No, its actually horribly bloated. Its just that it is horribly bloated by the standards of thirty years ago. A bit like Windows XP, but more so.
In other news, emacs 24 is to be renamed "egacs" because the previous snarky backonym of "Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping" is now the average footprint of "Hello World".
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
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· Score: 5, Funny
emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose.
Why do you feel that emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose?
Re:Talk about getting your facts right!
on
Tetraktys
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· Score: 1
...tells the story of Ambrose Jerusalem, a gifted computer security expert,... who has a beautiful and loving girlfriend.
Yeah right!
Its OK if it turns out that the GF was actually in the pay of the Big Bad, tasked with keeping an eye on Our Hero and offing him with some deadly sesame seed if he causes trouble...
(Am I the only one who actually liked that movie?)
Do you mean something that would include animations too?
...along with enough scripting, events, timelines, shape libraries, controls etc. and an application framework so you could easily write fairly sophisticated "rich internet applications" without needing a PhD in the Document Object Model and inter-browser variations. I.e, as I said, "Something like Flash".
Of course, it would all be running on a standard SVG + ECMAScript base so, unlike Flash, a puppy wouldn't die every time you used it.
Their biggest failure is only developing this for premium users.
Er, no - their biggest failure would be providing free a service that lots of people liked but which didn't earn them a brass penny. Making the mobile version premium only could well be the carrot that makes more people pay up.
A public spat with Apple would be great publicity for them, of course.
Interesting test coming up in EU/UK: the "iTunes killing" streaming music service Spotify has announced that they've submitted their client app for the iPhone/iPod Touch to Apple. Cannily, they've got this all over the press which must have rather put Apple on the spot(ify).
Spotify is nothing revolutionary but its well executed, easy to use and has a pretty good range of music from pop to classical (minus the usual digital hold-outs: Floyd etc.) and seems to have been very well marketed (starting with a Google style not-very-exclusive invitation/introduction system). Its been getting to quite a wide audience (not your usual pop download monkeys). If Apple reject this, then the App Store issue is going to be News in Europe. Could be fun.
Looks like mobile apps are part of their business model: the basic desktop service is free with (not too bad) ads or 10 quid a month for ad-free, but you're going to have to subscribe to use the mobile version. That'd probably put me off, but we shall see...
I remember having a BASIC program crash and finding it was because the Starship Enterprise had flown off the screen and embedded itself in a line of code. This was on an OSI Superboard which had a character set filled with useful stuff like aliens and spaceships instead of lower case letters. The downside was that nobody told Microsoft this so you'd get messages like "S[front-half-of-a-spaceship] Error at line 110".
Well... I would say that it really mushroomed when the Sinclair ZX 80 was made
So, around 1979-1980 then?
I'd agree that's when affordable, pre-assembled all-in-one home computers - with keyboards, video output and BASIC in ROM started to appear. Before that, it was a choice between soldering irons, hex keypads and Teletype 43s at dawn or finding a small fortune for a PET, Apple II or TRS-80.
Note also that these [Sinclair] were not running MS Basic.
But other cheap options - such as the OSI Superboard/UK101 - did. Ditto Commodore VIC, 64 etc.
I think the UK was a bit of a microcosm because the "cross off the Dollar sign and write a Pound sign" export strategy was already going strong and kept Commodore, Apple and Tandy stuff outside many people's price range. So in the UK, you soon had Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad pw3ning the market niches occipied by Commodore and Apple in the US.
I'm quite willing to give BillG a lot of credit for contributing to the early years of the PC. Even showing that you could make money by producing PC software was a contribution. Things didn't really go runny until IBM (remember when they were the evil monopolists?) belatedly got involved, took a mediocre 8088-based beige box running a CP/M knock-off OS, somehow convinced the world that it was wonderful and locked the industry into a closed, proprietary and pathologically non-scalable architecture.
Now Jobs et.al. is an other matter...
