Yes, people buy bottled water, too. The point is you don't HAVE to pay for food, you can grow your own. It's simply less work to pay for it with money.
Well, you have to respect your audience. Since I'm retired, I have no need to monetize my books; I'm just happy people read them, which is the whole point of writing them.
I seem to have written Nobots at too high a reading level for some folks; I got comments such as "can I find those words in a dictionary?" So I wrote Mars, Ho! (may be ready for publication this week) mostly from the perspective of a high school graduate with bad grammar, which was oddly more of a challenge.
I did get some folks saddened when I stopped writing diary-like stuff, but they seem to like the sci-fi even more.
Buying? We're talking about a post-scarcity society here. If no one is enjoying your art, it may not be any good. If nobody is using your code, it's probably poorly designed. Find something else to hold your interest, it isn't hard.
I'm lucky, in that people read my books every day, according to site stats, and folks buy hardcover copies and send me fan mail, which is far better than money; I have enough money to live pretty well.
Sales is the worst possible metric for any creative endeavor. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, to his brother to repay a debt. Meanwhile, what was selling in the galleries for big bucks is worthless today.
I have no fear of copyright trolls; I register my books with the US Copyright office. If one fucks with me, I'll wind up with HIS money.
And since I'm my own publisher, I'm my own gatekeeper. You can find my books in bookstores world-wide, and I've posted them on the internet. Site stats say folks are reading them every day.
What I'm doing was impossible twenty years ago. Now that I'm retired I have the time to do it. When the subject of conversation actually comes to pass, everybody will be retired.
They've been working on it for over 12 years; I wrote the following for my web site in 2002. It will be in an upcoming book. Apologies for the mangled unicode, but slashdot's preview is worthless, since "preview" shows the unicode but the submission displays garbage. Here is the article:
McCoy: He's dead, Jim
Several years ago, before PCs were not nearly as com-mon in the home as they are now, a friend of mine asked of my computer, âoebut aren't you afraid it will explode?â
He was a Star Trek fan, and in the old 1950s and 1960s science fiction and spy shows, computers all had a nasty habit of blowing up. All one had to do to these TV or movie computers to make them explode was shoot them, with either a ray gun or a police revolver. Some TV and movie computers would blow up if you âoepressed the wrong buttonâ; one episode of the 1960s TV show The Prisoner (âoeI am not a number! I am a free man!â) had a computer that could answer any question. The bad guys, who had imprisoned the hero, a spy who had resigned his post, wanted to know why he resigned. Of course, before the bad guys could ask the computer âoeWhy did number six resign his post?â the intrepid number six offered that he had a question the computer could not answer.
He typed in to the Remington electric typewriter and fed the paper into the computer, which, of course, promptly started smoking, sparking, and ultimately blew up. The question was simply âoewhy?â
Similarly, in an episode of Star Trek, Spock makes a computer explode by asking it to figure the value of pi to the last decimal place. Of course, any time a Star Trek computer was fired on, whether by a Klingon or Federation phaser, and no matter what civilization designed and built the computer, it would explode in a grand display of fireworks.
I had to explain to my friend that this was all nonsense, that early computers from the early 1950s used thousands of vacuum tubes, requiring high voltages, which could throw showers of sparks and bright purple flashes with the characteristic âoepop!â if there was a short circuit in its 120-240 volt circuitry but would not actually explode, and that modern computers ran on three to twelve volts and wouldn't even get a spark from a short.
I had to explain to my friend that the only explosions were in my games; that the computer itself here in the analog world was safe.
Along with the matter transporter and faster than light travel, the exploding computer was one of those things relegated to science fiction.
Until now.
New Scientist reports that they have found a way to make silicon explode on demand, either by shock, as with that.38 caliber police special or by electrical signal.
âoeThis machine is stolen and will self-destruct in ten seconds.â
New Scientist says âoeFor instance, the American spy plane impounded by China last year could have used it to destroy its secret electronics systems.â
They add âoeIn a stolen mobile phone, the network would send a trigger signal to the part of the chip containing the gadolinium nitrate âdetonatorâ(TM), triggering the explosion... and detonate it at will.â
So not only is Star Trek's computer to blow up, its communicators will too! I can see in five years when these bozos have the anti theft circuits in phones. Drop your phone now and it might break. Drop it in five years and it might take your leg off!
