Um, if I may point out to the people who, agreeing that we need to teach more programming, are hashing out *which* programming language to teach...*who* bloody cares which language? If you're born to code, the rottenest language in the world won't discourage you. If you're just not cut out to be a programmer, no language exists that will make you good at it.
I learned BASIC, Cobol, C, C++, Lisp, Assembler, Bash shell scripting, and Python in that order. Every language had it's strengths and weaknesses. Each language taught me valuable things about how to think about programming. Each language had features which made coding certain kinds of programs easier than others, and each had ways in which it was harder to code than all the others.
There is no magic language that will make you a perfect programmer, any more than there is a magic car that will make you a perfect driver.
Of course, the United States is falling behind the rest of the world, and that fact is blindingly obvious with no rhetoric, merely common sense:
Ask yourself, what is an intellectual like? What kind of atmosphere would an intellectual seek out? What kinds of things would appeal to an intellectual? What kinds of rewards would an intellectual seek out?
Now, take a peek around the US climate. Idiocy is shoved down our throats from every angle. Television is a waste-land of vapidity, bookstores stock light-weight fluff, education is the first thing to get cut whenever the wolverines in office need more pork to go around. Those who study and work hard are looked down upon as "geeks", "nerds", "bookworms" and worse, even to the point of getting beat up by the pick-up rednecks whenever they can't find any of their favorite minorities.
When I lived in Las Vegas, it came up to a vote on whether to build more libraries. Citizens of the city, who were thrilled to get 3 more hootie bars, 10 more casinos, and that "Wheel of Fortune" was auditioning at the Luxor, came out MARCHING IN PROTEST against building more libraries - the cheapest possible government expenditure!
Just today, there was a story in the news about Utah students who hooked a GPS up to a wheelchair to produce a satellite-guided navagation system for a small vehicle. Who are they looking to offer the idea to for further development? Car manufacturors, so we can have self-steering cars and have fewer accidents? Nursing homes, so more handicapped patients can have better mobility? Heck, no, they're gonna sell it to the military!
What is the richest person in our country rich for? A superior feat of engineering? No, a famously inadequate platform which he then keeps in business through legal bully tactics.
Who's the most famous American scientists? Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann? What was their field? Physics. What did we do with their research? Make bombs.
Hello, Average American. I'm an aspiring scientific researcher, looking for funding for my projects. Would you be interrested in contributing for...
AIDS research? "No, way, the sooner the fags die, the better!"
conservation? "What, are you some kinda tree-hugging hippie?"
alternative energy resources? "AAAAHHH! You're trying to devalue my Exxon stock!"
general medicine? "No, your stem-cell research is an abomination against God!"
computer science? "Thank God we have AOL to protect us against hackers like you!"
ah...
Hey, Average American! Name five NFL players!
Name five NASCAR drivers!
Name three Tournament-winning Golfers!
Name ONE Nobel-prize-winning scientist!
Yeah, America has *no* problem keeping ahead of the pack! We're *number one* and anybody who says different is just agenda-pushing and fear-mongering! Now don't bother me, I'm on my way to get that Godless evolutionary theory out of my child's educational curricullum.
Meanwhile, other countries see brains going to waste, and wouldn't at least one or two of them either strive to encourage their own brain-power or offer bigger salaries in the hopes of luring America's wasted talent overseas? What do you think, Average American? "Oh, no, anybody too stupid to speak English wouldn't think of that!"
Oh, my kid's school is locked into Microsoft but we're Linux geeks at home...I simply bust a gut every time I hear comments from the teacher about out daughter expressing disdain for Windows: "Where's the Supertux game?" "How come it doesn't have a kumpa screensaver?" "How come the computer freezes up?"
And *no* business *ever* asks you to do *anything* but make a power-point presentation or edit an office memo?
In any case, at a past job I had, when somebody suggested I use WordPerfect to edit the incompatable characters out of a thousand-line document (these characters were the result of saving the document on an earlier Microsoft product) I popped open my laptop and showed my boss how a one-line sed script could automate the job in one minute. As far as my boss was concerned, I walked on water for the rest of that month...especially since there were some 200 further documents yet to go...incidentally, they did end up paying more attention to the Unix workstations that were already in place in the server room.
If there's *nothing* you want your kids to do but use Word and Excell, Linux has comparable products that (a) work the same way, and (b) are free.
