err, 25 years overdue . . .

You can't count to five!
So then why do i bother?
Best your name not known . . .

hawk

This is more than 45 years overdue. Apple was in position to dominate this market two generations*before* you start.

The Mac IIfx had slave processors that were essentially a 6502 with a bunch of other stuff on the chip that could handle the AppleTalk network.

AppleTalk could be run over the second pair of the home phone wiring.

All they needed to do was sell the $10 chip to go into anything that someone would want to control in the home . . .

At the time, Apple would have gone broke selling a $100,000 Rolls Royce they built for $1k by insisting on building the garage to go with it . . .

hawk

Beos fails to sel
Asks too much for Apple sale
now just open source

>Ads slow down our computers,

I suppose it's nearly 20 years ago now . . .

On a 486, which was still respectable though not top of the line at the tie, I had two full pages open (large monitor for the time), and both hit ad-heavy pages.

It brought the machine to its knees.

I installed junkbuster.

To this day, I don't block ads. But I'm downright aggressive with anything that blinks (or moves, or scrolls, or . . .), including "content"

hawk

> I have a hen which has decent hardware, but the software is stuck in the past.

So?

You thought roosters don't get ED? :)

hawk

And optimization has a lot to do with why Fortran is still used, and preferable to c/c++ in many cases.

Fortran can make some strong assumptions that it uses for optimizations. It is not as general purpose as c, for which those assumptions might or might not be correct. Yes, you can do nearly anything in either language, but some will be easier to do in one, and some in the other.

Expecting c to smash arrays into one another as well as a language designed for that purpose is silly--as would be expecting the time it takes to code in the more general purpose language to be comparable to the custom language.

hawk

Well, make up your mind; which is it? :)

hawk

For some of us, "structured programming" was natural.

I'm of the generation that learned to code by cheating at star trek games.

However, from the beginning, my BASIC-80 looked more like Fortran 90. Having learned early about the search through memory of primitive microcomputer BASIC lead to through about where what routine should be, so setup was at line 50k+, main loop at line 1xxx, and so forth. Frequently a large program lacked any GOTO, or had just one to put you in the right section of memory. (Years later, though, on my dissertation, I realized that I was maintaining parallel blocks of code to avoid a GOTO, and I put one in. It's like the passive voice: "avoid", not "never use")

hawk

From time to time, a gas station here or there realizes that by checking under the hood, they sell enough oil alone to pay for the wages of the gas-pumper, and cheerfully offers full-serve at the same price as the self-serve across the street.

hawk

And then there's your retirement income when you move out of state.

Nevada has dealt with this by making all property within the state exempt when the judgment is for state income tax on retirement income.

sure, your *judgment* gets full faith and credit . . .

hawk, esq.

>Your forgetting the grinding of the fresh beans to put in that press.

*Shrug.*

And you forgot the part about roasting the coffee.

Although recently I've been lazy, and bought it both ground *and* roasted . . .

gosh, that's why I never switched from the original Master of Orion, which is what I still paly on a MacBook retina.

And, of course, nethack, the only game that *matters*

hawk

Executive options were actually a reform, to align the interests of executives with those of stockholders. They worked in one direction (up), but not the other--once the options were "under water", the executives had no reason *not* to "swing for the bleachers", risking whole company.

The solution is to align in *both* directions, so that the executives lose when the company loses, not just wins when winning.

This could be accommodated with a couple of changes in the tax code. Require a large part (majority) of high compensation to be in the form of stock: if your pay for the month is $100k, you get $60k of that as stock at current market prices. We need a (politically unpopular) tweak: this would currently create taxes on $60k. Instead, give the stock at a 0 basis, so there is no tax now, but the entire amount is taxed when sold--and require that the shares be held for a minimum number of years.

At this point, when the shares go down, so do the executives' worths. with options, stock going down merely increases the incentive for risky behavior seeking high gains.

But what do I know--I just have a Ph.D. in economics.

(doc)hawk

No.

It would be labeled GNU/RTOS, and everyone who objected would be accused of ignoring RMS' contribution . . . :)

hawk