The governments in many other parts of the world are so unstable, and their currency collapses or withers away from inflation so fast, that it's trivial for them to roll out totally new currency quite often.
That phenomenon isn't the case in the US. US currency has changed very little for close to a century.
People take the old greenback a lot more seriously than they do the full color mickeymouse currency from a lot of other places (i.e. Disneyworld, Canada, France, etc.)
A friend of mine got a high quality Tektronix color printer, with a skid load of supplies, for free a few months ago. He works as one of those guys who builds cubicles and pulls cable. He got the printer for free because he noticed it at the loading dock on it's way to the trash.
It works perfectly.
As long as tech like that is randomly available to joe-sixpack (the kind of person my friend is) there will be problems.
Someone experienced in hardware design and assembly programming probably has no experience with higher-level programming.
Yes. That very thing got me into trouble in the first C Programming course I took. I'd already rolled out a commercial single-chip design written in bare Assembly Language. There were thousands of them out in the field being used. But I completely missed the point of the standard library for most of the course. In the final exam I ran out of time hand-coding my primatives, when there was an appendix to the test paper listing 'system calls' we were supposed to make use of in our answers.
I've since gotten more of a clue, but am still (as are a lot of bare-hardware ASM coders) a control-freak when programming who prefers to not ride on the back of somebody else's code. It's not a good thing, some of the time.
Use PIC embedded controllers, as made by Microchip. There are PIC controllers that have absolutely TINY hardware footprints. They make single-chip processors in as small as an 8-pin package, both through-hole and surface mount. For the kind of design you're talking about, you'd use an external LCD controller, probably one talked to over a two wire serial interface. If you start delving into the huge mass of PIC enthusiast's websites, you'll probably find your display technology without difficulty.
You can also wire together your own processors using TTL chips and lots of wire wrap sockets. It's not likely to lead to any leading-edge designs, but who knows?
Every program you write is run inside the operating system, right?
That's where you are completely wrong.
Assembly Language programs can pimp off the I/O and system calls of an Operating System. They do not have to. As an extreme example: an 'x86 assembly language program can be written that replaces the BIOS ROM chip on a PC motherboard. You can then use the ISA channel drivers as general purpose I/O ports and roll out a 'single board computer' design.
In general, there are more 'computers' and 'microcontrollers' out there running Assembly language on 'bare hardware' than there are 'computers' running 'Operating Systems.'
From my point of view, the problem is inherent in your smudging together of 'IT' and 'Computer Science.'
IT is Information Technology, and there are many types of technology that can and are used to house and organize information. IBM used to do it with decks of punched cards, long before the Computer became a necessity to actually process said cards (they sorted card decks with jumper-wire panels set to sort on fields). 'IT' is just an electronic form of a filing system. 'IT Professionals' are somewhat-brighter peers of the people who work in factories making filing cabinets.
Computer Science is something else. And yes, the blurring of the distinction is deplorable. Don't contribute to it.
But could any web-based forum be a 'peer review'? Who are the author's peers? Certainly not the random rabble who have web browsers.
Having an opinion does not automatically qualify that opinion as being worth expressing to the world. Certainly there are a number of loud people who state that about Wolfram himself.
Clearly he 'owns the press' that this self-published book was printed on. People who oppose him can buy a printing press, too. Or snipe at him from their tenured roosts, which appears to be the common phenomon.
There is something wrong, however, with not loving knowledge, and somehow still managing to be a 'scientist.' It implies somebody who played the academic game as far as possible, then nestled into a bureacracy because it was too scary to graduate and move out into the 'real world.'
I am NOT attacking any particular person with this comment.
It would cost them more than fifty bucks to fight the credit card company. Hell, it's probably already cost them more than fifty bucks to deal with this account holder, as he's already fought with them some. Some oversight person will look at the lack of activity on the Xbox Live account and cut their losses by accepting cancel from the credit card company.
The people this fellow has already encountered are the billing people, who deal with whiney kids and scammers for the most part. The people who interface with the credit card company speak a whole different language.
The 'HC11A1 part has enough built-in EEPROM memory to do quite a bit, if you're writing it all in assembly language, and becomes a true single-chip solution. I haven't used the HC08 mainly because I have so much 'HC11 'stuff' lying around. I'm not sure what you mean when you say it needs external memory.
For a job about five years ago I coded an 'HC05 part. (It was a biofeedback device for 'pelvic floor' muscle development- it was called the 'electro-kegel' by some- if you know what I'm getting at, yes, I wrote code for that...) We did it 'cheap', doing the whole development on one of Motorola's $500 Evaluation Boards hooked to PC's serial port. You can do a heck of a lot with Moto. or Microchip (PIC) parts without investing a whole lot. You're in an 8-bit world, then, but that's not so bad.