Of course, the new viruses in ten years will not just reformat your hard drive; the kids will be writing viruses to make people's computers explode in their
Maybe folks will make art for art's sake, program for the love of code, etc. I love the freedom of being able to write and publish anything I want without making compromises with money issues. Like Rush (the band) sang in Spirit of Radio,
It's really just a question of your honesty, yeah Your honesty. One likes to believe in the freedom of music, But glittering prizes and endless compromises Shatter the illusion of integrity.
How else would you characterize this song from their third album?
"After Forever"
Have you ever thought about your soul - can it be saved? Or perhaps you think that when you're dead you just stay in your grave Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you? Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?
When you think about death do you lose your breath or do you keep your cool? Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope - do you think he's a fool? Well I have seen the truth, yes I've seen the light and I've changed my ways And I'll be prepared when you're lonely and scared at the end of our days
Could it be you're afraid of what your friends might say If they knew you believe in God above? They should realize before they criticize that God is the only way to love
Is your mind so small that you have to fall In with the pack wherever they run Will you still sneer when death is near And say they may as well worship the sun?
I think it was true it was people like you that crucified Christ I think it is sad the opinion you had was the only one voiced Will you be so sure when your day is near, say you don't believe? You had the chance but you turned it down, now you can't retrieve
Perhaps you'll think before you say that God is dead and gone Open your eyes, just realize that he's the one The only one who can save you now from all this sin and hate Or will you still jeer at all you hear? Yes! I think it's too late.
Yes, which is why I installed Thunderbird. I now still have my old 10+ year old email address and a stable email client. My phone's email client works well with the yahoo email as well.
Just install a real email client and your problems vanish.
Yes, if you listen casually to early Black Sabbath music, it sounds like a celebration of evil, but if you listen carefully it's actually Christian music. Hell, Iron Maiden's two minutes to midnight is an anti-abortion song. Twisted Sister was hauled in front of Congress for the "bloody" song under the blade; the song is about undergoing surgery.
I don't think that's what TFA was talking about. In the Ozzie case, the dad found the son dead and a song named "suicide solution". None of the lyrics could be misunderstood to sound like he was advocating suicide. The grieving father saw the title and jumped to conclusions.
Who else is hurt by it? Their stockholders? They OWN Sony. The employees? They ARE Sony. Playstation owners? Serves them right for buying Sony equipment.
Sony is hardly a "little old lady" and ruining someone's computer is hardly "cutting someone off"; it's a felony that should have been prosecuted, but wasn't. The guy who burglarized my house a couple of years ago is lucky the cops caught him before I did.
If Sony had repaid me for the damage and apologized I would forgive them, but if you want something from me you have to ASK. They didn't.
Again, fuck Sony, I wouldn't feel sorry for the asshole who broke into my house if someone broke into his. And I don't feel sorry for Sony.
So what? They have shown no indication that they will become less evil. Why would you buy computer equipment from a company willing to hack its customers?
Lots of large companies do lots of suspect things and you never hear about it.
I'll know about it if I'm one of their victims. And, so it's "well, everybody else shoplifts and teases nerds, why shouldn't I?" Just because someone else is being evil gives you no right to be evil as well.
You might think its karma for Sony getting hacked but what about all the innocent people who get hurt too?
I don't believe in karma, and I was one of the innocent people Sony's hacking hurt. If Sony's stockholders get hurt, GOOD. Owning Sony stock is evil. Their employees? What is a company, but its employees? Would you work for the Cosa Nostra just because they were hiring? Then why would you take a position with them?
Hacking Sony harms no innocents. If you work for them, you're part of the problem. If you own stock you're the biggest part of the problem.
These kids have my thanks, as does North Korea. Sony hacked my computer with the XCP trojan they loaded on a music CD my daughter bought at the record store she worked at. So any time Sony is hacked, I cheer and hope the attackers do a lot of expensive damage.
Yes, over ten years ago and I'm still enraged over it. Someone should have gone to prison for that.
