It is silly to suggest that there are no easily-accessible programming languages shipped with computers today; most come with at least two or three (if you count the command interpreter and Javascript), many come with dozens. Anyone with the littlest initiative could obtain free assemblers, compilers or interpreters for dozens more, just by connecting to the Internet. This would have been an embarrassment of riches when I started tinkering with personal computers in the early 1980s. And these languages range from the trivial (e.g. old-style BASIC) to the inscruitable (ADA anyone?). The motivated individual can get as close to the hardware as (s)he wants, with assembler or Forth, or as abstracted as desired, with for example XSLT. What is missing is not a simple-to-use language, but rather a lingua franca: A language that virtually everyone the least bit interested in computers is familiar with and has a facility for running, and -- importantly -- may be used to implement just about anything that people are currently doing with computers.
Put this way, I think that everyone can see the problem and the reason why the author's goal is mere fantasy. Today, people just do too damned many things with computers, and there just is no single language that is appropriate for all those tasks. Moreover, I suspect that the number of kids, or possibly even the percentage of kids who are coding up useful stuff is comparable to, or likely greater than, the equivalent figures when he was copying BASIC programs out of textbooks. And if all he was doing was copying programs out of textbooks and running them, maybe changing a line here or there, such an activity would today just be a tremendous waste of time. Nobody hand-copies code anymore, they download it from the Internet, and I expect that number of kids doing this is huge compared to twenty years ago. The running it, and tinkering with it, still happens, one just gets to that point a whole lot quicker.
I will also say that, if the author thought that learning BASIC was equivalent to understanding what was under the hood of his computer, then he clearly was not around when people were building Altair kits, programming drum cards for an 029 keypunch, or wire-wrapping backplanes. Certainly his elders looked down on his generation of BASIC-writing dweebs as little more than coddled dilitantes who would never truely understand the technology.
I live in the DC 'burbs, and have subscribed to -- and have been reading -- the Washington Post seven days a week for over 25 years -- since graduate school at UVa. I never thought much of the Times, largely for the reasons you cited. However, I recently was involved in a neighborhood protest against something the local government was doing, and this got reported both in the Post and the Times, along with a couple of other local papers. I have to say that I was astonished at how badly the Post slanted things. I was sitting next to a neighbor as he talked to the Post reporter on the phone for nearly an hour. The single quote that wound up in the story took one small sentence fragment out of a point that took my neighbor a paragraph to state. Stripped of all context, my neighbor's words appeared to say exactly the opposite of what he'd been saying for the entire interview -- the words were his understanding of what *other people* were saying about the issue. The distortions in that story were reprehensible, but the Post refused to carry a correction or a letter from my neighbor objecting to the article.
By contrast, the Times got it almost exactly right -- on both sides of the argument. And when they were told, by another neighbor, about a comparitively small error, the both printed a correction *and* a letter. This was enough to get me to buy a subscription to the Times and start seriously reading it for the first time. Yes, there is more of a conservative slant on things, especially in the opinions, columns, and story selection. But they also have *more* space for opinion than in the Post, and the opinions don't always agree with one another. The Times also is often intensely critical of the Bush administration.
I have no idea how much influence the moonies actually have in the operation of that paper. One friend that I trust had worked with them on some internal financial matters, and claims to have seen no evidence of it. But the more I read the paper, the more respect I have for them. In any event, we do need a paper to tell the side of the story that the Post is ignoring, or even actively distorting. Still, it *is* a shame shame that it has to come to us in a moonie-sponsered form.
Well, mostly I agree with you, although I took his "being so nasty" as a side effect of being under a tremendous amount of stress, and perhaps not dealing with as well as someone else could. It also worked to add to Harry's isolation and force him further along the road of taking matters into his own hands.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Goblet of Fire, where a minor character was set up and killed in the same book, and it was hard to care. In the Order of the Pheonix, it was in fact an important character that was killed off, one that was in three of the books. My daughter was heartbroken when she read that part.
Niagra Falls Great Falls of the Potomac
A lot of natural features I looked for didn't have good Hi-res images; I was hoping to see the Cog railway up Mt. Washington, NH, for example, but the resoution isn't sufficient for that. Oh well. Anyone else find some good waterfall pics?
