes either. It could be a "finding out dinosaurs had feathers all this time" event.
Still we should try. I don't think its disheartening because people are trying HARD at this. The lessens we learn in decoding the raw speech patterns of our planet's creatures will help us on truly alien species. I just hope when we do discover alien artifacts, that they aren't passed around as pretty door stops like alto of the Egyptian's ones were.
"Hey fred! That black monolith looks great behind my flat screen TV!"
Now, Microsoft is willing to pay me to wiggle a mouse around and occasionally click. Hmm...:)
I remember, back in college maybe 1998, my roomate signed up for this startup company that would pay him per click on advertisments. He wrote a script that would reload the website, move the mouse, and click on the link evey 2 seconds.
He made close to 300 bucks over 3 months before the company went belly up. I wish I got in the action but I was taking ethics:P
You know what the sad part of all this is? All they have to offer is phone number blocking per account. That would solve large part of my robot calls. No limits either, none of this "you can only block 10 numbers for $10" crap. I know what blocks they are coming from (FUCK YOU FLORIDA) It would cost them NOTHING to implement this. Sigh.
Possibly because of the size and that older DEC computers were built with "off the shelf" DEC logic modules. Similar to how this computer was built with logic modules connect to each other by cables.
Slashdot Mirror
They're trying to pull a fast one, and they're asking you to believe a story that either paints them as utterly incompetent, AND impossibly small.
That's the one I want to say. I knew a guy who was trying to start some weird "consulting services" thing. He WAY overpaid on his T1, hired people on commision only to COLD call people. I was brought in when a friend recommended me to do a router job for some small business when one of those cold calls worked.
I was "technically" paid 2 years latter in a bankruptcy filing from him. He was GREAT at selling himself and marketing, but had not a clue on how to hire people or any business sense.
So I can perfectly imagine this one guy, who thought "Hey, this gTLD will make a bunch of money easy for me!". Get some start up funds because he knows people, put the office in New York so it looks legit and sits at his desk for a year without a clue on how this works.
As the saying goes, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
PS- not sure the origin of the quote anymore. I always thought it was an old Heinlein book, but is it a quote from something else?
These types of glasses have been out in one form or another for a while. I have a pair of Epson BT-300. They work fine, but its like epson gave up on any software updates for the last few years. You can root atleast and its useful around the house. Hell, I could even get some cardboard apps to work with it. But other than the novelty, the interface is horrid and would never use it as a main device.
Granted its underpowered from what these guys want to do, but I just hope it will be open sourced enough for apps to get on it.
Yea, it just takes one time where the meat isn't cooked hot enough and your getting something pulled out of your ass at the doctors. Or worst, like my cousin, who had to have surgery.
I think the best way to test this is get a few people who have never read slashdot and see if they can come up with better headlines. I am sure they could, but be interesting to compare.
And it doesn't even affect the Web all that much.
EME lets browsers play back DRM'ed video and audio. That's all.
You miss understand, this is the npapi all over again. The buggy flash plugins that infect pc's. The java pugin that formats your hard drive. My personal opinion, for as useless as long term DRM is, that just having DRM isn't a problem for the web. The problem is custom plugins that sit outside chrome/IE/firefox's walled garden that do whatever the fuck. Now its in the standard that says "open season". And if you think that its "just for DRM video", I already see them trying to design some kind of os system API.
Lucky or it wasn't that old. Dynamite will sweat nitroglycerin after as soon as a year in storage. It can accumulate into pools on the floor. A small as a half of an ounce can take an arm off if you drop a hammer.
It just replaced my grandpa's TV. He would spend hours watching Direct-TV. Then he found Netflix and the same thing. Now its browsing any random shit he finds on YouTube or Facebook.
There is no epidemic. He is just board. Being forced to use a smart phone, he uses this rather than his computer because its more daunting. Rather than reading a book or watching the TV, we now just shit post on the internet for fun.
Though, even as I say this, even I want to tell my grandpa to turn the TV on once in a while.
I had a VW GTI Jetta that I just turned in just 3 weeks ago. The process was way to simple. My original goal was to just trade it in for a new GTI but VW abandoned the diesal in the states.
So I got a Hyundi Ioniq Hybrid instead. VW is WAY behind on there interior electronics. Even looking at the newer non diesel Jetta had no options in the way of LCD controls. The first time I tried Android Auto, I wondered why the hell everyone doesn't just do this instead of getting some proprietary menu. As a hybrid I have been getting about same mileage as I was from my GTI (about 44mpg per tank) so I am happy with that.
I wanted the Model 3, but no way that's is happening in the next year till manufacturing catches up with the pre-orders and knowing Tesla, a bunch of early small recalls initially too. It just shows that some 3rd tier automaker and build a decent hybrid with an interesting interior. I really hope this is a wake up call for VW because all they seem to have is the bettle.
I thought the same thing till they started talking about a python autocomplete tool. They changed it so it defaults to use their "cloud" based engine instead of local. Supposedly there is no notification when you do an update either. Also, I have ad blocker on just because of all the hijacks out there. I can't imaging what someone could do with a built in tool that you "trusted"
The US Government MUST of, at-least internally, had discussions about this very subject before all the Russian hacking came around. I mean Kaspersky has been around for at-least a decade, plenty of time to root everyone PC. I am not saying Kaspershy is Putin's lap dog, but I want to know what the discussions were before this whole fiasco happened and what evidence shown that Kaspersky is dangerous now.
