Redstate

I thought asp expressions translated pretty well to english. If, Then etc.

But, yeah, geeky anyway.

absentee

I love it. It make my inner geek smile.

absentee

ANY DECENT GEEK KNOWS YOU USE SOMETHING INCOMPREHENSIBLE

like this

(∼R∈R∘.×R)/R←1↓⍳R

From a good old IBM product if ever there was one
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Tell me, why isn't that around anymore?

The HinzSight Report
Managing Editor

Its still the best language for handling large matrices ever invented. It has uses in Geophysics and Modeling.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I'm strangely clueless here.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Thanks, Joliphant. APL reminded me of something like Brainfudge (I'm paraphrasing its name), a near impossible to read programming language. You can see an example of a DVD decryptor written in Brainfudge here. You can find other near impossible to use programming languages at Free Esoteric & Obfuscated Programming Languages.

Personally I get a real kick out of The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. They've had such winning gems like this. Now that is creative.

I never heard of the languages on that page (Possible exception of intercal), Java2k looks like fun.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

... for those of us mentally ill enough to appreciate them.
Thanks.

That DVD decryptor was sick, and no I didn't make the slightest attempt to understand it! I wasn't so impressed by the Obfuscated C winner - it looks about the same as when I have to go fix old code of mine, which I presumably thought made sense at the time ;-)

...
This is also from the Wikipedia entry:

'Tis the dream of each programmer
Before his life is done,
To write three lines of APL
And make the damn thing run.'

OK really, it's not that bad. Just because it is a programming language that occasionally used OVERSTRUCK characters doesn't mean it's bad...

But as you say, like everything interesting in the world, it has a use and some people are still using it for that.

Isn't there a 6 month rule before you can purposefully show your ignorance?

Texas Proud and Texas Loud

He's making fun of the paulites as being bots posting paranoid rants.

absentee

...you guys are posting in a foreign language, after all. :)

The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!

I stand by my earlier post... :)

Texas Proud and Texas Loud

I stand by your comment too then

Didn't he have that song, "Super Freak"?

The HinzSight Report
Managing Editor

I can't hold back for 6 minutes let alone 6 months.

YourComment=Request.Querystring("humor")

absentee

But because it's FUNNY, you're in.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

"If this ain't a mess, it'll do until one shows up." -Sheriff Bell, No Country For Old Men

My world is CRUSHED!

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

"If this ain't a mess, it'll do until one shows up." -Sheriff Bell, No Country For Old Men

I'd have dispensed with the loop and vectorized the statement in Matlab.

EQUIVALENCE FORTRAN DINOSAUR

Heh, heh...

which is what I largely deal in, but I figured some people would have a harder time reading it with things like i++ and all.

Not that I can read any of it anyway...
I'm just an amateur nerd, after all. With mostly non-computerized nerd-skills...

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

And SCREW the people who can't read geek, I say!

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

because JAVA is where all the cash is. After all, the root to all evil is money. Speaking from a guy who has done (C ++) for more than 15 years, and JAVA 10 years after wards.

C++ is acceptable ONLY because it's been fairly central to my income generation for about 12 years. Other than that, it is a horrible mutation of C -- as in Kernighan and Ritchie C.

"C" is the language that gods speak. And when we get down to it, the most purely golden version is not the original K&R, but the ANSI version developed circa 1989.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

1970's K&R C on a PDP-11 is MAN code...

Is VAX still around? Holy cow. But the deal is this -- M&R didnt include all the standard libraries, and I hate the way parameters are declared.

So, heretic I am. But if I'm a heretic, Strousup is a Commie spy.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

running on Windows NT 4.0 systems so we can still run the old programs. We also have DEC VAXstations running VMS.

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

Had the most rational and cleanest instruction sets I have ever seen. They were just things of beauty. As opposed to a certain series of processors that were originally meant for handheld calculators.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

not to say I haven't had occasions to appreciate those training wheels.

If you've been doing Java for the last 10 years, you started in 1997. That's cool. Java was released in May 1995, as I recall. (I remember well because the first thing I did when it came out was to write a native-x86 compiler for bytecode.)

Before that you wrote C++ for more than 15 years, which means you started no later than 1982.

At that time, Stroustrup hadn't even released cfront, and in fact hadn't even started using the name "C++" yet.

So, are you Bjarne Stroustrup? Or were you an assistant of his at Bell Labs?

And now that you mention it, in 97 Java had an almost non existent user base.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I've gotten a pretty good nose for when people are stretching. It's not just applicants either. I can remember want ads back in 1997 or so, looking for Java programmers with a minimum of five years' experience! I guess the only people who qualified at that time were Jim Gosling and a few other people who worked on Project Oak at Sun.

And while I'm reminiscing: legendary techie Bill Joy is often credited as one of the inventors of Java in the popular press. Yet when he first heard about Oak (probably in 1993 or 94), his first reaction reputedly was: "Oh I get it, it's C plus-plus minus-minus." Not a bad description of Java, actually.

But Thunder has yet to answer whether he was stretching. Who knows, he might really be the inventor of C++!

Back in 1997, Java was still being pushed mostly as a way of improving the Web experience, via applets. As you know, it never really worked, and not just because Microsoft did their level best to kill Java by forking it. Javascript took over inside the browser environment and Java ended up totally taking over the market for custom programming in enterprise IT shops.

However one feels about Java as a programming language, there's no denying that Sun has managed it in an extremely adroit and successful way. Of course you can argue that they have mishandled its transition to open source, but none of the agile-language competitors (notably Python and Ruby) have done much to capitalize on those recent errors.

I have a very simple way of verifying a programmer's creds in a language. I sit them down at a workstation and ask them to implement something short and simple.

Mostly because I can never remember when what came about
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

...with pencil and paper while you watch them do it.

It's the ultimate acid test. Fewer than one in ten applicants are both willing and able to do it.

Some people say "I can't do it with you watching me." Some people can't do it on paper, and they'll even admit they rely on the compiler to catch their syntax errors. A lot of people simply don't understand recursion.

