Commodore BASIC, Turbo Pascal, M6800 Assembly (wonderful!), 8088 Assembly (horrible!), C, SQL, M68k Assembly, AREXX, perl, sh, Javascript, Java, php. I've dabbled in others (I can crank out a VB macro if need be), but those are my core fluencies.
The assembly was very useful in learning how the CPU actually works, and proved very useful for understanding industrial/microcontroller stuff later on, but with CPUs these days being vastly more complex than an 8088 or an M6800, I don't know if it could be dumbed down enough. Perhaps on a virtual machine or something?
Turbo Pascal was an absolutely brilliant language to learn on, and it is a shame Pascal seems to have fallen out of favour. It was powerful enough to write workable programs on, but simple enough to keep a new student from wandering off the cliff edge.
If I was teaching, I'd use perl:
- perl supports multiple syntaxes so you can teach the simple stuff in a straightforward manner - The fact that it identifies variables and in which context they are being used is a brilliant way to help students separate out what bits are variables/arguments and what bits are code - The C and sh bits are gateways into C and sh - "C lite" - You can do some really powerful and *useful* programs in perl, which teaches that programming isn't just the creation of monolithic apps, but a *process* that can be used to solve a single specific problem. - perl has native regular expressions, and teaching pattern matching opens up a whole new world of problem solving techniques
I can see homework like "Take the provided text file, and write a program that takes it as input and prints out the sentence that has the most vowels in it" or "Write a program that prints a list of the songs in your music library, ordered by date of album release". These programs are easy to write in perl, fun, challenging, and *useful*.
I doubt I'll have much success in this, but I've tilted and windmills before:
Chemical Weapons are indeed "Weapons of Mass Destruction" - and the key characteristic that makes them so is *indescrimination*.
A straight-up HE bomb (or even a pie-in-the-sky KE weapon) has a known blast radius around its intended target. Pick target, apply Circular Error Probable, apply blast radius, and you now have a circle that pretty accurately defines the amount of damage that weapon will do.
With a Chemical, Nuclear, or Biological weapon, that calculation no longer applies. With each, you get a cloud of contamination whose extent and direction you cannot predict, and - as the contamination is persistant to some degree - you cannot predict the number of unintended exposures to weapon effects after the fact.
A single machine gun, or even a knife, given enough persistance and patience, can indeed kill as many people as any CBRN strike. But unlike the CBRN strike, each person killed will have been done so purpously and with intent - and in the occasion of unintended casualties, those numbers will be small. Not so with a CBRN strike on a military target outside a city, when the wind changes and accidentally contaminates a major populated area..
It is that capability to expose large numbers of non-combatants to weapons effects *indescriminately* from actual combatants that makes these "WMDs"
Where Wikipedia fails HARD though is the article deletion process.
There are people out there who get a weird thrill from deleting articles.
An article that has been in place for *10 years* can be snuffed out just because a motivated moderator decides it isn't "notable" and sets up a "speedy delete".
Notice 6 months after the fact, try and put it back, and the whole friggin' WORLD descends on you.
Wikipedia is ruled by a group of petty, self-nominated bureaucrats. And the system - as horribly broken as it is - cannot be reformed, because there are too many vested interests who want to see it STAY broken.
Let me guess, you're a Wikipedia moderator, right?
It continually amazes me how, in a world where storage is effectively free, where there is literally no cost to hosting articles, that there exist people who seek to suppress knowledge because it doesn't meet their arbitrary standard of "notable".
Give a man the power to say "no", and he says "no" - a lot.
My 7870 performance on Linux has been getting steadily better. The release schedule is WAY faster than it was and I haven't seen any regressions for a long time.
The last 2 releases tripled performance on Portal - it's over 300 FPS now.
Steam on Linux appears to have lit a fire under AMD and real progress is being made. Shit Just Works now.
A ban that was subsequently overturned, was it not?
Card and the homophobes are playing King Canute. Try as they might, they cannot order back the tide. They might have the occasional local and temporary success, but the writing is very much on the wall here.
