a utility that was written by someone who hasn't paid Apple's $99 fee for a developer's license
According to Gruber at Daring Fireball, the developer IDs will be issued free of charge. It's only if you want to submit to the App Store that you need to pay $99.
I'd group the vinyl and tape people in with the vhs heads
VHS is really a very poor quality video format. Just look at it! You can't really say that about vinyl and tape for audio, both of which are capable of high fidelity.
I'm not a golden-eared vinyl afficionado, and in general I much prefer CDs, but there's a big difference between a good CD and a bad CD, much bigger than the difference between a good and bad vinyl recording. That's because of the stupidity of the labels over the last 15 years in insisting that everything is mastered as loud as possible, reducing the effective dynamic range of CDs to often less than 10dB! You can't attempt that with vinyl because it won't physically work.
Properly done digital is indeed superior to all those formats - but show me a properly done CD and I'll show you 9 others that are garbage.
When I was a young lad, I made and flew radio-controlled model airplanes. I neither asked nor got permission from any government agencies.
So what?
When my father was a young lad in the 1930s you could fly a full-size aeroplane pretty much anywhere you wanted, without requiring substantial training, land anywhere you wanted and people rarely bothered you. Things have changed. Your point?
What on earth is a "faux" turtleneck? Seriously, is that a US term? Over here and in the UK they just call that style a "turtleneck". What's faux about it?
I was 20 when the C64 came on the scene, and was an apprentice electronics engineer, mostly in the analogue/RF field. Digital logic was something I understood, but microprocessors, as such, were not. I bought a C64 because I'd used a PET and thought BASIC would be something worth learning, with half a mind on a game idea I had. BASIC soon proved useless, so I turned to an assembler cartridge (bought rather expensively at the time) called MIKRO64. This unlocked the full available power of the machine, but more importantly, it made me understand how a microprocessor actually worked. Back then, the whole architecture was easily understood down to the last register, plus the 64 came with full schematics! This proved to be a most important eye-opener because in the industry I worked in, within a few years, nearly all designs had moved to having a processor at their heart, and programming replaced the old-school logic and analogue design I'd come up with. Without the 64, chances are I would not have been able to keep up in electronics, and eventually go into programming as a career.
I upped a Mac IIsi from 20 to 25MHz once. It was well worthwhile. In fact, that's a 20% increase - I bet you'd be hard-pressed to get a reliable 20% improvement on anything these days.
I suppose there is some larger scheme here that I am missing.
Well, some people, you know, like making stuff for themselves, rather than being just another consumer. It's infinitely more satisfying to make something than to buy it, even if it's more costly.
That said, I can't see what licensing has to do with this. Publish the plans and if they're any good people will use them. If the motivation is really ego, and simply attaching your name to the design isn't enough, then perhaps the OP needs to rethink the reason he wants to do this.
Have a set of original 1971 clackers in the kitchen drawer. Already introduced our 5-yo daughter to them - she can already do them better than me. I just cower, expecting them to explode violently...
iTo navigate a city looks like it was planned by throwing spaghetti at a wall and calling it a map.
Nevertheless, London is pretty understandable if you have to go there more than a few times. While I wouldn't claim to know all of it well, I know certain sections of it fairly well. It's fun to use your mental model of where things are to try and find a new route that brings you out close to your destination (probably best not tried if you are pressed for time). It doesn't always work but can lead to new discoveries.
When I drive in cities that use the grid model, I find myself bored. They are far too predictable and lose the power to surprise and entertain. It also is mildly irritating that there are no true short cuts as there are so few diagonals. The distance between any two points is always an integral multiple of "a block". How is that any fun?
I lived for many years in the UK town where Kodak had its European headquarters and plant - Hemel Hempstead. It's all gone now. Even the town only "skyscraper" which was Kodak offices has been converted to residential use. Makes me wonder where all those thousands of employees are working now.
Predicting the future is hard. Look at that scene in "The Man Who Fell To Earth" where Newton invents an instant camera. Instant is something anyone could see would be a winner, but no-one at that time saw it happening without using film.
Not really linked to the story, but it gives me a chance to relate this tale of idiocy.