Fuck that evil God damned Sony and the ass it rode in on, the fucking bastards. DIE, SONY, DIE!!!
You people who believe in the singularity very obviously don't know how a computer works. It's simply an electric abacus; look at schematics for an ALU or a logic gate. How many beads do I need to put on my abacus before it becomes self-aware?
The danger is anthropomorphism; it's simply too easy to fool people into believing they see sentience where there is none. Evil people will use this to their evil ends.
Effective visual editing of templates; HTML template editing but much more like a good UI editor
I've always used a text editor for HTML since automation always seemed to produce bloated, unreadable (if not edited by hand) garbage, whether AOL's, Netscape's, Front Page, Word Perfect, or Word.
However, I discovered recently that you can get very good HTML from Open Office, but the way to go about it is really convoluted thanks to Oo's retarded menu structure. Under "file" towards the bottom of the list, nowhere near "export" where it should be, is "view in browser". Saving the web page from FoxPro produces excellent, readable HTML. However, I didn't run it through the WC3's HTML validator.
Professionals with years or even decades of experience have enough trouble writing secure software.
And just where do these "professionals" who can't write secure software get these years or decades of experience??
It's even worse when they use "beginner-friendly" languages like PHP, Ruby (with Ruby on Rails), and JavaScript. These languages are totally shit, and end up promoting buggy, insecure code.
I don't know PHP or Ruby, but javascript is in no way "beginner-friendly". I'd been coding in BASIC, assembly, xBase (various dialects), NOMAD, and a couple I can't remember (I'm getting old) for well over a decade when I needed javascript.
Javascript is crap. Often useful and necessary crap, but still crap.
When these amateurs try to write code in any sort of a business or professional setting, it usually ends up being the IT department or professional software developers who get to maintain the crap code in the end.
It's true that someone who thinks he knows what he's doing but doesn't can really screw a project up, an idiot I worked with who thought he knew dBase almost cost us a ten million dollar Federal grant by removing some columns in some tables in an application I wrote. I was able to make it work anyway.
Asimov got it right in Foundation; those who know little and are aware of their ignorance aren't dangerous, it's those who think they know but don't that are.
But I was mostly self-taught, only taking classes after I'd been programming for years, and few of the classes taught me anything I hadn't already learned from reading hundreds of books on the subject and practicing.
And we can't forget how these half-assed amateurs often start "contributing to" (a.k.a. destroying) open source projects. Thanks to them, we have disasters like GNOME 3, where instead of trying to make efficient, effective software, they just ended up trying to make a shitty, half-assed copy of their warped understanding of OS X.
It's not that they're shitty programmers, it's that they're shitty designers, and the professionals at Microsoft are no better; Windows 8, anyone? And whose code is the least secure? Yep, your fellow professionals at Microsoft with their warped "understanding" of UI, just like the GNOME devs.
We shouldn't promote the idea of them getting involved with software development. We should discourage it!
No, we should develop easier to use tools. The languages and compilers you professionals are writing suck donkey ass.
Even if Macs weren't so expensive, something cross-platform, like BASIC, would be better. I learned BASIC on a TS-1000, and after BASIC, learning assembly wasn't that hard; I was hand-assembling machine code for that TS-1000. I had to since BASIC on a 1 mHz Z-80 that powered the entire machine was just too slow for games.
Oddly, the company that brought BASIC to most was Microsoft; they didn't write Sinclair BASIC but they wrote the BASIC for most other computers of the time. GW BASIC on the IBM PC was still good. They have a bad habit of taking an okay or even excellent program like BASIC, FoxPro, or Windows 7 and trashing it completely.
Visual Basic is a convoluted joke.
And you hit the nail on the head with syntax. Shit like curly braces are IMO incredibly counterproductive and stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, people buy bottled water, too. The point is you don't HAVE to pay for food, you can grow your own. It's simply less work to pay for it with money.
The best things in life are free.
Well, you have to respect your audience. Since I'm retired, I have no need to monetize my books; I'm just happy people read them, which is the whole point of writing them.