You seem to be forgetting about the Apple II. Not the first PC but one of the first (within a six month period) "buy it and plug it in" PCs and hugely influential in the early years and went on to popularise (if not actually invent) the spreadsheet, the GUI, desktop publishing, laser printing, local area networking, Photoshop et. al... Hell, it was even Apple who got USB off the staring blocks after it had been sitting unused on PC motherboards for ages, despite it being an Intel invention that competed with their own Firewire...
Note: I am happy that current "jewelery" is running Unix quite well:-D
Yup - Apple finally got ordinary people queueing up to run Unix on the desktop. That counts as an Achievement.
According to Graham, programming is exactly like painting so you don't have to plan anything.
Now, I'm not a painter, but I rather think you'll find that the good ones plan rather a lot. Planning work and discussing it with clients is not the same thing as getting interrupted every 30 minutes by some tw@ who wants to know exactly how many litres of linseed oil you're going to use next year, or whether you can display the painting (which, at the last meeting, you all agreed would take another month) at an exhibition next week and even though you're still at the sketch stage can you please specify the exact colour and dimensions of the frame because its the end of the financial year so if you don't order it now the accountant might have to spend an extra 5 minutes processing the order...
And yet we continue to see project after project scheduled in Gantt charts as if tasks like programming and engineering were no different than milling or smelting.
You get given Gantt charts that include time for programming!? Luxury! Most managers seem to think that just sort of happens by itself.
My favorite Gantt chart for a 6-month development project actually left 2 weeks for development once all the administrivia was stripped out.
d) Meetings need to have minutes summarizing what was discussed and what was decided. Managers tend to remember what they find it convenient to remember, not what actually happened. If necessary take notes yourself.
d1) Such minutes to be distributed ASAP after the meeting so that people actually have a record of the meeting - not sat on until the next meeting so that they can be "approved" and filed.
Since the Commodore PET, the Trash-80 Level 2 and various other circa-77 computers ran Microsoft BASIC I rather think BillG knows about them.
The point of TFA is not that 1979 marked the birth of the personal computer, but was the point at which things really started to mushroom. Sounds about right to me.
BASIC is good only for teaching the "programmers mindset" in how to reason and think with code. The language itself does nothing but teach you terribly bad habits that will plague your code if you use anything else.
A point of view which, in 1979, was widely held by people at university who had easy access to minis and mainframes with the grunt to run Pascal or Algol compilers.
Meanwhile, those of us using $300 6502 or Z80 systems with 4K of RAM and a only domestic cassette tape recorder as mass storage found that BASIC wasn't so bad when the only practical alternative was lovingly hand-crafted machine code.
Speaking of which, when I tried to learn 6502 machine code from someone else's handwritten notes which didn't cover indirect addressing properly, I used self-modifying code instead. By your logic, I should have been stuck writing self-modifying code hell for the rest of my life, but for some strange reason as soon as I discovered the "proper" way of doing it I recognised that it was much better and switched. Likewise, the urge to occasionally throw in a GOTO for the hell of it wore off pretty quick (and with proper execption handling in most decent languages the last, vestigial excuse for using it has now gone).
Are you saying the typical "/. type" wouldn't think to just fire up IE to download Firefox?
What? risk letting Microsoft register a hit to their news service before you had a chance to change the home page to about:blank?:-)
Anybody truly worthy of/.hood, faced with the simple task of downloading and installing Firefox would use FTP to download all the requisite gubbins to compile "wget" or "curl" from source, waste an afternoon on the forums arguing which was better, spot a comment about a new browser called EarthMarmoset and spend until 3am trying and failing to build it from the latest CVS, bork the registry by accident and decide to get up at the crack of noon the next day to re-install Windows from scratch. Then they'd still need to install Firefox.
It would be a shame to see these great traditions die.
Why? Its a perfectly reasonable solution for a/. type who has a second computer to look up the FTP address and can't be arsed to mess about with a USB stick. I've certainly used CLI tools to download and install software... usually wget on Linux, though, not FTP.
