Board index › Topical Discussion › Politics, Philosophy, and Religion

Please don't vote for Mitt Romney.

Page 8 of 15 [ 229 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1 ... 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 ... 15  Next

Previous topic | Next topic

shrox
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 11 Aug 2011
Age: 60
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,295
Location: OK let's go.

18 Jan 2012, 8:32 pm

Image



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

18 Jan 2012, 8:59 pm

shrox wrote:
Image


Justify that outlandish claim in very concrete and specific terms. No generalities now!

ruveyn



shrox
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 11 Aug 2011
Age: 60
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,295
Location: OK let's go.

18 Jan 2012, 9:09 pm

ruveyn wrote:
shrox wrote:
Image


Justify that outlandish claim in very concrete and specific terms. No generalities now!

ruveyn


Me.



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

18 Jan 2012, 9:20 pm

shrox wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
shrox wrote:
Image


Justify that outlandish claim in very concrete and specific terms. No generalities now!

ruveyn


Me.



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

18 Jan 2012, 9:21 pm

shrox wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
shrox wrote:
Image


Justify that outlandish claim in very concrete and specific terms. No generalities now!

ruveyn


Me.



You have made an arbitrary assertion which you have failed to back up with reference to facts.

You are a silly person.

ruveyn



Obres
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 13 Jul 2007
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,423
Location: NYC

18 Jan 2012, 10:15 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Without profits you would not have your computers on which many of you type your nonsense.

ruveyn


Some of us would. Computers existed for decades before they became profitable to private corporations.



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

19 Jan 2012, 7:50 am

Obres wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Without profits you would not have your computers on which many of you type your nonsense.

ruveyn


Some of us would. Computers existed for decades before they became profitable to private corporations.


I lived through the era of big government funded computers.

The kind that made a different were computers that ordinary people could afford.

Brought to you by Capitalists --- Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and many other like free spirits of the Silicone Valley tribe.

ruveyun



Obres
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 13 Jul 2007
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,423
Location: NYC

19 Jan 2012, 2:05 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Obres wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Without profits you would not have your computers on which many of you type your nonsense.

ruveyn


Some of us would. Computers existed for decades before they became profitable to private corporations.


I lived through the era of big government funded computers.

The kind that made a different were computers that ordinary people could afford.

Brought to you by Capitalists --- Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and many other like free spirits of the Silicone Valley tribe.

ruveyun


Funded by the government, further developed by academics and hobbyists, developed right up to the point of profitability by Xerox engineers who never ended up profiting from it, and finally packaged and sold by Jobs and Gates. All they did was slap a fancy ribbon on it and sell it for a huge profit. 99% of the road to the computer revolution had already been built before profit became a motive.



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

19 Jan 2012, 4:48 pm

Obres wrote:

Funded by the government,


Not really. There was no guarantee that the Apple line would succeed, for example. Jobs and Wozniack just as easily could have lost. The Transistor was invented at Bell labs and not at a government funded project.

The only thing the government did was the first generation of Internet, the DARPA network. All the other stuff was done by industry or the universities.

And no, Al Gore did not invent the internet.

The first all electronic computer ever invented was by Atanassof in 1938 at the University of Indiana I think. It was a private project and he built his first crude all electronic computer with second hand components on his own time. Not one single government buck went into it.

In 1939 Konrad Zeuss invented a similar computer in Germany independently. Again, it was not a government project and it was done on Zeuss' initiative.

Government funding came on line later on.

The first computers that small businesses and individuals could afford were build by DEC and a few other companies. A well off individual could afford to buy his own PDP-8, for example. The maxicomputers built by IBM could only be purchased by large well heeled business and government.

The desk top computers were the result of entreprenuers who had no guaranteed of success. Their line of development was a end-run around the big machines.

ruveyn



shrox
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 11 Aug 2011
Age: 60
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,295
Location: OK let's go.

19 Jan 2012, 4:56 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Obres wrote:

Funded by the government,


Not really. There was no guarantee that the Apple line would succeed, for example. Jobs and Wozniack just as easily could have lost. The Transistor was invented at Bell labs and not at a government funded project.