I mean it feels like Putin is having us run around in circles while all he is doing is sitting having a vodka:P/p?
The secret to being a great president is knowing when to keep your damn mouth shut.
The press want, no, NEED a spectacle daily. With Obama, all they had was who he was trying hire and the weekly Obamacare something. Otherwise there was nothing to talk about him. Hell, his entire platform when he was getting elected was "Vote for me, because I have no skeletons and I might change something..maybe"
Trump tweets constantly about stuff that even fourteen year old knows its stupid to do. Of course the media will jump on it, its easy filler and the media has ALWAYS been easy. CNN picks up the piece, FoxNews spins it, NPR/BBC pulls out some boring but relevant facts, and Youtube laughs at everyone bias's. Then everyone waits for the next stupid tweet and we got another news week fellas!
As Roosevelt said, "speak softly, and carry a big stick." He could be in the background using his money and connections to do anything he wants, but instead waists ALL that potential on his damn twitter.
As a side note, I did vote for Trump because I was hoping this was all a ruse and he would get serious when he came to power. If he had killed his twitter account, I wouldn't be so angry as I am now.
I would hope that the whole reason they are discontinuing these products is the realization on how they don't even compete with the arm products out there. Hell the ESP8266 showed that people will even tolerate a realistically unknown CPU instruction set, locked in firmware and a horrific manufacture SDK. It all doesn't matter if you just sell it cheap enough. So why, if Intel, wanted to compete, just slap on an atom and bare bones chips to make an IOT with a price that guarantees no one will use.
They NEED to make a RISC like chip using 3.3V using their fab plant tech and they can blow the lid off ARM. Hell, even just optimize the original Pentium core with some SIMD extensions would of been enough. If you keep in real mode, include a VGA compatible display core with drawing acceleration, you can be sure hackers will come out of the wood work do do all kinds of crazy stuff.
IoT might end up being in the hands of corporations, but it was the hobbyist that pushed it at the start.
PS As a side not, does anyone know the external component requirements for an Atom? Most arm chips, even A9's and the such require very little in the way of reset/clock circuits.
Not sure what's worse, managers who don't put in redundant power, or armchair engineers who just *assume* that they didn't because redundant power can't ever go out.
One word: Marketing
If a data center comes to you saying they have triple redundant power(battery-battery-generator> they can say to the manager, under the table, they have no need for rack UPS's. Orders to save money, no mater what the cost are the killer of IT.
Hell, it properly is even WORST if the airline owned the data-center. With airlines being as cheap as they are, using a good UPS/battery setup, except it being 20 years old and not able to handle power spikes because they have built out 2x its spec.
Data, is the biggest unaccounted for asset of a business.
I wish businesses realized this. I used to do these monthly all nighters for dell at this data center for a hospital. This data-center was one of those "legacy" ones, built into a signal floor office off the side of a busy highway. They are at the ABSOLUTE LIMIT of power consumption and they cannot get more power. Just the act of switching on or off one rack is enough to pop the outside transformer but because they are THE hospital in the city, they get away with it.
The problem becomes that the UPS is the only thing keeping the whole thing falling app-art when load spikes. So every month, they do this "update/upgrade" where all the various vendors go in and we do firmware updates only on on machine, at a time. Make sure the ups doesn't melt down and replace/add any new systems
I mean, Christ, they still had a VAX-11/780 in there that I was oogling. This was 10 years ago but they told me then they only JUST shut it off. Not because they wanted to, but because they needed the extra power for a few more web app boxes. I never got a clear answer on why they can't move either.
On the otherwise, my grandpa owned a 30m a year distribution company. He knows nothing about IT, except that every time skipped 4 years of upgrades, he paid double the next 4 years. So he learned even from the 70['s. Do you only learn these lessons when your the single owner?:P
Hopefully somebody will be able to break this cycle, but it will probably take some very good marketing to convince consumers to be less price-sensitive with the initial purchase.
I doubt it will happen in our lifetime. Just look at the cell phone market. You buy a phone for near nothing and the only real change in 10 years is your paying for it over the course of 3 years rather than a "contract" fee for leaving the agreement early. I know its different in Europe but in the states its almost universal. HP and Cannon dug this hole and they will have to find some way out of it and I don't think any kind of marketing will change the way we buy printers for atleast 20 years.
It took that long for me to accept that its easier to buy a printer for 100 bucks than keep refining my LaserJet 5P:P
What I want to know is the maximum amount of joules per cm this thing can hold "safely". Like if yo take a hammer to it fully charged will it just return a large voltage spike or turn into a small emp explosion. The Samsung already showed us what a 3500 mAh can do if improperly designed. I don't expect him to answer these questions in this teaser paper, I just thing rather than storage we just need a faster way to charge.
