The Apple ][ came with manuals that had the ROM listings. The ][+ (at least) had a mini-assembler built right in (Sweet-16, baby!). It had full schematics right there in the box. The default "shell" was a BASIC interpreter, fer cryin' out loud!
The Apple ][ was most definitely a tinkerer's machine.
There's a huge difference between the Apple ][ and pretty much any mainstream computer available today. The Apple ][ (and to a certain extent, the Commodore 64) was simple. Almost everything you did was related to the hardware. If you wanted to do anything but launch programs, you pretty much had to learn something about the computer, and how computers operate in general. Anyone nostalgic for those days is nuts.
Don't get me wrong. I really loved the Apple ][. (This was before the ][+ or ][e, you puppies.) I believe I am a much stronger computer geek because of it. I'd wager those who learned computing on the Apple ][ make up a good percentage of the alpha geeks today.
Computers today are far cooler than they were back then. Part of the reason is, they no longer resemble "computers" so much as they are now communications devices, or information handling devices. The downside is that kids starting out these days aren't learning about the true fundamentals of how computers work. Also, they're shielded from even the ability to tinker with them.
That's not as much of a loss as you might suppose. It's not like it'd be the old Apple ][ experience anyway.
Right, but the gene distribution present within the population is indicative of the changes in genotype within the population.
The notion of evolving males is not silly. That's why peacocks have big bright displays, while peahens are boring brown. (This is even within the wild population of peacocks.)
This is called "sex selection," and Darwin wrote extensively about it.
Sony recalled CDs with the rootkit, and apologized. Sony has its flaws, but they after the initial fuck-up, they at least fixed the problem, and admitted they fucked up. They handled their fuck-up in an honorable way.
That is far better than many corporations, such as Microsoft. You own an XBox? Microsoft has fucked you more than Sony ever has. And Microsoft never admits a problem, let alone apologize for creating a problem.
So stop with the rootkit bullshit already. Start complaining about Sony's tendency to go it solo on digital formats and storage devices. (BluRay was at least created and backed by a consortium of many corporations -- so BluRay isn't one of those formats. Sony does get a cut of the profits, though.) Complain about how PSN kinda blows compared to XBox Live (though this article suggests Sony is doing something about that). Whine about how the PS3 is hard to program compared to the XBox.
But for god's sake, get it through your thick fanboi skull that Sony fixed the rootkit problem, and even apologized.
LOL. How many people have Christians persecuted since, say, 1800? Quite few, if any. How many Christians have atheists killed for their Christianity? Quite a bit.
I call shenanigans. And bullshit.
Christians in the US are currently persecuting homosexuals. There is also persecution of atheists. And quite a few cases of persecution of Muslims, or any person vaguely Middle Eastern-looking.
In Africa, there are people murdered all the time for being "witches." This, by practicing Christians.
Then, there are the doctors who have been shot by "pro-life" fanatics. And then the many people who have been harassed and attacked outside clinics that perform abortions.
So, how 'bout you take your little persecution complex somewhere else?
But I'm sure it makes you feel better that atheists did it because they didn't want to "spread their religion". Even though I'm rather quite sure the USSR persecuted Christians in order to, you know, spread atheism.
As has been pointed out, the Soviet Union replaced organized religion with their own form of organized religion, based around The State. This was a power play to remove the church as a competitor. Churches tend to be dictatorial (SEE cases in which people have been driven from their church on any point of dogma). As the Soviet state wished absolute power, they removed the church. So it wasn't "atheists killing Christians," it was "dictators killing religious people who might follow something other than the state."
This was not about "spreading the gospel of atheism," or any other bullshit like that.
Agnosticism is about epistemology -- it's the position that you can't know for certain whether or not god exists.
Theism/atheism is about ontology.
Theism is believing gods exist.
Atheism is believing god does not exist.
Most agnostics are either atheist or theist. There are few agnostics who leave the existence of god in that quantum state of both existing and not existing.
Yes. I know the difference. C is an elegant if simple language, which is hard to program properly. C++ is an abomination that attempted to take the elegant, simple nature of C by bolting on spare body parts from dead object-oriented corpses, resulting in a language that is neither simple nor elegant, which is even harder to program properly.
See, I know the difference.
But if the point is to gain efficiency, why would you stop at C++? It's not a magical perfect balance of performance with elegance. C would give better performance than C++.