That's all we ever hear, isn't it? "We'll be teaching our kids to be programmers! I don't want *my* kid running around in a pocket protector and glasses patched with duct tape! ICK!" I'll never understand this until the end of my days. I can change the oil in my car and not be a mechanic. I can hang a towell rack in my bathroom and not be a carpenter. I can cook dinner and not be a chef. Hey, let's be *really* funny and say we can have sex without being a prostitute! OK, that's better. But when I say I wrote my own program, that makes me a "computer geek". If I let my daughter pop open a python prompt and bang out a few lines, I'm making her be a "nerd".
Look, make a file named "hello.c" on your Linux system, enter about five lines of a "hello world" code (google "hello world" and copy and paste what you find), save it, and at the prompt type:
gcc -o hello hello.c
Run the output. Now, ask yourself, why is Bill Gates a millionaire and you're not? See, programming doesn't require you to be a priest, you don't have to cast any runes or sacrifice goats under the full moon. It's about time we took control of our own machines, that we bought and paid for with our own money! Likewise, *my* kids are getting raised with the idea that writing a program to make a computer go is just another everyday, average skill that normal people have, like being able to push a button to make an elevator go without having to hire a specially-trained operator...
Computers are still young, and the culture still has a way to go before it's used to the concept. This step will help!
>> "Do kids these days even know multiplication tables without reaching for their cell phone's calculator app?"
Well, that's another bone to pick. I do see your point that computers aren't necessary to learning the three R's. But multiplication tables are just plain irrelevent. It took me about a month to learn multiplication, and for the rest of my school days I was irked at being forced to do pages and pages of multiplication when I was more interrested in exploring the higher mathematical concepts of Euler, Pascal, Fermat, and von Neumann. Everything worthwhile that I learned was because of libraries where I could get at the good stuff, and not by rote repetition of times tables. Are you saying it's *that* important to be able to compute 10-digit factorials in your head, or would you rather have a good grasp of probability theory so Las Vegas doesn't soak you so much? Just a rhetorical question - no attack, here!
This looks like a good place to mention: School boards have to worry about money. If you live in the United States, you get used to the idea that the government's budget thinks "global conquest", "grab money/power" first, and "take good care of our citizen's health, education, and environment" last, if at all. We private citizens look to other countries to lead the way, having abandoned all hope for ours.
The benefits of open-source software are the operating system's environment/philosophy. Want to know how a computer works? Here's the source code, read it yourself! Want to play around and experiment with computer science concepts, to make sure you understand them? Go ahead and change the software and re-compile it, nobody's stopping you! Got a better idea for how to do something, or a new idea that's never been done before? Here, here's compilers/interpretters for ten different programming languages, all free with free documentation and support! Our next Thomas Edison just might be playing with these toys right now, preparing to bring us our next technological revolution.
Unfortunately, most adults today still have the mindset that computers are exclusively the domain of a few millionaires, and are "hands-off" for the common joe. This just sends a message to the child in the classroom: "Hands off the computer, except for the limited programs we deem fit for you to use, and then only the way the corporations think they should be used!" We can either empower people and watch them learn, or enslave them and watch them shrivel.
ah, I wish it were so! But I'm still learning, myself, having discovered Linux and gotten into serious programming only a few years ago. At my blog http://hackersnest.modblog.com/ (also linkable from the blog in my sig), I post code in a few languages, intended to give others at my approximate learning level an example of how to do certain tricks, and also so I can track my own progress. In the "hobbies" section of the blogspot blog, I also occasionally share some howto on hardware topics, game guides, etc. But that's the extent of my contributions so far. While some of the code at hackersnest can have educational functions (word-guessing games and such) I have nothing aimed at the very young. Over time, I hope to get good enough that my graphics-intensive games/activities are fit to post on sourceforge. In the meantime, scour sourceforge.net, where other, more experienced hands may be found! My little rant was intended to throw fertilizer on the grass-roots movement, so to speak, to get more Linux desktops in more schools, because I think it would be a Very Good Thing! If only open-source was around back when I was in grade school, my mucking around in the computer lab would have had more stimulating results...children of my generation grew up more prone to think of computers as toys made by corporations, impenetrable and impervious, useful for playing games on and writing emails and nothing else. The next generation has to have the view that computers belong to *them*, theirs to program, build, and take on the world with, if our civilization hopes to progress into the next stage of science. The present state, where the public mindset is still suffering from the delusion that computers are the exclusive domain of a few millionaires, and that they only can run the handfull of limited applications those millionaires approve, is counter-productive to an educational goal.