Sure it would still be possible. If you're a dissident in, say, Kuwait or Oklahoma, you just have a civil libertarian sort in, say, the Netherlands register your domain for you. If things got so out of line, or you were spamming to get people to visit said domain to buy, say, organ enlarging devices, there would be somebody responsible to go after. For political dissent, do you really think the police thugs in Kuwait or Oklahoma have any clout in the Netherlands?
Well, some of us code assembly on bare hardware. We have to roll our own 'api' and include it in there with the rest of the code.
I've worked before with programmers who had little experience in programming 'bare hardware'- they do really foolish things like not initing timers, setting up stack pointers, and the like.
Writing bare ASM code for a processor (where it boots up out of your own EPROM or on an emulator) is good experience in minimalism. It can give you a good feeling when the project is all done and you can say you did it all yourself.
For those interested in getting into this kind of thing, start with a PIC embedded controller and a cheap programmer. You can get PIC assembly language tools for free, and build a programmer, or buy a kit for a programmer, that plugs into your serial or parallel port. Your first PIC machine can be the CPU, a clock crystal, a few resistors and capacitors, and the LED you want to blink, or whatever other intrigues you. If you're not into complex soldering, and/or layout and complex schematics, you can buy pre-etched boards you just plug the PIC into.
Another easy-start processor would be the 68HC11. It has a bootstrap built into ROM. Basically, you can jumper the chip so it wakes up listening on the serial port for code you send down the wire at it, and burns it into the EEPROM memory in the 'HC11 chip itself. Move the jumper and reboot the chip, and it's running your code.
I think this is far more interesting that just writing apps that run on an Operating System you didn't roll yourself.
When I was the sysop of a popular social BBS in the late 80's people applying for an account were required to give their name and phone number. Further, the phone number was called, to 'validate' them and welcome them to the board.
This was not an uncommon practice.
It doesn't mean that everybody else who called the board knew their name and phone number, of course.
It's easier for a special mechanism to be set up for the abused woman to call from some anonymous phone system than it is for the whole world to be compromised because people contrive up a special case like 'an abused woman' to make their arguement.
There are definitely Civil Libertarian types who would in an upstanding fashion support Falun Gong websites and allow their names to be in the WHOIS registry to protect said Falun Gong organizations.
There's always a way to cut through weak excuses people offer for why (horrors!) there's no need for the kind of complete/widespread anonymnity that currently plagues the Internet.
The anti-spammers get the info of the people who own the domain and paid people to spam you from the WHOIS database, and put the whole game out of business.
They don't have to spend a whole lot of time tracking down the false WHOIS record holders.
Just spend a little bit of time trying to track them down. Then cancel their domains. Let them present themselves for identification when they want the domains un-canceled.
A fully validated WHOIS database would make it trivial to enforce punishment against people who use spammers to promote the websites and scams on said websites registered to them.
Why do you assume somebody who is going to send you a malware attachment will use apple's mail.app to send it to you? There are plenty of other mail clients that don't zip it up automatically.
Granted, some of them are regular mainstream apps for non-Apples and probably damage binaries from Apple's forked-up filesystem.
It's been clearly identified that recyling operations concentrate hazardous materials in ways that no other kinds of operations do.
Recycling creates superfund sites.
Plus, recycling is a swindling operation by the packaging industry. The sustainable alternative is to put things like soda and milk (and even Peanut Butter) in cleanable refillable containers. 'Recycling' promotes the myth that it's okay to drink soda out of disposable aluminum/plastic containers rather than returnable bottles. It's, to put it bluntly, a load of bullshit in many instances.
We're all psychopaths. At least by the definition you use. We all do things for 'political' reasons that have 'no gain.' Why didn't you just call me a 'communist' or a 'terrorist' while you were at it?
I was using a machine in the performance range of the Mac. The first one was an 8088 'XT' system I bought in pieces at a swapmeet. An $80 motherboard, about a hundred dollars worth of RAM (about 640K), two floppy drives. A floppy controller. A monitor I converted over from a dumb terminal and plugged into an IBM MDA card (later when I got rich a hercules compatible).
I spent about as much as a Mac user would spend to get an external floppy drive for his Mac Plus.
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The governments in many other parts of the world are so unstable, and their currency collapses or withers away from inflation so fast, that it's trivial for them to roll out totally new currency quite often.
That phenomenon isn't the case in the US. US currency has changed very little for close to a century.
