People can't be trusted. They need guidance from people who know better than they do. Preferrably somebody with the proper training in 'Cultural Studies' or some branch of the Humanities. Otherwise they will lose their indigenous identities, and won't be available any longer as travel destinations for people from the West on summer break from getting their degrees in 'Cultural Studies' or some branch in the Humanities...
I haven't looked, but probably this is one of those books chock full of screen shots of gui tools. You know, with views of each stage along the way and what big friendly button to click, etc. etc.
There's an old rule of thumb about screen shots. If they take up more than ~10% of the total pages, get a better book.
And unless you hand coded those escape sequences into your word processing documents and used special routines provided by the graphics card manufacturer, you couldn't access those advanced features at all, in any way.
Let's not make the computer hardware past into some sort of nostalgic wonderland, okay?
It's the same as it is for any book on a software product where they put the version number in the title.
On the other hand, probably my favorite and well-thumbed book on Unix is 'Introducing the UNIX System' by McGilton and Morgan, published by Byte Books in 1983. For someone who wants to learn the core of Unix by the 'old way' (lots of little tools all piped together to do big things) a book like that, even one of that vintage, is best. Learn how to write/bin/sh scripts first, and nroff, and tee, ed, ex, vi, ar, make, etc. etc.
Most people who are involved in (spectator) sports like pro football are doing nothing to be involved with anytbody but the guy down at the liquor store. Oh, and the guy selling $27 t-shirts with hologram paper tags on them.
It is sort of ironic, though. I mean, when OS/2 came out, it was widely perceived as a bad, baaaaad thing by all the tech freaks and fanatics. It rolled out of Big Blue accompanying the Microchannel Architecture, and everybody perceieved it as evil and proprietary.
Now, there are geeks who wax nostalgic about how wonderful OS/2 was, and who speak fondly of IBM as the savior of freedom in computers.
Serious Gamers are used to spending $200 every six months to get a new graphics card.
I wouldn't say your spending $200 every two to three years is an unreasonable expense.
I say this, however, being the cheap mofo whose fastest graphics card is a Voodoo 3 2000... but I bought my first PlayStation at auction two weeks ago for $20.
Microsoft did not want developers to write games for the XBox and port them over to the PC. They wanted the migration to go the other way. They wanted game developers with experience developing PC games to be able to easily move over to the XBox platform. As to wether the migration is now complete and they have the developer mindspace to migrate their XBox technology away from the PC architecture, well, they must feel it's a safe thing to do. They certainly haven't encouraged cross platform XBox game developers to migrate the other way, over to the generic PC...
The question is, five or ten years down the road, will Apple give up on the efforts of their own engineers, buy this NeXT technology and slap their label on it?
There was good Linux support for some VGA stuff that just isn't that straight forward today. With primative simple SVGA cards like my Trident 8900CL card, the SVGAlib worked simply and well. All the old SVGAlib games in Linux worked great. DOSemu worked better and easier 'without any tweaking' with that old Trident Card as well. I can remember when I first got 'better' video hardware and how Linux video support suddenly got more convoluted and messy.
And unless you hand coded those escape sequences into your word processing documents and used special routines provided by the graphics card manufacturer, you couldn't access those advanced features at all, in any way.
Let's not make the computer hardware past into some sort of mecca, okay?
Apple is a marketing company. The Virginia Tech cluster is a marketing bullet point for their advertisements.
They want to sell units (G5 desktops) to their traditional markets. Their efforts to 'branch out' to new market segments and product categories have been just as feeble as Microsofts, historically.
They sell to fashion-concious consumers. That's what their whole iTunes thing is about. The Virgina Tech cluster is a racing stripe so hot-dog wannas will buy their boxes.
Yes, but is their current business model the same as it was a few years ago when they made that point? The Linux market has 'shaken out' quite a bit. It wouldn't have been wise for any company wanting to have a significant presence in the Linux market to 'take sides' a few years ago. That isn't necessarily the case today.
You're dwelling too much on my 'keypad' comment. My point was that the VoIP implementation that the mainstream uses will NOT be attached to an ASCII keyboard. It will NOT be through a PeeCee.
If VoIP becomes 'the standard' there will be a number or identifying code of some kind that people enter on the handset to make a call. Probably with buttons or a touch screen or some mechanism similar to what's in use today on the Western Electric 2500 set on my desk, which has a 1982 date code on it.
My final advice- get used to the idea that we all get to 'die out' eventually.
Since you quit anyways, you should have snuck into his office once or twice and cut the cord off his mouse. Why should he need to use a mouse?
