Posts by lambda_beta

Re: Technology-enabled narcissism...in spaaaaaaace!

Replace cool with stupid!

Re: Back to the Future?

30 years ago, most PCs were task switching ... not truly multitasking.

Re: "Nobody invented the screwdriver hammer"

You can hammer a screw, but you can't screw a hammer.

- ancient Chinese proverb -

Re: What? Renaming atoms?

Ununoctium: Uuo 118

Series: Noble gases

Group:18

Period:7

p-block

Discovered: 2006 (Russia/United States)

Joint Inst. for Nuclear Research / Lawrence Livermore Lab.

Re: The real difference

Dear old fart ... you missed the point. No, I never worked on the STAR, but saw a demo about year before Apple came out with the LISA (I did use a LISA). It was the concept that Apple stole, not the computer. Just as XEROX didn't invent the three-button mouse, it did invent the mouse.

Re: The USPTO

Didn't you know Jobs invented magnetism before he died? So it's only natural that Apple should get the patent. Screw all those people who claimed to have something to do with it - Ampère, Coulomb, Faraday, Gauss, Heaviside, Henry, Hertz, Lorentz, Maxwell, Tesla, Volta, Weber, Ørsted - they had no clue.

Re: I ain't Spartacus

I think you've missed the point. This is not an issue about IT or it's people. It's about today's society. It's about how everything has become so complex (by purpose) that people have given up. It's about black boxes and technological hocus pocus. Ask anyone who texts on their phone, 'Why is the there a limitation on the number of characters?' and they don't know. But sad thing is they DON'T CARE! It's all part of the wizardry of technology and there is no curiosity.

And you're correct we are too busy to learn. That's because:

The average time spent watching television (U.S.) is 5:11 hours per day.

The number of hours per year the average American youth watches television is 1,200 compared to 900 hours per year spent in school.

Americans spend an average of 13 hours per week playing video games.

And again the quote from Carl Sagan

'We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.'

Re: Hubris

You should replace the word hubris with supidity. Most politicians have no clue about the bills they pass (very few even read them), let alone bills concerning technology. They are driven by lobbists, money and getting re-elected (in fact, that's they main objective),

Re: Overly aggressive throttling?

Except when they advertize how much bandwidth they provide. Such bullshit ... it's all about control and making money ... it's the American way!!

Ufortunately, it's all about control, or to exercise power. I like to think of it as basic insucurity.

You've got to be kidding. The NSA does what it does, and dosen't give a sh*t about outside, inside or in between. It is in the business of gathering information even if they don't have a use for it. It's in the busines of spying and to accomplish its mission through clandestine means. It's budget is not made public. Even the number of NSA employees is classified. It's more than big brother, it's big sister, mother father and is not accountable to anyone, even the President and Congress.

Re: But it is a Mac

The point is sarcasm! Did you miss it?

Re: Liberal spotted

Asshole spotted in this rant.

subsidized or 'look at all the idiots out there'

you people are stupid morons if you think apple is subsidizing anything!

Re: Umm, minor point Hollow fibre propagates optics near speed of light

Good points ... now is hollow fiber still fiber? (is it fibre?) Or do you mean a wave-guide?

Re: A golden opportunity

If you think the economy is bad now, just wait until we "whack the Chinese military hard"

Maxwells theory of electromagnetic wave propagation

The point is, Maxwell equations it is a theory about light as waves. The single/double-slit diffraction experiment shows that light can be thought of not only as waves but also particles (the photon). You can send individule quanta of light one at a time through the slits, but still have a difrraction pattern created like waves. This also works for electrons and other 'particles'. Hence, the wave-particle duality.

Fingerpointing

To the person who posted this.

" Fingerpointing is one thing, Mr Stallman, but making things better does require skill. Did you set up a public proxy server? Did you create a new internet layer protocol which provides security and anonymity? Did you create the router firmware for it?"

You are an ASS!

Re: Question - 50,000 Lawyers

Q: What do you call 50,000 Lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A: Not enough

Re: Absolute rip off, but not a toy

Sorry the Mac was a toy, an expensive one at that. The Macs had task switching not a real multui-tasking OS. The Amiga would run circles in tems of performance and graphics ( it, as you may recall, had specicalized procecessors for graphics which off-loaded a lot of cycles from the main processor). The mac was a desendant from Lisa (which was way overpriced), and Lisa was a desendant from the Xerox Star. As usual, Apple was master of re-packaging, not innovation.

Re: Why C

Forgive my ignorance on this subject, but aren't a lot of operating systems and compliers written in C? If that's the case then using another language whose complier is written in C would be worse, since then you would have to debug both code and complier.

Re: and no-one mentioned RT-11 ...

I seem to remember that CP/M was a lot like RT11. I only used RT11 on a PDP11 and CP/M on an Osborne, but do remember the pip command on both.