Yeah, okay, so I'm not 100% there on when Alley Cat was released. But the hardware was there (okay, so I don't know if the CGA card was available then) which is what you seem to care about.
Using ZX81 screenshots is misleading. They were neat machines, but there was much better (if somewhat higher chip-count) hardware available at the time, such as the TI-99/4.
No. You know some programming already. But you don't really know much CS. And if that's all that a CS programme is going to teach you, then it's probably not worthwhile.
I say this as someone who had been programming since around age eight -- but did CS at university ten years later anyway. CS was an eye opener. Sure, I knew a reasonable number of languages. But I didn't have a clue how to structure programs and their data structures well. Knew nothing of algorithmic complexity measures. Never even seen a nonimperative programming language, let alone put in the effort to get my head around a few. And I'd never worked in a team. CS gave me all of this. And it can give it to you too!</infomercial>
I don't know about these "top 20" things, though; we have considerably less than 20 universities in New Zealand:-)
Open source developers usually write software because they want to use it. If they don't want to use it with Windows, then why should they port it just to satisfy some whinging Windows users? Especially the "I couldn't code my way out of a soggy paper bag, but Doing This Would Make Open Source Succeed*!" sort.
* Succeed being defined as "do what I want it to do"
Re:The Fundamental Rule of Everything
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
When reading your "the body..." line, I was half expecting it to read
* the body will expand to fill the (bodybag, shallow grave, etc)
As someone who uses a NZD40 secondhand Palm V as a book reader -- they're fine. The screen is only 160x160, but the text is nice and sharp, and a good size. Some models have worse screens, of course. I don't see the problem with having a serial port -- converters to USB are cheap and plentiful, and it's not as if you're going to be transferring more than a few hundred kilobytes at a time.
The other nice thing about the Palm V in particular is you can drop it from a height of a metre or two onto carpet and it won't break:-)
I tried to use Skype once, to call a friend from university. In the same city (Wellington, New Zealand). We were 5 hops, thirty milliseconds apart. Skype routed the call first through Korea, and the second time through Canada. Two hundred milliseconds away. Needless to say, it sounded awful.
Skype also has one major disadvantage: there's no way to plug a real physical telephone into it. And some people quite like their analogue handsets, especially when the alternative is a flimsy headset tethered to their PC.
Besides, I don't like my network bandwidth being usurped to help people behind firewalls talk to each other (I pay by the byte, so I care).
It's worth noting that AIM/MSN/ICQ won the IM market not due to being proprietary, but due to being first. Jabber was a late entrant. In comparison, SIP has pretty much taken over the VoIP market, leaving early proprietary systems such as VocalTec Internet Phone in the dust.
Re:Record companies already do this
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 1
If it's Sony, then it's probably 384Kbps ATRAC. Ick.
Which seems somewhat silly, as once you're up to 384kbps you may as well use a bit more space and one of the lossless codecs.
Of course, "IT Worker Shortage" really means that there isn't a glut of IT people in the market, and therefore they have to pay us more than minimum wage.
So stay away! Believe NardofDoom's claims about our lack of broadband! Etc! You'd just be making it (very slightly) harder for me to find a job, anyway.
In New Zealand we have party-appointed scrutineers looking over the shoulders of our (human) vote-counters; as a result, we're pretty sure that our votes will be counted correctly. And they're all counted by the end of election night -- no dimpled chads:-)
But our election system is much simpler than that of the US. I've seen your ballots - they've got vast numbers of choices on them, and this makes manually counting the votes much more difficult. Here, and I suspect in most other countries where votes are counted by hand, there are just two votes per ballot, so manual counting is relatively easy.
The big problem with such prize systems, as I see it, is when they give prizes for something that in and of itself has a low intrinsic monetary or other value. This means that there is little or no motivation other than the prize, and thus effort made towards it is completely wasted if or when someone else gets there first. This is often compounded by unrealistically small amounts of prize money for the amount of time, resources and risk involved.
Of course, you can collaborate with others, but then the prize is diluted, and you're still stuck competing against other teams.
I once wrote some code for someone on Slashdot who offered some sort of bounty for the first to finish, but it only required a couple of days' work, when I would otherwise have had nothing to do, and before I put any substantial effort in, I contacted the guy and made sure there was no one else seriously trying to solve the problem. And, of course, it was GPLed:-)
The X-Prize is completely different, of course -- the end result achieved does have intrinsic value, and would be worthwhile even if the prize did not exist:-)
It's focus groups, I tell, you, that destroyed any hope of the band getting their choice of cover art for Smell The Glove.
