So, not very useful then. I mean why choose BASIC? Or at least, why restrict it to BASIC? Would probably be a good learning or hobbyist machine if it had Python/Scheme/Ruby instead.
I mean, I loved my ZX Spectrum and the old BBC Micro, but in retrospect this was in spite of BASIC, not because of it. Nobody knew any better then.
Ironically, just before I clicked to read this article, Virgin dropped my broadband connection, so I had to bounce power on the modem before I could come here to find out why *other* people are leaving Virgin.
I'm leaving because they are just not good value for money any more. New customers get a reasonable deal for TV, broadband and phone. Existing customers get the shaft. And if you want to reduce what you're paying by taking a lower TV package, you actually would pay *more* because of the way they structure their "discounts".
The only way out is to drop them altogether. So that's what I'm doing. I can get cheaper broadband, and there's better entertainment out there on the web than on the dozens of shitty cable channels Virgin provide.
Download it if you are interested in the contents.
I'm not a lawyer, but since this is slashdot, I'll stick my neck out and suggest that if the text is in the public domain, you are allowed to do what you like with it.
Even if it was obtained by criminal means, that's entirely and only the responsibility of the person who committed said crime. It's not like receiving stolen property, since the original files are still there therefore nothing has been stolen.
The restrictions on making copies that copyright imposes do not apply, because the material is out of copyright.
someone with a strong engineering background and technical vision, surveying the field and calling the plays
...would (unlike Bill Gates) immediately see that the way forward is Open Source software and Open Standards. On the OS side, Windows would become an API wrapper on top of a BSD Unix kernel. The Office team would drop their ridiculous OOXML format and use ODF.
It's not like they couldn't compete that way: Microsoft Research hire a lot of very smart people. It's just that currently, the Windows and Office code base is a huge pile of shite that the smart people don't want to waste their life cleaning up, whereas present management seem to view it as a valuable asset rather than the giant sunk cost it really is.
I do, you know. Although I acknowledge your slightly longer experience, most of what you offer here is nostalgia, not evidence. I contend that you derived considerable satisfaction mastering programming in spite of BASIC's serious flaws. Respect for that, but I disagree with the conclusions you draw from it.
I think LISP back then was an objectively better language for both learning and development, and the 'basics' that BASIC (especially early BASIC) taught were pretty much wrong-headed. It's not just GOTO: it's the lack of functions and any kind of parameter passing other than global variables.
Maybe HP2000 BASIC was a structured language like the later BBC BASIC and didn't have those limitations? Whatever. You've since moved onto better things, and I bet you don't really want to go back to it.
Because it's crap. Seriously, it was really poorly designed both as a teaching language and as a software development language.
Don't be fooled by the name, with its false promise of simplicity. Anything non-trivial written in BASIC will be considerably more complicated and difficult to understand than the equivalent code in a language with proper data structures and first-class functions.
The only thing it had going for it was it was the only widely available language on 1980's home computers. But do to anything useful on those things you had to go down to machine code anyway. So we learned programming *in spite of* BASIC.
If we could have just had a cut-down LISP interpreter with a built-in assembler then software engineering practice would be 10 years further on by now. There would have been no VB, for example. As an industry, we're only now slowly recovering from that infection.
But this question keeps coming up on Slashdot for some fucking reason I can't comprehend. The same answers are always reiterated: Python, Smalltalk, Javascript etc. The one true answer is: Please, anything BUT fucking BASIC
If you had to write a useful program, and you could choose BASIC or any of the modern high-level languages, there is literally no good reason to choose BASIC. So it follows that if you start learning to program in BASIC, you will have to at some point ditch it and start using something better. I suggest that the optimal time to do that is immediately before you begin learning to program.
Maybe you have to be careful. Ryan Giggs is an idiot, because he took very bad legal advice and tried to sue twitter over the public release of some information about him. What information? I really couldn't say.
But let's suppose it was something he really didn't want widely known and hypothetically he had paid a lot of money to cover up by some means. How? I really couldn't say. More bad legal advice I suppose.
But for sure, by his own actions he just made himself look a lot worse than if he'd just admitted what he did and shrugged it off with a apology, however insincere.
