I remember like it was yesterday when I saw one demonstrated at a computer store. But because I was but a starving student, and the Lisa had a whole megabyte of memory and what for the day was quite a large, bright monochrome graphics display, I knew that I wouldn't have the ten grand to actually buy one any time soon.

The original Macintosh was a largely successful attempt to fix the problem of the Lisa's exhorbitant retail price. The "1984 Superbowl Ad" Macintosh just had 128 kb of RAM and a 512 by 342 monochrome display. The model I eventually bought used had just a single-sided 400 KB floppy and no hard drive.

It was not possible to develop real software on the original Macintosh. Instead developers used cross-compilers with Lisas as the host.

Not at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, but in Pasadena. He was a fellow Caltech student.

They had a color photocopier under development that printed on paper the size of an unfolded newspaper.

Now of course he wasn't supposed to, but just for grins he photocopied one side of a twenty dollar bill. He showed me both the original and the photocopy. I was completely unable to tell the difference between the two.

Now this was in 1984. How many of you are old enough to recall what photocopiers were like in 1984? I don't think color copiers even existed outside the laboratory.

Xerox could be bigger and richer than Microsoft, Intel and Apple all put together if they had ever gotten products like that into the market.

When was Xerox PARC founded? In the 1960s? And only just now they're thinking they should make a profit with it?

Apple's ATG - Advanced Technology Group - was well-known for just the same kind of nonsense. They were always showing off incredible new products at developer conferences, such as tablet computers with handwriting recognition, but they were reknowned for never actually bringing any of those companies to market.

Contrast this with Bell Labs that among many other valuable, money-making products, invented the Transistor.

I don't know how it compares to Visual Studio but they complete builds quicker and generates faster machine code than does GCC.

The CLang command-line is mostly GCC compatible. The parser is larger Visual Studio-compatible.

It is also Open Source under a BSD-style license.

A friend gave a talk at Microsoft one day. Upon his return he told me why Windows was so slow. It turns out that all the OEMs - Dell, Gateway, HP and the like - donate hardware to Microsoft's coders so they can be certain that the next version of Windows will run cleanly on them.

To encourage these coders to actually use the donated machines, they donate the very fastest hardware they make.

I'm very strongly of the opinion that coders should use, as their regular desktop machine, the very slowest hardware that can possibly get the job done. To this day I write most of my code on an Early 2006 MacBook Pro. It has a Core Duo, not a Core 2 Duo, and so is not even 64-bit. It only has two gig of RAM and a tiny cache compared to the MacBook Pros that are available today.

This has the effect on me that I can easily tell when my own code is slow. I don't need to use a profiler to know that.

My degree is in Physics, but the two very most useful courses I studied during my University days were Anthropology of Religion as well as Social Psychology, both at UC Santa Cruz.

The text for the Social Psych class was called The Social Animal. I recommend it to every man, woman and child, because it will enable you to better understand how people actually work and think.

One point that was taught during the class is that the most effective way to persuade anyone of anything is to have someone they know personally relate their own experience. Thus one might totally ignore the fact that Consumer Reports says that a particular model of car is unsafe and is expensive to maintain, but purchase it anyway because your cousing has that same car and thinks its just dandy.

There's no point to making fun of people for being that way. It's one of the fundamental factors that makes us humans the way we are.

If you want to be effective working for or against a particular candidate, volunteer for their campaign, then speak personally to your friends and relatives about your candidate, or why you are voting against the opposing candidate. The only way we will ever get the money and television advertising out of politics will be if regular people such as you and I actually get involved.

Just the owners of registered trademarks.

Do you know what Corporate Welfare is?

The Republicans are all for Big Government provided it benefit the rich.

Unlike water cooling, you don't need to isolate it from the circuitry, you could just immerse your whole PC in a tank of it, say a fish tank.

It's also quite an effective feline laxative. That is, if you catch my drift.

Sorry, it has been a long time. I don't have a link.

You would probably gripe at the fact that I prefer top-posting over bottom posting, as it lets me read the latest contribution to the thread.

I also like to Capitalize Some but not all words for emphasis. I also use Bold Face and italics for the same reason.

• If I want to drive home a particular point, I create a bulleted list with just one entry

Or Maybe I Use A Blockquote In Which All The Words Are Capitalized.

For some reason that completely escapes me, my colleagues at Kuro5hin all regard my writing style as some manner of symptom of mental illness. While I am without a doubt mentally ill, that's not reflected in my writing style. That has more to do with having read a lot of archaic writing during my education, and having come to the conclusion at all the text decoration is more expressive than the dull tedium that passes for typography these days.

I Am Absolutely Serious.

Shortly before a San Francisco Mayoral election a friend by the name of Andy Hasse registered the .coms of all of the expected candidates. One such candidate, upon finding that his domain was cyberly squatted upon, asked what he could do about it. Andy pitched his web consulting services then was hired by that candidate to do his site.