...until more third-generation Linux hackers make their mark. I have often noted with amazement the opportunity that OSS advocates are missing, by not making more grade-school-oriented educational software. In our home, we run Linux on every PC, I code special games and activities just for the kids (they're the easiest and most fun programs to write, after all!), the kids have open access to Linux, and my 8-year-old daughter now routinely opens a Python interpretter to "play" in. Sh-h-h! Don't anybody tell her she's "learning to program" instead of "playing"! At school, she expresses disdain for other platforms. Mind you, we have Windows available in the home, too. And let's not forget special-needs software for handicapped kids, as well! You think Microsoft will give a damn about *them*?
I put on a blindfold and stood outside this morning, and the sun did not rise. That *proves*, absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the sun is broken, and God is a lousy engineer.
Next, I will prove the world is flat, by walking off a building and pointing to the edge on my way down...
Nothing like getting up in the morning, reading the news, and being told that you don't exist...good, can I go back to bed, now?
OK, the core code of Linux is professionally developed. But many of the programs are done privately or as hobbies. Else, why is Linux released with all those compilers/interpretters for programming languages, why is Linux development such a buzzing topic on message boards, why the huge market in Linux programming books?
Well, I'll go back to writing my mythological programs and posting them the code on my imaginary blog, now...I'm in good company, Richard Stallman doesn't exist, either...
They probably adapted for the same reason any organism adapts - it's environment changed, and with it the opportunities, and it was adaptable enough to change it's behavior.
Too many predators, not enough prey = try eating plants
Too many herbivores, not enough plants = try eating herbivores
Whichever niche has the least competition!
Very insightful, but your equation fails to take into account "instinct", yet another fuzzily-defined concept. The only way I can prove that instinct exists is that children of pre-school age are notoriously afraid of the dark, doubtless because that fear kept our ancestors from wandering too far into the bear's cave at night.
Learning from experience is one thing, but how long before a robot learns to pull it's hand away from a hot stove? Or come in out of the rain before it rusts?
All of the above fails to mention the most pertinent fact of PDF which is that it sucks, and is cause why I always have a PDF2txt streamer handy so I could scroll though text like normal human being do and not have to squint at microscopic letters that I drag around with a little white baby hand...
YOU ARE TOO NICE.
And you put up with this abuse for free? Even if I was paid for the job, the second or third user I had who behaved so oafishly would have seen their precious porn/MP3 collection smashed to bits under my sledgehammer. And if I'd been fired for it, I would have considered that a blessing.
But there is no doubt in my mind that free *anything* in this country will eventually become illegal. Even air!
It's just this simple: Money drives the government. If you owned a multi-billion dollar company and somebody else gave away what you sell, you'd want laws passed against it, wouldn't you? Well, if all you have to do is buy a few politicians (or place a phone call to one you already own) what's stopping you? Only the fact that you haven't thought of it yet.
Don't gimme any bunk about the First Amendment. Anybody who doesn't think this country already wiped it's feet on the Constitution a long time ago is living in Wonderland.
I'm already an outlaw ten other ways, for consensual victimless crimes; I guess I might as well be a criminal for giving away free programs, too.
Somewhere in the Microsoft corporate offices, right now, is another "Halloween document" sitting in the middle of someone's desk, detailing the strategy for "dealing" with open-source. Were that document to be revealed to the rest of the world, it would fill them with disgust and horror. I guarantee all of you this and will make an exception and be back to say "I told you so".
I vow, if the Linux community becomes Microsoft's lapdog, then I'd just switch to BSD. What the hell does Linux need Microsoft for? What could we do with Microsoft that we haven't done better already without them (besides rape and pillage the world and turn out a shoddy, rip-off product) ?
Let's pause to consider. When you get tech support with a Linux product, you're talking to the programmer or design team which has no ulterior motives to do anything but fix your product.
