Back then, when I was first working with REXX, my wife was finishing up her second Master's degree in Math. Her thesis involved some pretty hairy prime decomposition and polynomial factoring, and required some pretty high precision math. She had just discovered that PL/1 wouldn't be able to keep up, and I kept jokingly suggesting REXX. Instead of REXX, she went with Maple, an arbitrary precision math package from Waterloo, if I recall (the name seems like a good hint that it was Canadian).
Given that one of her more significant runs ended up tallying one CPU-Month on the Math Department's 780, I suppose it's just as well that she didn't use an interpreted language like REXX.
On the other hand, I remember discovering that REXX must have had some fairly smart tricks built in to its mathematical functionality. Back when I was doing OS/2 programming, awed by the awesome processing power of the 16Mhz 386, I exercised the OS/2 REXX interpreter by writing a teeny-tiny program to output the value of X raised to the X power, for a variety of different values of X. For X = 99, it took forever; on the other hand, for X = 100, it finished almost immediately. Like I said, someone put some smarts in there.
REXX was very much like the Python or Perl of its day, in that it is a scripting language which can be used for everything from job control to add-on macros to interprocess communication.
It is a completely typeless language, more or less -- basically, everything is a string, so the same variable could hold "87", "eight-seven", "00110111", "0x0117", or "Four Score and Seven" -- and the interpreter kept track of what operations were meaningful (i.e., adding "4" and "5" would yield "9", but adding "4" and "Five" wouldn't). Not surprisingly, it had a wide variety of string manipulation functions built in -- ROT13 could easily be accomplished with one command ("translate()"), for instance.
On the other hand, it also featured arbitrary precision mathematics, which is a pretty nifty and not altogether common feature for a language.
It was fairly portable -- I wrote REXX code for OS/2 and the Amiga, and was usually able to move the code from one to the other without having to worry about anything more than CR/LF translation. I was able to make use of old mainframe REXX code too, although it was usually ALL IN CAPS and ugly, which isn't really REXX's fault.
In OS/2, I used REXX primarily as a batch language on steroids (the OS/2 "CMD" CLI ran REXX programs directly as a batch language), but I also used it to do some pretty heavy text manipulation as well. On the Amiga, I used REXX for those purposes, but the main things I used it for were for interprocess communication, and for extending the functionality of REXX-enabled programs. When Matt Dillon added a REXX port to his hacked-up version of emacs for the Amiga, I was able to use REXX macros to turn it from a nice programmer's text editor into one which did everything I wanted, excatly the way I wanted. I wrote macros to toss and filter FIDONet messages to and from my text editor.
The same power was available to the REXX ports on other Amiga programs, from word processors to graphics editors. As an aide to interprocess communication, it could be used to allow your graphics editor to control a raytracer, or for your text editor to use the spellchecker in your word processor.
I made some nice money at a time when I was underemployed by writing REXX programs to control the input and outputs of a NewTek Video Toaster for a guy with a mid-sized video production business; and the code was straightforward enough, and REXX easy enough to learn, that the business owner could easily make any minor changes to it himself (at the same time, after he had used it for a while, he was able to think of more and more things for it to do, which kept me in groceries for another month or two). For that matter, I also made a bit of money writing a REXX programming column for an Amiga magazine, so I really have fond memories of REXX for being a language that allowed me to continue, well, eating food.
For a long time, IBM tried to convince Microsoft to use REXX as the macro language for Office, instead of BASIC; needless to say, if they had succeeded, we would be living in a universal paradise of peace and understanding right now, or something like that.
Even today, I find myself thinking of all the neat things I could easily do with OpenOffice or AbiWord or Photoshop or Semware's text editor or Audacity or Zinf if they had REXX ports enabled...
I remember, back in 1987 or so, getting a good look at a computer industry study that showed gross revenues, margins, and so forth for pretty mich all of the companies in what one would consider "the computer industry" of the time. It also showed how much they spent on R&D.
Sperry spent a decent amount; so did Cray, and Hewlett Packard, and AT&T, and NCR, and so forth.
IBM spent more on R&D than the rest of them put together.
In fact, IBM spent more on R&D than the gross revenues of the second-largest company. Not the profits, mind you -- the gross revenues.