And while iTunes is all appley and so forth, it's still charging CD prices for compressed DRMed audio. Which I don't want. Not that I'm an iTunesable area:-)
How bad is this if you have a dual-head setup with one LCD and one CRT? Or if your monitors are set up in such a way that you're only really concentrating on one at a time?
Every time I hear the word "homeland" I'm reminded of studying South Africa in history:
In apartheid South Africa the concept was given a whole new meaning. The white government transformed the 13% of its territory that had been exempted from white settlement into regions of home-rule. Then they tried to bestow independence on these regions, so that they could then claim that the other 87% was white territory. See Bantustan.
If you consider yourself to be a $LANGUAGE programmer, then there's something wrong.
As the parent post says, knowing multiple languages is good. One of my pet annoyances is hearing people describe themselves as a programmer for a specific language -- there are many more out there, and to say you only do one speaks volumes about the lack of breadth of experience you posess.
And don't just stick with imperative object-oriented languages. Try a few declarative languages, like Haskell (functional) or Prolog (logic). Yes, getting your head around them is hard. But you'll be glad you did.
Disclaimer: I'm a student doing an MSc in Computer Science, and by lines of code, most of what I wrote in the last twelve months was Perl, and was completely unrelated to my thesis:-)
"The serial uploaders who post thousands of music files free of charge onto the Internet are stealing this product in exactly the same way as a shoplifter in a Music store. Theft on this scale cannot be allowed to continue unchecked." -- Steve Knott, Managing Director, HMV Europe, and Chairman, British Association of Record Dealers
Maybe he's right. The marginal cost of duplicating, sticking in a jewel case and selling another CD is probably pretty small. So maybe theft is only slightly worse than downloading MP3s from Kazaa:-)
Often seen in the alternate, and even sillier form: "I call shenanigans", this phrase seems to have appeared on Slashdot in the last couple of months. Does anyone have any idea where it came from? Some television show that I don't watch?
It's almost as bad as "As I recently wrote in my blog...". It invites the response "WhoTF are you, and why should I care about your opinion?"
Historical reasons? The US uses 60Hz power, and most of the rest of the world uses 50Hz. Therefore, TV runs at half(*) the power frequency to avoid beating patterns between the two.
Note that modern TV sets don't seem to have too much of a problem with this, however.
(*) Well, actually TV is interlaced -- so while you get 25/30 frames per second, you're getting 50/60 fields (half the scanlines) per second.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, okay, so I'm not 100% there on when Alley Cat was released. But the hardware was there (okay, so I don't know if the CGA card was available then) which is what you seem to care about.
Using ZX81 screenshots is misleading. They were neat machines, but there was much better (if somewhat higher chip-count) hardware available at the time, such as the TI-99/4.
Presumably you haven't seen Alley Cat. Or any of the games available for "home computers" at the time.
No. You know some programming already. But you don't really know much CS. And if that's all that a CS programme is going to teach you, then it's probably not worthwhile.
I say this as someone who had been programming since around age eight -- but did CS at university ten years later anyway. CS was an eye opener. Sure, I knew a reasonable number of languages. But I didn't have a clue how to structure programs and their data structures well. Knew nothing of algorithmic complexity measures. Never even seen a nonimperative programming language, let alone put in the effort to get my head around a few. And I'd never worked in a team. CS gave me all of this. And it can give it to you too!</infomercial>
I don't know about these "top 20" things, though; we have considerably less than 20 universities in New Zealand :-)
Well: if you do believe in free will, but it doesn't exist, then you don't have a choice about believing in free will...
Do you even have a clue what you're talking about?
:-)
What do you mean by a "pluggable API-level interface"? Explain how one "plugs into" one of these.
What do you mean by not depending on a single environment? Especially when you give "init" as an example of such an environment?
You can probably tell I've tutored first year CompSci students before
Some open source developers disagree with you.
Open source developers usually write software because they want to use it. If they don't want to use it with Windows, then why should they port it just to satisfy some whinging Windows users? Especially the "I couldn't code my way out of a soggy paper bag, but Doing This Would Make Open Source Succeed*!" sort.
* Succeed being defined as "do what I want it to do"
When reading your "the body..." line, I was half expecting it to read
* the body will expand to fill the (bodybag, shallow grave, etc)
but that's just me.
Yes.
As someone who uses a NZD40 secondhand Palm V as a book reader -- they're fine. The screen is only 160x160, but the text is nice and sharp, and a good size. Some models have worse screens, of course. I don't see the problem with having a serial port -- converters to USB are cheap and plentiful, and it's not as if you're going to be transferring more than a few hundred kilobytes at a time.