Just hypothetically, if some footballer fucked a model and got a super-injunction to prevent her telling anyone (and prevent anyone even reporting on the existence of the injunction), and if I were to post it on the internet, I wouldn't be facing a SECRET TRIAL and, what, the death penalty or life imprisonment? It's just not the same thing!
In the UK, we have more *effective* freedom of speech than we are guaranteed by law, due to cultural expectations. In the US maybe the opposite is true. But both countries are objectively better in this respect than Thailand.
No, you missed nothing: you picked up on the most important sentence in the article. It's clearly NOT a crime.
If they send him a letter telling him not to do 'it' again, so what? He can ignore it, because they have no jurisdiction to do more than send another letter. No chilling effect here.
I mean, it's fun laughing at the self-important prick who got his nose put out of joint by someone else's unlicensed competence, and whined about it so loud that the internet heard him, but let's all enjoy that for what it is, and not panic.:)
7) A year later, everyone is all like "Oh shit!". The intelligent women who voted for her are embarrassed by her; the disabled who voted for her are treated with zero respect and told to all get a job; the libertarians realise that having a President with insane beliefs implicitly forces the policy consequences of those insane beliefs on everybody.
8) The War on Dissent continues with renewed vigour, and an actual shooting war begins against either Iran, Ireland or a
randomly-selected Korea.
Sorry, but what the fuck is wrong with you (and the lunatics that moderated a post advocating genocide as "insightful")?
You surely don't know enough about the situation in North Korea to support your conclusion. I bet it's a lot more complicated than you know, and probably more complicated than you could understand even if it was explained to you SLOWLY.
But yes, as in most totalitarian regimes, there is enormous cultural inertia because the only way to oppress that many people all the time is to grind them down until they are all collaborating in oppressing each other out of fear of being singled out. That takes time and creativity to reverse, and trying to do it right doesn't make anyone a pussy.
While bombing the fuck out of them would no doubt make it all seem simpler to you, that's not actually a relevant outcome.
Having said that, the *government* of North Korea is clearly dangerously insane. It's just that neither standing up to them militarily nor negotiating is likely to have predictable results. Let's hope Kim Jong Un is less of a lunatic than his father, and Kim Jong Il doesn't decide that a crazy all-out assault on everyone else will be a good legacy to leave before he steps down.
But this is in some way similar to the result that people with better numeracy skills are less likely to get into desperate financial difficulties. People with a goal or something they have a passion to pursue are less likely to feel that their life is passing them by. I'm not surprised to find that there is a correlation there, but I doubt that graduates are the only subset of the people surveyed who have a less than average fear of death.
The keyboard is terrible, and sometimes inserts a stream of junk characters and flips into num-lock mode for no apparent reason. It is very slow to boot. Call me impatient, but it shouldn't take >40s to bring up a tiny linux system. The desktop and applications that come with it are not great, either, being very old versions. You can't easily install newer versions because the libraries are all based on a very old debian distro. You can't replace them easily, because there are parts of the system that may or may not have available source code so you could recompile them with newer libraries. The Wifi is unreliable. You can't hack on it unless you can get a programming language from somewhere, and things like Python (for example) are only available at quite old versions.
I'll be fair, it has been a fun toy. But it's a toy. If you expect to do ANYTHING useful with it, you'll be disappointed.
Nah, that's not insightful, just uninformed naysaying.
This is why no one is going to seriously use the HTML5 video tag.
Except, I dunno, maybe youtube. The single biggest video site on the web right now. The VP8 codec is going to be supported by just about every browser that can do video, except maybe on the iPhone and iPad, and guess what, no flash there either. Even those who inexplicably still use IE will be able to get the codec easily enough. There'll probably be a link to it on the youtube home page.
Allowing people to use proprietary patent-encumbered codecs as part of the official standard goes against that whole concept.
Well duh. That's kind of why VP8 (and Theora) are not patent-encumbered. There are patents, but there is an open-source implementation that is explicitly licensed royalty-free for them.
The <video> tag is very well designed in my opinion. Not mandating a patent-free codec in the standard was a disappointment, but remember who was fighting to prevent that. Yeah, the usual suspects. But the market will decide, and I think it's fair to say, it isn't Google who are fighting against the tide.