So then why care if he wants to waste his money supporting a futile fight?
But on the other side, Ender's Game the story has had uncounted amounts of positive effects on people (including me turning my life around, and all the second order effects that spill from that). Exposing more people to that story is only a good thing (especially if it leads to reading the books - the first three are very, very powerful and life-changing works of art)
I was shocked to my core to learn how reprehensible a person Card really is - and I still struggle to reconcile how that person could possibly write Ender's game, Speaker for the Dead, and the other one (the Shadow series is just Card going back to the well and largely forgettable) That, in of itself, is a valuable lesson.
I'll happily trade some money flowing into the hands of bigots to fund windmill-tilting if that results in a world where Ender's Game exists.
Slashdot Mirror
Son, I was there. Owned 3 Amigas.
Amigas were NOT PCs - and saying so in the wrong circles would get you shot.
"PC" meant it ran MS-DOS.
That's no longer true.
The Catalyst drivers have made *huge* gains over the past year to year and a half, both in terms of performance and stability.
Civ V and the recent Civ-BE preview run just fine on my HD 7870.
Commodore BASIC, Turbo Pascal, M6800 Assembly (wonderful!), 8088 Assembly (horrible!), C, SQL, M68k Assembly, AREXX, perl, sh, Javascript, Java, php. I've dabbled in others (I can crank out a VB macro if need be), but those are my core fluencies.
The assembly was very useful in learning how the CPU actually works, and proved very useful for understanding industrial/microcontroller stuff later on, but with CPUs these days being vastly more complex than an 8088 or an M6800, I don't know if it could be dumbed down enough. Perhaps on a virtual machine or something?
Turbo Pascal was an absolutely brilliant language to learn on, and it is a shame Pascal seems to have fallen out of favour. It was powerful enough to write workable programs on, but simple enough to keep a new student from wandering off the cliff edge.
If I was teaching, I'd use perl:
- perl supports multiple syntaxes so you can teach the simple stuff in a straightforward manner
- The fact that it identifies variables and in which context they are being used is a brilliant way to help students separate out what bits are variables/arguments and what bits are code
- The C and sh bits are gateways into C and sh - "C lite"
- You can do some really powerful and *useful* programs in perl, which teaches that programming isn't just the creation of monolithic apps, but a *process* that can be used to solve a single specific problem.
- perl has native regular expressions, and teaching pattern matching opens up a whole new world of problem solving techniques
I can see homework like "Take the provided text file, and write a program that takes it as input and prints out the sentence that has the most vowels in it" or "Write a program that prints a list of the songs in your music library, ordered by date of album release". These programs are easy to write in perl, fun, challenging, and *useful*.
Phenom II x6 1090t, Radeon HD 7880, 12 GB DDR2 (it's an AM2+ board), Ubuntu 14.04 32 bit. Runs flawlessly for me.
Amen, amen, amen.
I have an HD 7880 in my Linux box, and it works very well with Catalyst.
The drivers have made some real strides lately, and I bet all the issues in the Phoronix article are addressed in the next release.
I'm planning to move to systemd as soon as possible. Off Ubuntu and back to Fedora for me.
Why? Because it is clearly the right way ahead, and I'd rather learn its nuances sooner than later.
And it *has* to be better than the steaming pile of shit that Ubuntu has become.
The only real problem with systemd is the massive whinefest from the self-selected dinosaurs who cannot adopt to badly needed change.
Off to BSD with you all, with my heartfelt blessing - just for the love of Lob, be quiet about it!
I doubt I'll have much success in this, but I've tilted and windmills before:
Chemical Weapons are indeed "Weapons of Mass Destruction" - and the key characteristic that makes them so is *indescrimination*.
A straight-up HE bomb (or even a pie-in-the-sky KE weapon) has a known blast radius around its intended target. Pick target, apply Circular Error Probable, apply blast radius, and you now have a circle that pretty accurately defines the amount of damage that weapon will do.
With a Chemical, Nuclear, or Biological weapon, that calculation no longer applies. With each, you get a cloud of contamination whose extent and direction you cannot predict, and - as the contamination is persistant to some degree - you cannot predict the number of unintended exposures to weapon effects after the fact.