:-)
The other nice thing about the Palm V in particular is you can drop it from a height of a metre or two onto carpet and it won't break
I tried to use Skype once, to call a friend from university. In the same city (Wellington, New Zealand). We were 5 hops, thirty milliseconds apart. Skype routed the call first through Korea, and the second time through Canada. Two hundred milliseconds away. Needless to say, it sounded awful.
Skype also has one major disadvantage: there's no way to plug a real physical telephone into it. And some people quite like their analogue handsets, especially when the alternative is a flimsy headset tethered to their PC.
Besides, I don't like my network bandwidth being usurped to help people behind firewalls talk to each other (I pay by the byte, so I care).
It's worth noting that AIM/MSN/ICQ won the IM market not due to being proprietary, but due to being first. Jabber was a late entrant. In comparison, SIP has pretty much taken over the VoIP market, leaving early proprietary systems such as VocalTec Internet Phone in the dust.
If it's Sony, then it's probably 384Kbps ATRAC. Ick.
Which seems somewhat silly, as once you're up to 384kbps you may as well use a bit more space and one of the lossless codecs.
Of course, "IT Worker Shortage" really means that there isn't a glut of IT people in the market, and therefore they have to pay us more than minimum wage.
So stay away! Believe NardofDoom's claims about our lack of broadband! Etc! You'd just be making it (very slightly) harder for me to find a job, anyway.
In New Zealand we have party-appointed scrutineers looking over the shoulders of our (human) vote-counters; as a result, we're pretty sure that our votes will be counted correctly. And they're all counted by the end of election night -- no dimpled chads :-)
But our election system is much simpler than that of the US. I've seen your ballots - they've got vast numbers of choices on them, and this makes manually counting the votes much more difficult. Here, and I suspect in most other countries where votes are counted by hand, there are just two votes per ballot, so manual counting is relatively easy.
The big problem with such prize systems, as I see it, is when they give prizes for something that in and of itself has a low intrinsic monetary or other value. This means that there is little or no motivation other than the prize, and thus effort made towards it is completely wasted if or when someone else gets there first. This is often compounded by unrealistically small amounts of prize money for the amount of time, resources and risk involved.
:-)
:-)
Of course, you can collaborate with others, but then the prize is diluted, and you're still stuck competing against other teams.
I once wrote some code for someone on Slashdot who offered some sort of bounty for the first to finish, but it only required a couple of days' work, when I would otherwise have had nothing to do, and before I put any substantial effort in, I contacted the guy and made sure there was no one else seriously trying to solve the problem. And, of course, it was GPLed
The X-Prize is completely different, of course -- the end result achieved does have intrinsic value, and would be worthwhile even if the prize did not exist
It's focus groups, I tell, you, that destroyed any hope of the band getting their choice of cover art for Smell The Glove.
:-)
And while iTunes is all appley and so forth, it's still charging CD prices for compressed DRMed audio. Which I don't want. Not that I'm an iTunesable area
Algorithms don't keep time as well, but at least they're spelt correctly.
</pedant>
How bad is this if you have a dual-head setup with one LCD and one CRT? Or if your monitors are set up in such a way that you're only really concentrating on one at a time?
My swiss army knife beats your damn small linux any day of the week :-)
If you consider yourself to be a $LANGUAGE programmer, then there's something wrong.
:-)
As the parent post says, knowing multiple languages is good. One of my pet annoyances is hearing people describe themselves as a programmer for a specific language -- there are many more out there, and to say you only do one speaks volumes about the lack of breadth of experience you posess.
And don't just stick with imperative object-oriented languages. Try a few declarative languages, like Haskell (functional) or Prolog (logic). Yes, getting your head around them is hard. But you'll be glad you did.
Disclaimer: I'm a student doing an MSc in Computer Science, and by lines of code, most of what I wrote in the last twelve months was Perl, and was completely unrelated to my thesis
And may I just add,
"In Soviet Russia... bullshit calls you!"
Often seen in the alternate, and even sillier form: "I call shenanigans", this phrase seems to have appeared on Slashdot in the last couple of months. Does anyone have any idea where it came from? Some television show that I don't watch?
It's almost as bad as "As I recently wrote in my blog...". It invites the response "WhoTF are you, and why should I care about your opinion?"
Plan 9 From Outer Space is not "high-concept" sci-fi. It is, nonetheless, pretty funny. As is Ed Wood.
Historical reasons? The US uses 60Hz power, and most of the rest of the world uses 50Hz. Therefore, TV runs at half(*) the power frequency to avoid beating patterns between the two.
Note that modern TV sets don't seem to have too much of a problem with this, however.
(*) Well, actually TV is interlaced -- so while you get 25/30 frames per second, you're getting 50/60 fields (half the scanlines) per second.