Sure, there's the non-OO tradeoff (though you could quite easily gain the benefits of OO, though not as elegantly as C++), and then you don't have to deal with fucking templates (which are really nice to program, but a bitch to clean up when someone else has fucked them up for you).
The premise of the article is stupid, and shows a pure lack of understanding of PHP, web service architecture and implementation, and a not-inconsiderable dose of C++ fanboi-ism.
In fact, I *don't* want to cheer for Microsoft. Or Sun. Or Apple. Or IBM. Or even Red Hat (much).
Any company that holds software patents and has not worked to eliminate software patents is complicit in this fucked-up mess. This is especially true of any company that has attempted to enforce their software patents (I'm lookin' at you, Microsoft, IBM, Tivoli, Oracle, and any number of other companies).
Yes, patent trolls are the scum of the earth, right there with spammers and people who use off-ramps and shoulders as passing lanes. But those companies that hold software patents and do not fight to eliminate software patents are part of the problem; those that hold software patents and have actively fought to maintain the current system are even worse.
So one of my users accidentally runs your trojan. No problem. I write a script that cleans it up on every machine in my network without interfering with the users at all. It takes me about 5 minutes.
On MS-Windows, I have to go around to every machine on the network to clean it up. There have been times I've had to re-ghost a machine because it was so infected.
I'm not sure what this whole apple-to-oranges gedanken is all about. It surely doesn't explain how MS-Windows is just as secure as Linux.
Powerpoint is the worst fucking program ever written. It has no point except to fill up time with mindless drivel, to divert your attention so you don't notice the presenter perpetually has a booger hanging from his nose, and to make you think you're getting actual information, when in fact you are getting a series of tweets.
Apple doesn't try to get away with this: when you spend $700 on an Apple computer, you get a real computer, not just a web device; or, you get a teeny-tiny portable computer that doubles as a phone.
While I like the idea of the litl, the price tag is a little hefty. I'm really not considering getting one, and I buy *everything.* (I have an Openmoko phone, an iPhone, and a Google dev phone. I'm a sucker for new tech.)
When family members ask me which computer to buy, I tell 'em to get a Mac. Their refurbs are fairly well priced, and look brand-new.
I get lots of support requests for PCs. None for Macs. There are several Macs in the family, usually with the less-computer-literate folks, and I never get calls from them.
This is just anecdotal, of course. But I've heard the same from other people. Macs just don't seem to require much support at all.
I'm writing iPhone apps -- they are *very* easy to write. Extremely easy. Special effects and other eye-candy is automatic. The APIs are very clean, and well-organized, and (most importantly) extremely well documented. For the iPhone, the controls are built for MVC, and the design patterns are well-done. Objective-C (which I haven't used since the NeXT days) is one of the best OO languages around (far better than the complex mess that is C++, IMNSHO). Interfaces files are saved as XIB, making them easy to CVS and edit by hand or via a pipeline. Everything is developer-friendly.
However.
Provisioning an iPhone can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes it just fails. Now, maybe I just don't understand all the nuances of provisioning. But if *I* don't get understand it completely, how is a customer supposed to be able to test interim releases? Every release requires me to personally install the update on their iPhone.
Anyway. I love developing for the iPhone. I hate the restrictions on it.
This is fucking ludicrous. A large part of the failure of school is because the parents don't get involved. Studies have consistently shown that schools with high parent involvement produce better-educated children, and parents who engage their children outside of school produce better-educated children.
If parents aren't getting involved in education when the bulk of the burden is on someone else, why would they take any more time to do the whole thing themselves?
Schools are necessary. Very few parents have the necessary knowledge or experience to properly educate a child. If there is a problem with the school system here in the states, it's up to us to fix it.
I certainly don't want a society full of uneducated twits. We have enough of those now.
I knew our society was starting to distrust intelligence and education, and making ignorance a virtue, but this is fucking ridiculous.
Bell's Theorem has previously been disproven. As with all universal negatives, you only need to find one exception to disprove it. Joy Christian presented a disproof using Clifford algebra.
Citing Bell's Theorem no longer constitutes a rebuttal against local variables.
As for the cellular-automata models, it's really not that outlandish. Consider how molecules are made up of atoms, or any other emergent system. They are all cellular automata to one extent or another.