Hire the ones who roll up their sleeves and bang it out error-free in five minutes or less. The real stars are the ones who figure out the square-root optimization.

my first phone interview out of college in 03 the lady on the other end asked me if I had experience with OpenGL programming. I rattled off what I knew from gaming. She then asked me if I had two meshes how would I determine which 2 points (one on each mesh) were closest to each other. Lacking any significant geometric algorithm experience and realizing I was way under qualified, I asked "I assume you don't want me to say 'do a brute force loop through each point on both meshes'?"

I get recursion (better than most of the programmers I know... but maybe that says more about them than me), but honestly I don't know I could come up with a prime number generator off the top of my head. At least nothing slick and efficient.

Oh and btw, I now know how to do some basic OpenGL programming b/c of that interview.

Although I wouldn't use recursion, and I'm not a c/c++ coder.

algorithm:

int maxPrime=1000;
int[maxPrime] primes;
primes[0]=2;
print 2;
int numPrimesFound=1;

for (int i=3; i<=maxPrime; i++)
{
int currPrime=0;
boolean prime = true;
while (prime == true && primes[currPrime] != null && primes[currPrime] < root(i))
{
if (i % primes[currPrime] == 0) prime = false;
currPrime++;
} // while
if (prime == true)
{
print i;
primes[numPrimesFound]=i;
numPrimesFound++;
} // if
} // for
-
NARF

-
NARF

checking the current number to see if it was divisible ONLY by previously determined primes was the slick bit of efficiency I would have overlooked. I probably would have checked against all numbers <= 1/2 the current number which is hardly an efficient solution especially when you get to large numbers.

Talk about the ease with which you could find new Primes this way. Or confirming that what you're working with is a Prime...

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

Which is not a dig at jpers36, because it's not the solution I'd have first leapt to, either.

I'm pretty sure that the largest known prime is notably larger than, say, MAX_INT. I'm also pretty sure that there are enough known primes to overflow jpers36's choice of 1000 entries in his array. Would be reasonably trivial to generalize the approach to a dynamic array, and stocked with the first n primes in order. Would be a bit more complicated to cover numbers greater than MAX_INT, but there are existing code libraries for big numbers. (You could use floating-point numbers, but you'll get bitten by the (lack of) precision.)

Calculating primes seems to be a pretty common exercise for introducing CS students to loops.

Unless you were being sarcastic (I can never tell).

you only have to check all numbers < (n/2), not <=. Because n is an integer, n/2 is a valid factor iff 2 is a valid factor. And you'll have already checked 2.

HTML Help for Red Staters

NO TEXT DOES NOT WORK THIS WAY

HTML Help for Red Staters

I started out in high school on a PDP-8E with BASIC and Fortran programming. Later in life I learned C++. Now I do Java, and if given the choice, I am not going back.

Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion."); }

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

cc is the standard name for the UNIX C compiler, and Javascript does not have a preprocessor. (I'm honestly not sure what the C++ compiler would be called, although I think it's all aliased to gcc these days.)

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

I've done alot of gcc, forgot to notice the implication of cc.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

<script language="javascript">
if (YourLang=="C++") {
myage=this.age
yourage=myage+moreage
document.write("Use Java!")
}
</script>

absentee

/* But, if you insist: */
import com.redstate.users.*;

public class Rejoinder {
    public static void Main(String [] args) {
        System.out.println("Get off my lawn!");
        /* I'm not even 30! ;_; */
        if (RedStateUsers.GetUser("absentee").Age > RedStateUsers.GetUser("Canthros").Age) {
            System.err.println("Err ... sir.");
        } else {
            System.out.println("You whippersnapper!");
        }
    }
}

class Age
  def initialize(member)
    @member = member
  end
end

puts "Get off my lawn!"
if Age.member < 30
  puts " you wippersnapper!"
else
  puts " err ... sir."
end

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

class Age
	attr_accessor :value
	def initialize(age)
		@value = age
	end
	def <=>(b)
		@value <=> b.value
	end
	include Comparable
end
class Member
	attr_accessor :age, :name
	def initialize(name, age)
		@age = age
		@name = name
	end
end
puts "Get off my lawn!"
if member.age < 30
  puts " you wippersnapper!"
else
  puts " err ... sir."
end

HTML Help for Red Staters

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

©Z “ N DICE M; A; B
[1] Ê Dice
[2] A “ N ® M
[3] B “ œA
[4] Z “ -/B
[5] Ê Z “ -/œN®M or Z “ -/B“œA“N®M
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

HTML Help for Red Staters

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

What I ought to do is ad to_i to Age instead of calling #value.

HTML Help for Red Staters

: scram CR ." Get off my lawn!"
30 AGE < if CR ." you wippersnapper!"
else CR ." err ... sir." then;

scram

To think I once wrote a video game in that stuff

In Perl (could do similar in C/C++ or Java) I'd prefer

print "Get off my lawn "
  . ($age < 30 ? "you wippersnapper!" : "err ... sir.");

{ throw new SanityCheckException(); }

-
NARF

ListenTo("Rush", 3, vbDaily)

End Try

blast now i have to gifn my head
kinda wisj I xouls tyoe without it.

Can we now speak in Engliah, please?

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

absentee

Spongebob reference! The ultimate modern parental disclosure.

I have him on my keychain, souvenir of Nick Hotel in Orlando.

absentee

Plus she has that southern accent...

Creating blog entries with nearly incomprehensible comments, I mean. The homos one comes to mind.

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

HTML Help for Red Staters

<%elseif yourguy="Huckabee" Then%>Fred Thompson is the most conservative candidate. He's solid, he gets the thinkers fired up if not the whole population. He'll be a solid, decisive, fantastic Commander-in-Chief. He is NOT lazy, disinterested or dead in the water, yet.

--
We would also like to know your advice for somebody like my daughter, who's going to graduate in two years, advice that you would give a young person.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Advice for a young person. Study history.

HTML Help for Red Staters

For every instance where yourguy=Huckabee I reference Thompson instead. I was reclassifying, as is my wont.

Basically, that those for Huckabee ought to be for Thompson.

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

I frankly don't have much patience for the genre you're mocking, anyway, so I didn't get it...

--
We would also like to know your advice for somebody like my daughter, who's going to graduate in two years, advice that you would give a young person.

SEC. RUMSFELD: Advice for a young person. Study history.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Left over from my undergrad days.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." ~Professor Dumbledore

I knew a guy in college (97 or so) who was using Fortran for his scientific computing. I looked at him funny, and he said no, it's Fortran90.