The problem is that you're going to have trouble getting over a few MHz with wire-wrap; the timing issues will get enormous. And at a few MHz you'll have trouble running anything much more complex than DOS.
If you want a good first project, though, I'd suggest working with a decent microcontroller. IMHO Atmel's AVR line is a great place to start; they are flash based, programmers and even basic in-circuit emulator functionality can be had for not too much money (search for AVR ICE 200). There's a GCC port, decent books, and lots of online community support.
Tell me what alternative there is to SAS, for the things that SAS does really well, like grinding through enormous flat files and generating sophisticated statistical reports. I've found plenty of things that do bits and pices of what people use SAS for, but there's a core functionality for which there simply is nothing else available, and if it were possible to code something up in a few weeks to replace it, I promise you someone would already have done it, and they haven't.
Sure, you can use Scilab or Octave instead of Matlab, but only if you don't need any of the really cool toolboxes. Try telling an analyst making $150K/year that his or her time isn't worth a Matlab license. Show me an open-source CAD package that can handle a buildable 3D model of an office building or airplane, down to the threads on the screws.
Now, Matlab is a bad example because to Mathworks' credit they don't require an "enterprise" distribution. But to say "there's always a choice" is disingenuous. Sometimes the choice is between doing an analysis the right way and doing it a half-assed way because your organization won't pony up the bucks for the right software. Sometimes the choice is between getting your work done on schedule and not. Sometimes the choice is between a $25,000 package and $50,000 of labor. Sometimes the choice is between doing an analysis and not doing it at all.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't touch a commercial package anytime there is an actual substitute. For everything we do, PostgreSQL is just fine, we woudn't touch Oracle with a ten-foot pole. We've killed off every Windows server except the few AD, SMS & SUS controllers we need to meet internal "enterprise-wide" requirements. We use OpenBSD for DNS & Kerberos servers in part because it isn't supported on Red Hat WS, you need ES or AS, and that just seemed silly [although we buy $500 worth of CDs for every OpenBSD distribution to support them, so it isn't *just* because we're cheap].
But if you think that there aren't any commercial packages for which there is no real substitute, either you have way to much time on your hands, or you have the luxury of saying no when you get asked to do something for which there *is* no open-source software, or, like I said, you have the good fortune to just not need it for anything you do, because what you think is wrong.
Somewhat remarkably, the new Adobe reader actually supports mutt as an email client for the File...Email function. Other choices are Evolution, Kmail, Mozilla, Netscape and the old standby, "mail". Not a big deal, but it sure is nice not having to configure a second MUA just for this. See Edit...Preferences/SendMail.
I'm not certain I agree with this. Few one-use or even just low-end point-and-shoot cameras have good lenses, shutters with wide speed ranges, or sophisticated metering. It is generally the case that, as these features are added into a camera, the manufacturers give the user the ability to configure them as needed. However, the program modes are also designed to take advantage of these features in optimizing the settings for the shot it is being asked to make. As a result, you in fact can take a much better picture with a high-end camera in program mode than you can in a low-end camera in its single mode. I've been using cameras -- focusing, setting shutter speeds & apetures, reading internal and external meters, etc. -- for over thirty years and have a pretty good idea what all those settings mean. But I find that for 90% of the pictures I take, the program modes in my Canon S1 IS do a better job, faster, than I can do, despite being able to configure any of dozens of parameters myself. I do not get anywhere near the same results out of a single-use or low-end point and shoot camera. There is value in providing those features, there is value in exposing those features to user configuration, and there is value in giving the user an "autopilot" to take computerized control over all those features when appropriate.
This has been pretty much exactly my experience; I use Sprint and have the same plan I had years ago.
What I'm really hoping that number portability will do is to take away the last disincentive to switch carriers, and force carriers to occasionally offer better promotional deals on new phones as a way to keep the customers they have. My biggest problem with staying with Sprint is how much it costs to upgrade to a new phone, compared to how much it would cost to switch to a new carrier and get a promotional deal that way.
Although I have marginal coverage in my home, no carrier currently does much better because of local restrictions on cell towers. However Sprint has recently struck a deal with the city government to put some cells on a city-owned parking garage near me; as they're the only carrier to jump at that opportunity, I'm not in a mood to change.