Andy was at the time a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz and was living the Bohemian lifestyle in The Mission District. He was just starting out. Imagine his great surprise - and mine as well - when Andy made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle when the Willie Brown campaign discovered that willybrown.com was owned by one of the staff for a competing campaign.

That was a long time ago; I'm not sure that the article would still be online. Let me check... Ah! Here We Go!

Willie Brown is to San Frasncisco politics as the Kennedys were once to American politics. While Willie has many supporters in San Francisco, it's quite definitely old-skool big-city machine politices.

I suggested that Andy take advantage of his fifteen minutes by offering him some free hosting. The Willie Brown website is no longer online, with the registrant being hidden by a private registration service. But based on the creation date, that domain just has to still owned by Andy.

Let's ask The Wayback Machine... Service With A Smile.

Sometime later an incredibly right-wing guy by the name of Dan Lungren was running for California State Attorney General. "Did you register Dan Lundgren's domain?" I asked Andy.

"Yup," he replied. "Com, Net and Org."

For no reason I can fathom Apple's iOS UI designers had the idea that it would be cool to just blindly replace words with it's very first guess.

This has the effect of rendering entire paragraphs into complete gibberish. I can fix that by backspacing and retyping but it is a huge PITA.

I did try disabling autocorrect completely but that was actually worse.

but then I actually read your post.

The modern concept of Civil Disobedience originated with Mohandas K. Gandhi's work to free India from British Colonial Rule. As part of his protest he violated British Law by making salt from seawater. The franchise for the production of India's salt had been granted to a British company by the king of England.

Did Gandhi break the law by going to the sea to make salt? the British Crown claimed he did but the Indian people hastened to disagree.

Reverend King personally spent a lot of time in the slammer during the Civil Rights movement for doing all kinds of things that would be rightly regarded as hooliganism were he and his people not working for peaceful political change.

in the country from just one room in Stasi headquarters in East Berlin.

Digital telephony - not VoIP but digital POTS - was making phones hard to tap so the apparently reasonable law was passedbto require that phone switching equipment be equipped with automated wiretap interfaces, that would of course require a signed warrant from a judge to activate.

But now the PATRIOT Act authorizes warrantless wiretaps, with it having made headlines a few years ago that Oacific Bell provided the NSA with abwiretap facility in downtown San Francisco.

Sure if I were to ride in your own personal car then I would be obligated to follow your rules. But if I wanted to ride in your bus, despite your bus company being privately owned, your bus is a "public accommodation". That's a legal Term of Art that enables the government to require that YOU follow certain rulers and that I have certain rights.

Some Americans are heavily into the ideavthat property rights are absolute and inalienable, but that is not and has never been the case.

I have quite a serious mental illness. I have spent quite a lot of time being one of those bums in the street that you claim has no right to elected representation. the very fact that the stigma against mental illness led someone to direct three security guards to beat the living crap out of me for no other crime than that I was photographing my own hallucinations is the reason I devote psych tireless effort to pointing out the error of your ways to gentlemen such as yourself.

Consider the End User License Agreements that disclaims liability for causing real damage, as when a completely reproducible bug in Excel led my boss to overdraw the company checking account by four grand.

I recently turned down a lucrative remote consulting gig because the client was in Arizona, which recently passed an appallingly racist law that is clearly intended to keep Hispanic people down. I didn't just decline the gig, my email about it went on at some length about how wrong I feel that law is.

Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition is some of the most human life critical software there is. I resigned from that job not because their code isn't exception safe but because the company president specifically forbid me from teaching my colleagues how to do exception safe resource management. I am completely convinced that that company's industrial control system code will someday make Stuxnet look like a walk in the park.

I resigned in protest from the highest paying job I ever had because I was convinced their failure to adequately test our hardware RAID put end user data and possibly even human lives at risk.

the first time I resigned in protest it was over the CEOs decision to move our office out of scenic Scotts Valley California so she personally would have a shorter commute. While she was hired to take Live Picture public, instead she drove the company into bankruptcy.

I regard my real life's work not any kind of software I overwrite, but the essays and articles I write. I have always been clear about that. but even so, my colleagues at Kuro5hin give me no end of crap for not having gotten my first iOS App intonthebapp Store yet.

They wrent just violating segregation laws by refusing to sit in the back of the bus. They violated all manner of laws by braising all kinds if Hell. The "Civil" in Civil Disobedience doesn't mean one is polite, just that one is nonviolent.

An example of the way the Civil Rights Movement would violate the law, which those white ministers I mentioned claimed was wrong, was that the protestors would shut down entire cities by blocking the streets.

That negatively impacted corporate profits, pretty much what Anonymous has been doing.

In principle I agree with younthat one should commit such crimes under ones own real name. That lends legitimacy to ones argument. but consider the good sense that the French Underground and Eastern European Partisans had in hiding their identities from the Nazis. By not getting shot - or prosecuted in the case of Anonymous - they can survive to fight another day.