My co-workers struggle reading emails longer than 2 or 3 sentence (fragments). I can't even imagine asking them to read 150 pages. It would be a disaster.
Did they never use any of the "Windows for Dummies" books (~300 pages each)? Do they never click F1 for Help with its potentially thousands of pages to read through?
If they really struggle with reading 3 sentences, I can't see how they can be comfortable with any particular style of computing.
The internet was something brand spanking new and generation x ate it up like a junkie.
It was more than that, it was also the dot-com startup mentality and the hope that FINALLY we might be able to have jobs that we enjoy doing and not have to spend 20 years waiting on our elders to retire before we will be respected.
You are bitching because people don't know about some old, somewhat obscure, modem protocol? What the fuck? Why would they? Hell even many people who used modems didn't know about it because they didn't use it with the systems they were on (XMODEM and ZMODEM were way more popular in my experience).
The Kermit/Zmodem flame wars raged over Usenet for YEARS. I'd be surprised to find anyone who had been on comp.dcom.modems or comp.terminals circa 1988-1996 (!) who hadn't heard of it. I still stand in awe at Frank da Cruz's thick skin during the relentless attacks on what is undoubtedly the best widespread file transfer protocol ever designed. (And which saved our bacon while trying to automate an $80,000 scientific intrument when we only had three wires to talk to it with...but that was enough for RS-232 and Kermit95.)
But you're right, in the end all of those protocols were obscure. Xmodem/ymodem/zmodem were included in every version of Windows before Win7 in the form of HyperTerminal, hundreds of millions of installations, yet finding enough information to re-implement them required finding the old t-files floating around, poring over the lrzsz code, and reading Tim Kientzle's great book on serial protocols. (If I had known how painful it would be I would have just stolen sexyz's code.) Kermit OTOH had a great protocol manual that made it very easy.
As a counterpoint, do you know all about the telegraph, how it came to be, the development, the refinements, the way it changed the world? Can you tell me about the different kinds of keys and what they are good at? What can you tell me about the life of the man who invented it? Can you even tell me his name (without looking it up)?
I don't know the telegraph, but I do know a little about TTYs (the real ones). I needed to learn it in the process of making decent emulations for TTY, VT52, VT102, and others. Amazing how many of the C0 control codes have a real meaning.
Don't get grumpy because the things that were new to you are old to others. That's called progress and it is a wonderful thing.
The command line is just as much of an abstraction as a GUI is, just harder to learn.
I've got a book for VMS users describing how to login, check mail, start programs, phone network users, edit files, make DCL batch files, map logical devices, and get online help for everything. It even has diagrams of three different keyboards. It is about 150 pages total. You can read most of it and get going in about two hours.
Presumably that encrypted file would contain information that the government would want to remain secret more than they would want wikileaks in general silenced.
So obviously the file must contain highly sensitive copyrighted works like the music for next year's Disney pop star lineup. The economic damage from piracy of that magnitude could destroy the world economy 300 times over.
Brilliant move on Wikileak's part. Who in the US government will care about our minor military secrets when the RIAA's profits are at risk?
Not quite. Xmodem and Ymodem use SOH and STX to denote start of sectors and ACK/NAK, but after that it's just a raw 8-bit file dump to the checksum/crc bytes with no concern for character set encoding. Zmodem uses DLE and escapes out most of the C0 bytes (XON/XOFF and CAN must be escaped regardless of session flags), but doesn't use the rest of the codes for anything.
Most of C0/C1 codes mixed right in with the text for formatting/presentation, e.g. embedding backspaces followed by underscores to get underlined text. Some of the others did link-level too. It was a mess, so much so that parsers for ANSI X3.64 / ECMA-48 style escape sequences take a LOT of work to get right (passing 'vttest' is not trivial).