HA! Not that easy, What he means is that it comes up as an AP "Vizio-RandomLettersHere" so you can easily connect up to it with your phone. All unencrypted of course and cannot be turned off EVEN when you have it plugged into a wired network. It was annoying enough for me that I opened the back scratched off the antenna trace of the pcb. I like getting Netflix of it, but freaking hate open WiFi points like that.
I can somewhat agree but look at the stupid competition. Can't buy a cheaper android phone from china without a 60% chance of some kind of backdoor. Also, given how Apple doesn't just discard updates for their phone after 6 months and trying to make the iPhone a black box really appeals to me.
The constant interface between devices. A safer app store, abit shitty search for years. Its really REALLY hard for me to look at an alternative
Hell, it was a Samsung phone I was looking to upgrade my iPhone 5 from, just because it seemed to have all these features above. They blew that one. There really aren't that many smart phone companies out there that keep this kind of quality. I am looking at the Google pixel too, but it's just too new and doesn't look that impressive to be honest. Its still $600+ too.
I very much doubt anything is going to change in the next few years and both Apple and Samsung can charge insane prices for the phones because of it
I am confused. Yes it is scalping but you kill the dealer, not the customers. At this point its giving me second thoughts about keeping backups on their cloud if they decide a phone I bought off eBay is illegal by just the mac address.
Atleast use a shell company to go after customers, like Microsoft does when checking on business software licences
Snopes included.
After faithfully repeating President Obama's promise, any "undocumented citizens" who vote will not be prosecuted for such fraud, the site declared the claim, that he made such a promise "False" anyway.
That's when even my industrial strength bullshit-meter blew up...
You rail on snoops about this article but did you even look at any of the evidence they presented? Did you watch the video or even READ the short transcript where the quote comes from? They were debunking a short "out-of-context" video posted somewhere on Facebook by showing the entire interview. I don't see anywhere in the transcript or video where he encourages illegal aliens to vote. At most, he tells any of their family that are citizens to vote in their place.
I am not saying the interview was some great piece of journalism, its more of a polticial ad than anything. I am just saying its not what was presented on Fox News.
If I am wrong, cite please.
Maybe some kind of simple programming language elementary dealing with turtles? A command based system where you tell it to go 5 spaces, draw a line and turn and have the students predict where it goes?
Seriously, high-school= C. Maybe stripped down without any of that pointer stuff or, make that a separate class, and that covers the basic syntax of every other major language out there. I learned fucking pascal off a Mac LC and it nearly failed me in programming 101 in college cause no one used that stuff. But elementary students who can't spell and you want to teach algebra? Go with Logo. I might not remember much about pascal (till recently at-least) but I sure as hell remember spending hours in front of an Apple 2, trying to draw little people, then running them over with my turtle.
And YES. Strip out all that pointer stuff. To pass references, tell students to use &. I KNOW its not in the C spec, but anyone who as ever sat down and actually tried to teach someone programming realizes that people have problems with what a pointer is. I don't know why, but peoples eyes just glaze over. Its a complicated subject especially when you start throwing operator presidence in there like like *ptr++ or *(ptr-4). Those are just the basic examples. If you can get them to comprehend what a references are, then you are half way there.
If you can just get them to sit down and program something because they wanted to and not needed to, then they will learn themselves. Getting to that point is what everyone is trying to do. Just don't try to teach people flavor-of-the-month languages.
This is pretty neat progress, but IMO it's pretty disheartening that after several decades we're still not anywhere near understanding their language. If we can't figure out how to communicate with fellow mammals sharing a common lineage, it really challenges the common sci-fi trope of having any kind of meaningful discourse with a creature from the other side of the galaxy.
The problem is context. You have to assume that a dolphin, if they have a language, has hundreds of words for fish. But without semantics, all you can do is guess. For all anyone knew, Egyptian's hieroglyphs were just pretty pictures till the Rosetta Stone came around. Even then it took 20 years before anyone could confidently say what were drawn on those walls. We still aren't confident on how you say some of the phonemes either. It could be a "finding out dinosaurs had feathers all this time" event.
Still we should try. I don't think its disheartening because people are trying HARD at this. The lessens we learn in decoding the raw speech patterns of our planet's creatures will help us on truly alien species. I just hope when we do discover alien artifacts, that they aren't passed around as pretty door stops like alto of the Egyptian's ones were.
"Hey fred! That black monolith looks great behind my flat screen TV!"
Now, Microsoft is willing to pay me to wiggle a mouse around and occasionally click. Hmm ... :)
I remember, back in college maybe 1998, my roomate signed up for this startup company that would pay him per click on advertisments. He wrote a script that would reload the website, move the mouse, and click on the link evey 2 seconds.
He made close to 300 bucks over 3 months before the company went belly up. I wish I got in the action but I was taking ethics:P
You know what the sad part of all this is? All they have to offer is phone number blocking per account. That would solve large part of my robot calls. No limits either, none of this "you can only block 10 numbers for $10" crap. I know what blocks they are coming from (FUCK YOU FLORIDA) It would cost them NOTHING to implement this. Sigh.
Possibly because of the size and that older DEC computers were built with "off the shelf" DEC logic modules. Similar to how this computer was built with logic modules connect to each other by cables.