I'm not saying we need to write all apps in raw assembly, that's absurd. We rarely did that back in the day, except for extreme situations and bragging rights.
Speak for yourself.
I started out writing programs in hexadecimal. Assembly language simply wasn't practical on the machines I was using.
Then we got floppy disks...but I still did another four or five years of assembly language programming before I ever saw a compiler.
In light of the grandparent, my questions for you are:
1) Do you still use assembler as often as you did back then? 2) If not, is it because you weren't "lazy" then but now are?
No, it's because I write much larger programs.
The amount of time/effort needed to write assembly language programs grows exponentially as they grow larger. It's simply not worth it to gain a few percent of speed compared to a good compiler.
Much better to learn to disassemble critical code every now and again and learn what makes your compiler happy.
A much better answer is to ban any religion that thinks going out on the street and being violent is the right response to something they saw on a web page.
I don't watch much TV because I just don't have the time
This neatly answers the question of what's wrong with TV: It doesn't fit into people's schedules. If you're not available when the TV company is broadcasting then you're out of luck.
Then there's all the timewasting adverts. You might think a show starts at 10:30 but the broadcasters see the schedule time as a way to get you sitting down to watch a few adverts, nothing more. You might waste 20 minutes before it actually starts (at least, that's what they do around here).
Yes there's TIVO to timeshift things but it's only a half measure. You still have to be sitting in the right room in front of the right screen and you have to remember to program it to record the shows you want.
So far the only answer to these problems has been BitTorrent. But if the MAFIAA gets their way then pretty soon you'll have the outside world disconnected and/or be sent to prison for doing that.
Since no one else reads the article, I'll have to explain: it has many incorrect/missing words. It's as if it was written on a phone keyboard, with word completion, or something.
You could also mention that he uses it in a docking thing with a keyboard so he's using it more like a laptop than a tablet.
The architectures Android was tailored towards both in backend and in api were designed and utilized with instruction frugality and hardware limitations in mind.
Yep. Pretty much all the Android tablet reviews so far have ended with "it's nice but it's a bit slow..."
(Which is what happens when you try to make a tablet for a quarter of the price of an iPad)
If this fixes that then iPad is dead.
Well, not dead, but expect the ratio of Android tablets to iPads to head in the same direction as the ratio of desktop PCs to desktop Macs, laptop PCs to Macbooks. ie. a Fraction of the market share.
The BBC Micro at 2MHz was considerably faster than the Spectrum at 3.5MHz.
True, but it had far more screen RAM to update so it mostly evened out for games. The Beeb had slightly fancier graphics hardware though (eg. hardware screen scroll) and if you could leverage that you could do things that the Spectrum had no hope of doing.
The BBC easily had the best versions of early 80's arcade games - Defender, Asteroids, Scramble, Pacman. Nothing on any other machine could touch them.
I do not recall how many bytes were free for programming
It varied...
The screen display came out of the 1K of RAM but it only used as much RAM as was needed. There was a special 'end of line' character to mark the end of each screen line. A blank line only needed one byte (the end of line char). A line with 'Hello, world!' on it would need 14 bytes. A screenfull of text needed 768 bytes.
Many programs went to extremes to save RAM. There was a 1K chess program which displayed the moves as five chars at top of the screen, eg. 'E2E4+'. You had to use a real chess board to follow the game.
If I bought a million hard drives I'd expect several of them to not even power on. By your definition I'm sure the MTBF of all consumer hardware would be zero.
PS: MTBF means "Mean time between failures" not "Mean time before failure".
"Non-thermal electromagnetic radiation" means that electromagnetic radiation caused the effect through a nonthermal mechanism.
How exactly did they manage that? The frequencies used by WiFi are the same ones your microwave oven uses to cook food. The only way for the WiFi to not heat them up is to not switch it on.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is... there are SAFE reactor designs.
No, really. The fact that everybody is still using those old 1950s reactors is ludicrous.
I'm not saying we need to write all apps in raw assembly, that's absurd. We rarely did that back in the day, except for extreme situations and bragging rights.
Speak for yourself.
I started out writing programs in hexadecimal. Assembly language simply wasn't practical on the machines I was using.
Then we got floppy disks...but I still did another four or five years of assembly language programming before I ever saw a compiler.
In light of the grandparent, my questions for you are:
1) Do you still use assembler as often as you did back then?
2) If not, is it because you weren't "lazy" then but now are?
No, it's because I write much larger programs.
The amount of time/effort needed to write assembly language programs grows exponentially as they grow larger. It's simply not worth it to gain a few percent of speed compared to a good compiler.
