My generation (which is those of us who just turned 18) makes me sick. I can count on one hand the number of people I know (that are my age) who are registered to vote. Letting your country decide everything for you is most definately _not_ the American way--you should be exercising the little trace of a voice that you have as an individual in this country!
"10 years ago few people had even heard of the RIAA"
I beg to differ. Many people (including my father) were aware of the RIAA, but there was a different reason, as this quote from my father's Marantz 2240 Handbook (c.1975) shows:
"The
AUX INPUT jacks are for...phonographs that provide RIAA equalized high level output, TV sound..."
This was, obviously, from a simpler time--my dad didn't (at that time) know anything about the RIAA other than the responsibilties they had to make sure audio equipment was compatible with each other.
Something really interesting about "blinker fluid" is the way many older Chrysler minivans were set up--like the '93 Plymouth Grand Voyager that my parents own. There are two washer fluid reservoirs--one under the hood (where you'd expect it) for the front windshield, and one under the back liftgate for the rear windshield. Though the back was clearly labelled "USE Mopar WASHER FLUID," I know several people that worked for auto parts stores, and had people ask them--in all seriousness--where they could find "blinker fluid" for their Chrysler minivans, of course referring to the back reservoir (which is closer to a turn signal than it is to the windshield).
BASIC/bay'-sic/ n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]
Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, but this is a backronym. BASIC was originally named Basic, simply because it was a simple and basic programming language. Because most programming language names were in fact acronyms, BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or to be silly. No acronym for BASIC originally existed or was intended (as one can verify by reading texts through the early 1970s). Later, around the mid-1970s, people began to make up backronyms for BASIC because they weren't sure. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is the one that caught on.
I can definately attest to this... it's been somewhat difficult learning C++ after spending years doing GOTOs and working with line numbers. GOSUB 15 is so much different compared to the functions that I'm getting used to now... and for some reason, I keep putting a return; statement at the end of all void() functions.:)
Hmmm... There's another solution--how about users simply don't run anything as administrator? I think there are plenty of other OSes that work this way.
(21:58:17 ) chris $ ps -ax | grep vim
11903 p0 S+ 0:00.44 vim -c syn on
11983 p1 S+ 0:00.01 grep vim
(21:58:31 ) chris $ kill 11903
-bash: kill: (11903) - Operation not permitted
So, if a worm was executed in userland, this wouldn't be an issue. Too bad that I can't do shit as a user in Windows.
Ah, Return to Zork. The first adventure into the Great Underground Empire of Zork--that used graphics. Sure, the acting was awful, but it did have a lot of Full Motion Video (on the CD-ROM version), and the soundtrack was pretty good (again, only on the CD-ROM version)
And even if you thought the game sucked, you'd always rememeber Booz's famous quote:
"Want some rye? 'Course you do!"
And the drinking game that followed. Admit it, you ended up damn drunk several times before you found out you had to dump it in the plant.
What about jed? It has a pull down similar to MS-DOS Edit's.
Still, every Unix/Linux guru in the world is going to pick on you for using it. Take the verbal abuse, or open up a terminal window and type in "vimtutor" and learn the damned editor.
Also, keep in mind that Edit didn't show up until around MS-DOS 4 or 5, I believe. Before that, you had Edlin. And vi and emacs are a _whole_ lot better than that peice of crap!
(I'd paste an example of edlin here, but I don't happen to have a DOS machine handy.)
From the above link: "This puzzle was inspired by a misleading statement attribued to Danica McKellar of The Wonder Years:"
What's really amusing as that McKellar went on to get a BS in Pure Mathematics at UCLA, and write the foreward to "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus."
Bah, you and your "imposter" buckling-spring keyboards. Sure, they may be brand new... but I rescued my IBM Model M (born 4-MAR-94, P/N 82G2383) from a dumpster, next to some old IBM PS/2 486. The poor thing was almost brown when I got it. Take it home, pop all the key caps, throw 'em in a mesh sack and toss them in the dishwasher, one cycle, and it looks almost brand new. I've had this keyboard for 5 years, and it definately got 4 years of heavy office use before I got my hands on it. Not a single key is dead--and it still keeps my poor roommate awake on late-night coding runs.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who _aren't_ registered to vote (those of you that are over 18, and US residents, of course), go take a look at the Federal Election Commission's webpage. Since I'm an Illinois resident, I'll also point out the page that's specifically for Illinoisians (and it's pronounced ill-uh-noy, not ill-uh-noiyz): http://www.elections.state.il.us/ElecInfo/pages/Do wnReg.htm
My generation (which is those of us who just turned 18) makes me sick. I can count on one hand the number of people I know (that are my age) who are registered to vote. Letting your country decide everything for you is most definately _not_ the American way--you should be exercising the little trace of a voice that you have as an individual in this country!
