the first piece of disk-based software I bought was Visicalc. It definitely was available for the TRS-80; if Apple had an exclusive it didn't last long.
I didn't claim it was exclusive. It was released for Apple II first and took a while to perfect on other platforms. As you know, "getting it to work on" and running well are not the same thing. The practice of writing in say C or PASCAL and using API's to simplify OS interaction portability was not widespread on small computers back then, in part because of the hardware overhead of doing such on slow 70's era processors. (Even though it was the early 80's, the architecture in the 3 were already obsolete, but kept largely for compatibility.)
Apple II's version of VisiCalc was ahead of the curve, and made Apple's sales jump ahead of PET and TRS for a while, where they had been trailing before. PET and TRS were cheaper such that without a software advantage, people bought them first. Apple never tried to be a "volume dealer" the way Commodore wanted to be (and succeeded great at it for half a decade). Tramiel and Woz even had a little public debate about it, per "for the masses versus classes".
Apple II's were indeed nicer than the other two, but at a price. I remember the experience of first trying an Apple II: the look and feel was just better. Job's touch "worked" in that regard.
It gave Apple a boost, and some business cred, but wasn't decisive.
Apple's GUI-related R&D took a lot of cash, and they were still straining. Woz complained about Mac/Lisa hogging all the R&D away from Apple II improvements. The hardware of the time was just barely up to the task of handling a GUI. If not for the VisiCalc revenue boost, the Mac (or equiv) very likely would have been late, lame, or cancelled.
Culturally, they have a strong bias in favor of 'credentials' and 'certifications' as well as experience.
But if you emphasize credentials at the expense of experience and managerial competence, it could significantly hurt the end results. Expert test takers are rarely the best managers, even in China. But I guess ingrained cultural habits are a difficult wall to penetrate.
Likewise, in the US management hiring often over-emphasizes (projection of) confidence and bravado, even though the best managers tend to be mild mannered: excellent listeners who share credit. The bravado managers, like Jobs and Welch, just get more press.
Indeed. Christ was largely apolitical, and the few political things he said have multiple interpretations. Conservatives often accuse the left of trying to legislate practices which should be voluntary, such as helping the poor. But Christ (as written in the Bible) does not seem to condone nor condemn the practice of institutionalizing alleged Christian practices: he simply ignores that issue and focuses on individual relations. (He would probably have been jailed much earlier if he had.)
Ironically, the right wants to pass laws that forbid or hamper certain "bedroom" activities such as homosexuality. Thus, they play both sides of the "legislate morality" angle. In the end its a matter of personal interpretation, not written scripture. Thus, to say "our side better fits the Bible" is dubious from either side. However, the right appears to claim that far more often than the left by my observation.
I think I got a bad mod in part for associating conservatives with racism, but my long experience in political debate forums is that a good many conservatives do indeed hold racist or quasi-racist viewpoints. Even conservatives who don't outwardly admit it seem to condone statements by other conservatives holding racist viewpoints. It sounds like shocking claim, but I stand behind it.
Conservatives often have a belief that protestant evangelical "culture" has proven superior and they wish to defend it. I'll call these "culturists". Some go further and believe whites are simply genetically superior, using Africa as "evidence" that blacks cannot run successful civilizations. I'll call this group "racists" as a working term.
There are many in-between-er conservatives who may not claim to know whether it's a genetic or cultural issue, but still defend white evangelical culture and what they see as an attack on it by the left and "multi-culturism".
The issue of genetic-versus-culture is secondary to defending their way of life. An attack is an attack in their mind and the details of the cause is secondary. They may indeed suspect it's genetic, which the in-between-ers hint at, like this Google writer, but usually don't dwell on that issue intellectually because it doesn't really change the facts of the "war" on their way of life as they see it. They see the US as founded on a certain way of life and think it's obligated to stay that way because it has been so successful, at least economically in the past century. They see the left as meddling with success AND their culture by "polluting" it with foreign people and ideas.
It may be a matter of context. The person quoted as saying "40 or so astronomers...would qualify" MAY have been talking about actually qualifying in a practical sense, not necessarily about meeting the ads' requirements.
The ad is probably asking too much: a big-name degree, 20 years of big-radio-scope experience, AND esteemed professorship. Managers typically don't have time to be professors other than hit-and-run lectures perhaps; they are dealing with logistics, hiring, firing, office politics, budgets, screwy vendors, leaky plumbing, publish-or-perish pressure, etc.
seeing jobs advertised that had requirements of 10 years of experience working with "C#.Net".