That was the single most gobsmacking business statistic that I heard until the one a couple of years ago about how Microsoft could purchase the airline industry out of its cash reserves -- twice.
Dedicated to cataloging all of the hideous and obscene fanfic and fanart that ruins all of our cherished nostalgic childhood memories.
Powerpuff Girls, check. Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl, check. Rainbow Brite, check. Those are almost obvious. My Little Pony, perhaps less so.
On the other hand, Mighty Mouse or Care Bears slashfic takes a certain je ne sais quoi to create; and Gummi Bears or Knight Rider slash indicates someone, somewhere, is operating from an entirely different playbook: but slash based on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying? Or Whose Line Is It Anyway? Someone, somewhere, is just going down a long checklist, doing these one at a time; I just know it.
On the other hand, the existence of The Chronicles of Narnia slash could only have been predicted by H. P. Lovecraft himself.
And then he would have gone mad.
Re:Thundercats outtakes
on
Retro Vision
·
· Score: 1
April Winchell also has Thundercats outtakes (presumably the same ones) on her web site, although they're all rolled into one big MP3 file.
But do try the main link -- that way you can browse the rest of her collection of oddities.
One day, at a science fiction con, I was glancing across one of those large tables full of videotapes of, shall we say, dubious provenance, when I noticed, at the left edge of a box full of old TV shows, a tape labelled "AIR WOLF/ THE A-TEAM".
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that my initial thought was, "That has got to be the worst bit of slash ever written."
Does that mean that organizations like the RIAA are prohibited from suing music downloaders because the musicians have already been paid by the state (perhaps through some industry group), or is this just a tax?
This, like so many other things, varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In Canada -- which has a similar levy -- courts have ruled that downloading music is legal (uploading it is still a violation), in part because of this "fair use" levy.
I used to have a functional replica of the Mir space station, but after the carburetor broke and its transmission rusted out, I sold it to some guy who always wanted his own 1969 Camaro.
I just wish that ATI's Linux drivers supported the older radeons, like the 7200 series (which is what I'm still using). Their Win32 drivers support the old cards as well as the new ones; it's a shame that their Linux ones don't.
They use projectile weapons because projectile weapons are low maintenance items compared to Electronuclear Kill-O-Zap Rifles, which probably seize up the first time they get near a bit of dust. That's the way things always work.
By the same token, there's a pretty good chance that the ubiquity of modern communications will result in a significant reduction in the rate of linguistic drift, as well as a reduction in the variety of different accents and regional dialects.
On the other hand, a vast galactic diaspora followed by the destruction (or total abandonment) of the Earth and a gigantic interstellar civil war would tend to set the Wheels O' Linguistic Drift a-rollin' once more.
Yeah, but Monk and Dead Zone and Nip/Tuck and The Shield and the like absolutely have to have significantly lower per-episode costs than Firefly had.
Cable markets have even more trouble supporting effects-heavy science fiction than networks do. The only reason Farscape and Lexx ever worked financially for the Sci-Fi Channel were because they were filmed abroad (Australia and Canada, respectively) and also sold into numerous foreign markets, both of which helped lower the network's outlay.
If Firefly were to wind up on USA Network, you could look forward to a lot of episodes set planetside on dusty frontier worlds (like "Jaynestown"), or set entirely inside Serenity, with few guest stars and few exterior FX shots (like "Objects in Space").
Which isn't to say that Joss couldn't make it work despite all that, of course. He is, after all, Joss.
What on earth does AT&T do these days, anyway? They've sold off their cable business, they've sold off their cell phone business, they don't do much local phone service (possibly even less, after this ruling)... and isn't their ISP service just a rebranding of someone else's?
Aside from long distance phone service, what do they do?
It was when I heard that very joke ("Q: What's the difference between Jane Fonda and George Bush? A: Hey, at least Jane Fonda went to Viet Nam!") circulating on various veterans' boards and sites that I realized just how much trouble Bush is in with veterans. When veterans compare you unfavorably to Jane Fonda, even in a joke, something's going on.
Hey, I read it, at least, and if I could spend moderator points on this topic, I'd mod it up (Interesting? Informative?) in a second.