A friend was pulled over by police for running through an intersection just as it turned from amber to red instead of stopping. She said that because the car behind was tailgating (business as usual), to have stopped would have caused an accident, so in her judgement it was safer to continue. That cut no ice and she was booked. Eventually they let her go and then pulled out behind her and followed. At the next intersection, the lights were on amber so this time she stopped. The police patrol car ploughed straight into her rear. They booked her again (she was naturally livid) but elected to take the matter to court. She was cleared of all charges including the original offence and the police had to pay all costs. Justice.
Sometimes the right thing to do is to press on on amber - I usually stop but only if there's time to do it without the half-asleep moron behind rearranging the back of your car.
Yes it was, but it also required at least one (maybe more, I forget) custom plug-ins to actually work. XCMDs I think they were called. For example, Myst is in colour, but the colour support in HC 2.0 was woefully poor, and 1.x never had it at all.
No. You cannot compare it with anything that "was just around the corner" - it didn't exist yet. I don't recall AmigaOS being much ahead of the Mac (not "Mac OS", it wasn't called an OS for another 10 years), though it did have some nice features and eventually, some nice tools. Apart from Smalltalk, on which you might have a point, none of those other things would have been usable on a 68000 processor. It's questionable whether any sort of OOP runtime could have run on it. You could argue that the CPU was too small for the job, but the software was well tailored to the architecture they chose, for better or worse. The point is, it was a very productive way to program for a while. I'm not saying it was anywhere near perfect, but calling it a piece of shit is to judge it by the standards of today, not 1984.
I should also mention that programming in pascal, something that also perhaps seems strange from todays point of view, was also a remarkably pleasant experience, coming from a background in bASIC and embedded assemblers of various flavours. Borland Turbo Pascal for the Mac was, in 1985-6, a very nice and fast environment.
Actually, it wasn't hell to program. By the standards of the day, it was really not bad. Its built-in toolbox managed many chores for you - want a window, one line and you got one. Compared to today it looks quite low level, but at that time it was very high level. The first app I wrote for Mac (other than "hello world") was a full multi-windowed, menu and event driven affair that responded in real time to emergency radio transmissions. There was no way I could have done it if I had nothing but assembler and no toolbox. My main gripe at the time was the small screen and lack of colour, but that was fixed within a year.
The limited memory, lack of multi-tasking and all the rest of it that people think were a major headache were simply not a problem AT THE TIME. It was only later that people wanted and needed more.
...better suited for endurance sports like long distance running or swimming. Children that have a lot of it will be better suited for sports like football...
Football IS an endurance sport. The amount of running needed over the full 90 minutes of a game is easily up there with some of the longest track events. Or did they mean some other game? (clue: if it's played exclusively with the feet it's football).
There's a whole new software ecosystem being born right now. You can design, develop and code from home, and use one of the various App Stores to sell and market the products. If you get the right idea and do it well, the rewards are potentially huge. Having good ideas is the hard bit, but at least if you have one a) it's yours to do with as you please and b) you get all the rewards (less the App Store's cut, which is very reasonable in fact).
Using QR Codes is still complicated compared to simple barcodes. You need a fast camera, image processing, etc. That might be acceptable of course. But a simple laser barcode scanner is cheap and effective, and simpler to interface. You can print the barcode for the competitor on a sheet of office paper and stick it to a side window with tape. Super-cheap and likely to work. There could be a problem ensuring that several vehicles arriving at once were able to be scanned (that may not be an issue for the sport, if vehicles are set off at timed intervals and don't tend to catch one another - not sure).
Bill Gates. This guy is a brilliant programmer (which Steve Jobs could never do)
True, Jobs wasn't a programmer. But neither was Bill. Sure, he understood what code WAS, but that isn't enough to make you a "brilliant" programmer. (Jobs also knew what code was). In fact, the only thing that makes a brilliant programmer is writing code, day in, day out, making lots of mistakes and learning from them. Bill never had time for that, it wasn't his job. People who have seen Bill's early coding efforts (I haven't) have said that it's of low-to-average quality, the sort of thing that most of us write early in our careers.
Slashdot Mirror
a utility that was written by someone who hasn't paid Apple's $99 fee for a developer's license
According to Gruber at Daring Fireball, the developer IDs will be issued free of charge. It's only if you want to submit to the App Store that you need to pay $99.