Hey, and not all Christians (defined for my purposes as persons appreciating and following the ethical insights and teachings of Jesus), feel the need to believe a load of extraneous stories that were added decades after his death, or a bunch of mythology that was part of the culture Jesus happened to be born into, but is otherwise also just stories.
After all, the man said seek for the truth. To my mind that implies that the unconditional intellectual honesty of science is consistent with his teachings, even if it leads you to reject those stories.
I know my personal faith in a loving God is not completely rational, but then (a) at least I don't pretend I know what God is or wants, and (2) even if I became convinced that the universe was Godless, I'd still be a Christian by the definition given above.
Only one of the words "what the fuck" is "rude". So the problem is the F, right?
But F can stand for Fuck anywhere. As S can stand for Shit and C can stand for Cunt, and W for Wank, and so on.
There is literally no word, cluster of letters, picture, arrangement of vegetables or other combination of sensory inputs that cannot be construed in a sexual or scatological way.
Presumably the collision needed to splash a bit of rock off the Earth, through its atmosphere, up its gravity well to the moon would be at least 6 times as forceful as the collision with the moon.
They'd have to show that bits of organic material would survive both collisions to make it plausible.
Then explain how you would go looking for the few unlikely surviving chunks on something the size of the moon. Which by the way keeps getting hit all over with rocks from everywhere else, hence all the dust and craters.
Good luck with that.
Or is this just one of those things like string theory where you get to make up a hypothesis that you can't possibly actually falsify?
Slashdot Mirror
So, not very useful then. I mean why choose BASIC? Or at least, why restrict it to BASIC? Would probably be a good learning or hobbyist machine if it had Python/Scheme/Ruby instead.
I mean, I loved my ZX Spectrum and the old BBC Micro, but in retrospect this was in spite of BASIC, not because of it. Nobody knew any better then.
And how do MS disavow any unfortunate search results as not in any way defamatory to the celebrity whose "personality" is being impersonated?
Ironically, just before I clicked to read this article, Virgin dropped my broadband connection, so I had to bounce power on the modem before I could come here to find out why *other* people are leaving Virgin.
I'm leaving because they are just not good value for money any more. New customers get a reasonable deal for TV, broadband and phone. Existing customers get the shaft. And if you want to reduce what you're paying by taking a lower TV package, you actually would pay *more* because of the way they structure their "discounts".
The only way out is to drop them altogether. So that's what I'm doing. I can get cheaper broadband, and there's better entertainment out there on the web than on the dozens of shitty cable channels Virgin provide.
pace Godwin, of course.
Download it if you are interested in the contents.
I'm not a lawyer, but since this is slashdot, I'll stick my neck out and suggest that if the text is in the public domain, you are allowed to do what you like with it.
Even if it was obtained by criminal means, that's entirely and only the responsibility of the person who committed said crime. It's not like receiving stolen property, since the original files are still there therefore nothing has been stolen.
The restrictions on making copies that copyright imposes do not apply, because the material is out of copyright.
It's not like they couldn't compete that way: Microsoft Research hire a lot of very smart people. It's just that currently, the Windows and Office code base is a huge pile of shite that the smart people don't want to waste their life cleaning up, whereas present management seem to view it as a valuable asset rather than the giant sunk cost it really is.
I think LISP back then was an objectively better language for both learning and development, and the 'basics' that BASIC (especially early BASIC) taught were pretty much wrong-headed. It's not just GOTO: it's the lack of functions and any kind of parameter passing other than global variables.
Maybe HP2000 BASIC was a structured language like the later BBC BASIC and didn't have those limitations? Whatever. You've since moved onto better things, and I bet you don't really want to go back to it.
Sure will. :-)
OK, we're researching fusion drive. Now we need tritanium armour and battle pods.
The race is on to get at least phasers and class III shields before the Antarians show up.
Because it's crap. Seriously, it was really poorly designed both as a teaching language and as a software development language.
Don't be fooled by the name, with its false promise of simplicity. Anything non-trivial written in BASIC will be considerably more complicated and difficult to understand than the equivalent code in a language with proper data structures and first-class functions.
