Posts by that one in the corner 5493 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
> The app was tested in a pilot that ends today
So was the pilot about to retire anyway or is the removal of the app[1] not going a smoothly as the surgical team hoped?
[1] Yes which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know, I mean do people want fire^^^^apps that can be fitted nasally?
Why? Don't you know where your Address and Decrement Registers are?
And what do you end up using instead of CADR? FIRST_OF_THE_REST is readable but a pain to type! Which only leaves us needing "better" names for CDDR, CAAADR etc etc (you soon get used to using those to pick your way through flattened graphs, k-way trees and other fun data structures).
> Lisp I believe was used for ML or perhaps expert systems
Lisp has been used for pretty much everything interesting, including every aspect of AI research planning, natural language (not LLMs but directed syntax & semantics), theorem provers, theorem generators, logic programming, novel search and pattern recognition, fuzzy systems, weighted reasoning (leading to, yes, Expert Systems). In all of these areas more specialised languages have been created (e.g. Prolog, Loglang ... for logic programming) but Lisp-based tends to be a good starting point and for experimentation with modifying mechanisms before speeding things up with, e.g. a Prolog core written in Pascal or C.
Lisp is also good for "practical"(!) uses, like writing compilers, symbolic mathematics, text processing - yes, alternatives exist (compiler-compilers and lexical analyser generators abound, coded in your bog-standard languages like C/C++/Java (oh, why did Antlr go down that route, sob?) but if you have The Next Big Grammar Idea give Lisp a go for all the early trials before turning it into something faster, "more palatable" for the masses: your AST editing is probably going to involve lots of list transforms (see below re "every sufficiently large...").
> FORTH isn’t used much any more, if at all, though Lisp variants still exist and can be used in AI research.
Lisp is still definitely alive - it is still the core of Emacs, "modern" variants like Scheme or Guile are available and used inside applications. And, of course, "every sufficiently large C program will re-implement Lisp, badly".
Forth is still used as well. The issue with saying things like "language X is no longer used", especially for older languages, is that there are undoubtedly *more* people using X now than there were in its heyday. There is simply a smaller percentage of all current programmers using it - because there is now an utterly ludicrous number of programmers around! After all, there probably isn't a market for more than five computers in the world.
PS
Lisp is the one of the two that is more likely to be correctly spelt in all-caps, as it is a shortened form of LISt Processing and hence (mis)treated like an initialism or an acronym; Forth never an acronym or initialism, it was only spelt in all caps because in its origins you could only use all caps for file names- and they weren't long enough to include the missing letter 'u'!
PPS
Raw Lisp uses prefix notation, but anyone doing a decently long-lived sized system (hopefully) defines a grammar to front end it (as also happens with other "AI languages", such as Prolog). The fact that Emacs didn't do that just seems - weird. Maybe nobody could actually figure out what "a language for defining interactive editing text" could/should look like?
Hang on, so to avoid detection all you need to do is just avoid writing
system("/bin/takeoversystem -now")
and replace the constant with a buffer filled by a few strcat()'s from strings declared in different places, with dummies in between and maybe a few Xor's to "hide" the contents of the strings?
That seems a lot easier than learning another language[1]
[1] but not as much fun, to the proper geeky coder, so are we really just seeing another phase of Revenge Of The Nerds? In which case, we can blame the jocks for being the root cause of it all!
Haven't you noticed the increase in line noise over the last few years? That is all being caused by a system running a genetic algorithm to randomly evolve Perl code. So far, we have been lucky, but one day it'll click into place and, with what seems like a burst of static, everything is pwned at once.
Or I may be remembering a horror movie - Pontypool?
That really does sound like Forth and not Lisp: the first major use of Forth was for controlling radio telescopes (Chuck Moore worked at an observatory at the time he created the language).
Running a Lisp in an embedded controller is taking a big risk that the garbage collector needs to run at an inopportune moment. There are variants that purport to provide real time guarantees and you can alway try just triggering gc at known points, but on the whole IMHO there'd have to be a dang good reason to use Lisp versus anything more - shall we say "direct" - such as Forth. Now, splitting the system up, with a bigger computer running a Lisp-based planner and Forth (or C or ...) to drive the hardware via MCUs, that would play to each's strengths.
That bit did seem strange, as I was told, more than once, that if I wanted to do some data visualisation then I ought to use Excel first, instead of "fiddling around" with any other tools, which require a bit of scripting or, gasp, using a command line.
So the idea that an advert for an MS product would go for fiddling with Python instead of giving whatever arcane incantations might make Excel do the job seems - odd.
PS
I didn't listen and will still reach for gnuplot etc rather than try and use a spreadsheet, let alone Excel, but that is just being ornery.