RPM is just a CPIO archive with a bunch of metadata pasted on the front. All you have to do is strip off that metadata and feed the remainer to any decent implementation of CPIO. This is straightforward, and there's several utilities to do it, including this one written in perl.
At my suggestion, a few years ago my employer tried to give back a class B because we didn't really need it, asking only for a handful of class C numbers in return. Turned out to be harder than you might think, and it never happened. Now, since we never got the class C nets either, parts of the class B are in use and it would be a huge PITA to rip it out, so most of it's pretty much lost address space. So don't put all the blame on the holders of those nets -- a lot of the problem stems from mis-managment of the resource.
In my office we use a one-writer, many-readers database system for timeseries data. But we have many people responsible for small parts of the database, so we needed some way to pool the updates into a single, serial stream. About eight or so years ago, we wrote an update queueing system using PLP, the precursor to LPRng. The thing has worked flawlessly since then, in a production environment supporting dozens of updaters. Print spoolers aren't just for printing anymore:-)
Other than a slight degradation in signal, and a lot of sitting around waiting, what is so hard about taking an analog signal and re-digitizing it? Isn't this a pretty good low-tech way to get around any form of CD-based DRM?
My mom also has an @msn.com account. Now, that account is in her husband's name, and he doesn't even know how to use a computer, so the primary address under that account is never used. My mom set up an additional email address for herself, and she uses that. The thing is, the primary email address for the account -- that never gets used for anything -- gets tons of spam. But the secondary email address -- that my mom uses all the time -- gets none. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not an old guy.
It is silly to suggest that there are no easily-accessible programming languages shipped with computers today; most come with at least two or three (if you count the command interpreter and Javascript), many come with dozens. Anyone with the littlest initiative could obtain free assemblers, compilers or interpreters for dozens more, just by connecting to the Internet. This would have been an embarrassment of riches when I started tinkering with personal computers in the early 1980s. And these languages range from the trivial (e.g. old-style BASIC) to the inscruitable (ADA anyone?). The motivated individual can get as close to the hardware as (s)he wants, with assembler or Forth, or as abstracted as desired, with for example XSLT. What is missing is not a simple-to-use language, but rather a lingua franca: A language that virtually everyone the least bit interested in computers is familiar with and has a facility for running, and -- importantly -- may be used to implement just about anything that people are currently doing with computers.
Put this way, I think that everyone can see the problem and the reason why the author's goal is mere fantasy. Today, people just do too damned many things with computers, and there just is no single language that is appropriate for all those tasks. Moreover, I suspect that the number of kids, or possibly even the percentage of kids who are coding up useful stuff is comparable to, or likely greater than, the equivalent figures when he was copying BASIC programs out of textbooks. And if all he was doing was copying programs out of textbooks and running them, maybe changing a line here or there, such an activity would today just be a tremendous waste of time. Nobody hand-copies code anymore, they download it from the Internet, and I expect that number of kids doing this is huge compared to twenty years ago. The running it, and tinkering with it, still happens, one just gets to that point a whole lot quicker.
I will also say that, if the author thought that learning BASIC was equivalent to understanding what was under the hood of his computer, then he clearly was not around when people were building Altair kits, programming drum cards for an 029 keypunch, or wire-wrapping backplanes. Certainly his elders looked down on his generation of BASIC-writing dweebs as little more than coddled dilitantes who would never truely understand the technology.
I'm sorry, but you just can't go home again.
I live in the DC 'burbs, and have subscribed to -- and have been reading -- the Washington Post seven days a week for over 25 years -- since graduate school at UVa. I never thought much of the Times, largely for the reasons you cited. However, I recently was involved in a neighborhood protest against something the local government was doing, and this got reported both in the Post and the Times, along with a couple of other local papers. I have to say that I was astonished at how badly the Post slanted things. I was sitting next to a neighbor as he talked to the Post reporter on the phone for nearly an hour. The single quote that wound up in the story took one small sentence fragment out of a point that took my neighbor a paragraph to state. Stripped of all context, my neighbor's words appeared to say exactly the opposite of what he'd been saying for the entire interview -- the words were his understanding of what *other people* were saying about the issue. The distortions in that story were reprehensible, but the Post refused to carry a correction or a letter from my neighbor objecting to the article.