Something else that reminds me of that microwave is a very old digital alarm clock I have, where about a third of the LED bars are burned out, resulting in a clock that keeps time in obscure alien glyphs. Once upon a time, back when I had a brain, I could even read the time off of it.
Come to think of it, that may have been the same clock that my friend Steve "hacked" with a 50,000 volt transformer he had lying around his house.
When I was growing up, we had a microwave oven in our kitchen whose clock could be set by punching in the time on the number keypad, and hitting the "Clock Set" button. Pretty standard, realy.
So one night, with more free time than is strictly healthy, my friend Steve Roche and I were sitting around microwaving things, when one of us decided to set the time on the clock to "6:66", just to see what would happen.
Fortunately for us, the programmers of the firmware didn't include any validation code, because it let us set the time to 6:66. We sat there for a minute, debating what would happen next. Would it change to 7:07? 6:67? 6:07? 6:67 it was. What would happen, then, after 6:69? Again we debated -- would it go to 6:70? By that time we sort of assumed it would.
Well, it fooled us but good -- after 6:69, it invented a new number. The display read "6:6^", or something like that. We watched with fascination as it made up five more brand new digits, before changing to 6:70.
Damned if it wasn't using hexadecimal.
Then we microwaved some wormy flour, which stunk up the house in some awful, indescribable way, and ended the microwave experiments for the evening.
Thanks to the vast improvements in modern graphics capabilities, it'll now be a side-scrolling platform game, a la "Super Mario Brothers." Other than that, however, no major changes are planned.
it seems if they are going to do something like that, they need to get rid of the laws that can get you a DUI for just sitting in a parked car drunk.
I can hardly wait for the first time some stranded motorist dies up in Mesa country during the winter because he can't start his car to run the heater (either because of a malfunction in the interlock somewhere, or because he took a swig of booze in an effort to stay warm).
Slashdot Mirror
Back then, when I was first working with REXX, my wife was finishing up her second Master's degree in Math. Her thesis involved some pretty hairy prime decomposition and polynomial factoring, and required some pretty high precision math. She had just discovered that PL/1 wouldn't be able to keep up, and I kept jokingly suggesting REXX. Instead of REXX, she went with Maple, an arbitrary precision math package from Waterloo, if I recall (the name seems like a good hint that it was Canadian).
Given that one of her more significant runs ended up tallying one CPU- Month on the Math Department's 780, I suppose it's just as well that she didn't use an interpreted language like REXX.
On the other hand, I remember discovering that REXX must have had some fairly smart tricks built in to its mathematical functionality. Back when I was doing OS/2 programming, awed by the awesome processing power of the 16Mhz 386, I exercised the OS/2 REXX interpreter by writing a teeny-tiny program to output the value of X raised to the X power, for a variety of different values of X. For X = 99, it took forever; on the other hand, for X = 100, it finished almost immediately. Like I said, someone put some smarts in there.
REXX was very much like the Python or Perl of its day, in that it is a scripting language which can be used for everything from job control to add-on macros to interprocess communication.
It is a completely typeless language, more or less -- basically, everything is a string, so the same variable could hold "87", "eight-seven", "00110111", "0x0117", or "Four Score and Seven" -- and the interpreter kept track of what operations were meaningful (i.e., adding "4" and "5" would yield "9", but adding "4" and "Five" wouldn't). Not surprisingly, it had a wide variety of string manipulation functions built in -- ROT13 could easily be accomplished with one command ("translate()"), for instance.
On the other hand, it also featured arbitrary precision mathematics, which is a pretty nifty and not altogether common feature for a language.
It was fairly portable -- I wrote REXX code for OS/2 and the Amiga, and was usually able to move the code from one to the other without having to worry about anything more than CR/LF translation. I was able to make use of old mainframe REXX code too, although it was usually ALL IN CAPS and ugly, which isn't really REXX's fault.
In OS/2, I used REXX primarily as a batch language on steroids (the OS/2 "CMD" CLI ran REXX programs directly as a batch language), but I also used it to do some pretty heavy text manipulation as well. On the Amiga, I used REXX for those purposes, but the main things I used it for were for interprocess communication, and for extending the functionality of REXX-enabled programs. When Matt Dillon added a REXX port to his hacked-up version of emacs for the Amiga, I was able to use REXX macros to turn it from a nice programmer's text editor into one which did everything I wanted, excatly the way I wanted. I wrote macros to toss and filter FIDONet messages to and from my text editor.