I did wonder exactly who the author of those instructions thought his audience was going to be:-)
Apple certainly won't be doing it anytime soon, since they emphasize integration between programs so much.
On my Mac, if I click on the "Apple" menu (Note for Windows users: its a bit like the "Start" menu) and choose "Mac OS X Software" I go to an Apple-run software catalog website. Number 7 on the "Most Popular Downloads" list is currently Firefox. Number 1 if you go to the Internet Utilities section - Opera is down at 14. You have to dig a bit to find Camino, Flock, Omniweb and Seamonkey, but they're there.
Not exactly a "browser ballot", but all on an official Apple site one click away from the desktop, so its hardly a Safari lock in.
100 million typical PC users just heard you say "Download Firefox by re-routing warp power through the starboard deflector array and initiating an inverse tetrion pulse".
I installed kubuntu instead of the previous system (which you can easily guess). Made sure there were desktop links to firefox, kmail, dolphin and a SD card image transfer script.
...and there, I suspect, is the real secret to converting Windows users: first, recognize that your users don't care about KDE vs. Gnome holy war and give them the one that comes out of the gate looking more like Windows than a Mac. Second, a bit of intelligent customization to ensure that they can find the apps they use every day and disguise the fact that they now have different, wacky, names. Third, good after-"sales" support (I'm sure the staff at Buy More would have told them that Skype was windows-only:-) ).
Of course, that's better than you get when you buy Windows (or even Mac) but they have million-buck advertising campaigns and sales incentives instead so they don't need good service.
Er, they'd be the people who own the enormously successful distribution system that you want to distribute your work through. You know: the people who pay for those expensive TV ads promoting the iPhone and App Store - and, yes, the people who are currently coining it in doing so, but who are therefore responsible for maintaining the image which lets them continue to do so.
this is Apple's notion of what mature content is
No, this is Apple's notion of how paranoid a company with such a high media profile needs to be to avoid getting lynched by neopuritans.
Can I heartily commend to you a distribution medium called "The World Wide Web?" You can put whatever you want on it (and face the consequences yourself if you upset someone), it even works on iPhones and if people can't bear to be without your art when they're offline, they can download it and stick it in iPhoto.
it took them FOUR WEEKS to tell us this. and we have adjusted the rating and have now waited another TWO WEEKS and they haven't reviewed it again yet.
You meen a global publisher with a hugely successful distribution network and a waiting list of authors gives you a descision in UNDER A MONTH? I'd rank that as pretty bloody good service! If you're regularly dealing with publishers/distributors who do better than that then you really, really don't know you've been born.
This is so obviously a case of God himself reaching down and dividing these species
Once again the scientists and the Christians collude to hide the truth. Here, there is a conspiracy to conceal the almost certainly true factoid that significant traces of oregano and Parmesan were detected in these birds' habitat: clear evidence that these species were divided by the mere touch of His Noodley Appendage.
Ramen.
Anybody want to come and picket a Pot Noodle factory (the blasphemers!)
I think that as a general principle you can't arrest people for committing a crime unless there is actually some evidence that a crime is at least being planned.
Sorry? Read TFA. Where does it say that anybody has been charged with a crime?
Of course, in the USA I expect that the police would just have tipped off the RIAA stormtroopers and they'd all be facing million-dollar fines for definitely possibly being about to think about a potential unauthorized public performance.
Sure, if they had a truck with 30' speaker enclosures that they were unloading I'd say they at least had a case.
Well, the earlier article said that "amplified sound equipment" was confiscated. History does not relate whether this was a 30W home stereo or a pro PA rig with knobs that started at 11.
Slashdot Mirror
No, its actually horribly bloated. Its just that it is horribly bloated by the standards of thirty years ago. A bit like Windows XP, but more so.
In other news, emacs 24 is to be renamed "egacs" because the previous snarky backonym of "Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping" is now the average footprint of "Hello World".
emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose.
Why do you feel that emacs is what happens when a project goes too far beyond its intended purpose?