Much better to learn to disassemble critical code every now and again and learn what makes your compiler happy.
Care to back up your claim? I'll understand if you haven't used Java since 1.2, but that's hardly relevant today.
Ummm, isn't that exactly what he was claiming?
Yep, religion rears it's ugly head, again.
A much better answer is to ban any religion that thinks going out on the street and being violent is the right response to something they saw on a web page.
Root of all evil...etc.
Progress marches on...
I don't watch much TV because I just don't have the time
This neatly answers the question of what's wrong with TV: It doesn't fit into people's schedules. If you're not available when the TV company is broadcasting then you're out of luck.
Then there's all the timewasting adverts. You might think a show starts at 10:30 but the broadcasters see the schedule time as a way to get you sitting down to watch a few adverts, nothing more. You might waste 20 minutes before it actually starts (at least, that's what they do around here).
Yes there's TIVO to timeshift things but it's only a half measure. You still have to be sitting in the right room in front of the right screen and you have to remember to program it to record the shows you want.
So far the only answer to these problems has been BitTorrent. But if the MAFIAA gets their way then pretty soon you'll have the outside world disconnected and/or be sent to prison for doing that.
The UK likes to pretend it isn't in the USA's pocket...if they can get the Sweden thing to work then they look blameless so it's worth a try.
Since no one else reads the article, I'll have to explain: it has many incorrect/missing words. It's as if it was written on a phone keyboard, with word completion, or something.
You could also mention that he uses it in a docking thing with a keyboard so he's using it more like a laptop than a tablet.
Not really. If he wins his appeal then he's safe in the UK.
Yeah, but he won't. The whole thing is corrupt from top to bottom.
Yep. Why should anybody have to own/administer a complex machine when all they want is to connect and consume.
The architectures Android was tailored towards both in backend and in api were designed and utilized with instruction frugality and hardware limitations in mind.
Is that why they used Java?
It's about user experience.
Nobody I know seems to be having any trouble using their Android phones.
I've used both. There's not really much difference.
*sigh*
Tegra 3 is faster than the A5? Whoopty-doo.
Yep. Pretty much all the Android tablet reviews so far have ended with "it's nice but it's a bit slow..."
(Which is what happens when you try to make a tablet for a quarter of the price of an iPad)
If this fixes that then iPad is dead.
Well, not dead, but expect the ratio of Android tablets to iPads to head in the same direction as the ratio of desktop PCs to desktop Macs, laptop PCs to Macbooks. ie. a Fraction of the market share.
The BBC Micro at 2MHz was considerably faster than the Spectrum at 3.5MHz.
True, but it had far more screen RAM to update so it mostly evened out for games. The Beeb had slightly fancier graphics hardware though (eg. hardware screen scroll) and if you could leverage that you could do things that the Spectrum had no hope of doing.
The BBC easily had the best versions of early 80's arcade games - Defender, Asteroids, Scramble, Pacman. Nothing on any other machine could touch them.
The BBC Micro let you put the BASIC code anywhere in RAM to execute it.
I do not recall how many bytes were free for programming
It varied...
The screen display came out of the 1K of RAM but it only used as much RAM as was needed. There was a special 'end of line' character to mark the end of each screen line. A blank line only needed one byte (the end of line char). A line with 'Hello, world!' on it would need 14 bytes. A screenfull of text needed 768 bytes.
Many programs went to extremes to save RAM. There was a 1K chess program which displayed the moves as five chars at top of the screen, eg. 'E2E4+'. You had to use a real chess board to follow the game.
They've also heard of the magic geoengineering fairy. It sound cheaper/easier to them.
I can't get worries out of my head
Do you also obsessively defragment your hard disks? Change you car's engine oil more often then the recommendation?
LOL! Where did you get that from?
If I bought a million hard drives I'd expect several of them to not even power on. By your definition I'm sure the MTBF of all consumer hardware would be zero.
PS: MTBF means "Mean time between failures" not "Mean time before failure".
as far as I know, the MTBF figure is not related to the number of rated write-cycles.
Of course it isn't, and that's the problem - the numbers are easy to manipulate.
"Non-thermal electromagnetic radiation" means that electromagnetic radiation caused the effect through a nonthermal mechanism.
How exactly did they manage that? The frequencies used by WiFi are the same ones your microwave oven uses to cook food. The only way for the WiFi to not heat them up is to not switch it on.
Maybe you need to put less words in your emails...
ICQ? Wow, I think we just had a post arrive through a wormhole from the 1990s.