The only thing it had going for it was it was the only widely available language on 1980's home computers. But do to anything useful on those things you had to go down to machine code anyway. So we learned programming *in spite of* BASIC.
If we could have just had a cut-down LISP interpreter with a built-in assembler then software engineering practice would be 10 years further on by now. There would have been no VB, for example. As an industry, we're only now slowly recovering from that infection.
But this question keeps coming up on Slashdot for some fucking reason I can't comprehend. The same answers are always reiterated: Python, Smalltalk, Javascript etc. The one true answer is: Please, anything BUT fucking BASIC
If you had to write a useful program, and you could choose BASIC or any of the modern high-level languages, there is literally no good reason to choose BASIC. So it follows that if you start learning to program in BASIC, you will have to at some point ditch it and start using something better. I suggest that the optimal time to do that is immediately before you begin learning to program.
Maybe you have to be careful. Ryan Giggs is an idiot, because he took very bad legal advice and tried to sue twitter over the public release of some information about him. What information? I really couldn't say.
But let's suppose it was something he really didn't want widely known and hypothetically he had paid a lot of money to cover up by some means. How? I really couldn't say. More bad legal advice I suppose.
But for sure, by his own actions he just made himself look a lot worse than if he'd just admitted what he did and shrugged it off with a apology, however insincere.
Just hypothetically, if some footballer fucked a model and got a super-injunction to prevent her telling anyone (and prevent anyone even reporting on the existence of the injunction), and if I were to post it on the internet, I wouldn't be facing a SECRET TRIAL and, what, the death penalty or life imprisonment? It's just not the same thing!
In the UK, we have more *effective* freedom of speech than we are guaranteed by law, due to cultural expectations. In the US maybe the opposite is true. But both countries are objectively better in this respect than Thailand.
No, you missed nothing: you picked up on the most important sentence in the article. It's clearly NOT a crime.
If they send him a letter telling him not to do 'it' again, so what? He can ignore it, because they have no jurisdiction to do more than send another letter. No chilling effect here.
I mean, it's fun laughing at the self-important prick who got his nose put out of joint by someone else's unlicensed competence, and whined about it so loud that the internet heard him, but let's all enjoy that for what it is, and not panic. :)
7) A year later, everyone is all like "Oh shit!". The intelligent women who voted for her are embarrassed by her; the disabled who voted for her are treated with zero respect and told to all get a job; the libertarians realise that having a President with insane beliefs implicitly forces the policy consequences of those insane beliefs on everybody.
8) The War on Dissent continues with renewed vigour, and an actual shooting war begins against either Iran, Ireland or a randomly-selected Korea.
Sorry, but what the fuck is wrong with you (and the lunatics that moderated a post advocating genocide as "insightful")?
You surely don't know enough about the situation in North Korea to support your conclusion. I bet it's a lot more complicated than you know, and probably more complicated than you could understand even if it was explained to you SLOWLY.
But yes, as in most totalitarian regimes, there is enormous cultural inertia because the only way to oppress that many people all the time is to grind them down until they are all collaborating in oppressing each other out of fear of being singled out. That takes time and creativity to reverse, and trying to do it right doesn't make anyone a pussy.
While bombing the fuck out of them would no doubt make it all seem simpler to you, that's not actually a relevant outcome.
Having said that, the *government* of North Korea is clearly dangerously insane. It's just that neither standing up to them militarily nor negotiating is likely to have predictable results. Let's hope Kim Jong Un is less of a lunatic than his father, and Kim Jong Il doesn't decide that a crazy all-out assault on everyone else will be a good legacy to leave before he steps down.
Kill it with fire!
So did they break it down by faculty I wonder? :)
But this is in some way similar to the result that people with better numeracy skills are less likely to get into desperate financial difficulties. People with a goal or something they have a passion to pursue are less likely to feel that their life is passing them by. I'm not surprised to find that there is a correlation there, but I doubt that graduates are the only subset of the people surveyed who have a less than average fear of death.
I just closed my paypal account and said why in the "reason for closing" form they present.
Details of the angry rant are on my blog. ( http://scavenger-ethic.blogspot.com/2010/12/cancelled-my-paypal-account.html )
Frankly I'm faintly embarrassed that I waited this long to ditch them. I'm just lazy I suppose.