The only thing the government did was the first generation of Internet, the DARPA network. All the other stuff was done by industry or the universities.

And no, Al Gore did not invent the internet.

The first all electronic computer ever invented was by Atanassof in 1938 at the University of Indiana I think. It was a private project and he built his first crude all electronic computer with second hand components on his own time. Not one single government buck went into it.

In 1939 Konrad Zeuss invented a similar computer in Germany independently. Again, it was not a government project and it was done on Zeuss' initiative.

Government funding came on line later on.

The first computers that small businesses and individuals could afford were build by DEC and a few other companies. A well off individual could afford to buy his own PDP-8, for example. The maxicomputers built by IBM could only be purchased by large well heeled business and government.

The desk top computers were the result of entreprenuers who had no guaranteed of success. Their line of development was a end-run around the big machines.

ruveyn


Ada Lovelace, her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this she is sometimes considered the "World's First Computer Programmer" around 1845.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace



Kraichgauer
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Apr 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 48,550
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.

19 Jan 2012, 5:01 pm

While there was no continuity between the ancient world, and the modern in regard to computers, but perhaps the oldest known computer - a calculator - was discovered in a sunken Greek ship wreck in the eastern Mediterranean from the Roman era.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

19 Jan 2012, 5:05 pm

Kraichgauer wrote:
While there was no continuity between the ancient world, and the modern in regard to computers, but perhaps the oldest known computer - a calculator - was discovered in a sunken Greek ship wreck in the eastern Mediterranean from the Roman era.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


The so called Antikithera Machine. It was a mechanical device and rather cleverly contrived. Nothing like that was produced again until the time of Pascal. He invented a mechanical adding machine that could do carrying.

ruveyn



ruveyn
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 21 Sep 2008
Age: 88
Gender: Male
Posts: 31,502
Location: New Jersey

19 Jan 2012, 5:09 pm

shrox wrote:

Ada Lovelace, her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this she is sometimes considered the "World's First Computer Programmer" around 1845.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace


Ada was the brilliant protoge of Charles Babbage. She wrote programs for a machine that was never built. Babbage kept fiddling the specification for his "analytic engine" so often it never got built and the British Government cut off his funding. He did build a rump version of his "difference engine" which was not a general purpose machine like his "analytic engine"

So Ada programmed for a machine that never was, but if it had been, her program would have worked.

ruveyn



Kraichgauer
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Apr 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 48,550
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.

19 Jan 2012, 5:11 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
While there was no continuity between the ancient world, and the modern in regard to computers, but perhaps the oldest known computer - a calculator - was discovered in a sunken Greek ship wreck in the eastern Mediterranean from the Roman era.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


The so called Antikithera Machine. It was a mechanical device and rather cleverly contrived. Nothing like that was produced again until the time of Pascal. He invented a mechanical adding machine that could do carrying.

ruveyn


Thank you; I couldn't recall it's name.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



shrox
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 11 Aug 2011
Age: 60
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,295
Location: OK let's go.

19 Jan 2012, 5:25 pm

ruveyn wrote:
shrox wrote:

Ada Lovelace, her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this she is sometimes considered the "World's First Computer Programmer" around 1845.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace


Ada was the brilliant protoge of Charles Babbage. She wrote programs for a machine that was never built. Babbage kept fiddling the specification for his "analytic engine" so often it never got built and the British Government cut off his funding. He did build a rump version of his "difference engine" which was not a general purpose machine like his "analytic engine"

So Ada programmed for a machine that never was, but if it had been, her program would have worked.

ruveyn


I think that is rather sad. The world would have been very different.



Dox47
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 28 Jan 2008
Gender: Male
Posts: 13,670
Location: Seattle-ish

19 Jan 2012, 8:29 pm

shrox wrote:
I think that is rather sad. The world would have been very different.


There's actually a book about that very world, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Stirling. It's pretty entertaining and some of the ideas would probably work, plus it's often considered the origin of Steampunk.


_________________
Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer.

- Rick Sanchez