Object-Oriented Basic! Wait... :-)

- Tim

When I was around 13 years old (around 1978), my brother took me up a room at his college (UC Santa Cruz) that you needed a special key for, because it held one of the computer terminals spread around campus, connected to the university's DEC PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E.

It was a dark, mysterious little room, with this mysterious Datamedia terminal wish mysterious glowing characters and flashing cursor on the screen. I was fascinated.

He showed me how to play some games on it (I think the first one was 'trek', text-based of course). It was amazing, and seemed terribly high-tech and complex to my young mind.

A year later, someone at my Jr High told me about playing games on the university's computers, and I remembered that time when I'd done that; they told me how to login to the games account:

HELLO 5,5

And off I went. The first game I played was "Animal" (you know, it guesses what animal you're thinking of). I played for awhile, but then got bored and wanted to look at other games. But... I couldn't figure out how to end the game! "end"? no. "stop"? no. "quit"? no.

Frustrated, I told my friends back in Jr High, and they told me of the Magic that was "Control-C".

I went back, played more games, and decided then and there that I wanted to learn how these things worked!

I bought a Wiley Self-Teaching Guide to Basic. I bought "Introduction to Computer Logic Circuits and Boolean Logic" (or something like that). I bought "Introduction to Pascal". Off I went. I still like programming, these 37 years later, amazingly enough.

- Tim

Ahhh - thanks for explaining. The way they appear, they *look* a lot like the "card"/Google Now functionality; too bad I can't tell Google Search not even to display those. I wouldn't mind so much if 1) they didn't take up extra space at the top of the results screen, and 2) there wasn't that delay between showing that first result and showing the rest (at least on the phone, perhaps not in a full browser).

*sigh*

- Tim

Yes, just a single card - not a whole result set of them. Not a horrible problem, no indeed, but there's also often a delay between the first 'card' result and the rest of the results, which is annoying. It's as if Google is saying "You want this one, right?" and waiting for a bit, and then going to search for the rest of the results if I stay on the results page.

I just want the result immediately, not a "You want THIS, right? right? ... okay, I guess you might want something else - I'll go get some more results" behavior.

Not the worst problem I could have, but I just want to be able to control that behavior, to completely disable the "do what I mean" kind of thing it's doing there.

- Tim

I haven't tried the mobile site lately - I gave up when it was taking forever for them to fix the bug of thumb-scroll being reeeeeeeeely slow, but I've heard they fixed that since.

- Tim

Typo - "Computed by WolframJAlpha"

- Tim

I'm running stock vanilla Android on a Galaxy Nexus.

Lemme check here:

"What time is it in California" using:

Google Search Bar: 1st response is a 'card'
Android Stock Browser: 1st response is a 'card'
Firefox for Android: 1st response is a "card" (but scaled down in size - Google is default Firefox search engine)
Chrome for Android: 1st response is a "card" (full sized - Google is also default search engine)
DuckDuckGo: 1st response is a "card", but it looks like a different implementation - it says "Computer by WolframJAlpha" on it
Bing: No "card" - though I do get a summary of a world-time page as the first result ... so it looks like... THERE IS NO ESCAPE! :-(

I'll recheck my Android settings and see if there's anything else I need to turn off. Perhaps after some recent updates they were reset.

- Tim

I disabled it through all possible means (disabled all cards individually, disabled cards/Google Now generally. It reduces their number, but not entirely... as I mention above, for example, I type "What time is it in California" and get a "card" saying "It's 5 oclock in California" or whatever. I don't want that, I want search results only, no "guessing what I REALLY want" stuff.

I can get around it through using other browsers' search functions, perhaps, or alternative search apps like DuckDuckGo.

It'd just be nice if Google let me turn it off completely.

- Tim

Well, I meant from the search bar on an Android phone. I think the built-in browser also uses the cards, so I'd need to use the Firefox or Chrome search - not sure even those would work, depending on if they themselves are using Google for their search.

I opened a browser, typed "What time is it in California" and got a "card" for the time in California, which I don't want - just vanilla search results.

So your suggestion doesn't work as such.

- Tim

I understand it's utility when, say, you enter the name of a nearby store and it presents info about it, its hours, etc; or a plane flight, and it tells you the details of the flight.

But sometimes I just want plain, unadulterated search, based on the terms as entered. I don't even want the card presented first and THEN the search results (as it does now). I JUST WANT SEARCH RESULTS, NO CARDS.

I've turned off ALL the cards, all the Google Now stuff... but it doesn't go away on my Android device. Despite all the settings, there seems no way to completely turn it off.

Bah.

- Tim

My husband, some hotshot!

HERE'S his "Ancient Chinese Secret"!

I'm confused - did you just contradict yourself? You said in a Union shop, everything is followed to the letter. And then you said in most Union shops, they don't follow things to the letter.

Which is it??

Ah, one of my favorite search engines - you could be so specific and find exactly what you wanted so easily.

What is stopping Google from doing that with their interface? They seem to just keep dumbing it down - even "Advanced Search" doesn't provide the abilities DejaNews used to (and why does searching on Google for "Google Advanced Search" always show me the Canadian variant of that site? Are they smarter in Canada?)

Does Google have some kind of "premium" service you can buy that allows a richer search language? I haven't ever heard of one - do they just reserve that ability for themselves, then?

- Tim

Yep, I feel exactly the same way. When charities call me, I call them back and tell them to take me off their lists, and that having me on the list in the first place is an easy way to make sure that I NEVER give them anything. Not that that helps, even if I'm talking to their director, it would seem.

As mentioned above somewhere, a lot of these charities are sharing their info with each other, and at least here in the San Francisco area, there's an organization that's a kind of charity info clearinghouse that charities/nonprofits give peoples' info to, and they then give it out to other nonprofits. The idea is supposed to make their databases more efficient (single point of data management), but it also means I've started to get calls from nonprofits I've had nothing to do with.

I've called up and given them an earful, but they don't usually think they can do anything about it. I've also contacted the guy who runs the clearinghouse, several times, and he's never gotten back to me.

As for political parties and campaigns - I know it's all supposed to be part of free political speech, but just 'cause I'm on the voter roles or DMV roles doesn't mean I want robocalls from candidates and action committees. I've called a few candidates' offices before, too, and they all say they scrub their databases after each campaign, and refresh it again from the votor/DMV roles each time, so they don't maintain "do not call" lists.

I think political organizations should be bound by the same do-not-call rules as corporations (and that corporations should be even further tied down - eg. do not call unless I've opted you in, and opt-out is always the default). That'll never happen, though, since the Direct Marketer's Association seems to have a ton of power.

Bunch of idiots, all of 'em.

I was on contract at Sun for a bit, fixing one of their old Unix variants that was used by Bell or some other telecommunications company as the basis for a phone messaging system. It was going to start having problems in 2000 due to its time calculations (both in the kernel and in some apps), but they didn't think it would be around by 2038, so I was instructed to use 32-bit time_t for every time value in the system.

I do suppose those systems will not exist in 2038, but who knows...?