Could Microsoft ever be this honest? Or would their Linux support consist of "fixing" my latest bug by installing a patch which guarantees me calling back for another $100 phone call tomorrow? I've seen Microsoft code, and I've seen Linux code, and I don't want ANY of that mixed together. I don't want to have to spend a week groveling through 10,000 lines of "MS_Wincall(callback, CALLback callback, MS_Wincode, callback(wincode), Wincode(call_back), CallBack callBACK){ MS_Callwin (wincall) };" trying to find where the evil-crock-of-the-week is.
There's only one thing scarier than being beset by a devil, and that's having the devil come on chummy and say, "Let's be friends!"
Don't do it! Don't take the carrot! It's a trap you fools!
Wow, good point about the crowd lauging when you see the movie. I don't know if it's just me, but I notice the crowd never laughs in the same places I do, and sometimes the places the crowd laughs are almost sad. Or I laugh when the rest of the crowd is silent. But I try never to let it affect how much I enjoy the movie.
I must be a psycho, my sense of humor is 180 degrees from normal...
In the first place, I always tell people that GNU/Linux/BSD is not for everyone. I tell them if all you do with a computer is surf the web or play games or download music - in other words, if a computer is nothing to you but an entertainment device - than you're better off with Windows.
If, however, you even *think* of attempting to get any productive work done on a computer, then I say you're a fool to use anything *but* an open-source platform. That is motivated solely by my honest belief that, on the whole, GNU/Linux/BSD gets the work done faster, more correctly, and certainly more intelligently.
The side-ways motivation is, we are coming upon an age that will doubtless be looked upon as a dark one. Every time I hand someone a tool which they can take apart and learn from, I am showing them that elves and faries are not what makes it go, that an invisible man in the sky did not make them out of mud, that they are not stupid but rather impeded by their society from learning anything, that science works in a logical fashion.
Which will serve to prevent the human race's devolution back to tree-dwelling primates not a bit, but will at least slow it down enough to help ensure I still have people with minds to talk to while *I'm* still alive.
Well, I had fun with Lisp for a couple of weeks. It almost reminds me of the hippy days! The primary benefit of Lisp, to me, has been that it has made learning Python easier.
Lisp is just plain beautiful, as long as you don't mind enclosing everything in parenthesis. I sometimes have C programs call Emacs to interpret Lisp routines with a system call:
system("Emacs --no-site-file -batch -l myLispcode.el");
for temporary routines that I intend to code in C, or hairy data-processing functions that would simply be a nightmare to code in C.
You can also call Emacs to process an ELisp routine from a shell script. Of course, by the time I get to shell scripts, I'm using the Python environment.
"Demergence"...excellent word! I'll file it away in my misanthropist's lexicon, right beside "devolution" (the theory that man is regressing from a once-enlightened being to a plain old monkey again, to be replaced by more capable beings), and "deaducation" (what suckers feel obliged to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to a college for).
Slashdot Mirror
I learned BASIC, Cobol, C, C++, Lisp, Assembler, Bash shell scripting, and Python in that order. Every language had it's strengths and weaknesses. Each language taught me valuable things about how to think about programming. Each language had features which made coding certain kinds of programs easier than others, and each had ways in which it was harder to code than all the others.
There is no magic language that will make you a perfect programmer, any more than there is a magic car that will make you a perfect driver.
Hah! I read it! Ha ha ha!
Ask yourself, what is an intellectual like? What kind of atmosphere would an intellectual seek out? What kinds of things would appeal to an intellectual? What kinds of rewards would an intellectual seek out?
Now, take a peek around the US climate. Idiocy is shoved down our throats from every angle. Television is a waste-land of vapidity, bookstores stock light-weight fluff, education is the first thing to get cut whenever the wolverines in office need more pork to go around. Those who study and work hard are looked down upon as "geeks", "nerds", "bookworms" and worse, even to the point of getting beat up by the pick-up rednecks whenever they can't find any of their favorite minorities.
When I lived in Las Vegas, it came up to a vote on whether to build more libraries. Citizens of the city, who were thrilled to get 3 more hootie bars, 10 more casinos, and that "Wheel of Fortune" was auditioning at the Luxor, came out MARCHING IN PROTEST against building more libraries - the cheapest possible government expenditure!
Just today, there was a story in the news about Utah students who hooked a GPS up to a wheelchair to produce a satellite-guided navagation system for a small vehicle. Who are they looking to offer the idea to for further development? Car manufacturors, so we can have self-steering cars and have fewer accidents? Nursing homes, so more handicapped patients can have better mobility? Heck, no, they're gonna sell it to the military!