...tells the story of Ambrose Jerusalem, a gifted computer security expert, ... who has a beautiful and loving girlfriend.
Yeah right!
Its OK if it turns out that the GF was actually in the pay of the Big Bad, tasked with keeping an eye on Our Hero and offing him with some deadly sesame seed if he causes trouble...
(Am I the only one who actually liked that movie?)
Do you mean something that would include animations too?
...along with enough scripting, events, timelines, shape libraries, controls etc. and an application framework so you could easily write fairly sophisticated "rich internet applications" without needing a PhD in the Document Object Model and inter-browser variations. I.e, as I said, "Something like Flash".
Of course, it would all be running on a standard SVG + ECMAScript base so, unlike Flash, a puppy wouldn't die every time you used it.
Their biggest failure is only developing this for premium users.
Er, no - their biggest failure would be providing free a service that lots of people liked but which didn't earn them a brass penny. Making the mobile version premium only could well be the carrot that makes more people pay up.
A public spat with Apple would be great publicity for them, of course.
Was Wolfenstein based on a reusable 3D engine - which is the theme of TFA - though?
Interesting test coming up in EU/UK: the "iTunes killing" streaming music service Spotify has announced that they've submitted their client app for the iPhone/iPod Touch to Apple. Cannily, they've got this all over the press which must have rather put Apple on the spot(ify).
Spotify is nothing revolutionary but its well executed, easy to use and has a pretty good range of music from pop to classical (minus the usual digital hold-outs: Floyd etc.) and seems to have been very well marketed (starting with a Google style not-very-exclusive invitation/introduction system). Its been getting to quite a wide audience (not your usual pop download monkeys). If Apple reject this, then the App Store issue is going to be News in Europe. Could be fun.
Looks like mobile apps are part of their business model: the basic desktop service is free with (not too bad) ads or 10 quid a month for ad-free, but you're going to have to subscribe to use the mobile version. That'd probably put me off, but we shall see...
Ah. the good old days of POKE.
I remember having a BASIC program crash and finding it was because the Starship Enterprise had flown off the screen and embedded itself in a line of code. This was on an OSI Superboard which had a character set filled with useful stuff like aliens and spaceships instead of lower case letters. The downside was that nobody told Microsoft this so you'd get messages like "S[front-half-of-a-spaceship] Error at line 110".
Guess that means she's going to find out I've been tapping her sister...
Only after you find out that her sister is also your own great-grandmother.
Well... I would say that it really mushroomed when the Sinclair ZX 80 was made
So, around 1979-1980 then?
I'd agree that's when affordable, pre-assembled all-in-one home computers - with keyboards, video output and BASIC in ROM started to appear. Before that, it was a choice between soldering irons, hex keypads and Teletype 43s at dawn or finding a small fortune for a PET, Apple II or TRS-80.
Note also that these [Sinclair] were not running MS Basic.
But other cheap options - such as the OSI Superboard/UK101 - did. Ditto Commodore VIC, 64 etc.
I think the UK was a bit of a microcosm because the "cross off the Dollar sign and write a Pound sign" export strategy was already going strong and kept Commodore, Apple and Tandy stuff outside many people's price range. So in the UK, you soon had Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad pw3ning the market niches occipied by Commodore and Apple in the US.
I'm quite willing to give BillG a lot of credit for contributing to the early years of the PC. Even showing that you could make money by producing PC software was a contribution. Things didn't really go runny until IBM (remember when they were the evil monopolists?) belatedly got involved, took a mediocre 8088-based beige box running a CP/M knock-off OS, somehow convinced the world that it was wonderful and locked the industry into a closed, proprietary and pathologically non-scalable architecture.
Now Jobs et.al. is an other matter...
You seem to be forgetting about the Apple II. Not the first PC but one of the first (within a six month period) "buy it and plug it in" PCs and hugely influential in the early years and went on to popularise (if not actually invent) the spreadsheet, the GUI, desktop publishing, laser printing, local area networking, Photoshop et. al... Hell, it was even Apple who got USB off the staring blocks after it had been sitting unused on PC motherboards for ages, despite it being an Intel invention that competed with their own Firewire...
