This.
But the QNX ones look quite good - if only they made them with a decent landscape format keyboard.
The ultimate smartphone formfactor was the Nokia Communicator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E90_Communicator
If someone made one of those again, I'd buy it whatever OS it ran... Android, Sailfish Jolla, Tizen, Blackberry 10, even Windows Phone.
> I remember thinking -- how are you ever going to
> type a message without keys? Well...
Wait, wait, I know this one.
"Slowly, and with difficulty," amirite?
Pardon my vast ignorance. Which Andrew? I know dozens, I'm sure.
It is harder than you think.
I am a former editor of heise-online.co.uk, the site that became the H.
I *do* speak a little German - enough to read the headlines on the internal CMS and request translations of stuff that I thought would be interesting for English-speaking readers. Then the professionally-translated copy needed to be edited by a native English speaker - such as me or one of my colleagues - and the edited version checked over by another editor (because you cannot spot your own mistakes).
It's more labour-intensive (and thus, expensive) than you might think.
As for the site design, it's based off the German one - it's hosted on the same servers and managed through the same CMS. German people like a rather more conservative style of Web design than we are used to on the English-language Web.
Something like 15 years on Slashdot, and finally a story of mine makes the front page. Woo.
As a Brit, I am not 100% certain what American terms such as "high school" or "grade school" means, but I'm guessing secondary school - age range approximately 16-18.
My school introduced an 'O'-level course in that time period - I think my class might have been the 2nd or 3rd year to do it. The odd thing was that 'O' levels are the 14-16yr exams, so we were doing a more junior course while doing senior exams.
The computer department had 4 already quite elderly Commodore PET machines - I believe model 4032 ones, networked (kinda sorta) over IEEE to a CMD 4040 dual 5¼" disk drive. They later acquired a whole room full of TI99/4As, each with its own cassette recorder and 14" black & white TV set. The PETs were a much more pleasant environment than the TIs - they only got the TIs because they were very cheap. BBC Micros were the standard by then.
I did my coursework on my home computer, a 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as it was more capable than the school computers. Coursework was presented on paper, not in machine-readable form, so it didn't hugely matter on what you wrote your BASIC.
The first lesson, the computer teacher - who was one of the maths teachers - told us all just how useless a Computer Studies 'O'-level would be and that we should all focus on our 'A'-levels, the exams that would secure us a place at University. About half the class walked out.
The rest were told that this was a waste of their time, that they should not do it, that it would not impart any useful skills and was only simple, "Mickey-Mouse" stuff. More walk-outs.
In the end, there were about half a dozen of us, determinedly hanging on. He proceeded to tell us not to do the course, that it was futile and pointless and a distraction that would reduce our chances of getting into Uni.
The rest walked. I stayed.
I made a deal with him. He told me the syllabus; I did it myself, in my own time, and checked in with him once a fortnight to ensure I was on the right track. He wasn't happy and advised against it, but I pressed on.
The following year, half way through my non-course, a full class series was taught, and I sat in on some of those, learning moderately arcane stuff like one's-complement and two's-complement binary arithmetic.
So I ended up tutoring myself in my spare time. I got a 'B' in the end.
The course was quite low-level - binary, octal, hex and conversions; simple programming in BASIC - the 8-bit BASICs of the time mostly did not have things like IF...THEN...ELSE or WHILE...WEND or CASE statements, let alone named procedures or support for local variables and recursion, so it was all quite rudimentary.
I took a step back in time 2y later, studying FORTRAN at Uni as part of a Biology BSc. Got a First in that, but never used the language - the little bit of stats and so on, I did on my Spectrum.
Fewer added special effects and so on.
> Sadly no one I know, even vintage sci-fi buffs, have ever read anything he ever wrote.
If someone claims to be into classic SF & they've not read Simak, they're a liar. He is an essential writer, one of the greats. Unsung, yes, underappreciated, definitely, but not
Swine! That comment is *far too* insightful.
So you've clearly never used code written on, say, an Apple Newton or an iPad, or possibly even a PalmOS machine - all systems where the user (for which, read "programmer") has no access to the filesystem or there IS no filesystem.
You need to get out more. Learn about how much you don't know before you start confidently making statements about the world.
This is the first person in any discussion of Unity who's said what I too felt. I spent ages fiddling with and customising GNOME 2 to try to get it working as smoothly as I can do in 2min with [*whispers*] Windows. Unity has just blown this away. Minimal tweaking and it works just fine.
I really do not understand people who are flexible enough to move away from majority, default-choice commercial OSs to a minority FOSS OS such as Linux and then have a nervous breakdown because the desktop changes a bit!
Unity is a
And Unity does actually work pretty well. It replicates all the important functionality from GNOME 2, Mac OS X and, yes, even Windows. No, not everything I'd like is there, but everything I
GNOME 3, from a fairly brief try, is far more disruptive - but it's pretty and there were some elements of it I liked. When it's an option on Ubuntu, I will give it a proper try.
Bugger the video formats, where are the transcripts?
I could either spend half a day watching them or 5-10 min reading. You guys may have all day; I don't.
We can expect the first biological package to hit Kilimanjaro soon... right after Iapetus turns black and Hyperion disappears.
(Hint for the terminally unhip.)
Congrats! I did indeed change my password & post from it myself. Almost surreal to use a Spectrum on the Web...
Good to finally meet you, as well. If I'm back on the Isle of Man, I'll let you know.
Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?