A single machine gun, or even a knife, given enough persistance and patience, can indeed kill as many people as any CBRN strike. But unlike the CBRN strike, each person killed will have been done so purpously and with intent - and in the occasion of unintended casualties, those numbers will be small. Not so with a CBRN strike on a military target outside a city, when the wind changes and accidentally contaminates a major populated area..
It is that capability to expose large numbers of non-combatants to weapons effects *indescriminately* from actual combatants that makes these "WMDs"
My experience running SolidWorks through MasterCAM was very different.
Feed MasterCAM the specs on your machine and the part file, and what you got Just Worked. Clamp the workpiece and you could walk away.
Indeed.
Print encyclopedias had to be picky about editing, because even edited down they were still 100lbs and took up feet of shelf space.
A digital encyclopedia has no such constraints. It can be a repository for everything, at no cost.
The "not notable" constraint is totally artificial and serves only as an outlet for the petty-minded to exert some small degree of power.
DG
Says the "Anonymous Coward".
Oh, the irony.
DG
Where Wikipedia fails HARD though is the article deletion process.
There are people out there who get a weird thrill from deleting articles.
An article that has been in place for *10 years* can be snuffed out just because a motivated moderator decides it isn't "notable" and sets up a "speedy delete".
Notice 6 months after the fact, try and put it back, and the whole friggin' WORLD descends on you.
Wikipedia is ruled by a group of petty, self-nominated bureaucrats. And the system - as horribly broken as it is - cannot be reformed, because there are too many vested interests who want to see it STAY broken.
Let me guess, you're a Wikipedia moderator, right?
It continually amazes me how, in a world where storage is effectively free, where there is literally no cost to hosting articles, that there exist people who seek to suppress knowledge because it doesn't meet their arbitrary standard of "notable".
Give a man the power to say "no", and he says "no" - a lot.
DG
When I lived in Toronto, about a year ago, I had to look hard to find anyone using an Apple or Android phone.
It was all BlackBerry - on the subway, in Starbucks, on the street - BB ruled the roost.
And the BB10 phones are *amazing*. The UI is bar none the best designed for a phone I've ever encountered.
Yup.
And as I already had the Windows version, it was free.
Works flawlessly on an HD7870 Ubuntu / Catalyst box. Squee!
And not at all surprising that it is posted as AC. Few would post something that stupid and mis-informed under their own name.
McVeigh a hero? Sure, the same way Stalin was.
My 7870 performance on Linux has been getting steadily better. The release schedule is WAY faster than it was and I haven't seen any regressions for a long time.
The last 2 releases tripled performance on Portal - it's over 300 FPS now.
Steam on Linux appears to have lit a fire under AMD and real progress is being made. Shit Just Works now.
As if you have any right to talk....
Who you calling "old", Sonny?
You called?
Oh, right, FUCK BETA!
Dude, this is my *home*.
How would you know, you 4-digit n00b? :)
(Yes, I know, we all resisted getting accounts at first)
Oh, hardly.
People have been complaining about the decline of /. since day 1.
DG
Why not? I did it.
A ban that was subsequently overturned, was it not?
Card and the homophobes are playing King Canute. Try as they might, they cannot order back the tide. They might have the occasional local and temporary success, but the writing is very much on the wall here.
So then why care if he wants to waste his money supporting a futile fight?
But on the other side, Ender's Game the story has had uncounted amounts of positive effects on people (including me turning my life around, and all the second order effects that spill from that). Exposing more people to that story is only a good thing (especially if it leads to reading the books - the first three are very, very powerful and life-changing works of art)
I was shocked to my core to learn how reprehensible a person Card really is - and I still struggle to reconcile how that person could possibly write Ender's game, Speaker for the Dead, and the other one (the Shadow series is just Card going back to the well and largely forgettable) That, in of itself, is a valuable lesson.
I'll happily trade some money flowing into the hands of bigots to fund windmill-tilting if that results in a world where Ender's Game exists.