The irony is they terminate you when you actually have 10 years for being too old. They want "experienced youth". Can we download John McCain's experience into a fetus? Unfortunately you gotta bullshit to get past HR and PHB's in order to talk to the real techies. Dev job hunting is a fashion & buzzword game.
Trump U could have been Yuuuge if they specialized in teaching you the bullshit needed in the work place instead of using bullshit to con you out of tuition money. (Dilbert can be one of the textbooks.) Many naturally learn BS from life, but us non-social types can lack such skills. There's a real market for strategic lying. I don't condone it, but honest people often get trampled by liars and spinners, and you have to play the game to compete with them. Anything complicated with lots of moving parts and tricky trade-offs is subject to heavy BS: economics, IT, psychology, climatology, finance, law, etc.
"I have the best radio gastronomy skills, believe me! I know more about the stars than Hollywood boulevard and Grassy Tyson combined. When you know stars, they let you grab uranuses, and I've grabbed some yuuuuge uranuses, let me tell ya. It's fake news they were neptunes. Neptune grabbing is for total looosers and I will ban neptune grabbers from serving in the military! We must have quality troops to successfully invade Australia, Germany, and Mar-a-Lago competitors. Make Astrology Great Again!"
It may be a cliche, but I have indeed seen a good many ads like that per IT. One insider who admitted to "playing the game" said he simply lied to get jobs like that. But those kinds of people will encourage HR and PHB's to do it again, which is probably why the practice persists.
No, he'll run for office as somebody who can turn the clock back to the "good ol' days" when white males ruled. Perhaps he'll put a related slogan on a baseball cap even. Could happen.
Programming is a dead-end job. It's one of the shortest careers statistically. Burn out and/or RSI is common. Either you move into management, or move into something else like network management or cyber security.
How many times can you watch the industry reinvent UI's and watch PHB's get carried away with buzzwords before it gets old. It's like serving on the USS Groundhog Titanic.
If you'd ever seen the way little girls and little boys play together you'd understand that it has very little to do with nurture. Little boy play is competitive, little girl play is cooperative and egalitarian
Every family is different, but I had 2 brothers and 1 sister. My brothers and I often cooperated by making make-believe miniature villages out of blocks, Legos, and Tinkertoys where together we fought off a common enemy, be it Russians or space aliens or killer robots.
My sister on the other hand liked to stir things up and pit one of us against the other: conniving politics. She's much nicer as an adult, but I'd hate to be on her bad side. I've also encountered some conniving females at work. Women can and often do have a competitive streak, but it tends to be less overt than male competition: you may not even know it's happening.
He sounds just like one of the racist conservative personalities (troll) I encounter in a certain political forum. Either it's the same person or they use the same sources.
I wonder if "alienating conservatives" is a problem for Google. How often do their executives wake up and think, "Gee, we don't hire enough conservatives."
Apple may have been the market leader (at least in the US), but...
Apple was not the leader per units sold until VisiCalc came along. TRS and PET traded placed I believe until VisiCalc. Then Commodore 64 ruled even Apple II in the home market until the PC got cheap enough for home use.
Two things allowed Apple to survive while the others withered. The first is that the first microcomputer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, ran on Apple first. Why the Apple II was picked has a lot of conflicting stories behind it, and may just have been happenstance: one story is the PET and TRS in the dev office were being used by others. Some say Steve Jobs gifted them an Apple II to write for it, but that hasn't been confirmed.
VisiCalc's popularity exploded, giving Apple enough money to pursue GUI's...
And then the Macintosh came along, the first affordable GUI microcomputer. Although it didn't sell that well at first, desktop publishing exploded in the mid/late 80's and everyone wanted a Mac. The others were slow to get GUI's and related software. By the time they did, they were competing with both Mac and Microsoft Windows.
While the Apple II was arguably a better machine, it was also more expensive than PET and TRS and thus had no inherent edge.
If VisiCalc were written for either of the other 2, tech history may have been significantly different and you may have had a TRSphone in your pocket right now.
In the 1930's thru 1970's, trickle down mostly worked. Whatever the reason, it gradually pooped out starting in the 80's and inequality is growing worse. It appears to be from a combination of outsourcing/offshoring to cheap-labor countries, weak unions, and automation.
