Yes. Slashdot is ... unenlightened ...

You'll find countless cowards (anonymous and otherwise) terrified that they'll be unable to compete with "inferior" groups as their undeserved privilege erodes.

No.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

I find it it frustrating. It's unnecessarily difficult to tell where various blocks begin and end, particularly when two or more nested blocks end together.

On top of that, the myth that python is inherently easy to read has lead to some ridiculously illegible python code. I cringe every time I need to deal with anything written in python.

Indeed. I just wish it had a half-way decent editor.

He's the same guy who brought you the BBS and Text Adventure documentaries. Send him your things!

If you can support floppydump, you can support this guy. He's about the most important computer archivist around.

I used to tutor VAX assembly ages ago. It was a nice system. Be thankful that it wasn't x86.

If you can support floppydump, you have no choice but to support Jason Scott. As far as computing archivists go, you can't do much better.

It could be worse: It could be running Android.

Honestly, is more competition in this space a problem? Is your objection to "Smart TV's" in general or the OS specifically?

It's not like you can't just use a Matchstick or Roku box if you want. At worst, smart TV features are harmless.

Seriously? There's absolutely nothing suspicious about the AC's claim. Countless hobbyists have done the same thing.

I know the younger crowd seems to think assembly seems a bit like incomprehensible magic, but it's really not.

That would be called "behavior".

Just make up any old nonsense. It's what he does most of the time.

In 1997, it would have been hell. I don't know if you remember dialup back then, but even a high-end V.34 33.6 would not have been sufficient.

The web, of course, wasn't ready for that kind of application either. You'd have been running IE3 or (if you were leading edge) Netscape Communicator 4. Even on your impressive 166mhz Pentium with 32mb of RAM, javascript performance was absurdly slow. This is to say nothing of the incredible differences between IE and Netscape at the beginning of the great browser wars. If anyone were to have attempted such a thing, it would have undoubtedly been a Java applet simply for speed and compatibility. Let's face it, Java applets were not known for their speed!

A table of images would have taken minutes to load -- no one would dare scroll or zoom. Further, something simple today like "JS overlays" simply wasn't possible. (I'm fairly certain layers and position weren't available until IE4 and a later version of NN4 sometime near the end of 1997). Even then, users would have needed a high-end computer, the latest software, and a lot of patience for something even approaching Google maps.

What did we have in 1997? MapQuest. You typed in your starting location and final destination and got a set of turn-by-turn directions with a few static maps. It was still slow, but far more than sufficient at the time. Something like Google maps would have been significantly slower and, consequently, much less useful.

Why? That presumption is unjustified. Why would I offer some other unjustified presumption? Why would we prefer one to another?

Isn't it much more sensible to say, simply, "we don't know" to questions to which we have no justifiable answer?

Sure, but that's not science either.

I think I see what you're going for with the "fixed by definition" but it's very silly. Consider this bit of nonsense: "By definition, digestion is what the heart does". You'd reject that, obviously, as it's completely unjustified.

You accept the phrase in question here not because it's been established through scientific means, but on a purely metaphysical basis. It's just as foolish as any other reason to accept an unjustified proposition, but far more dangerous as it unjustifiably lends scientific credibility, and distorts the public understanding of science.