UTF-8 isn't bad. It specifies that character decoding be done before any other processing including C0/C1 and ANSI escape sequences, which makes it very easy to integrate on the reading side. Harder is dealing with wide chars on the screen and user I/O. Compared to Avatar's repeat character and ANSI fallback features, it's much more bang for the buck. And let's not talk about "ANSI Music" and it's use of SO (Ctrl-N) because it's the "music symbol" in CP437!
(Disclaimer: I've written a console-based terminal emulator that does a decent VT102/220, UTF-8, X/Y/Zmodem/Kermit, and lots of other things.)
1980-1990 seems about the time cable television became more common than OTA TV. OTA TV used to be very boring for children, but cable brought Nickelodeon and the Disney channel in homes to become defacto babysitters for millions of kids.
And where is the requirement for the monthly DSL cost to remain the same as voice only? Without that, you're forcing customers who use dialup to double their monthly bill.
Just a markup language, not really all that different from ANSI or RIP back in the day, except more readable.
As someone who has put in the significant work required to implement a good parser for ECMA-48 style emulations (vt100, vt220, ANSI.SYS, etc.), let me say that wikitext is nothing at all like ANSI.
You should have used TeX as your counter-example. TeX operates at a similar level of abstraction, separating content from presentation.
Integration of [concept a] with [concept b] is really all "new" ideas is about. Integration itself is nothing new, though.
When that integration is what makes the overall concept -- in this case a global editable internally-hyperlinked encyclopedia -- possible in the first place, I think it's fair to call it new. You may as well argue that no new "physical stuff" is being made either, it's all just atoms being mechanically and chemically rearranged.
I'm only 33, have already transitioned out of IT for a living, and have a LOT of respect for the older generations, especially the mainframe engineers and the people who created the BBS scene. I agree with most of your post.
Is there any "new technology" out there to get, that I didn't get decades ago with a different marketing campaign and different command line syntax?
MediaWiki (Wikipedia) was really new. We had had user-generated content before (e.g. BBSes) but wikitext, history, discussion pages, integration with email, and concurrent revisions IMHO made a really new animal.
But beyond that, I'm kind of drawing up a blank too.
I can start printing facts like "I am a liar and a cheat."
I'd like to see your lawyer defend your publication as fact that you are a liar. Will the courtroom explode from being exposed to the logical paradox? Bonus points if your lawyer sounds like William Shatner.
I find it truly unnerving that something as trivial as digital entertainment
Because digital entertainment isn't trivial. The rise of radio and television are what the established interests have used to "thoroughly wash the public's mind as with soap" as stated by Scott Nearing in "The Making of a Radical".
Before ubiquitous mass media, the public discourse used to be far more diverse particularly regarding economic systems. Communism and socialism were seriously considered for use throughout the western world - even in the USA candidates had won seats at the national level. Once radio and TV came online however that diversity quickly narrowed.
Governments know the power of well-controlled medias to maintain the interests of their paymasters. Our "entertainment" does far more than just entertain us.
The reason that most people don't see a difference between candidate A and B, is because they don't do research
No, they do the research just fine. But in a two-party where (for instance) both parties agree that the USA should have a hundred military bases in the Middle East and only disagree on the specific priority of the various missions performed by those bases, any voter who wishes those bases closed has no one to vote for.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the concept that a human isn't human because it's still in inside its mother.
No, the concept is that people aren't legally forced to loan out use of their organs to other people, even those who need them to live.
My co-workers struggle reading emails longer than 2 or 3 sentence (fragments). I can't even imagine asking them to read 150 pages. It would be a disaster.
Did they never use any of the "Windows for Dummies" books (~300 pages each)? Do they never click F1 for Help with its potentially thousands of pages to read through?
If they really struggle with reading 3 sentences, I can't see how they can be comfortable with any particular style of computing.
The internet was something brand spanking new and generation x ate it up like a junkie.
It was more than that, it was also the dot-com startup mentality and the hope that FINALLY we might be able to have jobs that we enjoy doing and not have to spend 20 years waiting on our elders to retire before we will be respected.