HTML Help for Red Staters

Graduated from an EE program in 98... used Fortran until the bitter end. No punchcards, but I still have nightmares about that program.

www.fairtax.org
Sick of Government Expansion? libertarian-Minded Republican? Check This Out... Republican Liberty Caucus!!!
www.rlc.org http://www.republicanliberty.org/

Iustum et tenacem propositi virum non civium ardor prava iubentium, non vultus instantis tyranni mente quatit solida.
-Quintus Horatius Flaccus

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." ~Professor Dumbledore

I'm ready for the Smithsonian.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." ~Professor Dumbledore

May I present the DEC Professional 350 Personal Computer...

I swear the thing ran on hamster power.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

My first "Personal Computer," though the term was barely coined in '81 or '82, was a NorthStar Advantage 64Kb running in CPM with a 5Mb Winchester hard drive. Ran WordStar, DBase 2 and SuperCalc. That was absolutely state of the art for a small business/personal computer (And it cost an **fing fortune)

Also had a TRS 80 handheld that ran in BASIC and used a cassette tape for data storage, that I could actually do a little work with - the predecessor of the laptop.

In Vino Veritas

I remember it well...

Joe Schmo's blog

I think.

Anyway, I started on a Leading Edge that we converted from a cassette reader to DOS...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/LeadingEdgeModelD.jpg

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

Still have it on my desk at home, use it frequently. 64k ram, 1 mhz processor, it is a beaut. It looks a little drab next to my Athlon FX-62 with 4 Gb and Dual 8800's, but I'm sentimental on the the C64.

that, that piece of crud was a brilliant idea was priceless.

My apologies you got forced into buying it.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Though I had CGA not MDA.

HTML Help for Red Staters

was on three of these:

The DEC "Rainbow" computer.

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

1981 at 8 years old was a TI 99 4/A quickly followed by an apple IIe. Then we upgraded to an IBM PC XT with something like a 10MB hard drive, who would ever need more than 10MB they said. then and AT and Ive pretty much had a new computer every year since the 1990s.

Big win last night - congrats.

While we're all strolling down computer memory-lane, anyone remember this gem...

Behold! The Timex Sinclair ZX-81 PC!

They made great doorjams.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

... is a 16K (that's not a typo, folks - 16K) piece of memory.

Ah, good times. Good times...

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

That can't be operational. It doesn't show a great big rubber band holding that horrible jiggly memory pack on.

And I felt sorry for him. I suggested he throw it in the trash, sell some newspapers, and wait for the QL to arrive and push IBM into the dustbin of history... ;)

But let's be fair. Lots of people learned how to program on a ZX-81 and its bretheren. I have a sweet spot in my heart for all of those cheap computers. If it hadn't been for them, IBM and Don Estridge might never have wanted to make the original PC open architecture (at least as far as the bus was concerned). In that sense they did everyone a big favor.

Were, as they say, "Zexy." If that machine had actually made a bigger splash I might have been Linus Torvalds. See Trivia at the bottom of the page.

It's TRUE! Unfortunately the QL was a manufacturing monstrosity even worse than the CMI hard drives on the original IBM PC/ATs. It was typical Sir Clive Sinclair BS marketing with terrible engineering and manufacturing capacity. For some reason he's recieved an official title for it in Britain. Strange.

Don't promise things you can't deliver.

Come to think of it, that goes awfully well for Presidential candidates, also.

Really. Simple language (and operating system, in most cases), it worked, any dope could use it, it worked, you could do lots of neat things with it... and did I mention that it worked?

I'm writing this on a Vista-based, Dual-Core Pentium-based Gateway laptop and thinking fondly of the Sinclair ZX-81. Man, I need to get some rest...

Oh, by the way, I freaking hate Vista with the seething, blaring, white-hot intensity of 1K suns - but that's a threadjack for another day...

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I tried to install XP-64 on my workstation (HP Pavilion 64-bit dual core 4GB - pre-installed Vista Home Basic) and got multiple blue-screens of death. Seems that there's some core hardware that DOES NOT WORK with XP - only Vista.

There will be a special place waiting in Hell for Bill Gates, I'm sure - and it will be filled with Linux-based workstations.

-------------
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Where's Service Pack 1?

It was supposed to be here by now.

On the other hand, my AMD machine has been running Vista now for almost 9 months I lurrrrrve it. Especially when playing Crysis.

Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }

I haven't found any reason to hate it. It's working great for me, and I'm not a Microsoft Evangelist. I'm sure you have a long list, maybe I just have a high tolerance for pain, but my system has been running 24/7 for the last nine months and it has crashed *precisely once.*

It baffles me that people don't like Vista. I use it for everything, every day and it never lets me down.

Vista is the "new and improved Tide." They really haven't changed much of anything, but they painted it in all new colors and moved it all around. A longtime user is simply driven nuts by it; see my comment below about my wife's new Vista machine. She's been using PCs all day every day since they came into existence. Notice I said "using," not playing with or programming. She simply hates it.

In Vino Veritas

They changed a lot in the interface and it makes a lot of people who are used to the Old Windows edgy. My Dad hates it, still boots into Win2KPro for his daily work. My job is to stay current so I swallowed my initial reluctance and just learned the interface, and actually there's a lot to like about it, but coming from the earlier versions of Windows I can understand why people don't like it.

I never had an XP system, I skipped right from a Win2KPro machine to Vista and I hate using Win2KPro now. I really do like my Vista32 and 64 machines even though I have it set up to boot into 2KPro in case I need to for a driver or 2.

My biggest hassle with Vista in fact has been getting older drivers to work. The rest of the software has run well, except for the fact that Adobe and Microsoft had a very public spat over the PDF format in XP and as a result Adobe products were broken under the early versions of Vista.

I run InDesign on a regular basis now and and this machine works very well. I'd never switch back to XP or 2KPro.

Are the system tools under Vista Ultimate. Things like the rollback feature and the backup tools, and the extended functions through the Control Panel. One thing I miss is the simple, straightforward RUN command from the start button, so I just have command-prompt icon in the taskbar instead.