What is the richest person in our country rich for? A superior feat of engineering? No, a famously inadequate platform which he then keeps in business through legal bully tactics.
Who's the most famous American scientists? Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann? What was their field? Physics. What did we do with their research? Make bombs.
Hello, Average American. I'm an aspiring scientific researcher, looking for funding for my projects. Would you be interrested in contributing for... AIDS research? "No, way, the sooner the fags die, the better!" conservation? "What, are you some kinda tree-hugging hippie?" alternative energy resources? "AAAAHHH! You're trying to devalue my Exxon stock!" general medicine? "No, your stem-cell research is an abomination against God!" computer science? "Thank God we have AOL to protect us against hackers like you!" ah...
Hey, Average American! Name five NFL players! Name five NASCAR drivers! Name three Tournament-winning Golfers! Name ONE Nobel-prize-winning scientist!
Yeah, America has *no* problem keeping ahead of the pack! We're *number one* and anybody who says different is just agenda-pushing and fear-mongering! Now don't bother me, I'm on my way to get that Godless evolutionary theory out of my child's educational curricullum.
Meanwhile, other countries see brains going to waste, and wouldn't at least one or two of them either strive to encourage their own brain-power or offer bigger salaries in the hopes of luring America's wasted talent overseas? What do you think, Average American? "Oh, no, anybody too stupid to speak English wouldn't think of that!"
Oh, my kid's school is locked into Microsoft but we're Linux geeks at home...I simply bust a gut every time I hear comments from the teacher about out daughter expressing disdain for Windows: "Where's the Supertux game?" "How come it doesn't have a kumpa screensaver?" "How come the computer freezes up?"
In any case, at a past job I had, when somebody suggested I use WordPerfect to edit the incompatable characters out of a thousand-line document (these characters were the result of saving the document on an earlier Microsoft product) I popped open my laptop and showed my boss how a one-line sed script could automate the job in one minute. As far as my boss was concerned, I walked on water for the rest of that month...especially since there were some 200 further documents yet to go...incidentally, they did end up paying more attention to the Unix workstations that were already in place in the server room.
If there's *nothing* you want your kids to do but use Word and Excell, Linux has comparable products that (a) work the same way, and (b) are free.
Look, make a file named "hello.c" on your Linux system, enter about five lines of a "hello world" code (google "hello world" and copy and paste what you find), save it, and at the prompt type:
gcc -o hello hello.c
Run the output. Now, ask yourself, why is Bill Gates a millionaire and you're not? See, programming doesn't require you to be a priest, you don't have to cast any runes or sacrifice goats under the full moon. It's about time we took control of our own machines, that we bought and paid for with our own money! Likewise, *my* kids are getting raised with the idea that writing a program to make a computer go is just another everyday, average skill that normal people have, like being able to push a button to make an elevator go without having to hire a specially-trained operator...
Computers are still young, and the culture still has a way to go before it's used to the concept. This step will help!
>> "Do kids these days even know multiplication tables without reaching for their cell phone's calculator app?" Well, that's another bone to pick. I do see your point that computers aren't necessary to learning the three R's. But multiplication tables are just plain irrelevent. It took me about a month to learn multiplication, and for the rest of my school days I was irked at being forced to do pages and pages of multiplication when I was more interrested in exploring the higher mathematical concepts of Euler, Pascal, Fermat, and von Neumann. Everything worthwhile that I learned was because of libraries where I could get at the good stuff, and not by rote repetition of times tables. Are you saying it's *that* important to be able to compute 10-digit factorials in your head, or would you rather have a good grasp of probability theory so Las Vegas doesn't soak you so much? Just a rhetorical question - no attack, here!