The right often blame it on increasing regulations, but removing those regulations would turn us into a 3rd-world country. I hope the only way to compete with the 3rd world is not become a polluted sweatshop dump like they are.
Thus, I won't agree with a blanket statement that capitalism always leads to heavy inequality. It just happens to be doing that at this point in history.
DJI are simply profit-hungry assholes that depend on open-source to give them clues. They have ripped off and stolen everything they have ever done. This is the Chinese way.
Most Silicon Valley executives are centrists, not liberals, and focus more on what their company "needs" than the 99%.
They want cheap labor without any training needed so they can be more profitable and/or grow faster. That's their primary concern and what they are paid to focus on. They don't spend a lot of time researching or philosophizing on middle class economics, except when they want to sell them something.
I hate to say it, but I'll side with (gulp) Trump on this one: CEO's look out for their profits, and I'll look out for my paycheck: same thing, just a different angle.
Whether it slows the general economy is hard to say. While I agree it may make services a bit more expensive, it may also shift money from the 1% to the 99%. It's currently log-jammed at the top.
Skipped key frames (which causes this, if I am correct) in a video stream can lead to some very bizarre visual effects.
It probably should switch off incremental rendering if a key frame was not received correctly. Just leave the last good image paused until a good key frame arrives (with regular sound pace, assuming good sound).
Maybe they should also send a lower-res key frame (LRKF) in case the regular one comes messed up. Don't put the LRKF adjacent to the regular KF because signal gaps tend to bunch together. Maybe put the LRKF about 1/3 the way thru. Example:
KF// regular key frame #23 IU// incremental update IU LRKF// low-res key frame version of #23 at 1/3 of cycle IU IU IU IU KF// regular key frame #24 IU IU LRKF// low-res key frame version of #24 IU etc...
(IU frequency is only an example and may vary per picture complexity.)
This way if KF#23 is messed up, the screen pauses until it reaches LRKF#23 as a consolation prize. The chance of both KF#23 and LRKF#23 being messed up is relatively small. If they both are by chance, then the pic just pauses at the last good set (KF#22 + IU's) rather than force render the incremental updates like the current standards seem to.
A bad KF would then just usually cause a slight pause for 1/3 of a cycle and then use a somewhat blurry key frame (LRKF) image for the other 2/3.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't claim it was exclusive. It was released for Apple II first and took a while to perfect on other platforms. As you know, "getting it to work on" and running well are not the same thing. The practice of writing in say C or PASCAL and using API's to simplify OS interaction portability was not widespread on small computers back then, in part because of the hardware overhead of doing such on slow 70's era processors. (Even though it was the early 80's, the architecture in the 3 were already obsolete, but kept largely for compatibility.)
Apple II's version of VisiCalc was ahead of the curve, and made Apple's sales jump ahead of PET and TRS for a while, where they had been trailing before. PET and TRS were cheaper such that without a software advantage, people bought them first. Apple never tried to be a "volume dealer" the way Commodore wanted to be (and succeeded great at it for half a decade). Tramiel and Woz even had a little public debate about it, per "for the masses versus classes".
Apple II's were indeed nicer than the other two, but at a price. I remember the experience of first trying an Apple II: the look and feel was just better. Job's touch "worked" in that regard.
Apple's GUI-related R&D took a lot of cash, and they were still straining. Woz complained about Mac/Lisa hogging all the R&D away from Apple II improvements. The hardware of the time was just barely up to the task of handling a GUI. If not for the VisiCalc revenue boost, the Mac (or equiv) very likely would have been late, lame, or cancelled.
But if you emphasize credentials at the expense of experience and managerial competence, it could significantly hurt the end results. Expert test takers are rarely the best managers, even in China. But I guess ingrained cultural habits are a difficult wall to penetrate.
Likewise, in the US management hiring often over-emphasizes (projection of) confidence and bravado, even though the best managers tend to be mild mannered: excellent listeners who share credit. The bravado managers, like Jobs and Welch, just get more press.
Well, it is what it is.
Indeed. Christ was largely apolitical, and the few political things he said have multiple interpretations. Conservatives often accuse the left of trying to legislate practices which should be voluntary, such as helping the poor. But Christ (as written in the Bible) does not seem to condone nor condemn the practice of institutionalizing alleged Christian practices: he simply ignores that issue and focuses on individual relations. (He would probably have been jailed much earlier if he had.)