I hope your demands get some kind of response though.
Oh alright.
The keyboard is terrible, and sometimes inserts a stream of junk characters and flips into num-lock mode for no apparent reason.
It is very slow to boot. Call me impatient, but it shouldn't take >40s to bring up a tiny linux system.
The desktop and applications that come with it are not great, either, being very old versions.
You can't easily install newer versions because the libraries are all based on a very old debian distro. You can't replace them easily, because there are parts of the system that may or may not have available source code so you could recompile them with newer libraries.
The Wifi is unreliable.
You can't hack on it unless you can get a programming language from somewhere, and things like Python (for example) are only available at quite old versions.
I'll be fair, it has been a fun toy. But it's a toy. If you expect to do ANYTHING useful with it, you'll be disappointed.
Nah, that's not insightful, just uninformed naysaying.
Except, I dunno, maybe youtube. The single biggest video site on the web right now. The VP8 codec is going to be supported by just about every browser that can do video, except maybe on the iPhone and iPad, and guess what, no flash there either. Even those who inexplicably still use IE will be able to get the codec easily enough. There'll probably be a link to it on the youtube home page.
Well duh. That's kind of why VP8 (and Theora) are not patent-encumbered. There are patents, but there is an open-source implementation that is explicitly licensed royalty-free for them.
The <video> tag is very well designed in my opinion. Not mandating a patent-free codec in the standard was a disappointment, but remember who was fighting to prevent that. Yeah, the usual suspects. But the market will decide, and I think it's fair to say, it isn't Google who are fighting against the tide.
I've got a CnMbook. It's shite; however I do have Debian on it. Not that I could have figured out how to do it myself, but someone did.
I want an ARM netbook with linux on it, but I'll wait until I can buy one.
Insightful? Really? Wow. Super-awesome point-missing.
I'll refrain from commenting on your mom. Everyone else meaner than me, reply below with your speculation about what 4D6963's mom gets or doesn't get!
Hey, and not all Christians (defined for my purposes as persons appreciating and following the ethical insights and teachings of Jesus), feel the need to believe a load of extraneous stories that were added decades after his death, or a bunch of mythology that was part of the culture Jesus happened to be born into, but is otherwise also just stories.
After all, the man said seek for the truth. To my mind that implies that the unconditional intellectual honesty of science is consistent with his teachings, even if it leads you to reject those stories.
I know my personal faith in a loving God is not completely rational, but then (a) at least I don't pretend I know what God is or wants, and (2) even if I became convinced that the universe was Godless, I'd still be a Christian by the definition given above.
What makes *me* laugh is: the only good advice seems to be make a better product, faster. That doesn't remind me of Microsoft.
And open source development actually is one way to make a better product, faster. Hmmm...
As for the tired old lock-in bullshit. Is that plan B? Really? We know *that* plan isn't working either, even with Microsoft's billions behind it.
Us vs Them is never more fun than when Them's doing or saying something stupid.
Yeah, how much more dumb could they be?
Only one of the words "what the fuck" is "rude". So the problem is the F, right?
But F can stand for Fuck anywhere. As S can stand for Shit and C can stand for Cunt, and W for Wank, and so on.
There is literally no word, cluster of letters, picture, arrangement of vegetables or other combination of sensory inputs that cannot be construed in a sexual or scatological way.
That's what humans DO!
Un-fucking-believable.
ROTFLUINSM
(exercise for the reader)
Presumably the collision needed to splash a bit of rock off the Earth, through its atmosphere, up its gravity well to the moon would be at least 6 times as forceful as the collision with the moon.
They'd have to show that bits of organic material would survive both collisions to make it plausible.
Then explain how you would go looking for the few unlikely surviving chunks on something the size of the moon. Which by the way keeps getting hit all over with rocks from everywhere else, hence all the dust and craters.
Good luck with that.
Or is this just one of those things like string theory where you get to make up a hypothesis that you can't possibly actually falsify?
Mod parent up - no wait! He's already got 5 mod points! If anyone gets 6 or more Slashdot will turn into a Brown Hole and destroy everything!