I'd group the vinyl and tape people in with the vhs heads
VHS is really a very poor quality video format. Just look at it! You can't really say that about vinyl and tape for audio, both of which are capable of high fidelity.
I'm not a golden-eared vinyl afficionado, and in general I much prefer CDs, but there's a big difference between a good CD and a bad CD, much bigger than the difference between a good and bad vinyl recording. That's because of the stupidity of the labels over the last 15 years in insisting that everything is mastered as loud as possible, reducing the effective dynamic range of CDs to often less than 10dB! You can't attempt that with vinyl because it won't physically work.
Properly done digital is indeed superior to all those formats - but show me a properly done CD and I'll show you 9 others that are garbage.
When I was a young lad, I made and flew radio-controlled model airplanes. I neither asked nor got permission from any government agencies.
So what?
When my father was a young lad in the 1930s you could fly a full-size aeroplane pretty much anywhere you wanted, without requiring substantial training, land anywhere you wanted and people rarely bothered you. Things have changed. Your point?
faux turtleneck...
What on earth is a "faux" turtleneck? Seriously, is that a US term? Over here and in the UK they just call that style a "turtleneck". What's faux about it?
I was 20 when the C64 came on the scene, and was an apprentice electronics engineer, mostly in the analogue/RF field. Digital logic was something I understood, but microprocessors, as such, were not. I bought a C64 because I'd used a PET and thought BASIC would be something worth learning, with half a mind on a game idea I had. BASIC soon proved useless, so I turned to an assembler cartridge (bought rather expensively at the time) called MIKRO64. This unlocked the full available power of the machine, but more importantly, it made me understand how a microprocessor actually worked. Back then, the whole architecture was easily understood down to the last register, plus the 64 came with full schematics! This proved to be a most important eye-opener because in the industry I worked in, within a few years, nearly all designs had moved to having a processor at their heart, and programming replaced the old-school logic and analogue design I'd come up with. Without the 64, chances are I would not have been able to keep up in electronics, and eventually go into programming as a career.
I upped a Mac IIsi from 20 to 25MHz once. It was well worthwhile. In fact, that's a 20% increase - I bet you'd be hard-pressed to get a reliable 20% improvement on anything these days.
I suppose there is some larger scheme here that I am missing.
Well, some people, you know, like making stuff for themselves, rather than being just another consumer. It's infinitely more satisfying to make something than to buy it, even if it's more costly.
That said, I can't see what licensing has to do with this. Publish the plans and if they're any good people will use them. If the motivation is really ego, and simply attaching your name to the design isn't enough, then perhaps the OP needs to rethink the reason he wants to do this.
Have a set of original 1971 clackers in the kitchen drawer. Already introduced our 5-yo daughter to them - she can already do them better than me. I just cower, expecting them to explode violently...
Wow, really profound and mind-blowing.
Anyway.
Back to the porn...
C'mon, let's have a challenge here.
Mornington Crescent.
iTo navigate a city looks like it was planned by throwing spaghetti at a wall and calling it a map.
Nevertheless, London is pretty understandable if you have to go there more than a few times. While I wouldn't claim to know all of it well, I know certain sections of it fairly well. It's fun to use your mental model of where things are to try and find a new route that brings you out close to your destination (probably best not tried if you are pressed for time). It doesn't always work but can lead to new discoveries.
When I drive in cities that use the grid model, I find myself bored. They are far too predictable and lose the power to surprise and entertain. It also is mildly irritating that there are no true short cuts as there are so few diagonals. The distance between any two points is always an integral multiple of "a block". How is that any fun?
I lived for many years in the UK town where Kodak had its European headquarters and plant - Hemel Hempstead. It's all gone now. Even the town only "skyscraper" which was Kodak offices has been converted to residential use. Makes me wonder where all those thousands of employees are working now.
Predicting the future is hard. Look at that scene in "The Man Who Fell To Earth" where Newton invents an instant camera. Instant is something anyone could see would be a winner, but no-one at that time saw it happening without using film.
Not really linked to the story, but it gives me a chance to relate this tale of idiocy.