I seem to have written Nobots at too high a reading level for some folks; I got comments such as "can I find those words in a dictionary?" So I wrote Mars, Ho! (may be ready for publication this week) mostly from the perspective of a high school graduate with bad grammar, which was oddly more of a challenge.
I did get some folks saddened when I stopped writing diary-like stuff, but they seem to like the sci-fi even more.
Buying? We're talking about a post-scarcity society here. If no one is enjoying your art, it may not be any good. If nobody is using your code, it's probably poorly designed. Find something else to hold your interest, it isn't hard.
I'm lucky, in that people read my books every day, according to site stats, and folks buy hardcover copies and send me fan mail, which is far better than money; I have enough money to live pretty well.
Sales is the worst possible metric for any creative endeavor. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, to his brother to repay a debt. Meanwhile, what was selling in the galleries for big bucks is worthless today.
I have no fear of copyright trolls; I register my books with the US Copyright office. If one fucks with me, I'll wind up with HIS money.
And since I'm my own publisher, I'm my own gatekeeper. You can find my books in bookstores world-wide, and I've posted them on the internet. Site stats say folks are reading them every day.
What I'm doing was impossible twenty years ago. Now that I'm retired I have the time to do it. When the subject of conversation actually comes to pass, everybody will be retired.
They've been working on it for over 12 years; I wrote the following for my web site in 2002. It will be in an upcoming book. Apologies for the mangled unicode, but slashdot's preview is worthless, since "preview" shows the unicode but the submission displays garbage. Here is the article:
McCoy: He's dead, Jim .38 caliber police special or by electrical signal.
Several years ago, before PCs were not nearly as com-mon in the home as they are now, a friend of mine asked of my computer, âoebut aren't you afraid it will explode?â
He was a Star Trek fan, and in the old 1950s and 1960s science fiction and spy shows, computers all had a nasty habit of blowing up. All one had to do to these TV or movie computers to make them explode was shoot them, with either a ray gun or a police revolver. Some TV and movie computers would blow up if you âoepressed the wrong buttonâ; one episode of the 1960s TV show The Prisoner (âoeI am not a number! I am a free man!â) had a computer that could answer any question. The bad guys, who had imprisoned the hero, a spy who had resigned his post, wanted to know why he resigned. Of course, before the bad guys could ask the computer âoeWhy did number six resign his post?â the intrepid number six offered that he had a question the computer could not answer.
He typed in to the Remington electric typewriter and fed the paper into the computer, which, of course, promptly started smoking, sparking, and ultimately blew up. The question was simply âoewhy?â
Similarly, in an episode of Star Trek, Spock makes a computer explode by asking it to figure the value of pi to the last decimal place. Of course, any time a Star Trek computer was fired on, whether by a Klingon or Federation phaser, and no matter what civilization designed and built the computer, it would explode in a grand display of fireworks.
I had to explain to my friend that this was all nonsense, that early computers from the early 1950s used thousands of vacuum tubes, requiring high voltages, which could throw showers of sparks and bright purple flashes with the characteristic âoepop!â if there was a short circuit in its 120-240 volt circuitry but would not actually explode, and that modern computers ran on three to twelve volts and wouldn't even get a spark from a short.
I had to explain to my friend that the only explosions were in my games; that the computer itself here in the analog world was safe.
Along with the matter transporter and faster than light travel, the exploding computer was one of those things relegated to science fiction.
Until now.
New Scientist reports that they have found a way to make silicon explode on demand, either by shock, as with that
âoeThis machine is stolen and will self-destruct in ten seconds.â
New Scientist says âoeFor instance, the American spy plane impounded by China last year could have used it to destroy its secret electronics systems.â
They add âoeIn a stolen mobile phone, the network would send a trigger signal to the part of the chip containing the gadolinium nitrate âdetonatorâ(TM), triggering the explosion... and detonate it at will.â
So not only is Star Trek's computer to blow up, its communicators will too! I can see in five years when these bozos have the anti theft circuits in phones. Drop your phone now and it might break. Drop it in five years and it might take your leg off!