You are bitching because people don't know about some old, somewhat obscure, modem protocol? What the fuck? Why would they? Hell even many people who used modems didn't know about it because they didn't use it with the systems they were on (XMODEM and ZMODEM were way more popular in my experience).
The Kermit/Zmodem flame wars raged over Usenet for YEARS. I'd be surprised to find anyone who had been on comp.dcom.modems or comp.terminals circa 1988-1996 (!) who hadn't heard of it. I still stand in awe at Frank da Cruz's thick skin during the relentless attacks on what is undoubtedly the best widespread file transfer protocol ever designed. (And which saved our bacon while trying to automate an $80,000 scientific intrument when we only had three wires to talk to it with...but that was enough for RS-232 and Kermit95.)
But you're right, in the end all of those protocols were obscure. Xmodem/ymodem/zmodem were included in every version of Windows before Win7 in the form of HyperTerminal, hundreds of millions of installations, yet finding enough information to re-implement them required finding the old t-files floating around, poring over the lrzsz code, and reading Tim Kientzle's great book on serial protocols. (If I had known how painful it would be I would have just stolen sexyz's code.) Kermit OTOH had a great protocol manual that made it very easy.
As a counterpoint, do you know all about the telegraph, how it came to be, the development, the refinements, the way it changed the world? Can you tell me about the different kinds of keys and what they are good at? What can you tell me about the life of the man who invented it? Can you even tell me his name (without looking it up)?
I don't know the telegraph, but I do know a little about TTYs (the real ones). I needed to learn it in the process of making decent emulations for TTY, VT52, VT102, and others. Amazing how many of the C0 control codes have a real meaning.
Don't get grumpy because the things that were new to you are old to others. That's called progress and it is a wonderful thing.
I missed the text-mode online days too, got grumpy for a while, but then decided to bring my nostalgia into the more modern era. TradeWars 2002 FTW! :)
This 26 year old joker isn't even old enough to have used Kermit when it was still new
That would have been hard since the Kermit protocol document floating around dates back to 1986 when he would have been about 2 years old. :)
The command line is just as much of an abstraction as a GUI is, just harder to learn.
I've got a book for VMS users describing how to login, check mail, start programs, phone network users, edit files, make DCL batch files, map logical devices, and get online help for everything. It even has diagrams of three different keyboards. It is about 150 pages total. You can read most of it and get going in about two hours.
How is this really harder than a GUI?
They are about the brief blurb you put on a resume so it isn't automatically thrown away.
When the major corporations are willing to hire people without degrees, then universities might be about education again.
Come to think of it, has that specific thing been done in fiction?
Something similar is integral to the plot of "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez.
If we have laws that keep us from assassinating leaders of countries we don't like, such as Fidel Castro
What keeps us from successfully assassinating Castro isn't anything like "laws". Not that we haven't tried.
Presumably that encrypted file would contain information that the government would want to remain secret more than they would want wikileaks in general silenced.
So obviously the file must contain highly sensitive copyrighted works like the music for next year's Disney pop star lineup. The economic damage from piracy of that magnitude could destroy the world economy 300 times over.
Brilliant move on Wikileak's part. Who in the US government will care about our minor military secrets when the RIAA's profits are at risk?
Or get a real pipe Input/OutputStream to work.
C++ is turning into a bloated slow fat pig and I'm thinking of getting a divorce.
Check out D sometime, you might really like it.
Even [XYZ]-modem used a similar setup.
Not quite. Xmodem and Ymodem use SOH and STX to denote start of sectors and ACK/NAK, but after that it's just a raw 8-bit file dump to the checksum/crc bytes with no concern for character set encoding. Zmodem uses DLE and escapes out most of the C0 bytes (XON/XOFF and CAN must be escaped regardless of session flags), but doesn't use the rest of the codes for anything.
Most of C0/C1 codes mixed right in with the text for formatting/presentation, e.g. embedding backspaces followed by underscores to get underlined text. Some of the others did link-level too. It was a mess, so much so that parsers for ANSI X3.64 / ECMA-48 style escape sequences take a LOT of work to get right (passing 'vttest' is not trivial).