Still, we'll have to see. Quantum physics has been at a near-standstill for the last twenty-five years. It's good to see some movement, even if it turns out wrong.
Someday, science will be just another thing your computer can do for you. If you want a new product, your computer will just plug into a cloud, design it, and then seek a manufacturing shop somewhere to make it and ship it to you.
That's not science, that's engineering. Science is the methodical discovery of the principles of reality through observation and abstraction. Engineering is a much simpler task, and one which AI may be able to handle in a few years. Science, on the other hand, will be a little more difficult, as it requires abstraction and creativity.
The Macs I've owned over the past few years (starting with a Powerbook for my wife) have been excellent. The hardware and construction are top-notch. The design (worth a little bit, anyway) is superior to pretty much everything produced in the Wintel arena.
Most important, though, the OS kicks ass.
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable. Combine the excellent hardware engineering, and the superior UI design of OS X, and you have a machine that is worth the extra money. (Which really isn't extra. As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.)
Me, I still gravitate to Linux. When my wife ran MS-Windows, though, I had to either lock her machine down and manage it myself, or let her manage it, but re-install the OS every six months. With OS X, she can manage the machine herself, and I don't have to lock it down or re-install all the time.
My sig still holds. MS-Windows (and the machines it typically runs on) is like Budweiser. Cheap, but not worth the price. Once you get used to the good stuff, it's hard to go back to the shit peddled as "The King of Computers."
I was going to get my wife a Kindle for her birthday. She asked, "What's the point? The books are almost as expensive, and I can't send them to my mom or sister when I'm done. And what happens when the hardware breaks, and I need to get a new one? I don't want to be forced to get a Kindle just because those are the books I bought before. Fuck 'em."
Slashdot Mirror
Google Patents Country-Specific Content Blocking
Cool. I'm glad someone's taking a stand for decent music everywhere.
The Apple ][ came with manuals that had the ROM listings. The ][+ (at least) had a mini-assembler built right in (Sweet-16, baby!). It had full schematics right there in the box. The default "shell" was a BASIC interpreter, fer cryin' out loud!
The Apple ][ was most definitely a tinkerer's machine.
There's a huge difference between the Apple ][ and pretty much any mainstream computer available today. The Apple ][ (and to a certain extent, the Commodore 64) was simple. Almost everything you did was related to the hardware. If you wanted to do anything but launch programs, you pretty much had to learn something about the computer, and how computers operate in general. Anyone nostalgic for those days is nuts.
Don't get me wrong. I really loved the Apple ][. (This was before the ][+ or ][e, you puppies.) I believe I am a much stronger computer geek because of it. I'd wager those who learned computing on the Apple ][ make up a good percentage of the alpha geeks today.
Computers today are far cooler than they were back then. Part of the reason is, they no longer resemble "computers" so much as they are now communications devices, or information handling devices. The downside is that kids starting out these days aren't learning about the true fundamentals of how computers work. Also, they're shielded from even the ability to tinker with them.
That's not as much of a loss as you might suppose. It's not like it'd be the old Apple ][ experience anyway.
I hope he warns them about FBI posing as 13-year-old choirboys.
Right, but the gene distribution present within the population is indicative of the changes in genotype within the population.
The notion of evolving males is not silly. That's why peacocks have big bright displays, while peahens are boring brown. (This is even within the wild population of peacocks.)
This is called "sex selection," and Darwin wrote extensively about it.
One little murder and they're Jack the Ripper.
Sony recalled CDs with the rootkit, and apologized. Sony has its flaws, but they after the initial fuck-up, they at least fixed the problem, and admitted they fucked up. They handled their fuck-up in an honorable way.
That is far better than many corporations, such as Microsoft. You own an XBox? Microsoft has fucked you more than Sony ever has. And Microsoft never admits a problem, let alone apologize for creating a problem.
So stop with the rootkit bullshit already. Start complaining about Sony's tendency to go it solo on digital formats and storage devices. (BluRay was at least created and backed by a consortium of many corporations -- so BluRay isn't one of those formats. Sony does get a cut of the profits, though.) Complain about how PSN kinda blows compared to XBox Live (though this article suggests Sony is doing something about that). Whine about how the PS3 is hard to program compared to the XBox.