If you had the resources at hand (probably not) you should have pulled his PC entirely and wheeled in a mini-computer with a switch panel and lights, like a PDP-8. Why should he use a computer that boots automatically? It isn't that hard to memorize the five or six octal command sequences to bootstrap a PDP-8 and get it started reading the high speed paper tape to load the FOCAL interpreter.
Well, actually, the little beeping sound that was made at each key-press of the control panel on the microwave oven was generated in software in (one of) the computer(s) in your Microwave oven. Likely, the speed control on your blender is done using a microprocessor (computer) as well.
The thing that this article misses by a mile is that general purpose computers are severely sub-optimal for many tasks, and people make a lot of money building little bitty specialized computers into other devices.
It's hard to believe people are so distracted by 'the computer' (meaning, that beige box that makes noise beside their desk) to recognize this. I thought this was a tech site, not another phone-in 'computer' Thursday-night radio program.
A way to summarize this is to say that one of the tasks of a wise, educated person is to know how and when to delegate a task to a pre-built mechanism.
Sometimes an 'intro to C programming' student makes the mistake of dwelling too much in lower-level coding. It's easy to take a minimalist tact and not use any standard library calls. You can code all that stuff yourself. However, even if your code works well, a good instructor will mark you down for doing that.
It's a good idea for everyone to have a general idea of the mechanism behind the automata they use to perform tasks. But it's ludicrous and borders on ignorant to claim that they should roll up their sleeves and do it all themselves.
they'll most likely be using some type of VoIP replacement.
Yes, they'll be using some type of VoIP replacement. Embedded into the handset of a phone, with the same array of buttons we use on a phone today.
I find it unbelievable that people like you are assuming that general purpose computers are the be-all and end-all and that things like VoIP translate into booming sales for Sound Card vendors.
Well, some would contend that Novell is a tech graveyard as well. They bought a lot of PC software and helped it into the nursing home over the last decade. Plus the UNIX code base itself.
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People can't be trusted. They need guidance from people who know better than they do. Preferrably somebody with the proper training in 'Cultural Studies' or some branch of the Humanities. Otherwise they will lose their indigenous identities, and won't be available any longer as travel destinations for people from the West on summer break from getting their degrees in 'Cultural Studies' or some branch in the Humanities...
how usual it is that those macros are used in static word docs for anything useful?
Well, umm, by definition they're not used much at all in static word documents.
I know that my brother-in-law, who is a software engineer who hates Microsoft, can't migrate away from MS Office because he's an Excel macro weenie.
I haven't looked, but probably this is one of those books chock full of screen shots of gui tools. You know, with views of each stage along the way and what big friendly button to click, etc. etc.
There's an old rule of thumb about screen shots. If they take up more than ~10% of the total pages, get a better book.
And unless you hand coded those escape sequences into your word processing documents and used special routines provided by the graphics card manufacturer, you couldn't access those advanced features at all, in any way.
Let's not make the computer hardware past into some sort of nostalgic wonderland, okay?
It's the same as it is for any book on a software product where they put the version number in the title.
/bin/sh scripts first, and nroff, and tee, ed, ex, vi, ar, make, etc. etc.
On the other hand, probably my favorite and well-thumbed book on Unix is 'Introducing the UNIX System' by McGilton and Morgan, published by Byte Books in 1983. For someone who wants to learn the core of Unix by the 'old way' (lots of little tools all piped together to do big things) a book like that, even one of that vintage, is best. Learn how to write
Well, there are a couple of pretty darn good O'Reilly and Assoc. books on Windows NT...
Most people who are involved in (spectator) sports like pro football are doing nothing to be involved with anytbody but the guy down at the liquor store. Oh, and the guy selling $27 t-shirts with hologram paper tags on them.
It's sort of a neurotic love/hate relationship.
It is sort of ironic, though. I mean, when OS/2 came out, it was widely perceived as a bad, baaaaad thing by all the tech freaks and fanatics. It rolled out of Big Blue accompanying the Microchannel Architecture, and everybody perceieved it as evil and proprietary.
Now, there are geeks who wax nostalgic about how wonderful OS/2 was, and who speak fondly of IBM as the savior of freedom in computers.
Serious Gamers are used to spending $200 every six months to get a new graphics card.
I wouldn't say your spending $200 every two to three years is an unreasonable expense.
I say this, however, being the cheap mofo whose fastest graphics card is a Voodoo 3 2000... but I bought my first PlayStation at auction two weeks ago for $20.
