Well I'm not a programmer by trade... well not exactly. I do quite a bit of VHDL coding though, so I suppose I'm a candidate.
I got started with AppleBasic in 1982 or thereabouts. We'd got an Apple ][+ because it had some accounting software for farming. For the most part though, it didn't do anything too special. There wasn't a way to get programs from a network. There wasn't an easy way to buy software, as the nearest computer shop was 50-60 miles away. So if you wanted to do something, you had to do it yourself. At first it was just writing Hello programs (and I'm not talking about "Hello World" ones, the Hello program was what ran when you booted the computer and it looked at the floppy in the drive). I suppose that was the closest analogue to theming I had at that point. You could make some really interesting Hello programs with judicious vtab and htab loops.
Then Softdisk came along. That delivered a disk full of programs once a month. You used it for a month, and sent it back and then they sent you a new one. That was exposure to a whole lot of other programs and they usually had some tips and tricks around.
So pretty soon there were the odd flip-spin-twisties you could get from PEEKing and POKEing at the right addresses, and working through books of Basic code, finding the bits that were wrong and correcting them. I got an assembler book at one point and wrote an even faster flip-spin-twisty, and wrote a flight database program for my dad.
And that was it really.
As far as getting kids to want to do it, or try to do it, I'm not sure there's a sure-fire way. But perhaps there are some things:
Make it accessible. We all know coding is typing. Run a sort of operating system that lets you drop to a prompt easily.
There has to be something easy and accessible. I don't think Logo is it, it doesn't seem to do anything useful. Basic actually works pretty well. Shell scripting would work if it weren't for some of the stranger Bourne shell syntax. C isn't it. Ruby might be it. PHP is pretty damn close. Quick and dirty and easy.
It might be nice to have a reason. Some kids will create their own reasons... these are usually easy to spot. Sometimes though there needs to be something to do. For instance I had my Hello programs and then the flight database. Web programming is pretty easy and might provide a good purpose.
Don't force it. Either it'll be interesting or it won't. Even if it isn't, it doesn't mean that it won't later be interesting. Remember you cannot really teach kids. You can provide an environment for them to teach themselves, but if someone really doesn't want to learn it, forcing the issue will only ensure it never happens even in the future.
It might be a problem if it were not so well known. However, it's very common to test a part under optimal conditions because numbers sell. A 1.2 GHz capable part sounds better than a 1 GHz capable part.
That being said, anyone who takes the numbers completely at face value gets what they deserve. We have an entire facility that acquires parts we are considering using, and "qualifies" them, and then publishes their findings in the company's part database. So somewhere between the vendor data sheet and the homespun one, the truth lies.
Frankly, I thought the ending for The Diamond Age was just fine. The entire book was about connections in all variations (strength, importance of, breaking, etc). The final scene is the last and most important connection between Nell and Miranda and nothing more needs to be said. Mother and daughter (albeit in a non-traditional fashion) are reunited. I don't think Nell would appreciate melodramatic nonsense to appease those who wanted a little more.
I would recommend whole heartedly the Lands' End Vertical Brief. It's about $60 or so. It's got a laptop segregation section in the main body. Plus, it's got a huge amount of pockets all over the place for cables etc. The main compartment is also nicely big enough to put paper documentation in with the laptop (on the other side of the partition. It has either a shoulder strap, or backpack straps (and of course, a normal handle.
I've thought about this a lot as I've acquired a lot of friends in remote places and ones that I only know over various services.
It wouldn't be too hard to set up a deadman's switch cron job on a server that would unpack a tgz file and execute a number of scripts. That way you could target a large number of folks, and not simply via e-mail. IM, e-mail, SMS, web sites, etc could all be updated.
The only drawback is that chance you forget and prematurely tell everyone what you think of them;-).
Of couse, some linux installs with have sidebars and other copies of new longhorn features. Longhorn will likely gain some new linux-like features between now and then as well... It's just the features race.