Of course, the new viruses in ten years will not just reformat your hard drive; the kids will be writing viruses to make people's computers explode in their
Maybe folks will make art for art's sake, program for the love of code, etc. I love the freedom of being able to write and publish anything I want without making compromises with money issues. Like Rush (the band) sang in Spirit of Radio,
How else would you characterize this song from their third album?
"After Forever"
Have you ever thought about your soul - can it be saved?
Or perhaps you think that when you're dead you just stay in your grave
Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you?
Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?
When you think about death do you lose your breath or do you keep your cool?
Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope - do you think he's a fool?
Well I have seen the truth, yes I've seen the light and I've changed my ways
And I'll be prepared when you're lonely and scared at the end of our days
Could it be you're afraid of what your friends might say
If they knew you believe in God above?
They should realize before they criticize
that God is the only way to love
Is your mind so small that you have to fall
In with the pack wherever they run
Will you still sneer when death is near
And say they may as well worship the sun?
I think it was true it was people like you that crucified Christ
I think it is sad the opinion you had was the only one voiced
Will you be so sure when your day is near, say you don't believe?
You had the chance but you turned it down, now you can't retrieve
Perhaps you'll think before you say that God is dead and gone
Open your eyes, just realize that he's the one
The only one who can save you now from all this sin and hate
Or will you still jeer at all you hear? Yes! I think it's too late.
Yes, which is why I installed Thunderbird. I now still have my old 10+ year old email address and a stable email client. My phone's email client works well with the yahoo email as well.
Just install a real email client and your problems vanish.
Yes, if you listen casually to early Black Sabbath music, it sounds like a celebration of evil, but if you listen carefully it's actually Christian music. Hell, Iron Maiden's two minutes to midnight is an anti-abortion song. Twisted Sister was hauled in front of Congress for the "bloody" song under the blade; the song is about undergoing surgery.
I don't think that's what TFA was talking about. In the Ozzie case, the dad found the son dead and a song named "suicide solution". None of the lyrics could be misunderstood to sound like he was advocating suicide. The grieving father saw the title and jumped to conclusions.
Who else is hurt by it? Their stockholders? They OWN Sony. The employees? They ARE Sony. Playstation owners? Serves them right for buying Sony equipment.
There are no innocents here.
Sony is hardly a "little old lady" and ruining someone's computer is hardly "cutting someone off"; it's a felony that should have been prosecuted, but wasn't. The guy who burglarized my house a couple of years ago is lucky the cops caught him before I did.
If Sony had repaid me for the damage and apologized I would forgive them, but if you want something from me you have to ASK. They didn't.
Again, fuck Sony, I wouldn't feel sorry for the asshole who broke into my house if someone broke into his. And I don't feel sorry for Sony.
It was 10 years ago.
So what? They have shown no indication that they will become less evil. Why would you buy computer equipment from a company willing to hack its customers?
Lots of large companies do lots of suspect things and you never hear about it.
I'll know about it if I'm one of their victims. And, so it's "well, everybody else shoplifts and teases nerds, why shouldn't I?" Just because someone else is being evil gives you no right to be evil as well.
You might think its karma for Sony getting hacked but what about all the innocent people who get hurt too?
I don't believe in karma, and I was one of the innocent people Sony's hacking hurt. If Sony's stockholders get hurt, GOOD. Owning Sony stock is evil. Their employees? What is a company, but its employees? Would you work for the Cosa Nostra just because they were hiring? Then why would you take a position with them?
Hacking Sony harms no innocents. If you work for them, you're part of the problem. If you own stock you're the biggest part of the problem.
Why are defending evil? Are you a Sony employee?
Sony's sins go far beyond XCP and OtherOS.
These kids have my thanks, as does North Korea. Sony hacked my computer with the XCP trojan they loaded on a music CD my daughter bought at the record store she worked at. So any time Sony is hacked, I cheer and hope the attackers do a lot of expensive damage.
Yes, over ten years ago and I'm still enraged over it. Someone should have gone to prison for that.
Fuck that evil God damned Sony and the ass it rode in on, the fucking bastards. DIE, SONY, DIE!!!
You people who believe in the singularity very obviously don't know how a computer works. It's simply an electric abacus; look at schematics for an ALU or a logic gate. How many beads do I need to put on my abacus before it becomes self-aware?