I beg to differ. Many people (including my father) were aware of the RIAA, but there was a different reason, as this quote from my father's Marantz 2240 Handbook (c.1975) shows:
This was, obviously, from a simpler time--my dad didn't (at that time) know anything about the RIAA other than the responsibilties they had to make sure audio equipment was compatible with each other.
Just some worthless information
Something really interesting about "blinker fluid" is the way many older Chrysler minivans were set up--like the '93 Plymouth Grand Voyager that my parents own. There are two washer fluid reservoirs--one under the hood (where you'd expect it) for the front windshield, and one under the back liftgate for the rear windshield. Though the back was clearly labelled "USE Mopar WASHER FLUID," I know several people that worked for auto parts stores, and had people ask them--in all seriousness--where they could find "blinker fluid" for their Chrysler minivans, of course referring to the back reservoir (which is closer to a turn signal than it is to the windshield).
I can definately attest to this... it's been somewhat difficult learning C++ after spending years doing GOTOs and working with line numbers.
GOSUB 15 is so much different compared to the functions that I'm getting used to now... and for some reason, I keep putting a return; statement at the end of all void() functions.
Hmmm... There's another solution--how about users simply don't run anything as administrator? I think there are plenty of other OSes that work this way.
(21:57:40 ) root # uname
FreeBSD
(21:57:43 ) root # vim
On another terminal...
(21:58:17 ) chris $ ps -ax | grep vim
11903 p0 S+ 0:00.44 vim -c syn on
11983 p1 S+ 0:00.01 grep vim
(21:58:31 ) chris $ kill 11903
-bash: kill: (11903) - Operation not permitted
So, if a worm was executed in userland, this wouldn't be an issue. Too bad that I can't do shit as a user in Windows.
Yeah, and last time I checked, I think the price of an Explorer rockets to $80,000USD.
My point? I'm not sure I really have one--seems like almost the same concept.
Ah, Return to Zork. The first adventure into the Great Underground Empire of Zork--that used graphics. Sure, the acting was awful, but it did have a lot of Full Motion Video (on the CD-ROM version), and the soundtrack was pretty good (again, only on the CD-ROM version)
And even if you thought the game sucked, you'd always rememeber Booz's famous quote:
"Want some rye? 'Course you do!"
And the drinking game that followed. Admit it, you ended up damn drunk several times before you found out you had to dump it in the plant.
What about jed? It has a pull down similar to MS-DOS Edit's.
Still, every Unix/Linux guru in the world is going to pick on you for using it. Take the verbal abuse, or open up a terminal window and type in "vimtutor" and learn the damned editor.
Also, keep in mind that Edit didn't show up until around MS-DOS 4 or 5, I believe. Before that, you had Edlin. And vi and emacs are a _whole_ lot better than that peice of crap!
(I'd paste an example of edlin here, but I don't happen to have a DOS machine handy.)
From the above link: "This puzzle was inspired by a misleading statement attribued to Danica McKellar of The Wonder Years:" What's really amusing as that McKellar went on to get a BS in Pure Mathematics at UCLA, and write the foreward to "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus."
Bah, you and your "imposter" buckling-spring keyboards. Sure, they may be brand new... but I rescued my IBM Model M (born 4-MAR-94, P/N 82G2383) from a dumpster, next to some old IBM PS/2 486. The poor thing was almost brown when I got it. Take it home, pop all the key caps, throw 'em in a mesh sack and toss them in the dishwasher, one cycle, and it looks almost brand new. I've had this keyboard for 5 years, and it definately got 4 years of heavy office use before I got my hands on it. Not a single key is dead--and it still keeps my poor roommate awake on late-night coding runs.