Note: I am happy that current "jewelery" is running Unix quite well :-D
Yup - Apple finally got ordinary people queueing up to run Unix on the desktop. That counts as an Achievement.
CBM BASIC = MS-BASIC? I didn't realize that... POKE 53280,0: POKE 53281,0
Uh... was that something to do with switching between lower-case and graphics (or was that POKE 59468,1)?
Anyway, WAIT 6502,0 would fill the screen with the word "Microsoft!".
According to Graham, programming is exactly like painting so you don't have to plan anything.
Now, I'm not a painter, but I rather think you'll find that the good ones plan rather a lot. Planning work and discussing it with clients is not the same thing as getting interrupted every 30 minutes by some tw@ who wants to know exactly how many litres of linseed oil you're going to use next year, or whether you can display the painting (which, at the last meeting, you all agreed would take another month) at an exhibition next week and even though you're still at the sketch stage can you please specify the exact colour and dimensions of the frame because its the end of the financial year so if you don't order it now the accountant might have to spend an extra 5 minutes processing the order...
And yet we continue to see project after project scheduled in Gantt charts as if tasks like programming and engineering were no different than milling or smelting.
You get given Gantt charts that include time for programming!? Luxury! Most managers seem to think that just sort of happens by itself.
My favorite Gantt chart for a 6-month development project actually left 2 weeks for development once all the administrivia was stripped out.
d) Meetings need to have minutes summarizing what was discussed and what was decided. Managers tend to remember what they find it convenient to remember, not what actually happened. If necessary take notes yourself.
d1) Such minutes to be distributed ASAP after the meeting so that people actually have a record of the meeting - not sat on until the next meeting so that they can be "approved" and filed.
Since the Commodore PET, the Trash-80 Level 2 and various other circa-77 computers ran Microsoft BASIC I rather think BillG knows about them.
The point of TFA is not that 1979 marked the birth of the personal computer, but was the point at which things really started to mushroom. Sounds about right to me.
BASIC is good only for teaching the "programmers mindset" in how to reason and think with code. The language itself does nothing but teach you terribly bad habits that will plague your code if you use anything else.
A point of view which, in 1979, was widely held by people at university who had easy access to minis and mainframes with the grunt to run Pascal or Algol compilers.
Meanwhile, those of us using $300 6502 or Z80 systems with 4K of RAM and a only domestic cassette tape recorder as mass storage found that BASIC wasn't so bad when the only practical alternative was lovingly hand-crafted machine code.
Speaking of which, when I tried to learn 6502 machine code from someone else's handwritten notes which didn't cover indirect addressing properly, I used self-modifying code instead. By your logic, I should have been stuck writing self-modifying code hell for the rest of my life, but for some strange reason as soon as I discovered the "proper" way of doing it I recognised that it was much better and switched. Likewise, the urge to occasionally throw in a GOTO for the hell of it wore off pretty quick (and with proper execption handling in most decent languages the last, vestigial excuse for using it has now gone).
Are you saying the typical "/. type" wouldn't think to just fire up IE to download Firefox?
What? risk letting Microsoft register a hit to their news service before you had a chance to change the home page to about:blank? :-)
Anybody truly worthy of /.hood, faced with the simple task of downloading and installing Firefox would use FTP to download all the requisite gubbins to compile "wget" or "curl" from source, waste an afternoon on the forums arguing which was better, spot a comment about a new browser called EarthMarmoset and spend until 3am trying and failing to build it from the latest CVS, bork the registry by accident and decide to get up at the crack of noon the next day to re-install Windows from scratch. Then they'd still need to install Firefox.
It would be a shame to see these great traditions die.
It was supposed to be a joke
Why? Its a perfectly reasonable solution for a /. type who has a second computer to look up the FTP address and can't be arsed to mess about with a USB stick. I've certainly used CLI tools to download and install software... usually wget on Linux, though, not FTP.