The danger is anthropomorphism; it's simply too easy to fool people into believing they see sentience where there is none. Evil people will use this to their evil ends.
To anyone who thinks laws apply to the internet. It wasn't a rebuttal to your comment, it was an addition.
Stop feeding the trolls.
Your data protection thing can't possibly work. Your country's laws do not apply to me any more than Sharia law does.
There is no more of a way for your government to make me take something down than I could issue a meaningful DMCA takedown to you.
The internet is international. Your laws are meaningless there, as are mine.
True, but it was trivial to take, say, Sinclair BASIC and convert it to Apple II's BASIC. If you knew one dialect, all the rest were easy to write in.
Effective visual editing of templates; HTML template editing but much more like a good UI editor
I've always used a text editor for HTML since automation always seemed to produce bloated, unreadable (if not edited by hand) garbage, whether AOL's, Netscape's, Front Page, Word Perfect, or Word.
However, I discovered recently that you can get very good HTML from Open Office, but the way to go about it is really convoluted thanks to Oo's retarded menu structure. Under "file" towards the bottom of the list, nowhere near "export" where it should be, is "view in browser". Saving the web page from FoxPro produces excellent, readable HTML. However, I didn't run it through the WC3's HTML validator.
Professionals with years or even decades of experience have enough trouble writing secure software.
And just where do these "professionals" who can't write secure software get these years or decades of experience??
It's even worse when they use "beginner-friendly" languages like PHP, Ruby (with Ruby on Rails), and JavaScript. These languages are totally shit, and end up promoting buggy, insecure code.
I don't know PHP or Ruby, but javascript is in no way "beginner-friendly". I'd been coding in BASIC, assembly, xBase (various dialects), NOMAD, and a couple I can't remember (I'm getting old) for well over a decade when I needed javascript.
Javascript is crap. Often useful and necessary crap, but still crap.
When these amateurs try to write code in any sort of a business or professional setting, it usually ends up being the IT department or professional software developers who get to maintain the crap code in the end.
It's true that someone who thinks he knows what he's doing but doesn't can really screw a project up, an idiot I worked with who thought he knew dBase almost cost us a ten million dollar Federal grant by removing some columns in some tables in an application I wrote. I was able to make it work anyway.
Asimov got it right in Foundation; those who know little and are aware of their ignorance aren't dangerous, it's those who think they know but don't that are.
But I was mostly self-taught, only taking classes after I'd been programming for years, and few of the classes taught me anything I hadn't already learned from reading hundreds of books on the subject and practicing.
And we can't forget how these half-assed amateurs often start "contributing to" (a.k.a. destroying) open source projects. Thanks to them, we have disasters like GNOME 3, where instead of trying to make efficient, effective software, they just ended up trying to make a shitty, half-assed copy of their warped understanding of OS X.
It's not that they're shitty programmers, it's that they're shitty designers, and the professionals at Microsoft are no better; Windows 8, anyone? And whose code is the least secure? Yep, your fellow professionals at Microsoft with their warped "understanding" of UI, just like the GNOME devs.
We shouldn't promote the idea of them getting involved with software development. We should discourage it!
No, we should develop easier to use tools. The languages and compilers you professionals are writing suck donkey ass.
Even if Macs weren't so expensive, something cross-platform, like BASIC, would be better. I learned BASIC on a TS-1000, and after BASIC, learning assembly wasn't that hard; I was hand-assembling machine code for that TS-1000. I had to since BASIC on a 1 mHz Z-80 that powered the entire machine was just too slow for games.
Oddly, the company that brought BASIC to most was Microsoft; they didn't write Sinclair BASIC but they wrote the BASIC for most other computers of the time. GW BASIC on the IBM PC was still good. They have a bad habit of taking an okay or even excellent program like BASIC, FoxPro, or Windows 7 and trashing it completely.
Visual Basic is a convoluted joke.
And you hit the nail on the head with syntax. Shit like curly braces are IMO incredibly counterproductive and stupid.
What would cause a person to make an insane choice?
"Supernatural" is not a synonym for "magic."