Otherwise it's been very good to me. My laptop(s) use it also. YMMV. I'm not a tough critic of operating systems because I don't have a dog in the OS fight personally, I just adapt. To me the Vista adaptation was easy and I like it.

Good graphics accelerator at least a dual core processor and it works.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

It's a hardware intensive OS. I have a dual-processor (not dual core, but soon to be 2x dual core) Opteron system with 4GB of RAM and the penultimate nVidia 8800 series card and it's great.

It's not for people who want to run old hardware. Don't try, and don't gripe because you can't. It's not meant for you to run on your old Pentium III with 512MB of RAM. It's there to help keep the computer industry going. All those people at CompUSA owe their livelihoods, like it or not, to the fact that Microsoft keeps making new operating systems that require new hardware.

Lots of purists think it's a horrible thing, but I could run the whole freaking world on a 386 if I really wanted to go back to programming in Assembler and nobody would ever sell another PC again.

So people really need to chill out and make up their minds about whether Microsoft is really "that bad". In fact what they've done is create an entire INDUSTRY of people -- booksellers, programmers, hardware specialists, etc., etc., etc. all of whom make a lot of money.

If you'd really like to be poor n' pure, you can move to India.

Because I really do have a dog in the Open Source fight. Open Source is *PURE SOCIALISM*. Paul Allen said it exactly correctly when he described it as a VIRUS. You write your stuff and you GIVE IT AWAY. It's insanity.

I really enjoy the people in this world who like to be able to afford living in America who actually think open-source software is a business model. It's not: it's a terrible geek affectation.

If it weren't for Microsoft and their continual expansion of what it takes to run the machine, all the people around the world who make RAM and motherboards and the latest hardware would *go broke.* And they'd all turn Commie faster than you can shake a stick at them.

Who don't like that. But I'm a strong supporter of DRM and I'm a strong supporter of Copyright law and I think Open Source and the GNU Public License and all the rest of the stuff peddled under its imprimatur is deliberately and self-consciously anti-Capitalist. I don't care about the "community benefits" of having someone contribute to my code and help me fix the bugs: I want those people under binding nondisclosure agreements as part of my corporation, selling for-profit products.

I'm not interested in making the world easier for Chinese manufacturers who need to copy my software in order to put me out of business faster. It should be as hard as possible for them to do so. Believe me, when the time comes, they're not going to care about your generosity 30 years ago.

I don't share in that sense. If you want to write code, come up with an idea and form a company and get a few people together and write the code and sell it. But for Christ's sake don't give it away. What are you working for? To race yourself to the bottom?

I just don't buy DRM-laden products, heh.

HTML Help for Red Staters

But that's the end of my rant about it in this thread in any case. Part of the problem for me relates to past experience on this. 'Nuff said for now.

I'm a huge anti-piracy guy myself. And while I don't loath open source software (I've put out a couple of free things myself), the anti-microsoft attitude and the anti-capitalist attitude that denies the concept of intellectual property cheeses me off to know end.

My only disagreement is I think that the music industry's DRM oversteps reasonable bounds. When I buy a product, obviously I can't share it, especially in a way that could discourage further sales. But saying I can't copy my CD to my MP3 player sounds about as reasonable to me as Heinz telling you what hotdogs you are allowed to put their ketchup on. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm not sharing it with anyone else, after the transaction is complete, it is not up to them how I use it personally because it is my property now.

All the major labels have dropped DRM for music. Amazon has a store selling nothing but DRM free MP3s.

Why They got tired of getting a butt whooping by Apple. Itunes took the DRM chain and choked them with it.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

But I would never participate except to take advantage of the suckers who offer up their products for free...

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

It's a Biblical freaking nightmare on my laptop.

Oh, but having to grant myself permission to make a basic change to my computer system - like back-up files? Yeah, that's productivity for you.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Turn off User Account Control.

Control Panel > User Accounts > Turn User Account Control On or Off.

Simple.

Forgive my ignorance, but my internet searching on that topic said Bad Things™ happen if you turn-off UAC. What gives?

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

But you can turn it off with no ill effects as long as you know what you're doing. Microsoft enforced user accounts in Vista because they're exposed by virtue of the fact that they have the largest market share. They didn't want Vista to die an early death because people started installing rogue programs without knowing what they were doing.

But you can turn it off, and I have, and it doesn't hurt the system at all. I'm running mine with no UAC right now.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Vista will unquestionably succeed at some level because new PCs in the consumer market ship with it. In other words, consumers don't get a choice.

Enterprises are seriously staying away from Vista on the whole, however. Many large organizations traditionally had a pattern of replacing all of their PCs on a three-year cycle. Many of them are now stretching that out to five years.

It's not just because Vista breaks so much software. It's more because there's no compelling reason to upgrade, especially given two of the largest trends in enterprise IT: Software-as-a-service, and consolidation.

Microsoft is not about to get into trouble, of course. They will still keep releasing Office updates that are not back-compatible, forcing massively expensive (but fundamentally useless) upgrade cycles.

And what they're doing with SharePoint is fascinating too. They're basically giving it away to small companies. But they're telling large companies to either buy and use SharePoint or give up on the dream of getting timely support for their other Microsoft products. (Taking a page out of IBM's playbook. And IBM is a company that simply can't deliver software solutions to most of their clients no matter what they do.)

On the MS ecosystem that you mentioned elsewhere: yes, a lot of people have made a lot of money supporting Windows, and at one level, that includes hardware vendors. But the monopoly position of Windows has indeed wiped out creative new approaches and locked everyone into an information-processing model (namely, using files and folders on personal computers) that was already an antique ten years ago. On a net basis, Microsoft has been a destructive force in the information-processing world.

Open source: that is a subject worthy of a very long discussion. You (and Paul Allen) are wrong at one level. Open source is not communism. It's also not 100% true that it's not a business model. (My creds in the open-source world are perhaps a little bigger than you may realize.)

However, major cracks will soon appear in the open source world. This is a technology development model with a lot of underappreciated internal stresses. Again, much larger subject than can be dealt with in one comment.

Being the most popular doesn't make you a monopoly especially when some of your competition gives their product away for free. If Microsoft didn't have enough positives (regardless of the negatives you see) the market would switch to Linux in a heartbeat.