People take the old greenback a lot more seriously than they do the full color mickeymouse currency from a lot of other places (i.e. Disneyworld, Canada, France, etc.)
A friend of mine got a high quality Tektronix color printer, with a skid load of supplies, for free a few months ago. He works as one of those guys who builds cubicles and pulls cable. He got the printer for free because he noticed it at the loading dock on it's way to the trash.
It works perfectly.
As long as tech like that is randomly available to joe-sixpack (the kind of person my friend is) there will be problems.
Hitler himself wasn't actually of German ancestry.
They have the paper book in the library about a half mile from where I sit. And I am talking 'small-town-podunk' library.
Someone experienced in hardware design and assembly programming probably has no experience with higher-level programming.
Yes. That very thing got me into trouble in the first C Programming course I took. I'd already rolled out a commercial single-chip design written in bare Assembly Language. There were thousands of them out in the field being used. But I completely missed the point of the standard library for most of the course. In the final exam I ran out of time hand-coding my primatives, when there was an appendix to the test paper listing 'system calls' we were supposed to make use of in our answers.
I've since gotten more of a clue, but am still (as are a lot of bare-hardware ASM coders) a control-freak when programming who prefers to not ride on the back of somebody else's code. It's not a good thing, some of the time.
Use PIC embedded controllers, as made by Microchip. There are PIC controllers that have absolutely TINY hardware footprints. They make single-chip processors in as small as an 8-pin package, both through-hole and surface mount. For the kind of design you're talking about, you'd use an external LCD controller, probably one talked to over a two wire serial interface. If you start delving into the huge mass of PIC enthusiast's websites, you'll probably find your display technology without difficulty.
You can also wire together your own processors using TTL chips and lots of wire wrap sockets. It's not likely to lead to any leading-edge designs, but who knows?
Every program you write is run inside the operating system, right?
That's where you are completely wrong.
Assembly Language programs can pimp off the I/O and system calls of an Operating System. They do not have to. As an extreme example: an 'x86 assembly language program can be written that replaces the BIOS ROM chip on a PC motherboard. You can then use the ISA channel drivers as general purpose I/O ports and roll out a 'single board computer' design.
In general, there are more 'computers' and 'microcontrollers' out there running Assembly language on 'bare hardware' than there are 'computers' running 'Operating Systems.'
From my point of view, the problem is inherent in your smudging together of 'IT' and 'Computer Science.'
IT is Information Technology, and there are many types of technology that can and are used to house and organize information. IBM used to do it with decks of punched cards, long before the Computer became a necessity to actually process said cards (they sorted card decks with jumper-wire panels set to sort on fields). 'IT' is just an electronic form of a filing system. 'IT Professionals' are somewhat-brighter peers of the people who work in factories making filing cabinets.
Computer Science is something else. And yes, the blurring of the distinction is deplorable. Don't contribute to it.
I think you overestimate us computer scientists.
Are you going to stand there all day scratching away at that chalkboard??
The LJ4 up on fourth floor is out of TONER dude! That is the sales floor! Get moving!
But could any web-based forum be a 'peer review'? Who are the author's peers? Certainly not the random rabble who have web browsers.
Having an opinion does not automatically qualify that opinion as being worth expressing to the world. Certainly there are a number of loud people who state that about Wolfram himself.
Clearly he 'owns the press' that this self-published book was printed on. People who oppose him can buy a printing press, too. Or snipe at him from their tenured roosts, which appears to be the common phenomon.
There is something wrong, however, with not loving knowledge, and somehow still managing to be a 'scientist.' It implies somebody who played the academic game as far as possible, then nestled into a bureacracy because it was too scary to graduate and move out into the 'real world.'
I am NOT attacking any particular person with this comment.
It would cost them more than fifty bucks to fight the credit card company. Hell, it's probably already cost them more than fifty bucks to deal with this account holder, as he's already fought with them some. Some oversight person will look at the lack of activity on the Xbox Live account and cut their losses by accepting cancel from the credit card company.
The people this fellow has already encountered are the billing people, who deal with whiney kids and scammers for the most part. The people who interface with the credit card company speak a whole different language.
The 'HC11A1 part has enough built-in EEPROM memory to do quite a bit, if you're writing it all in assembly language, and becomes a true single-chip solution. I haven't used the HC08 mainly because I have so much 'HC11 'stuff' lying around. I'm not sure what you mean when you say it needs external memory.
For a job about five years ago I coded an 'HC05 part. (It was a biofeedback device for 'pelvic floor' muscle development- it was called the 'electro-kegel' by some- if you know what I'm getting at, yes, I wrote code for that...) We did it 'cheap', doing the whole development on one of Motorola's $500 Evaluation Boards hooked to PC's serial port. You can do a heck of a lot with Moto. or Microchip (PIC) parts without investing a whole lot. You're in an 8-bit world, then, but that's not so bad.