By contrast, the Times got it almost exactly right -- on both sides of the argument. And when they were told, by another neighbor, about a comparitively small error, the both printed a correction *and* a letter. This was enough to get me to buy a subscription to the Times and start seriously reading it for the first time. Yes, there is more of a conservative slant on things, especially in the opinions, columns, and story selection. But they also have *more* space for opinion than in the Post, and the opinions don't always agree with one another. The Times also is often intensely critical of the Bush administration.
I have no idea how much influence the moonies actually have in the operation of that paper. One friend that I trust had worked with them on some internal financial matters, and claims to have seen no evidence of it. But the more I read the paper, the more respect I have for them. In any event, we do need a paper to tell the side of the story that the Post is ignoring, or even actively distorting. Still, it *is* a shame shame that it has to come to us in a moonie-sponsered form.
Hanlon's Razor. See also this
Well, mostly I agree with you, although I took his "being so nasty" as a side effect of being under a tremendous amount of stress, and perhaps not dealing with as well as someone else could. It also worked to add to Harry's isolation and force him further along the road of taking matters into his own hands.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Goblet of Fire, where a minor character was set up and killed in the same book, and it was hard to care. In the Order of the Pheonix, it was in fact an important character that was killed off, one that was in three of the books. My daughter was heartbroken when she read that part.
Niagra Falls
Great Falls of the Potomac
A lot of natural features I looked for didn't have good Hi-res images; I was hoping to see the Cog railway up Mt. Washington, NH, for example, but the resoution isn't sufficient for that. Oh well. Anyone else find some good waterfall pics?
The problem is that you're going to have trouble getting over a few MHz with wire-wrap; the timing issues will get enormous. And at a few MHz you'll have trouble running anything much more complex than DOS.
If you want a good first project, though, I'd suggest working with a decent microcontroller. IMHO Atmel's AVR line is a great place to start; they are flash based, programmers and even basic in-circuit emulator functionality can be had for not too much money (search for AVR ICE 200). There's a GCC port, decent books, and lots of online community support.
FWIW, YMMV, etc.
Tell me what alternative there is to SAS, for the things that SAS does really well, like grinding through enormous flat files and generating sophisticated statistical reports. I've found plenty of things that do bits and pices of what people use SAS for, but there's a core functionality for which there simply is nothing else available, and if it were possible to code something up in a few weeks to replace it, I promise you someone would already have done it, and they haven't.
Sure, you can use Scilab or Octave instead of Matlab, but only if you don't need any of the really cool toolboxes. Try telling an analyst making $150K/year that his or her time isn't worth a Matlab license. Show me an open-source CAD package that can handle a buildable 3D model of an office building or airplane, down to the threads on the screws.
Now, Matlab is a bad example because to Mathworks' credit they don't require an "enterprise" distribution. But to say "there's always a choice" is disingenuous. Sometimes the choice is between doing an analysis the right way and doing it a half-assed way because your organization won't pony up the bucks for the right software. Sometimes the choice is between getting your work done on schedule and not. Sometimes the choice is between a $25,000 package and $50,000 of labor. Sometimes the choice is between doing an analysis and not doing it at all.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't touch a commercial package anytime there is an actual substitute. For everything we do, PostgreSQL is just fine, we woudn't touch Oracle with a ten-foot pole. We've killed off every Windows server except the few AD, SMS & SUS controllers we need to meet internal "enterprise-wide" requirements. We use OpenBSD for DNS & Kerberos servers in part because it isn't supported on Red Hat WS, you need ES or AS, and that just seemed silly [although we buy $500 worth of CDs for every OpenBSD distribution to support them, so it isn't *just* because we're cheap].
But if you think that there aren't any commercial packages for which there is no real substitute, either you have way to much time on your hands, or you have the luxury of saying no when you get asked to do something for which there *is* no open-source software, or, like I said, you have the good fortune to just not need it for anything you do, because what you think is wrong.
In that last paragraph, s/sense to avoid/good fortune to not need/. It isn't always that simple.