UTF-8 isn't bad. It specifies that character decoding be done before any other processing including C0/C1 and ANSI escape sequences, which makes it very easy to integrate on the reading side. Harder is dealing with wide chars on the screen and user I/O. Compared to Avatar's repeat character and ANSI fallback features, it's much more bang for the buck. And let's not talk about "ANSI Music" and it's use of SO (Ctrl-N) because it's the "music symbol" in CP437!
(Disclaimer: I've written a console-based terminal emulator that does a decent VT102/220, UTF-8, X/Y/Zmodem/Kermit, and lots of other things.)
Nearly everything I was unhappy about in C++ is better in D.
Just another face of Eternal September.
1980-1990 seems about the time cable television became more common than OTA TV. OTA TV used to be very boring for children, but cable brought Nickelodeon and the Disney channel in homes to become defacto babysitters for millions of kids.
And where is the requirement for the monthly DSL cost to remain the same as voice only? Without that, you're forcing customers who use dialup to double their monthly bill.
In one case your prior art will need to be from around 1990. What seems perfectly obvious now was probably not so obvious back then.
HAM radio BBSes.
Yes they do, one cop at a time.
All of those are also really old concepts
| wikitext
Just a markup language, not really all that different from ANSI or RIP back in the day, except more readable.
As someone who has put in the significant work required to implement a good parser for ECMA-48 style emulations (vt100, vt220, ANSI.SYS, etc.), let me say that wikitext is nothing at all like ANSI.
You should have used TeX as your counter-example. TeX operates at a similar level of abstraction, separating content from presentation.
Integration of [concept a] with [concept b] is really all "new" ideas is about. Integration itself is nothing new, though.
When that integration is what makes the overall concept -- in this case a global editable internally-hyperlinked encyclopedia -- possible in the first place, I think it's fair to call it new. You may as well argue that no new "physical stuff" is being made either, it's all just atoms being mechanically and chemically rearranged.
I'm only 33, have already transitioned out of IT for a living, and have a LOT of respect for the older generations, especially the mainframe engineers and the people who created the BBS scene. I agree with most of your post.
Is there any "new technology" out there to get, that I didn't get decades ago with a different marketing campaign and different command line syntax?
MediaWiki (Wikipedia) was really new. We had had user-generated content before (e.g. BBSes) but wikitext, history, discussion pages, integration with email, and concurrent revisions IMHO made a really new animal.
But beyond that, I'm kind of drawing up a blank too.
I can start printing facts like "I am a liar and a cheat."
I'd like to see your lawyer defend your publication as fact that you are a liar. Will the courtroom explode from being exposed to the logical paradox? Bonus points if your lawyer sounds like William Shatner.
I find it truly unnerving that something as trivial as digital entertainment
Because digital entertainment isn't trivial. The rise of radio and television are what the established interests have used to "thoroughly wash the public's mind as with soap" as stated by Scott Nearing in "The Making of a Radical".
Before ubiquitous mass media, the public discourse used to be far more diverse particularly regarding economic systems. Communism and socialism were seriously considered for use throughout the western world - even in the USA candidates had won seats at the national level. Once radio and TV came online however that diversity quickly narrowed.
Governments know the power of well-controlled medias to maintain the interests of their paymasters. Our "entertainment" does far more than just entertain us.
The reason that most people don't see a difference between candidate A and B, is because they don't do research
No, they do the research just fine. But in a two-party where (for instance) both parties agree that the USA should have a hundred military bases in the Middle East and only disagree on the specific priority of the various missions performed by those bases, any voter who wishes those bases closed has no one to vote for.
It's like Obama is the Reagan of the left.
Obama is actually center-right, not left. Just like Clinton in 1992, and the other Clinton in 2008.
The only person who ran from the left in 2008 was Kucinich.