One reason I use linux is because I don't HAVE to have these features. If Linux gains some "features" like sidebars and whatnot, I can choose to not install them, or find an implementation that I like. Most likely with Windows, they will be ON by default and the means by which to turn them off will be buries so far in some sort of crayon bright eye-candied "configuration" that I would never, ever find it.
1) Why does Luna look like a pre-schooler threw up after eating several crayons?
2) Why do MS Office, MS Visio, and MS Visual Studio all look different (hint: they use different toolkits!)
I don't know about Visual Studio, but Visio was another one of those software projects that Microsoft acquired when they realized that it could be useful to have a pseudo-drafting type of drawing program. It was only in Office 2000 that Visio showed up as an "integrated" application. It is still first generation and only shows many differences in the splash screen and such.
3) Why does every other Windows apps (Winamp, Windows Media Player, Ephpod, etc, etc) use their own weird-looking skin?
Personally, I think it's rather impressive. Back when everyone could work on their own car, everyone *had* to work on their own car, because cars needed lots of attention on a regular basis just to keep running. Modern automobiles have gotten so reliable that people fully expect them to run for 100,000+ miles without anything more than gas, oil changes and new tires and brakes. The day when driving a car daily meant you had to be able to troubleshoot problems is gone.
Interestingly enough, this is essentially the situation in Cuba. Due to the decades long embargo of parts, most of the cars in Cuba were built a very long time ago. They work on the cars because they HAVE to work on their cars themselves and get parts where they can find them. There is apparantly quite a industry in fitting heterogenous parts together to cobble together a working vehicle. Very much a "do-it-yourself" situation at least as far as automobiles go.
I just hope that the Baroque Cycle has an ending so, like "The young lady's primer", it doesn't just come to a screeching halt like a bad B-movie run out of money.
I have to disagree with this to a degree. The ending of The Diamond Age has fascinated me since the first time I read it. I admit the first time I read the book, it completely felt running at full tilt off a cliff and suddenly there's no ground left beneath you, a la Wile E. Coyote. However, after reading more of his work, I got to thinking that perhaps there is some way of observing the ending that doesn't feel stilted. There is.
The main two themes of the book are societal connections, from the mini (immediate family) to the macro (full scale phyles), and cycles. When Nell and her brother fled their home early on, it broke the connections of family, leaving her adrift, and it broke the basic maturation cycle. Viewed in these terms, the true climax of the plot lies roughly in the section in which Nell becomes the Queen of the Mouse Army. The rescue of Miranda and the healing of the mother-daughter connection is more falling action and essentially assured.
Now, this all gets COMPLETELY mixed up with the Seed/Feed transition which is completely left hanging, and causes most of the confusion. If you read the book with the thematic view completely on Nell/Miranda and trying to push Hackworth's design for the seed, it all works much better.
Just one fellows opinion.
I've said it before (just as recently as the Movieoke post a day or two ago, where it seems like we're a hairsbreadth from the 'ractives featured in The Diamond Age. This seems to be a hairsbreadth from Fido in Snow Crash. I think I will have to reread everything to see if I can't spot the next trend. The unfortunate thing is that he's been so prolific with ideas that it's like looking for a needle in a haystack!
Maybe it's that I have Stephenson on the brain, having just finished Quicksilver but this news items immediately reminded me of the 'ractive players in The Diamond Age. All it lacks is the helper industry of 'ractors, and the virtual abstraction used in the book.
Past experience suggests if there is a market for movieoke actors to help, it will arrive. The virtualization part only needs R&D and time.
The "diplomat" will be able to enter the opposite players back two rows and either conduct technological espionage, or will be able to subvert the other players pieces such that they change color.
This behavior can be eliminated if the King and Queen decide to research hack-proof cryptographic bureacracies as a social development.