Trying to tell KVM/QEmu to capture the mouse/keyboard device and pass it between host & guest requires[1] putting the USB-enumeration-generated device id into the XML config. So moving ports, or (far) worse having a glitch during a session and you've just lost the connection (and has it gone to the host, the guest - or is just flapping in the wind?)
[1] in the docs & examples I've found so far; pointers to better ways to do things gratefully accepted.
> Just think what all the money spent by fantasists like Musk, Bezos, Gates etc on going to the Moon, Mars, or on equally useless and cliquey projects, could do for world health, welfare and peace if applied locally.
Not as much as you might think. Don't forget, there isn't any "money going into space", there is only a few lumps of (exquisitely crafted) metals, plastics etc.
All[1] of the money being spent is ending up, basically, giving people jobs - feeding, clothing, housing, improving physical and mental health, providing dignity[2]. Even if you don't believe that there are any other benefits, either short[3], medium[4] or long[5] term (or, for the hopelessly romantic/optimistic, the very long term[6]).
Go and have a look at the old idea of the Eccentric British Landowner, who spent their money on having Follies built: these provided the locals with work and wages. And all within The System, no need to try and Tear Down The Man[7], just that daft old buffer spending the family money on a pointless Summer House in the North Forty.
Yes, the modern lot could go about it with less of an eye on making a buck in return, and a healthy dose of humility (and "old bufferism") would go a long way to making them more palatable, but take what we can get.
[1] yes, yes, there are no doubt boondoggles and backhanders and all the rest, but so long as that also gets spent.
[2] even if current events puts paid to the idea that - certain people - actually have "giving people jobs" as one of their life goals, that is the (unintended) result.
[3] e.g. we may be pissed off at aspects of it, but satellite launch capability gives us Good Things, and the improvements in lift required for Moon/Mars/Manned missions can then be used for other things.
[4] There is no Planet B, but there are honking great lumps of rock out there, with our names on them; it would be nice to have a way to send up something big to give them a nudge
[5] materials science in space - along with all basic science - is valuable research, that all feeds back into the good of the human race (and other denizens of Earth).
[6] There is no Planet B, so there is merit in looking to settle the neighbourhood (Solar and stellar).
Fireball XL5 still showing on Talking Pictures TV, Sat 14:25.
Next episode: an Amazonian Queen has ben exiled into Spaaaaace![1]
[1] probably all to the best, as if she were undersea she'd have to wait for Stingray to be invented, in a few years' time (Supercar is only a two-seater, so where would an Amazon stow her bow?)
> It's not an explosion...
Although there is the rotating detonation engine, coming soon to a vehicle stack in your neighbourhood (fingers crossed - though fingers in ears may be more appropriate).
What does that equate to in day to day units, like heating water for ISO standard cups of tea[1] and toasting crumpets?
[1] but don't warm the tea in the cooling loop!
> On one side we have developers rolling in cash from software that can't be used but must be paid for and on the other we have developers quitting because of software that's widely used by people who refuse to pay a thing.
That first lot of "developers" are companies, shareholders and management.
That second lot are actual developers, acting as individuals.
Not exactly comparable groups.
If you should ever wish to witness confusion, bluster and even some anger ("how dare YOU ask of US.."), when someone offering a straightforward service insists that you install their app instead of using their website, politely but firmly inquire about the necessity of each of the app's permissions and their assurances against datarape of your device.
Web sites are rarely better, but with No Script etc you have at least *some* visibility and control.
There is hardly any science in the gathering of too much data from a web browser extension, you just need a metaphorical shovel instead of a spatula, but yes, making your plugin bloated in order to steal and monetise personal information[1] is an affront to engineering.
[1] unless the end user explicitly installed the extension in order that his data be snarfed, of course: supplying the customer with a system that fits his requirements, no matter how strange or self-defeating those requirements may seem, is a sine qua non of good engineering.
Do you stil have a copy of the contract?
Betcha it says they get to keep your profile (and probably the raw materials, to re-run as the price of doing that drops and the results get better, full sequences and not just a "profile") - and all the metadata attached to it (maybe they'll excise your name and address, or "anonymise" it to "keep it private").
But the only way these companies can do what they do (whatever that really is and however useless it is) is to keep all the data they have and cross-reference it. How do they "know" you are 12.7% Norse? Because you match with other people who sent in their samples and gave their birthplace as "in the cold hills of Midgard". Sure, they started with purchased samples from around the world, but they can be so much more "informative" now...
I so wanted to be able to disagree with, so carefully thought about all the kit I've owned.
The Cosmac CDP1892, Atom, BBC, Amiga (replacement after 1st one went), some favourite MCU boards - all still sitting around here, somewhere.
After that - all various PCs, with CPUs from different companies but otherwise, yes, replaceable. A few items I've hung onto (mostly the cases, really) but the guts have been stripped out and replaced, or still working bits moved down the line "and the one on the end fell out".