I rarely see people who complain about Microsoft's software model complain about Apple's hardware model which was (is?) way more restrictive.

Restrictive hardware doesn't lock up your data.

HTML Help for Red Staters

for all the complaining from Microsoft haters for the way they market their apps and "deliberately" make their competitor's apps not work on their OS's (which is a perspective I disagree with. I wouldn't write an OS to bend over backwards to run someone else's app. I'd write an OS the way I thought it should be written. Then I'd write my app to fit in that model and if someone elses app doesn't work, oh well. They can write their own darn OS if they don't like it or learn to work within my model.), I never hear complaints about how Apple completely controlled their hardware making it literally impossible for a 3rd party start up to market peripherals like sound cards to their systems. IBM didn't do this (to their detriment?) and that's why there are so many PC hardware manufacturers. If you are going to complain about Microsofts business model, I think it only fair that you at least rip Apple for theirs.

If my data is portable, there's no real lock in. That's why Microsoft is so pushy when it comes to file formats.

One's data is infinitely more valuable than mere money, sorry.

HTML Help for Red Staters

Do we? I'm talking about the business model which as a starter hardware company it'd be literally impossible to work with Apple, but as a starter software company you could work with Microsoft but at a disadvantage. It sounds to me you are talking about the consumer's perspective weighing your data vs the hardware it uses.

HTML Help for Red Staters

On the MS ecosystem that you mentioned elsewhere: yes, a lot of people have made a lot of money supporting Windows, and at one level, that includes hardware vendors. But the monopoly position of Windows has indeed wiped out creative new approaches and locked everyone into an information-processing model (namely, using files and folders on personal computers) that was already an antique ten years ago. On a net basis, Microsoft has been a destructive force in the information-processing world.

The "files and folders" model -- with all of its attendant basis in the disk file system -- of presenting information stored on a computer is indeed a terribly obsolete paradigm and it's one of the things I regret the most that Microsoft hasn't taken their enormous R&D capability to change. Files within folders within folders nested deeply to an endless level might make sense to someone used to recursive programming but congitively, visually and metaphorically it's an awful model for people who are using the machine.

I would love to see Microsoft start working much more aggressively on building alternative shells for Windows that abstract the underlying architecture of the filesystem right out of existence from the user's point of view, and replace it with a much more intuitive way of looking at a disk drive (and a computer generally.) The shell itself would have to be a pretty powerful abstraction layer in that instance but who cares? You'd need a Intel Core II Duo and 2GB of RAM just to run the shell? Big deal. That's what the hardware industry wants anyway.

I know they have the programming talent and mindpower to do it if they were really interested in changing the model.

"of presenting information stored on a computer is indeed a terribly obsolete paradigm"

I don't follow. It always seemed intuitive to me even at 8 years old. Who's got a better model? Last I checked Linux and Mac are still using the same model.

The capacity of the hardware to display a complex visual interface has improved by leaps and bounds and what I would do is allow people to place "objects" in "spaces". That's how we arrange our world, after all. When someone says to you: "Where is your toothbrush?" you think of a place. All of the underlying, data about how that information is stored on the disk or other media would be abstracted away and what you'd have instead is an interface based on locations, with visual cues and a very powerful search function. Microsoft tries things like this with stuff like the "Pictures" folder but it's not quite there yet.

You would say things in a natural language query like, for example: "Where did I put the accounting data for the Rozencrantz Group back in 2009? I need to see the bottom line." And the software would just spit back the item and its location.

How all that stuff gets written to disk doesn't matter as long as the abstraction layer works right.

Let's say you're starting a project with a Microsoft Brand suite of software that will require elements in Word, Excel, and Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

When you start the project you say to the software: "I want all of this in the orange Rozencrantz box, and I want it encrypted with my password 'selmalouise'." No file names. No specific directory/file information. You create the stuff and the software puts it in the "Orange Rozencrantz Box" and whenever you want to see it, you just say:

"Show me the Orange Rozencrantz Box, third quarter projections. I'm selmalouise." and the software just finds the Orange box, opens the file using the appropriate program, and displays it.

You could supply one or have the software generate one for you automatically, but what I'm talking about is just saying something like:

"Send the whole Orange Box to Doctor Bilderstrummen, except convert everything to PDF first and don't send the raw files."

Ok. It sounds to me then like your talking about adding an additional layer of abstraction which I may admit may be overdue. I don't see that so much killing the idea of a file system as much as dropping it to the background to be managed by "experts".

Speaking of neat abstraction layers like this, have you heard of Microsoft Milan Surface Computer? While I wouldn't be surprised to be replied to with a "Microsoft ripped it off!" comment, just judging from the screen shots, they might be backing it up with an OS that has the kind of abstraction layer you are describing. I don't know, but it looks neat.

While that might be true in the information processing world, it depends on what you mean. We process hundreds of millions of customer records a year with Windows machines and command-line programs written in Visual Basic and even older stuff written in Turbo Pascal. We use Access for 95% of our database work and we've gotten very good at it. It just hasn't been that much of a hindrance to us. I just processed a 650,000 record file for a mailing that is printing *right now* using a program running on a Win2KPro box.

In other areas Microsoft has been even better. They've almost singlehandedly built the PC videogame industry in this country. Even John Carmack had good things to say about why he kept ID Software on Windows NT when they were developing Quake, and that's true right up until this day. Microsoft OSes have moved hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in graphics cards. Now that's not *information processing* per se but the sale of that hardware has kept all these companies alive and kicking, largely because of DirectX.

I had one of the original ATI EGA Wonder (about $400 IIRC) graphics cards back in 1987-88 in my PC/AT and ATI is still around two decades later (now owned by AMD) fighting it out tooth-and-nail with nVidia. If I had bought an Apple at the time I would have missed all the wonderfully instructive time I spent getting it to work... ;)

And while this isn't necessarily something to be proud of, the fact remains that Microsoft by "virtue" of its products has ensured that companies in the antivirus software, system backup and restore, and network management software businesses can continue to hire people who want to find a good job that will not stop being interesting any time soon. :P

HTML Help for Red Staters

My roommate and I are both IT professionals. Earlier this year, he bought a brand-spanking-new laptop from Dell, with what was supposed to be top-of-the-line hardware (don't have the specs in front of me). It came pre-packaged with Vista as the only option.