The same power was available to the REXX ports on other Amiga programs, from word processors to graphics editors. As an aide to interprocess communication, it could be used to allow your graphics editor to control a raytracer, or for your text editor to use the spellchecker in your word processor.
I made some nice money at a time when I was underemployed by writing REXX programs to control the input and outputs of a NewTek Video Toaster for a guy with a mid-sized video production business; and the code was straightforward enough, and REXX easy enough to learn, that the business owner could easily make any minor changes to it himself (at the same time, after he had used it for a while, he was able to think of more and more things for it to do, which kept me in groceries for another month or two). For that matter, I also made a bit of money writing a REXX programming column for an Amiga magazine, so I really have fond memories of REXX for being a language that allowed me to continue, well, eating food.
For a long time, IBM tried to convince Microsoft to use REXX as the macro language for Office, instead of BASIC; needless to say, if they had succeeded, we would be living in a universal paradise of peace and understanding right now, or something like that.
Even today, I find myself thinking of all the neat things I could easily do with OpenOffice or AbiWord or Photoshop or Semware's text editor or Audacity or Zinf if they had REXX ports enabled...
I tried out a wooden monitor once, but the picture was just too grainy.
I remember, back in 1987 or so, getting a good look at a computer industry study that showed gross revenues, margins, and so forth for pretty mich all of the companies in what one would consider "the computer industry" of the time. It also showed how much they spent on R&D.
Sperry spent a decent amount; so did Cray, and Hewlett Packard, and AT&T, and NCR, and so forth.
IBM spent more on R&D than the rest of them put together.
In fact, IBM spent more on R&D than the gross revenues of the second-largest company. Not the profits, mind you -- the gross revenues.
That was the single most gobsmacking business statistic that I heard until the one a couple of years ago about how Microsoft could purchase the airline industry out of its cash reserves -- twice .
... The Hall of Broken Memories!
Dedicated to cataloging all of the hideous and obscene fanfic and fanart that ruins all of our cherished nostalgic childhood memories.
Powerpuff Girls, check. Electra-Woman and Dyna-Girl, check. Rainbow Brite, check. Those are almost obvious. My Little Pony, perhaps less so.
On the other hand, Mighty Mouse or Care Bears slashfic takes a certain je ne sais quoi to create; and Gummi Bears or Knight Rider slash indicates someone, somewhere, is operating from an entirely different playbook: but slash based on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying? Or Whose Line Is It Anyway? Someone, somewhere, is just going down a long checklist, doing these one at a time; I just know it.
On the other hand, the existence of The Chronicles of Narnia slash could only have been predicted by H. P. Lovecraft himself.
And then he would have gone mad.
April Winchell also has Thundercats outtakes (presumably the same ones) on her web site, although they're all rolled into one big MP3 file.
But do try the main link -- that way you can browse the rest of her collection of oddities.
One day, at a science fiction con, I was glancing across one of those large tables full of videotapes of, shall we say, dubious provenance, when I noticed, at the left edge of a box full of old TV shows, a tape labelled "AIR WOLF / THE A-TEAM".
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that my initial thought was, "That has got to be the worst bit of slash ever written."
...but let's just see how Algernon is doing in a couple of months.
Only a Scandanavian scientist would come up with the theory that melancholy gloom and existential despair are what makes humans great.
Does that mean that organizations like the RIAA are prohibited from suing music downloaders because the musicians have already been paid by the state (perhaps through some industry group), or is this just a tax?
This, like so many other things, varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In Canada -- which has a similar levy -- courts have ruled that downloading music is legal (uploading it is still a violation), in part because of this "fair use" levy.
I used to have a functional replica of the Mir space station, but after the carburetor broke and its transmission rusted out, I sold it to some guy who always wanted his own 1969 Camaro.
I just wish that ATI's Linux drivers supported the older radeons, like the 7200 series (which is what I'm still using). Their Win32 drivers support the old cards as well as the new ones; it's a shame that their Linux ones don't.
...Not to mention Strange Luck, which was mondo cool.