Somewhat remarkably, the new Adobe reader actually supports mutt as an email client for the File...Email function. Other choices are Evolution, Kmail, Mozilla, Netscape and the old standby, "mail". Not a big deal, but it sure is nice not having to configure a second MUA just for this. See Edit...Preferences/SendMail.
RSS URLs e.g. http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss and http://apple.slashdot.org/apple.rss seem to work, and it seems possible to load any valid article or comments.pl or article.pl URL e.g. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133791 or http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/23/22 59226&tid=155&tid=123, but the index pages e.g. http://slashdot.org or http://apple.slashdot.org all seem to be broken, I get mostly 503s and the occasional 500.
Any of these will change the way you look at the world:
d/dx [e^x] = e^x
I'm not certain I agree with this. Few one-use or even just low-end point-and-shoot cameras have good lenses, shutters with wide speed ranges, or sophisticated metering. It is generally the case that, as these features are added into a camera, the manufacturers give the user the ability to configure them as needed. However, the program modes are also designed to take advantage of these features in optimizing the settings for the shot it is being asked to make. As a result, you in fact can take a much better picture with a high-end camera in program mode than you can in a low-end camera in its single mode. I've been using cameras -- focusing, setting shutter speeds & apetures, reading internal and external meters, etc. -- for over thirty years and have a pretty good idea what all those settings mean. But I find that for 90% of the pictures I take, the program modes in my Canon S1 IS do a better job, faster, than I can do, despite being able to configure any of dozens of parameters myself. I do not get anywhere near the same results out of a single-use or low-end point and shoot camera. There is value in providing those features, there is value in exposing those features to user configuration, and there is value in giving the user an "autopilot" to take computerized control over all those features when appropriate.
Shouldn't it be W2.003K?
This has been pretty much exactly my experience; I use Sprint and have the same plan I had years ago.
What I'm really hoping that number portability will do is to take away the last disincentive to switch carriers, and force carriers to occasionally offer better promotional deals on new phones as a way to keep the customers they have. My biggest problem with staying with Sprint is how much it costs to upgrade to a new phone, compared to how much it would cost to switch to a new carrier and get a promotional deal that way.
Although I have marginal coverage in my home, no carrier currently does much better because of local restrictions on cell towers. However Sprint has recently struck a deal with the city government to put some cells on a city-owned parking garage near me; as they're the only carrier to jump at that opportunity, I'm not in a mood to change.
RPM is just a CPIO archive with a bunch of metadata pasted on the front. All you have to do is strip off that metadata and feed the remainer to any decent implementation of CPIO. This is straightforward, and there's several utilities to do it, including this one written in perl.
Seriously, how much do you want????
Didn't I already say? :-)
At my suggestion, a few years ago my employer tried to give back a class B because we didn't really need it, asking only for a handful of class C numbers in return. Turned out to be harder than you might think, and it never happened. Now, since we never got the class C nets either, parts of the class B are in use and it would be a huge PITA to rip it out, so most of it's pretty much lost address space. So don't put all the blame on the holders of those nets -- a lot of the problem stems from mis-managment of the resource.
In my office we use a one-writer, many-readers database system for timeseries data. But we have many people responsible for small parts of the database, so we needed some way to pool the updates into a single, serial stream. About eight or so years ago, we wrote an update queueing system using PLP, the precursor to LPRng. The thing has worked flawlessly since then, in a production environment supporting dozens of updaters. Print spoolers aren't just for printing anymore :-)
I've got a Clie and an HP48 and would love to
try this, but the website's 509/Bandwidth Limit
Exceeded.
You must have just started paying attention...
Other than a slight degradation in signal, and a lot of sitting around waiting, what is so hard about taking an analog signal and re-digitizing it? Isn't this a pretty good low-tech way to get around any form of CD-based DRM?
cf Analog Hole.
My mom also has an @msn.com account. Now, that account is in her husband's name, and he doesn't even know how to use a computer, so the primary address under that account is never used. My mom set up an additional email address for herself, and she uses that. The thing is, the primary email address for the account -- that never gets used for anything -- gets tons of spam. But the secondary email address -- that my mom uses all the time -- gets none. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.