Ironically, the right wants to pass laws that forbid or hamper certain "bedroom" activities such as homosexuality. Thus, they play both sides of the "legislate morality" angle. In the end its a matter of personal interpretation, not written scripture. Thus, to say "our side better fits the Bible" is dubious from either side. However, the right appears to claim that far more often than the left by my observation.
I think I got a bad mod in part for associating conservatives with racism, but my long experience in political debate forums is that a good many conservatives do indeed hold racist or quasi-racist viewpoints. Even conservatives who don't outwardly admit it seem to condone statements by other conservatives holding racist viewpoints. It sounds like shocking claim, but I stand behind it.
Conservatives often have a belief that protestant evangelical "culture" has proven superior and they wish to defend it. I'll call these "culturists". Some go further and believe whites are simply genetically superior, using Africa as "evidence" that blacks cannot run successful civilizations. I'll call this group "racists" as a working term.
There are many in-between-er conservatives who may not claim to know whether it's a genetic or cultural issue, but still defend white evangelical culture and what they see as an attack on it by the left and "multi-culturism".
The issue of genetic-versus-culture is secondary to defending their way of life. An attack is an attack in their mind and the details of the cause is secondary. They may indeed suspect it's genetic, which the in-between-ers hint at, like this Google writer, but usually don't dwell on that issue intellectually because it doesn't really change the facts of the "war" on their way of life as they see it. They see the US as founded on a certain way of life and think it's obligated to stay that way because it has been so successful, at least economically in the past century. They see the left as meddling with success AND their culture by "polluting" it with foreign people and ideas.
It may be a matter of context. The person quoted as saying "40 or so astronomers...would qualify" MAY have been talking about actually qualifying in a practical sense, not necessarily about meeting the ads' requirements.
The ad is probably asking too much: a big-name degree, 20 years of big-radio-scope experience, AND esteemed professorship. Managers typically don't have time to be professors other than hit-and-run lectures perhaps; they are dealing with logistics, hiring, firing, office politics, budgets, screwy vendors, leaky plumbing, publish-or-perish pressure, etc.
The irony is they terminate you when you actually have 10 years for being too old. They want "experienced youth". Can we download John McCain's experience into a fetus? Unfortunately you gotta bullshit to get past HR and PHB's in order to talk to the real techies. Dev job hunting is a fashion & buzzword game.
Trump U could have been Yuuuge if they specialized in teaching you the bullshit needed in the work place instead of using bullshit to con you out of tuition money. (Dilbert can be one of the textbooks.) Many naturally learn BS from life, but us non-social types can lack such skills. There's a real market for strategic lying. I don't condone it, but honest people often get trampled by liars and spinners, and you have to play the game to compete with them. Anything complicated with lots of moving parts and tricky trade-offs is subject to heavy BS: economics, IT, psychology, climatology, finance, law, etc.
"I have the best radio gastronomy skills, believe me! I know more about the stars than Hollywood boulevard and Grassy Tyson combined. When you know stars, they let you grab uranuses, and I've grabbed some yuuuuge uranuses, let me tell ya. It's fake news they were neptunes. Neptune grabbing is for total looosers and I will ban neptune grabbers from serving in the military! We must have quality troops to successfully invade Australia, Germany, and Mar-a-Lago competitors. Make Astrology Great Again!"
It may be a cliche, but I have indeed seen a good many ads like that per IT. One insider who admitted to "playing the game" said he simply lied to get jobs like that. But those kinds of people will encourage HR and PHB's to do it again, which is probably why the practice persists.
No, he'll run for office as somebody who can turn the clock back to the "good ol' days" when white males ruled. Perhaps he'll put a related slogan on a baseball cap even. Could happen.
Programming is a dead-end job. It's one of the shortest careers statistically. Burn out and/or RSI is common. Either you move into management, or move into something else like network management or cyber security.
How many times can you watch the industry reinvent UI's and watch PHB's get carried away with buzzwords before it gets old. It's like serving on the USS Groundhog Titanic.
Every family is different, but I had 2 brothers and 1 sister. My brothers and I often cooperated by making make-believe miniature villages out of blocks, Legos, and Tinkertoys where together we fought off a common enemy, be it Russians or space aliens or killer robots.