While I can understand the commentator's point about people online being complete choads, and could even be generalized, in specific instances, it's completely backwards. One case in point is Sanctum, an online collectable card game, probably the best one I've found looking around. The people are great to play with. The game is balanced. The replay options are enormous. Did I mention the people are great to play with? Instead of the 90% of people are choads (a la Penny Arcade) I'd have to say 99.98% of the Sanctum community is truly interested in helping new people play, giving pointers on how to play certain strategies, willing to trade and help new players get going with common cards and such.
I highly recommend it. I can't imagine playing M:TG Online.
I'm convinced that amateurs are usually better at most things than professionals, for the simple reason that they care more.
The root of amateur in Latin is amat and refers to one who "loves" an activity. In a previous time, the amateur was one who was more highly thought of because they pursued a study for the love of it, rather than the "crass materialism" of the professional. The amateur was likely to delve into strange areas of the art or science, explore frontiers and new territory. The amateur was the innovator, not a profit oriented business.
It's interesting to see the swap of meaning (or at least depending on who you're listening to) in modern usage.
"Though Battle.net is a matchmaking service, it's silly to call that its only function. I've always thought of it as performing a sort of de facto authentication, a la Half-Life. This watchdog element is (I'm sure they believe) crucial to sustaining their business, and Blizzard has absolutely every right to try and protect their stuff via whatever methods they want to."
I think Blizzard has the right to try to protect their property, but in general I have a BIG problem with the phrase "via whatever methods they want to." They cannot protect themselves by doing whatever they want to. There are rules protecting the consumer as well. Once you say they can do anything they want, you're essentially backing the same abusive business practices we see in the current headlines and in our history books!
Blizzard has a great product and they ought to work with the bnetd people rather than just trying to shut them down completely.
No to mention if they've got a good enough camera that they can read the LED from the front panel, they more than likely can read the manufacturer and model sticker on it as well and just look up the modem specs;).
Not to mention that given a recorded stream of assumed 1's and 0's, you can play with it all you like until you figure out what encoding has been used. If (for whatever reason, bandwidth, etc) they used NRZ-M (non-return-to-zero mark, where you get a '1' on a data transition, not a real logic one) you could try all the various encoding methods til you hit one that produced apparantly good output.
It's just like decryption.
Re:How To Keep A Healthy Level Of Insanity
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
Actually at In-and-Out Burger you actually have to do #11. It was very strange for awhile, til I figured out that they have such a small building, they expect people to park in a parking lot with no shade and eat burgers in their frying hot cars, and then return the tray.
Slashdot Mirror
I got started with AppleBasic in 1982 or thereabouts. We'd got an Apple ][+ because it had some accounting software for farming. For the most part though, it didn't do anything too special. There wasn't a way to get programs from a network. There wasn't an easy way to buy software, as the nearest computer shop was 50-60 miles away. So if you wanted to do something, you had to do it yourself. At first it was just writing Hello programs (and I'm not talking about "Hello World" ones, the Hello program was what ran when you booted the computer and it looked at the floppy in the drive). I suppose that was the closest analogue to theming I had at that point. You could make some really interesting Hello programs with judicious vtab and htab loops.
Then Softdisk came along. That delivered a disk full of programs once a month. You used it for a month, and sent it back and then they sent you a new one. That was exposure to a whole lot of other programs and they usually had some tips and tricks around.
So pretty soon there were the odd flip-spin-twisties you could get from PEEKing and POKEing at the right addresses, and working through books of Basic code, finding the bits that were wrong and correcting them. I got an assembler book at one point and wrote an even faster flip-spin-twisty, and wrote a flight database program for my dad.
And that was it really.
As far as getting kids to want to do it, or try to do it, I'm not sure there's a sure-fire way. But perhaps there are some things:
Well there you have it, for what it's worth.
It might be a problem if it were not so well known. However, it's very common to test a part under optimal conditions because numbers sell. A 1.2 GHz capable part sounds better than a 1 GHz capable part.
That being said, anyone who takes the numbers completely at face value gets what they deserve. We have an entire facility that acquires parts we are considering using, and "qualifies" them, and then publishes their findings in the company's part database. So somewhere between the vendor data sheet and the homespun one, the truth lies.