Sure it would still be possible. If you're a dissident in, say, Kuwait or Oklahoma, you just have a civil libertarian sort in, say, the Netherlands register your domain for you. If things got so out of line, or you were spamming to get people to visit said domain to buy, say, organ enlarging devices, there would be somebody responsible to go after. For political dissent, do you really think the police thugs in Kuwait or Oklahoma have any clout in the Netherlands?
Well, some of us code assembly on bare hardware. We have to roll our own 'api' and include it in there with the rest of the code.
I've worked before with programmers who had little experience in programming 'bare hardware'- they do really foolish things like not initing timers, setting up stack pointers, and the like.
Writing bare ASM code for a processor (where it boots up out of your own EPROM or on an emulator) is good experience in minimalism. It can give you a good feeling when the project is all done and you can say you did it all yourself.
For those interested in getting into this kind of thing, start with a PIC embedded controller and a cheap programmer. You can get PIC assembly language tools for free, and build a programmer, or buy a kit for a programmer, that plugs into your serial or parallel port. Your first PIC machine can be the CPU, a clock crystal, a few resistors and capacitors, and the LED you want to blink, or whatever other intrigues you. If you're not into complex soldering, and/or layout and complex schematics, you can buy pre-etched boards you just plug the PIC into.
Another easy-start processor would be the 68HC11. It has a bootstrap built into ROM. Basically, you can jumper the chip so it wakes up listening on the serial port for code you send down the wire at it, and burns it into the EEPROM memory in the 'HC11 chip itself. Move the jumper and reboot the chip, and it's running your code.
I think this is far more interesting that just writing apps that run on an Operating System you didn't roll yourself.
When I was the sysop of a popular social BBS in the late 80's people applying for an account were required to give their name and phone number. Further, the phone number was called, to 'validate' them and welcome them to the board.
This was not an uncommon practice.
It doesn't mean that everybody else who called the board knew their name and phone number, of course.
It's easier for a special mechanism to be set up for the abused woman to call from some anonymous phone system than it is for the whole world to be compromised because people contrive up a special case like 'an abused woman' to make their arguement.
There are definitely Civil Libertarian types who would in an upstanding fashion support Falun Gong websites and allow their names to be in the WHOIS registry to protect said Falun Gong organizations.
There's always a way to cut through weak excuses people offer for why (horrors!) there's no need for the kind of complete/widespread anonymnity that currently plagues the Internet.
The anti-spammers get the info of the people who own the domain and paid people to spam you from the WHOIS database, and put the whole game out of business.
It's not your choice. It's society's choice.
They don't have to spend a whole lot of time tracking down the false WHOIS record holders.
Just spend a little bit of time trying to track them down. Then cancel their domains. Let them present themselves for identification when they want the domains un-canceled.
A fully validated WHOIS database would make it trivial to enforce punishment against people who use spammers to promote the websites and scams on said websites registered to them.
Why do you assume somebody who is going to send you a malware attachment will use apple's mail.app to send it to you? There are plenty of other mail clients that don't zip it up automatically.
Granted, some of them are regular mainstream apps for non-Apples and probably damage binaries from Apple's forked-up filesystem.
It's been clearly identified that recyling operations concentrate hazardous materials in ways that no other kinds of operations do.
Recycling creates superfund sites.
Plus, recycling is a swindling operation by the packaging industry. The sustainable alternative is to put things like soda and milk (and even Peanut Butter) in cleanable refillable containers. 'Recycling' promotes the myth that it's okay to drink soda out of disposable aluminum/plastic containers rather than returnable bottles. It's, to put it bluntly, a load of bullshit in many instances.
We're all psychopaths. At least by the definition you use. We all do things for 'political' reasons that have 'no gain.' Why didn't you just call me a 'communist' or a 'terrorist' while you were at it?
I was using a machine in the performance range of the Mac. The first one was an 8088 'XT' system I bought in pieces at a swapmeet. An $80 motherboard, about a hundred dollars worth of RAM (about 640K), two floppy drives. A floppy controller. A monitor I converted over from a dumb terminal and plugged into an IBM MDA card (later when I got rich a hercules compatible).
I spent about as much as a Mac user would spend to get an external floppy drive for his Mac Plus.
Lots of us were.
Maybe his landlord is cute. I can't imagine investing $7000 in enhancing the value of my landlord's property.
(I am not making these lyrics up)