It is a glaring difference, from the unique points in each of the old stuff, that the only things I want to hang onto are the black anodised (how goth!) bent pieces of metal, because it turns out that those are the things that matter when it comes to usability & how I can stack the kit. Whilst the modern guts inside are ok, so long as they still work, but can then be junked with out too much drama (and I do love my drama).
The 6809 had a better programming model, especially for stack handling (the Forth inner loop was tiny, and fast) BUT the 6809 was also really expensive, compared to both the 6502 and the Z80. Being in the UK, after the CDP1802, a 6502 machine really was the next affordable choice to own myself (Acorn Atom, in a kit, of course). And then you grow to love the machine that you actually own (and whose solder joints had the remains of your finger prints in them).
> original IBM PC (and AT) reference manuals
With the ring-binder BIOS listing - including the serial port code that "wasn't broken" yet somehow only worked after you'd copied it into your program and then swapped two config values around (eek, was it two adjacent bytes or two nybbles in one byte? Nybbles, IIRC). So if you had a working serial port, chances were you'd just pirated part of their (very) copyrighted BIOS...
> RSTS/E
Good grief, I'd entirely forgotten RSTS! The Engineering department were running RSTS, whilst the Stats dept had Unix, CompSci had something entirely different and the Pr1me lurked elsewhere. In my day you had to look at your schedule and carry around the correct cheat sheets for that day! You try telling the youngsters that.
Trying to remember what the big machine in the Maths dept was...dang, all I can recall is that it filled the machine room one year, then it transmogrified into a couple of cabinets looking rather lost in the middle of all that space.
Did get locked away with in an office with a half-height Vax (nope, can't recall the model, rats) for a while in one job, running VMS: I do miss file version numbers.
The first MPU I owned was an RCA CDP 1802, and whilst it didn't have as good a collection as you've illustrated[1] it did provide the X and Y regs, with Set Y being SEY and ...
[1] not help by not having an assembler at all - hand-coded hex, 16 push keys and a "load" switch were all I 'ad (cue "keys? You had keys? You were lucky!" responses)
> And you're suggesting that a program ... would be taught in primary schools?
Yes.
Bishopton Primary School used it to create images then used to spruce their school Created with GIMP (not a great gallery presentation, it is clearer if you directly search their site which picture they are highlighting).
Wheelers Hill Primary School downloads page says it isn't necessary for their teaching program, but may be useful for pupils to follow their own interests.
But the (surely, to your mind, evil, EEEEVILLLLL), Cawthorne Church Of England (VC) Primary School computing curriculum in YEAR 1!
Heavens, GIMP was even a recommended program back when BECTA was in existence, in the Before Times when they were just trying to get schools to indulge in all this tech and STEM sort of stuff: Using Open Source Software in Schools. So it is probably in so many schools now that it is just part of the day to day.
And once they get out into Secondary school, why, it is rife: CEA Using ICT Desirable Features for Key Stage 3 (KS3 - that is just one year out of Primary, isn't it? Whilst their minds are still - malleable - and we can bend them to our vile usage).
(It is the weekend, I'll stop at those citations, it is getting a bit tedious having to do the homework for people like Lord Elpuss.
True, but before then people would have complained that XIMP would be pronounced like ZIMP like CIMP like SIMP - and calling someone "a simp" is not exactly polite. Calling it - no, I can not bear to use that word, you know what it is - might be hailed as a great step forwards.
Although, looky here, googling for that shows the word "simp" has changed its meaning and now refers to someone who is too deferrent to women for a nearby misygonist to bear. A much lesser usage than what it used to mean.
FWIW I was introduced to GIMP at work, in a perfectly professional environment (those who ventured outside all wore suits, we all filled in the relevant due diligence forms etc etc, as well as getting to actually write code and do the good stuff).
Nobody ever really cared one jot about it, beyond "that looks useful, can I have a copy?" (at which point we'd just refer them, as I was, to the internal webpages[1] with instructions).
As grown ups, we just took a useful tool and used it. No snickering - or any other reaction, really.
Since then, it has just been around in all my later jobs - in one, which runs a security system that gets vetted by the MoD, engineering did have to put in a formal note to say we'd like to have it added to the list of available tools to which the response was - ok, fine, we'll virus check it for you the first time (later we had to tell them not to download it from SourceForge, but that is a whole other story).
[1] before the days of this "Intranet" malarkey
You decided long ago to "move on" and not use GIMP - so this whole discussion is totally irrelevant to you and your work, all your examples of the hardship it will cause you are simply not happening, nothing that GIMP does or does not do, is or is not named, actually affects you in any way at all.
And you've made it clear that you're not going to actually try to do anything practical to alter the situation.