...I could justify professional scalp massage as an antidote to brain-related RSI.
We were wearing condoms
>> He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head
> But, but... it's a wireless mike.
> You know, I'm beginning to suspect that that whole answer might have had a little embellishment in it.
Well your basic credulity aside, there is a long tradition of this sort of internally inconsistent narrative embellishment.
Observe Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe who strips naked, swims out to the shipwreck, and fills his pockets with all the necessities he requires.
Frankly, I thought the ending for The Diamond Age was just fine. The entire book was about connections in all variations (strength, importance of, breaking, etc). The final scene is the last and most important connection between Nell and Miranda and nothing more needs to be said. Mother and daughter (albeit in a non-traditional fashion) are reunited. I don't think Nell would appreciate melodramatic nonsense to appease those who wanted a little more.
I would recommend whole heartedly the Lands' End Vertical Brief. It's about $60 or so. It's got a laptop segregation section in the main body. Plus, it's got a huge amount of pockets all over the place for cables etc. The main compartment is also nicely big enough to put paper documentation in with the laptop (on the other side of the partition. It has either a shoulder strap, or backpack straps (and of course, a normal handle.
I've thought about this a lot as I've acquired a lot of friends in remote places and ones that I only know over various services.
;-).
It wouldn't be too hard to set up a deadman's switch cron job on a server that would unpack a tgz file and execute a number of scripts. That way you could target a large number of folks, and not simply via e-mail. IM, e-mail, SMS, web sites, etc could all be updated.
The only drawback is that chance you forget and prematurely tell everyone what you think of them
One reason I use linux is because I don't HAVE to have these features. If Linux gains some "features" like sidebars and whatnot, I can choose to not install them, or find an implementation that I like. Most likely with Windows, they will be ON by default and the means by which to turn them off will be buries so far in some sort of crayon bright eye-candied "configuration" that I would never, ever find it.
1) Why does Luna look like a pre-schooler threw up after eating several crayons?
;-)
2) Why do MS Office, MS Visio, and MS Visual Studio all look different (hint: they use different toolkits!)
I don't know about Visual Studio, but Visio was another one of those software projects that Microsoft acquired when they realized that it could be useful to have a pseudo-drafting type of drawing program. It was only in Office 2000 that Visio showed up as an "integrated" application. It is still first generation and only shows many differences in the splash screen and such.
3) Why does every other Windows apps (Winamp, Windows Media Player, Ephpod, etc, etc) use their own weird-looking skin?
I think you answered this one under #1.
I swear, reading Slashdot is starting to sound like those scrolling news blurbs in Uplink.
Company X reports that N gigs of customer information were stolen by an unidentified hacker.
Company Y reports that N gigs of project data was deleted by an unidentified hacker.
etc., etc., etc.
... someone tries to make a Beowulf cluster out of these things. ... and how many parking garages would it take?
Interestingly enough, this is essentially the situation in Cuba. Due to the decades long embargo of parts, most of the cars in Cuba were built a very long time ago. They work on the cars because they HAVE to work on their cars themselves and get parts where they can find them. There is apparantly quite a industry in fitting heterogenous parts together to cobble together a working vehicle. Very much a "do-it-yourself" situation at least as far as automobiles go.
I just hope that the Baroque Cycle has an ending so, like "The young lady's primer", it doesn't just come to a screeching halt like a bad B-movie run out of money. I have to disagree with this to a degree. The ending of The Diamond Age has fascinated me since the first time I read it. I admit the first time I read the book, it completely felt running at full tilt off a cliff and suddenly there's no ground left beneath you, a la Wile E. Coyote. However, after reading more of his work, I got to thinking that perhaps there is some way of observing the ending that doesn't feel stilted. There is. The main two themes of the book are societal connections, from the mini (immediate family) to the macro (full scale phyles), and cycles. When Nell and her brother fled their home early on, it broke the connections of family, leaving her adrift, and it broke the basic maturation cycle. Viewed in these terms, the true climax of the plot lies roughly in the section in which Nell becomes the Queen of the Mouse Army. The rescue of Miranda and the healing of the mother-daughter connection is more falling action and essentially assured. Now, this all gets COMPLETELY mixed up with the Seed/Feed transition which is completely left hanging, and causes most of the confusion. If you read the book with the thematic view completely on Nell/Miranda and trying to push Hackworth's design for the seed, it all works much better. Just one fellows opinion.