They use projectile weapons because projectile weapons are low maintenance items compared to Electronuclear Kill-O-Zap Rifles, which probably seize up the first time they get near a bit of dust. That's the way things always work.
By the same token, there's a pretty good chance that the ubiquity of modern communications will result in a significant reduction in the rate of linguistic drift, as well as a reduction in the variety of different accents and regional dialects.
On the other hand, a vast galactic diaspora followed by the destruction (or total abandonment) of the Earth and a gigantic interstellar civil war would tend to set the Wheels O' Linguistic Drift a-rollin' once more.
Yeah, but Monk and Dead Zone and Nip/Tuck and The Shield and the like absolutely have to have significantly lower per-episode costs than Firefly had.
Cable markets have even more trouble supporting effects-heavy science fiction than networks do. The only reason Farscape and Lexx ever worked financially for the Sci-Fi Channel were because they were filmed abroad (Australia and Canada, respectively) and also sold into numerous foreign markets, both of which helped lower the network's outlay.
If Firefly were to wind up on USA Network, you could look forward to a lot of episodes set planetside on dusty frontier worlds (like "Jaynestown"), or set entirely inside Serenity, with few guest stars and few exterior FX shots (like "Objects in Space").
Which isn't to say that Joss couldn't make it work despite all that, of course. He is, after all, Joss.
What on earth does AT&T do these days, anyway? They've sold off their cable business, they've sold off their cell phone business, they don't do much local phone service (possibly even less, after this ruling)... and isn't their ISP service just a rebranding of someone else's? Aside from long distance phone service, what do they do?
If anyone wants a link to the original New York Times (#include "free_reg") article by William Safire about this incident, here it is. Now you don't have to hunt down the dupe to read it.
According to the study, 44% of all internet users have contributed something of value to the content of the internet.
The other 56% argue about vi vs emacs.
It was when I heard that very joke (" Q: What's the difference between Jane Fonda and George Bush? A: Hey, at least Jane Fonda went to Viet Nam!") circulating on various veterans' boards and sites that I realized just how much trouble Bush is in with veterans. When veterans compare you unfavorably to Jane Fonda, even in a joke, something's going on.
Hey, I read it, at least, and if I could spend moderator points on this topic, I'd mod it up (Interesting? Informative?) in a second.
Something else that reminds me of that microwave is a very old digital alarm clock I have, where about a third of the LED bars are burned out, resulting in a clock that keeps time in obscure alien glyphs. Once upon a time, back when I had a brain, I could even read the time off of it.
Come to think of it, that may have been the same clock that my friend Steve "hacked" with a 50,000 volt transformer he had lying around his house.
When I was growing up, we had a microwave oven in our kitchen whose clock could be set by punching in the time on the number keypad, and hitting the "Clock Set" button. Pretty standard, realy.
So one night, with more free time than is strictly healthy, my friend Steve Roche and I were sitting around microwaving things, when one of us decided to set the time on the clock to "6:66", just to see what would happen.
Fortunately for us, the programmers of the firmware didn't include any validation code, because it let us set the time to 6:66. We sat there for a minute, debating what would happen next. Would it change to 7:07? 6:67? 6:07? 6:67 it was. What would happen, then, after 6:69? Again we debated -- would it go to 6:70? By that time we sort of assumed it would.
Well, it fooled us but good -- after 6:69, it invented a new number . The display read "6:6^", or something like that. We watched with fascination as it made up five more brand new digits, before changing to 6:70.
Damned if it wasn't using hexadecimal.
Then we microwaved some wormy flour, which stunk up the house in some awful, indescribable way, and ended the microwave experiments for the evening.
Thanks to the vast improvements in modern graphics capabilities, it'll now be a side-scrolling platform game, a la "Super Mario Brothers." Other than that, however, no major changes are planned.
it seems if they are going to do something like that, they need to get rid of the laws that can get you a DUI for just sitting in a parked car drunk.
I can hardly wait for the first time some stranded motorist dies up in Mesa country during the winter because he can't start his car to run the heater (either because of a malfunction in the interlock somewhere, or because he took a swig of booze in an effort to stay warm).
And yes, it has actually begun, in fact involving a late Beatle.
Speaking of which, has anyone actually done a mashup of "He's so Fine" and "My Sweet Lord"?