But for god's sake, get it through your thick fanboi skull that Sony fixed the rootkit problem, and even apologized.
In Africa, many Christians are targeted.
Of course, that's by other, different Christians.
LOL. How many people have Christians persecuted since, say, 1800? Quite few, if any. How many Christians have atheists killed for their Christianity? Quite a bit.
I call shenanigans. And bullshit.
Christians in the US are currently persecuting homosexuals. There is also persecution of atheists. And quite a few cases of persecution of Muslims, or any person vaguely Middle Eastern-looking.
In Africa, there are people murdered all the time for being "witches." This, by practicing Christians.
Then, there are the doctors who have been shot by "pro-life" fanatics. And then the many people who have been harassed and attacked outside clinics that perform abortions.
So, how 'bout you take your little persecution complex somewhere else?
But I'm sure it makes you feel better that atheists did it because they didn't want to "spread their religion". Even though I'm rather quite sure the USSR persecuted Christians in order to, you know, spread atheism.
As has been pointed out, the Soviet Union replaced organized religion with their own form of organized religion, based around The State. This was a power play to remove the church as a competitor. Churches tend to be dictatorial (SEE cases in which people have been driven from their church on any point of dogma). As the Soviet state wished absolute power, they removed the church. So it wasn't "atheists killing Christians," it was "dictators killing religious people who might follow something other than the state."
This was not about "spreading the gospel of atheism," or any other bullshit like that.
Agnosticism is about epistemology -- it's the position that you can't know for certain whether or not god exists.
Theism/atheism is about ontology.
Theism is believing gods exist.
Atheism is believing god does not exist.
Most agnostics are either atheist or theist. There are few agnostics who leave the existence of god in that quantum state of both existing and not existing.
Yes. I know the difference. C is an elegant if simple language, which is hard to program properly. C++ is an abomination that attempted to take the elegant, simple nature of C by bolting on spare body parts from dead object-oriented corpses, resulting in a language that is neither simple nor elegant, which is even harder to program properly.
See, I know the difference.
But if the point is to gain efficiency, why would you stop at C++? It's not a magical perfect balance of performance with elegance. C would give better performance than C++.
Sure, there's the non-OO tradeoff (though you could quite easily gain the benefits of OO, though not as elegantly as C++), and then you don't have to deal with fucking templates (which are really nice to program, but a bitch to clean up when someone else has fucked them up for you).
The premise of the article is stupid, and shows a pure lack of understanding of PHP, web service architecture and implementation, and a not-inconsiderable dose of C++ fanboi-ism.
Yes yes, very nice. Now make the language not shit, please.
This, in a discussion of C++?
Cool. Then C would be even faster. It should all be written in C.
In fact, I *don't* want to cheer for Microsoft. Or Sun. Or Apple. Or IBM. Or even Red Hat (much).
Any company that holds software patents and has not worked to eliminate software patents is complicit in this fucked-up mess. This is especially true of any company that has attempted to enforce their software patents (I'm lookin' at you, Microsoft, IBM, Tivoli, Oracle, and any number of other companies).
Yes, patent trolls are the scum of the earth, right there with spammers and people who use off-ramps and shoulders as passing lanes. But those companies that hold software patents and do not fight to eliminate software patents are part of the problem; those that hold software patents and have actively fought to maintain the current system are even worse.
So fuck 'em both.
So one of my users accidentally runs your trojan. No problem. I write a script that cleans it up on every machine in my network without interfering with the users at all. It takes me about 5 minutes.
On MS-Windows, I have to go around to every machine on the network to clean it up. There have been times I've had to re-ghost a machine because it was so infected.
I'm not sure what this whole apple-to-oranges gedanken is all about. It surely doesn't explain how MS-Windows is just as secure as Linux.
Powerpoint is the worst fucking program ever written. It has no point except to fill up time with mindless drivel, to divert your attention so you don't notice the presenter perpetually has a booger hanging from his nose, and to make you think you're getting actual information, when in fact you are getting a series of tweets.
Powerpoint blows.
Computers blow.
That's why I refuse to ever use a computer.
Apple doesn't try to get away with this: when you spend $700 on an Apple computer, you get a real computer, not just a web device; or, you get a teeny-tiny portable computer that doubles as a phone.