I did wonder exactly who the author of those instructions thought his audience was going to be :-)
Apple certainly won't be doing it anytime soon, since they emphasize integration between programs so much.
On my Mac, if I click on the "Apple" menu (Note for Windows users: its a bit like the "Start" menu) and choose "Mac OS X Software" I go to an Apple-run software catalog website. Number 7 on the "Most Popular Downloads" list is currently Firefox. Number 1 if you go to the Internet Utilities section - Opera is down at 14. You have to dig a bit to find Camino, Flock, Omniweb and Seamonkey, but they're there.
Not exactly a "browser ballot", but all on an official Apple site one click away from the desktop, so its hardly a Safari lock in.
Step 1) Download Firefox using FTP
100 million typical PC users just heard you say "Download Firefox by re-routing warp power through the starboard deflector array and initiating an inverse tetrion pulse".
[Canvas] is already supported on Firefox and Webkit-based browsers. This is the most practical advantage it has -- availability in the field.
Except SVG is already supported on Opera, Firefox and Webkit, too, and even in IE via plugins.
The killer app for SVG would be if someone developed an artist-centric development tool like Flash.
I installed kubuntu instead of the previous system (which you can easily guess). Made sure there were desktop links to firefox, kmail, dolphin and a SD card image transfer script.
...and there, I suspect, is the real secret to converting Windows users: first, recognize that your users don't care about KDE vs. Gnome holy war and give them the one that comes out of the gate looking more like Windows than a Mac. Second, a bit of intelligent customization to ensure that they can find the apps they use every day and disguise the fact that they now have different, wacky, names. Third, good after-"sales" support (I'm sure the staff at Buy More would have told them that Skype was windows-only :-) ).
Of course, that's better than you get when you buy Windows (or even Mac) but they have million-buck advertising campaigns and sales incentives instead so they don't need good service.
who are they to say what my art should be?
Er, they'd be the people who own the enormously successful distribution system that you want to distribute your work through. You know: the people who pay for those expensive TV ads promoting the iPhone and App Store - and, yes, the people who are currently coining it in doing so, but who are therefore responsible for maintaining the image which lets them continue to do so.
this is Apple's notion of what mature content is
No, this is Apple's notion of how paranoid a company with such a high media profile needs to be to avoid getting lynched by neopuritans.
Can I heartily commend to you a distribution medium called "The World Wide Web?" You can put whatever you want on it (and face the consequences yourself if you upset someone), it even works on iPhones and if people can't bear to be without your art when they're offline, they can download it and stick it in iPhoto.
it took them FOUR WEEKS to tell us this. and we have adjusted the rating and have now waited another TWO WEEKS and they haven't reviewed it again yet.
You meen a global publisher with a hugely successful distribution network and a waiting list of authors gives you a descision in UNDER A MONTH? I'd rank that as pretty bloody good service! If you're regularly dealing with publishers/distributors who do better than that then you really, really don't know you've been born.
This is so obviously a case of God himself reaching down and dividing these species
Once again the scientists and the Christians collude to hide the truth. Here, there is a conspiracy to conceal the almost certainly true factoid that significant traces of oregano and Parmesan were detected in these birds' habitat: clear evidence that these species were divided by the mere touch of His Noodley Appendage.
Ramen.
Anybody want to come and picket a Pot Noodle factory (the blasphemers!)
I think that as a general principle you can't arrest people for committing a crime unless there is actually some evidence that a crime is at least being planned.
Sorry? Read TFA. Where does it say that anybody has been charged with a crime?
Of course, in the USA I expect that the police would just have tipped off the RIAA stormtroopers and they'd all be facing million-dollar fines for definitely possibly being about to think about a potential unauthorized public performance.
Sure, if they had a truck with 30' speaker enclosures that they were unloading I'd say they at least had a case.
Well, the earlier article said that "amplified sound equipment" was confiscated. History does not relate whether this was a 30W home stereo or a pro PA rig with knobs that started at 11.