Microsoft did not want developers to write games for the XBox and port them over to the PC. They wanted the migration to go the other way. They wanted game developers with experience developing PC games to be able to easily move over to the XBox platform. As to wether the migration is now complete and they have the developer mindspace to migrate their XBox technology away from the PC architecture, well, they must feel it's a safe thing to do. They certainly haven't encouraged cross platform XBox game developers to migrate the other way, over to the generic PC...
The question is, five or ten years down the road, will Apple give up on the efforts of their own engineers, buy this NeXT technology and slap their label on it?
There was good Linux support for some VGA stuff that just isn't that straight forward today. With primative simple SVGA cards like my Trident 8900CL card, the SVGAlib worked simply and well. All the old SVGAlib games in Linux worked great. DOSemu worked better and easier 'without any tweaking' with that old Trident Card as well. I can remember when I first got 'better' video hardware and how Linux video support suddenly got more convoluted and messy.
And unless you hand coded those escape sequences into your word processing documents and used special routines provided by the graphics card manufacturer, you couldn't access those advanced features at all, in any way.
Let's not make the computer hardware past into some sort of mecca, okay?
The Sex Pistols did an absolutely great cover of 'Stepping Stone.'
Apple is a marketing company. The Virginia Tech cluster is a marketing bullet point for their advertisements.
They want to sell units (G5 desktops) to their traditional markets. Their efforts to 'branch out' to new market segments and product categories have been just as feeble as Microsofts, historically.
They sell to fashion-concious consumers. That's what their whole iTunes thing is about. The Virgina Tech cluster is a racing stripe so hot-dog wannas will buy their boxes.
Yes, but is their current business model the same as it was a few years ago when they made that point? The Linux market has 'shaken out' quite a bit. It wouldn't have been wise for any company wanting to have a significant presence in the Linux market to 'take sides' a few years ago. That isn't necessarily the case today.
You're dwelling too much on my 'keypad' comment. My point was that the VoIP implementation that the mainstream uses will NOT be attached to an ASCII keyboard. It will NOT be through a PeeCee.
If VoIP becomes 'the standard' there will be a number or identifying code of some kind that people enter on the handset to make a call. Probably with buttons or a touch screen or some mechanism similar to what's in use today on the Western Electric 2500 set on my desk, which has a 1982 date code on it.
My final advice- get used to the idea that we all get to 'die out' eventually.
without knowing the difference between a hacker and a cracker
All that means is that she's been around long enough that her copy of the Jargon file is from before ESR started corrupting it.
Since you quit anyways, you should have snuck into his office once or twice and cut the cord off his mouse. Why should he need to use a mouse?
If you had the resources at hand (probably not) you should have pulled his PC entirely and wheeled in a mini-computer with a switch panel and lights, like a PDP-8. Why should he use a computer that boots automatically? It isn't that hard to memorize the five or six octal command sequences to bootstrap a PDP-8 and get it started reading the high speed paper tape to load the FOCAL interpreter.
Well, actually, the little beeping sound that was made at each key-press of the control panel on the microwave oven was generated in software in (one of) the computer(s) in your Microwave oven. Likely, the speed control on your blender is done using a microprocessor (computer) as well.
The thing that this article misses by a mile is that general purpose computers are severely sub-optimal for many tasks, and people make a lot of money building little bitty specialized computers into other devices.
It's hard to believe people are so distracted by 'the computer' (meaning, that beige box that makes noise beside their desk) to recognize this. I thought this was a tech site, not another phone-in 'computer' Thursday-night radio program.
A way to summarize this is to say that one of the tasks of a wise, educated person is to know how and when to delegate a task to a pre-built mechanism.
Sometimes an 'intro to C programming' student makes the mistake of dwelling too much in lower-level coding. It's easy to take a minimalist tact and not use any standard library calls. You can code all that stuff yourself. However, even if your code works well, a good instructor will mark you down for doing that.
It's a good idea for everyone to have a general idea of the mechanism behind the automata they use to perform tasks. But it's ludicrous and borders on ignorant to claim that they should roll up their sleeves and do it all themselves.
Even x86 opcodes are translated to lower-level instructions in a plain old Intel 8086 processor.
they'll most likely be using some type of VoIP replacement.
Yes, they'll be using some type of VoIP replacement. Embedded into the handset of a phone, with the same array of buttons we use on a phone today.
I find it unbelievable that people like you are assuming that general purpose computers are the be-all and end-all and that things like VoIP translate into booming sales for Sound Card vendors.
Perhaps I mean any economic system where if you earn more than average, 70-90% of it is taxed away to give to other people.
Well, some would contend that Novell is a tech graveyard as well. They bought a lot of PC software and helped it into the nursing home over the last decade. Plus the UNIX code base itself.