This looks like a good place to mention: School boards have to worry about money. If you live in the United States, you get used to the idea that the government's budget thinks "global conquest", "grab money/power" first, and "take good care of our citizen's health, education, and environment" last, if at all. We private citizens look to other countries to lead the way, having abandoned all hope for ours. The benefits of open-source software are the operating system's environment/philosophy. Want to know how a computer works? Here's the source code, read it yourself! Want to play around and experiment with computer science concepts, to make sure you understand them? Go ahead and change the software and re-compile it, nobody's stopping you! Got a better idea for how to do something, or a new idea that's never been done before? Here, here's compilers/interpretters for ten different programming languages, all free with free documentation and support! Our next Thomas Edison just might be playing with these toys right now, preparing to bring us our next technological revolution. Unfortunately, most adults today still have the mindset that computers are exclusively the domain of a few millionaires, and are "hands-off" for the common joe. This just sends a message to the child in the classroom: "Hands off the computer, except for the limited programs we deem fit for you to use, and then only the way the corporations think they should be used!" We can either empower people and watch them learn, or enslave them and watch them shrivel.
ah, I wish it were so! But I'm still learning, myself, having discovered Linux and gotten into serious programming only a few years ago. At my blog http://hackersnest.modblog.com/ (also linkable from the blog in my sig), I post code in a few languages, intended to give others at my approximate learning level an example of how to do certain tricks, and also so I can track my own progress. In the "hobbies" section of the blogspot blog, I also occasionally share some howto on hardware topics, game guides, etc. But that's the extent of my contributions so far. While some of the code at hackersnest can have educational functions (word-guessing games and such) I have nothing aimed at the very young. Over time, I hope to get good enough that my graphics-intensive games/activities are fit to post on sourceforge. In the meantime, scour sourceforge.net, where other, more experienced hands may be found! My little rant was intended to throw fertilizer on the grass-roots movement, so to speak, to get more Linux desktops in more schools, because I think it would be a Very Good Thing! If only open-source was around back when I was in grade school, my mucking around in the computer lab would have had more stimulating results...children of my generation grew up more prone to think of computers as toys made by corporations, impenetrable and impervious, useful for playing games on and writing emails and nothing else. The next generation has to have the view that computers belong to *them*, theirs to program, build, and take on the world with, if our civilization hopes to progress into the next stage of science. The present state, where the public mindset is still suffering from the delusion that computers are the exclusive domain of a few millionaires, and that they only can run the handfull of limited applications those millionaires approve, is counter-productive to an educational goal.
...until more third-generation Linux hackers make their mark. I have often noted with amazement the opportunity that OSS advocates are missing, by not making more grade-school-oriented educational software. In our home, we run Linux on every PC, I code special games and activities just for the kids (they're the easiest and most fun programs to write, after all!), the kids have open access to Linux, and my 8-year-old daughter now routinely opens a Python interpretter to "play" in. Sh-h-h! Don't anybody tell her she's "learning to program" instead of "playing"! At school, she expresses disdain for other platforms. Mind you, we have Windows available in the home, too. And let's not forget special-needs software for handicapped kids, as well! You think Microsoft will give a damn about *them*?
I put on a blindfold and stood outside this morning, and the sun did not rise. That *proves*, absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the sun is broken, and God is a lousy engineer. Next, I will prove the world is flat, by walking off a building and pointing to the edge on my way down...
Nothing like getting up in the morning, reading the news, and being told that you don't exist...good, can I go back to bed, now? OK, the core code of Linux is professionally developed. But many of the programs are done privately or as hobbies. Else, why is Linux released with all those compilers/interpretters for programming languages, why is Linux development such a buzzing topic on message boards, why the huge market in Linux programming books? Well, I'll go back to writing my mythological programs and posting them the code on my imaginary blog, now...I'm in good company, Richard Stallman doesn't exist, either...
They probably adapted for the same reason any organism adapts - it's environment changed, and with it the opportunities, and it was adaptable enough to change it's behavior. Too many predators, not enough prey = try eating plants Too many herbivores, not enough plants = try eating herbivores Whichever niche has the least competition!
I'm sure Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble will be delighted!
Very insightful, but your equation fails to take into account "instinct", yet another fuzzily-defined concept. The only way I can prove that instinct exists is that children of pre-school age are notoriously afraid of the dark, doubtless because that fear kept our ancestors from wandering too far into the bear's cave at night. Learning from experience is one thing, but how long before a robot learns to pull it's hand away from a hot stove? Or come in out of the rain before it rusts?
All of the above fails to mention the most pertinent fact of PDF which is that it sucks, and is cause why I always have a PDF2txt streamer handy so I could scroll though text like normal human being do and not have to squint at microscopic letters that I drag around with a little white baby hand...
YOU ARE TOO NICE. And you put up with this abuse for free? Even if I was paid for the job, the second or third user I had who behaved so oafishly would have seen their precious porn/MP3 collection smashed to bits under my sledgehammer. And if I'd been fired for it, I would have considered that a blessing.