One could start to wonder about precisely why are you so desperate to hang onto that oldest definition of a word and declaim about it here.
Shrug.
Have you had a look at the PhotoGIMP plugin, as TFA mentions?
It may make the UI Photoshop enough for you to get along with it. Even if you already get Photoshop for free, and don't really have any particular need to move across, it would be useful to know, from a Photoshop user's[1] p.o.v., how good (or bad) PhotoGIMP is.
[1] which isn't me
If you had wanted to use the software, as explained before, you are - and always have been - 100% at liberty to make the minor changes to the program to make it show any other 4-character name[1]
If it wasn't worth that minimal effort, then you aren't a potential user and your entire "argument" is a meaningless counterfactual.
It you believe it is worth some effort, then off you pop and do the renaming, put it into a project up on your favourite public source code server and then calmly, quietly, approach the project and say "hey, I have an itty bitty little script that just might be useful for some of you users, can we consider adding it in, it won't affect anything or anyone else at all" - and you may Be The Change You Want To See.
> Can you see that there might have been a problem if it can been called the Noncommercial Interactive Graphic Generation and Editing Resource - or would that just be an inconsequential name too?
Now you are just being silly - as has also already been pointed out, by multiple people, the name you object is not a universal usage, unlike your deliberately OTT example. Even the usage from the character in Pulp Fiction, as the original authors admit to doing, is a sexual reference, not an ableist one, and is clearly not considered beyond the pale by everybody.
[1] 4 characters needs a trivial amount of edting, more than that needs to be rebuilt from source.
> The INVENTOR quite LITERALLY said that he started with the name The Gimp, inspired by the BDSM slave submissive character in Pulp Fiction, and then worked backwards from this to find a name that fitted the acronym.
From the words of the INVENTOR, as per link already posted: in their interview for The GIMP Gazette:
>> We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for.
They quite LITERALLY said that he started with the name IMP[1], wanted ONE LETTER MORE, tried out an "X", *then* inspired by a word they'd heard in the film "Pulp Fiction".
> Which bit of this is difficult for you?
None of it. Let us turn that around:
Q: Which bit of this is difficult for you?
(apparent A: not being able to read, not being able to speak the truth)
[1] can *YOU* tell the difference between starting with "IMP" and starting with "GIMP" - note, *NOT* "The Gimp", just "GIMP".
From the EO linked in TFA:
> The Department of Education currently manages a student loan debt portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion. This means the Federal student aid program is roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo. But although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid. The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.
In other words, the DoE is 100 times *more* efficient than Wells Fargo[1] and in a move that is all about efficiency[2] it is the DoE who gets canned?
And as for "return authority over education to the States and local communities", well, the book bans in schools are just getting started and if you thought "Pi is to equal to 3" was stupid, wait until you read the Christian (i.e. Creationist) science textbooks!
Not being in the US and this not having an *immediate* obvious route to damaging international relations or finances (the coming Marching Morons still have to work their benighted way through the schools system) this isn't going to affect me & mine badly in the short term, but I'd like to look forwards to a few more Hollywood blockbusters in the coming decades: "Jack Reacher : Gospel Worth Dying For" does not appeal. Could be worse, though: so far I've not heard of[3] any push to go so far that we'd get James Bond in "The World is Not Flat Enough"
[1] yes, yes, I know WF does a wider variety of products, but then 100 times 1,500 is less than 200,000
[2] yeah, pull the other one
[3] please don't disabuse me, not until after the weekend at least
And are grateful for it.
NASA are ok for the moment, but all too soon:
'No, you can't have a ThinkPad, how many times have we told you? What do mean, "this laptop isn't ISS validated"? It has Bluetooth and USB-C, that means it can do everything!'
How could anyone forget that?
"Were you truly wafted here from Paradise?” “Nah, mate, Luton Airport!”
> Zenith H-89 and Zenith Z-100 systems running CP/M with probably 4mb of RAM
4 milli-bits of RAM? Well, that wouldn't quite manage DOS, so CP/M it would have to be.
Sorry, couldn't resist. But 4MB would have been a marvel to behold on a Z-100 (max 768KB) let alone the Heath H-89/Zenith Z-89 (max 64KB)! Remember drooling over the Heath version in the catalogue, never got my hands on one. Probably all to the best.
Maybe we're so used to 32GB or more that 4MB sems so very tiny, we forget how little RAM is - was - *actually* needed to get useful work done.
> FFS, it's not terrorism, it's just a crime.
Legal Eagle's latest Boycotting Tesla illegal? goes over this[1]. There is a reason why the charges are "labelled" as "domestic terrorism", they can only be charged with the actual crimes (damage to property, danger to life - using the appropriate wording) , the "label" is just there so Trump, the FBIS etc can say something super scary about them.
[1] briefly, it is only a short, vertical format and all :-(