The thing ran slooooooooooow. Explorer windows sometimes took as much as a minute to come up. Booting up took longer than Win2000 used to. He bought and installed City of Heroes, which ended up looking like a first-generation polygon game and playing like a snail. He tried to install World of Warcraft, but the installation process froze after running for about 3 hours. In addition, we couldn't find a way to share files between the laptop and my XP desktop.

He eventually gave up and rolled back to XP. Explorer windows popped up immediately. Boot time was less than a minute. City of Heroes looked decent and played smoothly, he hasn't tried to install WoW yet, and network communication is great.

-
NARF

An Acer Aspire with Vista Home Basic installed as the only option. It was slow until swapped out the base 512MB of RAM for $81 from NewEgg and installed 2GB; it completely transformed the machine. I wrote a blog entry about it back in July.

One problem may be the graphics chipset on your Dell. If it's like the ATI Radeon 1100 chipset in the Acer and it borrows video RAM from the system memory pool instead of having high-speed RAM dedicated to the chipset, it will make the machine bog down severely playing games.

This isn't an especially fast laptop (AMD 3500+) and cost less than $600 even with the memory upgrade, so maybe there's something wrong with your Dell? ;)

But if it was a hardware issue, perhaps MS shouldn't have been pushing so hard for PC manufacturers to sell Vista on machines that can't handle it.

-
NARF

I haven't bought any games newer than 2 years old and most of what I have is better than 10 years old.
Vista won't let me play any of them.

That, and the hardware I have has drivers so old Vista won't recognize them. That doesn't help any.

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

Before Microsoft hired the author away from Borland, Turbo Pascal was the best general-purpose language in the world. And it still is in many applications.

Though CodeGear screwed the help system in the latest releases
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

of spec-ing and purchasing a new Dell for my wife running in Vista. If I don't show up for awhile, it is because of my suicide to escape the bitching. Since I bought the damned thing, I am now personally responsible for every sin against humanity committed by Bill Gates and Microsoft.

This is an XP machine and it has been more or less fine running the Office Suite and a bunch of photography and music stuff plus the stuff you collect over the years, e.g., the software for all the remotes in the house. I long ago relegated computers to the same category as hammers; don't care how they work, don't want to work on them, just want them to do what I tell them.

In Vino Veritas

That's actually a Sinclair ZX81. This is a Timex Sinclair 1000...

...which followed it, and also not to be confused with the rarer, and frankly even suckier, Sinclair ZX80. And if you bother to zoom in, yes, the Dymo label on the upper right says "Mom's Computer". That's what Mom got stuck with in 1982...

And, since I'm quite frankly unable to restrain myself...

That's a TI 99/4A with expansion box, Atari 600, Atari 1040ST, and the original diskettes for Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. If my parents ever cleaned out their basement (which I'm not living in, thank you very much), I'd need a wide-angle lens.

I bought it at a Skaggs drugstore in Columbia, MO in 1983...I think it was like $20.00, and $5.00 for the memory...

My first PC was a HP 486 SX 33 Mhz with 4 MB of RAM and a 200 MB hard drive. It had a 3 1/2 inch floppy, and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. It had no CD ROM or sound card. It ran DOS 6 with Windows 3.1 and I bought it used.

I still have it in it's original box out in the garage. I refuse to part with it.

Wubbies World, MSgt, USAF (Retired):
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("An argument is a sequence of statements aimed at demonstrating the truth of an assertion.); }

I thought everyone knew that FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. :-)

---
Finrod's First Law of Bandwidth:
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it takes the bandwidth of ten thousand.

The head of my alma mater's CS department when I was a college student was reputed to have that he didn't know what language the mechanical engineers would be using in fifty years, but it would called FORTRAN, or words to that general effect.

My parents, both engineers but neither of the mechanical sort, had to learn FORTRAN 4 in their day.

Most of the guts of nearly all the commercial codes is still in Fortran.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

I had a seat at the death of FORTRAN. Once spreadsheets came out with their nifty copy and paste functions who needed to program calcualations anymore.

FORTRAN 77 counted as my foreign language requirement.

has been greatly exaggerated, my friend.

That said, now that I can use Matlab for finite element analysis programming I don't use Fortran (or C, for that matter) in the class I teach anymore. Pretty slick, really.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

     PROGRAM HELLO
     WRITE (*,100)
     STOP

  100 FORMAT (' Hello World! ' /)

     END

Can't go wrong with the old Hello Word

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

Brought a smile to my face after all that object-oriented bunk upthread!

Thanks!

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

EQUIVALENCE FORTRAN DINOSAUR

...yep, that's harsh, all 72 columns, but this comes from a guy who's regrettably written a few hundred thousand lines of FORTRAN over the years and has a Processor Technology Sol in his closet with a FORTRAN compiler on hard sector diskettes. Killing this horrid "language" has been one of my life's dearest callings.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I am undaunted by mismatched bytes sizes in implicit type conversions. And I'm one of the very few people who can say they still have the first computer they ever used, not model, but specific instantiation of computer, back in 1977:

No stock photos here. That's five minutes ago in the upstairs hallway. Booyah!

Its in storage where it belongs n/t
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

...it's no Altair, but it's certainly geek cred. I salute you.

Having built something from one of Don Lancasters books.

Anybody who would try to synchronize frame buffers to sweep coils on a tube, well thats something
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Even I'm not that geeky. Although I do still have a core memory assembly somewhere in storage, it's not on hand. I can't take a picture of it, and therefore, you get the prize.

:)

Core memory is serious stuff. That's what the Space Shuttle v1.0 ran on, so much respect. ;)

This particular board is a failed prototype board from the Apollo Flight Computer. !!

...DEC-11 running RSTS/E. It was at a local university and I talked to it over a 300 baud phone line. I did go to visit it once. Couldn't get over how small the actual CPU was (about the size of a large breadbox, in a whole room full of peripherals), but I did like the lavender and purple switches all over it. (Obviously I was a little kid at the time.)

So I don't have my first computer. I do still have boxes of the yellow eight-hole paper tape it stored programs on, however.

the closer you look, the more bejeweled it is.

Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie

Dyslexia is a horrible disease! ;)

Warning you may want to turn down your volume

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Most people will never understand ;)

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

And all the other Microprose stuff. At the time I didn't use the "expensive computer" to play games much, because it was a "serious" machine. We had an Atari 2600 when we wanted to "goof off." Later a Colecovision, which is in fact the last videogame console I've ever owned.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

... chowed on my hyde in the darkness of my dorm room at 03:00 on the morning of exams.

Probably cost me a couple of tenths on my overall GPA.

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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.

Its just on the level of things were somebody makes a machine do things that they shouldn't be able to.

What you don't see in the video is that not only did Leo Christopherson get the TRS-80 do music and animation he also got a monochrome machine to do greyscale.

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

That's impressive.

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

I may not have a steam or mouse-on-a-wheel driven "computer" like some of the commenters, but I do have a working 2600 with games. The good one too, fake wood paneling, made at the Sunnyvale plant. It is to love.

Of course, the Wii absorbs my attention, now. It's the first time I've owned the "current" video game system since ... well, the Atari 2600.

Microprose. Remember King's Quest? I can still hear the creaking and groaning of the Tandy as it loaded the screens.

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

Of all of that schtuff was what happened when bored and smelly IBM programmers and engineers got together and decided to make their heavy-iron impact printers into musical instruments.

And also pinup printers, but I won't go there right now. We had a 1403N1 and two of the *really* large, 2000LPM models, the model numbers of which I cannot recall offhand. The 2000LPM machines were fully-enclosed.

LOUD! printers with the covers open. The print train moved at something like an honest 60MPH in linear velocity.

...the programmers of "target", a game of shooting blimps and parachutes that's the grandaddy of today's Ipod game, actually touted as "sound effects" the ability to leave a radio with the volume up beside the rather loosely shielded computer while playing. They considered the auditory rendering of RF interference a "feature" that enhanced the gaming experience.

Was a speaker that was driven off of a fixed-volume, single-tone oscillator chip on the motherboard and you could make it beep in a continuous tone or you could, if you were trying to be clever, try to program the chip in realtime which also brought the processor to its knees. You could play "chords" but they were interpolated chords. You could get it to do things like say: "Hello" but at that point you couldn't do anything else with it.

And I loved it.

I am reminded of the Retroencabulator is used to have.

It seems funny to you but frankly that's how PCs were sold in those days and the Tandy ads were very successful. It's a big cultural difference in a sense but the people who sold those machines really did believe in those advertisements and they were actually very successful.

People make light of them in the same way they use '50s kitsch now in a self-indulgently ironic sense, but that's not the sense I meant when I highlighted the ad. Actually I know a lot of people who made their livings selling those computers and the software for those machines. A lot of people who disparage it today really couldn't build an enterprise even if they *had* 100 million dollars to start with.

I remember the day my dad brought home a VHS (what? too modern?) with a video demo chowing off the Commodore64. I was in shock at what they claimed they could do. Then my dad got a laptop (the size of my desktop) that needed 3.5" floppies to boot up to DOS (I don't recal what version but it had BASIC still on it and it was prior to 6). It was 4 chades of blue until we finally got an external monitor which blew me away when I saw the 4 different colors on it. I don't remember what came after that, but several formatting of my dad's disks later we got a 486 with VGA and Windows 3.1 (and I think I got Sound Blaster Pro which knocked my socks off). That's when I went rumaging through our (10MB?) hard drive to find stuff to delete so I could free up some space for things like images and stumbled on a program called QBasic. Always one to try out what it was I was about to delete, I found I could make it BEEP. And then I found I could annoy the living snot out of my siblings with it. And thus my career was born. So yeah, I am kind of a young buck, but I'm grateful as heck for the guys who preceeded me inveting things like object oriented programming. I hope I never see another goto statement.

OMG that cracked me up. It sounded like Dr. Seuss made that monster.

I know some guys with the current incarnation of Rockwell Automation. I'm going to send them this video.

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

But some of those words he used sounded downright Kinky

"Guns don't kill people...
"...But they sure help!"
-Paul Giamatti, Shoot 'Em Up

Surveying for many developments in southern California (and other places I'm sure) was done using them.

What we need in a leader is to tell us not what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

==== 13 ====

it was cool , I could play football, chess, and Hunt the wampuss. It was easy to program primitive graphic and sound programs.

I graduated to the Commodore 64, and that box lasted several years. It was a supurb game platform. I breifly had an Amiga and experimented with Video Toaster technology.

Then I got hooked on Microsucks and have been hurting ever since.

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

I finally cut all use of MS products out of my life when it literally gave me headaches. Used Slackware for 5-6 years or so, then FreeBSD for 2-3 years, and then got my Mac.

HTML Help for Red Staters

since the very earliest days Apple has always been the same,
1)better quality
2)less trouble
3)too expensive
4)no software.

Now that MS finally has some stable platforms it seems foolish to switch now. (and for all the grousing, Vista is a pretty nice platform, it is quick and has never caused me any silly errors)

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle

I still have mine, along with Extended Basic, Munchman, and Tunnels of Doom, which is still remarkably playable.

I took the other fork in the road and graduated to an Atari 800XL. W00t! for Star Raiders and Eastern Front 1941.

I still have the Speechbox add-on, and the Star Trek:Strategic Operation Simulator game that used it.

-
NARF

watching my stepkids watching the scene in Apollo 13 where they are computing the orbital mechanics with a slide rule and pencil and paper. Their mouths were agape!

About the only things in my current home that existed in anything resembling their current form when I was in high school and college are the house itself (sorta), the kitchen range, and the furnace, and even it's the high tech energy efficient deriviative. And, yeah, once upon a time I could use that slide rule and do math with pencil and paper - in my head even. Well, I'm still pretty good with arithmetic and basic algebra in my head - a real advantage in today's World.

My stepkids, aged 21-25 have never seen a vinyl record, a black and white television, a television with no remote, a home without a microwave, a rotary phone, a day without a wireless phone - or a weekday when their mother was home; there is that.

My lair where I write this has four computers with capacity that only the CIA could have dreamed of when I was a young adult, flat screen TV, DVD and surround sound, a hundred odd channels of TV, many HD. And then there's a real honest to God bookcase with real books in it, the kerosene lamps that we use for power outages, and my blackpowder muskets - I like the contrasts.