But there is no doubt in my mind that free *anything* in this country will eventually become illegal. Even air!
It's just this simple: Money drives the government. If you owned a multi-billion dollar company and somebody else gave away what you sell, you'd want laws passed against it, wouldn't you? Well, if all you have to do is buy a few politicians (or place a phone call to one you already own) what's stopping you? Only the fact that you haven't thought of it yet.
Don't gimme any bunk about the First Amendment. Anybody who doesn't think this country already wiped it's feet on the Constitution a long time ago is living in Wonderland.
I'm already an outlaw ten other ways, for consensual victimless crimes; I guess I might as well be a criminal for giving away free programs, too.
Somewhere in the Microsoft corporate offices, right now, is another "Halloween document" sitting in the middle of someone's desk, detailing the strategy for "dealing" with open-source. Were that document to be revealed to the rest of the world, it would fill them with disgust and horror. I guarantee all of you this and will make an exception and be back to say "I told you so". I vow, if the Linux community becomes Microsoft's lapdog, then I'd just switch to BSD. What the hell does Linux need Microsoft for? What could we do with Microsoft that we haven't done better already without them (besides rape and pillage the world and turn out a shoddy, rip-off product) ?
Let's pause to consider. When you get tech support with a Linux product, you're talking to the programmer or design team which has no ulterior motives to do anything but fix your product. Could Microsoft ever be this honest? Or would their Linux support consist of "fixing" my latest bug by installing a patch which guarantees me calling back for another $100 phone call tomorrow? I've seen Microsoft code, and I've seen Linux code, and I don't want ANY of that mixed together. I don't want to have to spend a week groveling through 10,000 lines of "MS_Wincall(callback, CALLback callback, MS_Wincode, callback(wincode), Wincode(call_back), CallBack callBACK){ MS_Callwin (wincall) };" trying to find where the evil-crock-of-the-week is.
There's only one thing scarier than being beset by a devil, and that's having the devil come on chummy and say, "Let's be friends!" Don't do it! Don't take the carrot! It's a trap you fools!
Wow, good point about the crowd lauging when you see the movie. I don't know if it's just me, but I notice the crowd never laughs in the same places I do, and sometimes the places the crowd laughs are almost sad. Or I laugh when the rest of the crowd is silent. But I try never to let it affect how much I enjoy the movie.
I must be a psycho, my sense of humor is 180 degrees from normal...
In the first place, I always tell people that GNU/Linux/BSD is not for everyone. I tell them if all you do with a computer is surf the web or play games or download music - in other words, if a computer is nothing to you but an entertainment device - than you're better off with Windows.
If, however, you even *think* of attempting to get any productive work done on a computer, then I say you're a fool to use anything *but* an open-source platform. That is motivated solely by my honest belief that, on the whole, GNU/Linux/BSD gets the work done faster, more correctly, and certainly more intelligently.
The side-ways motivation is, we are coming upon an age that will doubtless be looked upon as a dark one. Every time I hand someone a tool which they can take apart and learn from, I am showing them that elves and faries are not what makes it go, that an invisible man in the sky did not make them out of mud, that they are not stupid but rather impeded by their society from learning anything, that science works in a logical fashion.
Which will serve to prevent the human race's devolution back to tree-dwelling primates not a bit, but will at least slow it down enough to help ensure I still have people with minds to talk to while *I'm* still alive.
Well, I had fun with Lisp for a couple of weeks. It almost reminds me of the hippy days! The primary benefit of Lisp, to me, has been that it has made learning Python easier. Lisp is just plain beautiful, as long as you don't mind enclosing everything in parenthesis. I sometimes have C programs call Emacs to interpret Lisp routines with a system call: system("Emacs --no-site-file -batch -l myLispcode.el"); for temporary routines that I intend to code in C, or hairy data-processing functions that would simply be a nightmare to code in C. You can also call Emacs to process an ELisp routine from a shell script. Of course, by the time I get to shell scripts, I'm using the Python environment.
"Demergence"...excellent word! I'll file it away in my misanthropist's lexicon, right beside "devolution" (the theory that man is regressing from a once-enlightened being to a plain old monkey again, to be replaced by more capable beings), and "deaducation" (what suckers feel obliged to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to a college for).