My sister on the other hand liked to stir things up and pit one of us against the other: conniving politics. She's much nicer as an adult, but I'd hate to be on her bad side. I've also encountered some conniving females at work. Women can and often do have a competitive streak, but it tends to be less overt than male competition: you may not even know it's happening.
He sounds just like one of the racist conservative personalities (troll) I encounter in a certain political forum. Either it's the same person or they use the same sources.
I wonder if "alienating conservatives" is a problem for Google. How often do their executives wake up and think, "Gee, we don't hire enough conservatives."
Apple was not the leader per units sold until VisiCalc came along. TRS and PET traded placed I believe until VisiCalc. Then Commodore 64 ruled even Apple II in the home market until the PC got cheap enough for home use.
Two things allowed Apple to survive while the others withered. The first is that the first microcomputer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, ran on Apple first. Why the Apple II was picked has a lot of conflicting stories behind it, and may just have been happenstance: one story is the PET and TRS in the dev office were being used by others. Some say Steve Jobs gifted them an Apple II to write for it, but that hasn't been confirmed.
VisiCalc's popularity exploded, giving Apple enough money to pursue GUI's...
And then the Macintosh came along, the first affordable GUI microcomputer. Although it didn't sell that well at first, desktop publishing exploded in the mid/late 80's and everyone wanted a Mac. The others were slow to get GUI's and related software. By the time they did, they were competing with both Mac and Microsoft Windows.
While the Apple II was arguably a better machine, it was also more expensive than PET and TRS and thus had no inherent edge.
If VisiCalc were written for either of the other 2, tech history may have been significantly different and you may have had a TRSphone in your pocket right now.
ALL the early microcomputers sucked. It was the 1st generation, for Pete's sake. Working around the flaws was part of the "fun".
Some diseases even make you grab pussies, tweet all night, turn orange, run for president, and insult allies.
"Very exciting"? Bad choice of words. No, it's fucking "scary".
cooties are real
In the 1930's thru 1970's, trickle down mostly worked. Whatever the reason, it gradually pooped out starting in the 80's and inequality is growing worse. It appears to be from a combination of outsourcing/offshoring to cheap-labor countries, weak unions, and automation.
The right often blame it on increasing regulations, but removing those regulations would turn us into a 3rd-world country. I hope the only way to compete with the 3rd world is not become a polluted sweatshop dump like they are.
Thus, I won't agree with a blanket statement that capitalism always leads to heavy inequality. It just happens to be doing that at this point in history.
American companies invent their own evil.
Most Silicon Valley executives are centrists, not liberals, and focus more on what their company "needs" than the 99%.
They want cheap labor without any training needed so they can be more profitable and/or grow faster. That's their primary concern and what they are paid to focus on. They don't spend a lot of time researching or philosophizing on middle class economics, except when they want to sell them something.
I hate to say it, but I'll side with (gulp) Trump on this one: CEO's look out for their profits, and I'll look out for my paycheck: same thing, just a different angle.
Whether it slows the general economy is hard to say. While I agree it may make services a bit more expensive, it may also shift money from the 1% to the 99%. It's currently log-jammed at the top.
I typed in "What is the diameter of Earth?" and got this.
"Cheatalogist"
It probably should switch off incremental rendering if a key frame was not received correctly. Just leave the last good image paused until a good key frame arrives (with regular sound pace, assuming good sound).
Maybe they should also send a lower-res key frame (LRKF) in case the regular one comes messed up. Don't put the LRKF adjacent to the regular KF because signal gaps tend to bunch together. Maybe put the LRKF about 1/3 the way thru. Example:
KF // regular key frame #23 // incremental update // low-res key frame version of #23 at 1/3 of cycle // regular key frame #24 // low-res key frame version of #24
IU
IU
LRKF
IU
IU
IU
IU
KF
IU
IU
LRKF
IU
etc...
(IU frequency is only an example and may vary per picture complexity.)
This way if KF#23 is messed up, the screen pauses until it reaches LRKF#23 as a consolation prize. The chance of both KF#23 and LRKF#23 being messed up is relatively small. If they both are by chance, then the pic just pauses at the last good set (KF#22 + IU's) rather than force render the incremental updates like the current standards seem to.
A bad KF would then just usually cause a slight pause for 1/3 of a cycle and then use a somewhat blurry key frame (LRKF) image for the other 2/3.