A friend was pulled over by police for running through an intersection just as it turned from amber to red instead of stopping. She said that because the car behind was tailgating (business as usual), to have stopped would have caused an accident, so in her judgement it was safer to continue. That cut no ice and she was booked. Eventually they let her go and then pulled out behind her and followed. At the next intersection, the lights were on amber so this time she stopped. The police patrol car ploughed straight into her rear. They booked her again (she was naturally livid) but elected to take the matter to court. She was cleared of all charges including the original offence and the police had to pay all costs. Justice.
Sometimes the right thing to do is to press on on amber - I usually stop but only if there's time to do it without the half-asleep moron behind rearranging the back of your car.
Yes it was, but it also required at least one (maybe more, I forget) custom plug-ins to actually work. XCMDs I think they were called. For example, Myst is in colour, but the colour support in HC 2.0 was woefully poor, and 1.x never had it at all.
In 1000 years or more, they'll have no idea what we were up to at all. At lease some paper records have a chance of surviving.
No. You cannot compare it with anything that "was just around the corner" - it didn't exist yet. I don't recall AmigaOS being much ahead of the Mac (not "Mac OS", it wasn't called an OS for another 10 years), though it did have some nice features and eventually, some nice tools. Apart from Smalltalk, on which you might have a point, none of those other things would have been usable on a 68000 processor. It's questionable whether any sort of OOP runtime could have run on it. You could argue that the CPU was too small for the job, but the software was well tailored to the architecture they chose, for better or worse. The point is, it was a very productive way to program for a while. I'm not saying it was anywhere near perfect, but calling it a piece of shit is to judge it by the standards of today, not 1984.
I should also mention that programming in pascal, something that also perhaps seems strange from todays point of view, was also a remarkably pleasant experience, coming from a background in bASIC and embedded assemblers of various flavours. Borland Turbo Pascal for the Mac was, in 1985-6, a very nice and fast environment.
looked nice but was hell to program
Actually, it wasn't hell to program. By the standards of the day, it was really not bad. Its built-in toolbox managed many chores for you - want a window, one line and you got one. Compared to today it looks quite low level, but at that time it was very high level. The first app I wrote for Mac (other than "hello world") was a full multi-windowed, menu and event driven affair that responded in real time to emergency radio transmissions. There was no way I could have done it if I had nothing but assembler and no toolbox. My main gripe at the time was the small screen and lack of colour, but that was fixed within a year.
The limited memory, lack of multi-tasking and all the rest of it that people think were a major headache were simply not a problem AT THE TIME. It was only later that people wanted and needed more.
Or just send them off with the telephone sanitisers.
Football IS an endurance sport. The amount of running needed over the full 90 minutes of a game is easily up there with some of the longest track events. Or did they mean some other game? (clue: if it's played exclusively with the feet it's football).
Mod -1, asinine.
There's a whole new software ecosystem being born right now. You can design, develop and code from home, and use one of the various App Stores to sell and market the products. If you get the right idea and do it well, the rewards are potentially huge. Having good ideas is the hard bit, but at least if you have one a) it's yours to do with as you please and b) you get all the rewards (less the App Store's cut, which is very reasonable in fact).
Using QR Codes is still complicated compared to simple barcodes. You need a fast camera, image processing, etc. That might be acceptable of course. But a simple laser barcode scanner is cheap and effective, and simpler to interface. You can print the barcode for the competitor on a sheet of office paper and stick it to a side window with tape. Super-cheap and likely to work. There could be a problem ensuring that several vehicles arriving at once were able to be scanned (that may not be an issue for the sport, if vehicles are set off at timed intervals and don't tend to catch one another - not sure).
How about sticking a big barcode to the competition number panel and use a simple barcode scanner to ID the vehicle as the beam breaker is triggered?
Bill Gates. This guy is a brilliant programmer (which Steve Jobs could never do)
True, Jobs wasn't a programmer. But neither was Bill. Sure, he understood what code WAS, but that isn't enough to make you a "brilliant" programmer. (Jobs also knew what code was). In fact, the only thing that makes a brilliant programmer is writing code, day in, day out, making lots of mistakes and learning from them. Bill never had time for that, it wasn't his job. People who have seen Bill's early coding efforts (I haven't) have said that it's of low-to-average quality, the sort of thing that most of us write early in our careers.