I've said it before (just as recently as the Movieoke post a day or two ago, where it seems like we're a hairsbreadth from the 'ractives featured in The Diamond Age. This seems to be a hairsbreadth from Fido in Snow Crash. I think I will have to reread everything to see if I can't spot the next trend. The unfortunate thing is that he's been so prolific with ideas that it's like looking for a needle in a haystack!
Past experience suggests if there is a market for movieoke actors to help, it will arrive. The virtualization part only needs R&D and time.
The "diplomat" will be able to enter the opposite players back two rows and either conduct technological espionage, or will be able to subvert the other players pieces such that they change color.
This behavior can be eliminated if the King and Queen decide to research hack-proof cryptographic bureacracies as a social development.
You know, every time I hear about Microsoft doing something like this, it reminds me of the Deveels in Robert Asprin's Myth books.
"If you think you got a good deal from a Deveel, better count your fingers and toes."
I can't help but think there's a catch. There's always a catch.
While I can understand the commentator's point about people online being complete choads, and could even be generalized, in specific instances, it's completely backwards. One case in point is Sanctum, an online collectable card game, probably the best one I've found looking around. The people are great to play with. The game is balanced. The replay options are enormous. Did I mention the people are great to play with? Instead of the 90% of people are choads (a la Penny Arcade) I'd have to say 99.98% of the Sanctum community is truly interested in helping new people play, giving pointers on how to play certain strategies, willing to trade and help new players get going with common cards and such.
I highly recommend it. I can't imagine playing M:TG Online.
Sanctum can be found here.
Regards,
Mark Norton
I'm convinced that amateurs are usually better at most things than professionals, for the simple reason that they care more.
The root of amateur in Latin is amat and refers to one who "loves" an activity. In a previous time, the amateur was one who was more highly thought of because they pursued a study for the love of it, rather than the "crass materialism" of the professional. The amateur was likely to delve into strange areas of the art or science, explore frontiers and new territory. The amateur was the innovator, not a profit oriented business.
It's interesting to see the swap of meaning (or at least depending on who you're listening to) in modern usage.
"Though Battle.net is a matchmaking service, it's silly to call that its only function. I've always thought of it as performing a sort of de facto authentication, a la Half-Life. This watchdog element is (I'm sure they believe) crucial to sustaining their business, and Blizzard has absolutely every right to try and protect their stuff via whatever methods they want to."
I think Blizzard has the right to try to protect their property, but in general I have a BIG problem with the phrase "via whatever methods they want to." They cannot protect themselves by doing whatever they want to. There are rules protecting the consumer as well. Once you say they can do anything they want, you're essentially backing the same abusive business practices we see in the current headlines and in our history books!
Blizzard has a great product and they ought to work with the bnetd people rather than just trying to shut them down completely.
That's why it's the natural color for all computer cases!
No to mention if they've got a good enough camera that they can read the LED from the front panel, they more than likely can read the manufacturer and model sticker on it as well and just look up the modem specs ;).
Not to mention that given a recorded stream of assumed 1's and 0's, you can play with it all you like until you figure out what encoding has been used. If (for whatever reason, bandwidth, etc) they used NRZ-M (non-return-to-zero mark, where you get a '1' on a data transition, not a real logic one) you could try all the various encoding methods til you hit one that produced apparantly good output.
It's just like decryption.
Actually at In-and-Out Burger you actually have to do #11. It was very strange for awhile, til I figured out that they have such a small building, they expect people to park in a parking lot with no shade and eat burgers in their frying hot cars, and then return the tray.