While I like the idea of the litl, the price tag is a little hefty. I'm really not considering getting one, and I buy *everything.* (I have an Openmoko phone, an iPhone, and a Google dev phone. I'm a sucker for new tech.)
Seriously.
When family members ask me which computer to buy, I tell 'em to get a Mac. Their refurbs are fairly well priced, and look brand-new.
I get lots of support requests for PCs. None for Macs. There are several Macs in the family, usually with the less-computer-literate folks, and I never get calls from them.
This is just anecdotal, of course. But I've heard the same from other people. Macs just don't seem to require much support at all.
I'm writing iPhone apps -- they are *very* easy to write. Extremely easy. Special effects and other eye-candy is automatic. The APIs are very clean, and well-organized, and (most importantly) extremely well documented. For the iPhone, the controls are built for MVC, and the design patterns are well-done. Objective-C (which I haven't used since the NeXT days) is one of the best OO languages around (far better than the complex mess that is C++, IMNSHO). Interfaces files are saved as XIB, making them easy to CVS and edit by hand or via a pipeline. Everything is developer-friendly.
However.
Provisioning an iPhone can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes it just fails. Now, maybe I just don't understand all the nuances of provisioning. But if *I* don't get understand it completely, how is a customer supposed to be able to test interim releases? Every release requires me to personally install the update on their iPhone.
Anyway. I love developing for the iPhone. I hate the restrictions on it.
This is fucking ludicrous. A large part of the failure of school is because the parents don't get involved. Studies have consistently shown that schools with high parent involvement produce better-educated children, and parents who engage their children outside of school produce better-educated children.
If parents aren't getting involved in education when the bulk of the burden is on someone else, why would they take any more time to do the whole thing themselves?
Schools are necessary. Very few parents have the necessary knowledge or experience to properly educate a child. If there is a problem with the school system here in the states, it's up to us to fix it.
I certainly don't want a society full of uneducated twits. We have enough of those now.
I knew our society was starting to distrust intelligence and education, and making ignorance a virtue, but this is fucking ridiculous.
Bell's Theorem has previously been disproven. As with all universal negatives, you only need to find one exception to disprove it. Joy Christian presented a disproof using Clifford algebra.
Citing Bell's Theorem no longer constitutes a rebuttal against local variables.
As for the cellular-automata models, it's really not that outlandish. Consider how molecules are made up of atoms, or any other emergent system. They are all cellular automata to one extent or another.
Still, we'll have to see. Quantum physics has been at a near-standstill for the last twenty-five years. It's good to see some movement, even if it turns out wrong.
It's the Man! I knew it.
Because they're not the government?
Someday, science will be just another thing your computer can do for you. If you want a new product, your computer will just plug into a cloud, design it, and then seek a manufacturing shop somewhere to make it and ship it to you.
That's not science, that's engineering. Science is the methodical discovery of the principles of reality through observation and abstraction. Engineering is a much simpler task, and one which AI may be able to handle in a few years. Science, on the other hand, will be a little more difficult, as it requires abstraction and creativity.
The Macs I've owned over the past few years (starting with a Powerbook for my wife) have been excellent. The hardware and construction are top-notch. The design (worth a little bit, anyway) is superior to pretty much everything produced in the Wintel arena.
Most important, though, the OS kicks ass.
Using a Mac is not just a neutral experience. It is pleasurable. Combine the excellent hardware engineering, and the superior UI design of OS X, and you have a machine that is worth the extra money. (Which really isn't extra. As others have pointed out, a comparable Wintel machine is in the same price range.)
Me, I still gravitate to Linux. When my wife ran MS-Windows, though, I had to either lock her machine down and manage it myself, or let her manage it, but re-install the OS every six months. With OS X, she can manage the machine herself, and I don't have to lock it down or re-install all the time.
My sig still holds. MS-Windows (and the machines it typically runs on) is like Budweiser. Cheap, but not worth the price. Once you get used to the good stuff, it's hard to go back to the shit peddled as "The King of Computers."
For the really lazy, there's always LyX.
I was going to get my wife a Kindle for her birthday. She asked, "What's the point? The books are almost as expensive, and I can't send them to my mom or sister when I'm done. And what happens when the hardware breaks, and I need to get a new one? I don't want to be forced to get a Kindle just because those are the books I bought before. Fuck 'em."
My wife, the non-geek. She gets it.