In Vino Veritas

Lafayette F-428, Bamboo/Plastic, leather carrying case. Purchased 1962, Radio Shack. Still in excellent condition. Click image for larger.

wouldn't recognize three quarters of the stuff on the shelves of a Radio Shack in 1962! The transister was a new-fangled thing barely five years old and "transister radios" were just coming to the consumer market. Half the store was vacuum tubes and a central feature was the big tube tester. Tried buying a vacuum tube lately? They've become a very expensive luxury market product for audiophiles with either very old or high-priced custom amplifiers. I sure wish I hadn't thrown away that Sixties vintage Dynaco tube type stereo amplifier and Lafayette preamp I had back then. And every boy who didn't have one wanted a shortwave radio and there were lots of kits of varying "sophistication." And there was always a huge selection of TV antennae and rotors. I guess there are some really rural areas these days where people have the big "fringe" antennae with rotors to aim them, but in those days they were on every house. I still have one that was in my attic when I bought my current house and which probably dates from the sixties. I still use it, but only for FM radio reception. It is so directional and has so much gain that it cleans up the multipath that is such a problem in this very mountainous area. To keep a good signal while I drive to town, thirteen miles, I have to switch to at least two and with some stations three different frequencies on my car radio. Anyway, it was a different World in '62.

In Vino Veritas

For someone like my father who has been around in this business since the late 1950's, it's really mind-blowing. IBM once sent him to programming school in New York State to learn some optimization techniques so that he could save a few hundred bytes of RAM at a time, because the next option for his company was to purchase another 256K or so for a quarter of a million dollars.

People take so much for granted. And all of it has arrived because of the way this country works.

The power of congress is awesome.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

4t l34st w3 w3r3n't t4lk1ng 1n l33t, r1ght?

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

I find that is the language of wannabes, not engineers who know their stuff.

... Sans the geek. It's techy not techie. Chat-o-philes and gamerz. It has little to do with programming and plenty to do with instant messaging.

Also, it is extremely annoying. But quite hilarious in the right situation.

absentee
Thompson | McCain | Romney | Giuliani

You shouldn't be in the game.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Scott Adams skewers that pretty well, heh.

HTML Help for Red Staters

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

"The original pseudocode someone posted wasn't even careful enough to ignore even numbers."

Even numbers will be taken out of consideration in the first iteration of the while. The only further optimization I could see based on your post is i=i+2 instead of i++. Is that what you mean? It's perfectly "careful enough"; just not 100%optimized.

"Neil Stevens is the only one who caught the real optimization, which is only to test already-discovered primes up to the square root of the value being tested."

Um. That was included in my pseudocode. Neil's post is nested below mine.

"Asking for it in C: even though many prefer to write in other languages these days, I always look for someone who can pass the test in more than one language. That tells you the person thinks algorithmically rather than in terms of a specific language."

I confess: I'm one of those who never learned c. I took a c++ class, but I haven't had to use it yet in the workplace. I could, however, write the code in Java, Perl, and one or two niche languages, and could do it in 5 or 6 more with a quick refresher study.

But I'm confused: if you're looking for someone who thinks algorithmically, why ask for a specific language at all? Wouldn't a pseudocode description of the solution be sufficient? What you should be looking for (and maybe this is what you're trying to say) is someone who solves problems algorithmically, but also has the technical skills to apply that solution intelligently in any language with minimal study.

-
NARF

The ability to think through algorithms is necessary but not sufficient. If I'm hiring a programmer, he needs the ability to take those algorithms and efficiently translate them into source code in a specific language.

I suspsect 20 years ago he'd have used assembler instead of C as his test language, but unfortunately times have changed.

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Nowadays I hire mostly managers rather than programmers, but what I want from a programmer is the ability to produce an error-free solution to the business problem in a short amount of time.

That may sound like standard pointy-haired-boss language, but it's actually a very carefully considered statement.

The engineering parameters within which I would expect a coding project to be managed include a variety of quality dimensions, including time-to-market, maintainability and stability.

We went through perhaps a five-year period after the Internet bust when raw efficiency became greatly de-emphasized as a quality dimension, because the economic returns for it were not there. That has suddenly changed in the last two years or so, for some extremely interesting reasons (among them the requirement to minimize data-center power consumption), so hard-core C programming has been making a comeback.

If you really know what you're doing, it's possible to make some pretty efficient Java code, but there are limits because of the way Java manages memory. And Java threading is totally hopeless. Python is decent but the language is stagnant. Ruby is wonderful, but suffers from serious, inherent performance problems and is suitable only as a glue language.

In terms of hiring people, the need to work well in heterogeneous teams has come to the fore as never before. The old-fashioned maverick coder who can sling hundreds of lines a day but doesn't play nice in the sandbox with others, isn't nearly as valuable as he once was.

Above all, I look for a guy (there aren't many girls in this biz and probably never will be) who can supply error-free code the first time. The economic value of this (primarily in the time-to-market dimension) is impossible to underestimate. I've become a total devotee of test-driven development.

That's the real point of the prime-number test and the conditions under which I give it. If algorithmic thinking and language fluency are not second-nature to a given person, none of his other attributes will match the required economic profile. The only way to assess this is under stressful conditions.

Mainframe systems programmers will probably know this story: in the IBM mainframe world, there is a utility program known as IEFBR14. This program does nothing. It is a tiny assembler program that can be called as a step in a batch job so one can do misc. things like file allocation. I've never looked at the source code, but I believe it has about 5 lines of mainframe Assembler code. Even that trivial, non-functional program has had two errors (APARs, in IBM-speak) written against it. One was an actual programming error, believe it or not - IIRC, the developer neglected to save and restore the machine registers at entry. I think the other was for documentation, or something similar.

As much as you'd like to think programmers can write error-free code, even the most mundane task is prone to error.

A good friend, H, (I was his roommate at the time, I think, and ushered at his wedding more recently) witnessed a comment by the girlfriend of another student, T, known to H and I, in the middle of a conversation about programming between T and H.

If I recall correctly, T's girlfriend opined that a "good" programmer was one who "never wrote any bugs". It's one of those things that has always rankled.