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OT: What's the f stop of the lens on the SLR in your profile pic? 1.4? Looks like a pretty fast lens.
/ravi
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No, it's this: EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens[^].
Had this quite a few years: my walking-around-lens.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
me, in pictures
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Nice. Hard to beat the versatility of a 28-135.
/ravi
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Agreed though that seemed like a good choice at the time. I dip in and out of photography: sometimes carry the camera around, other times won't touch it for months. Thinking of trying astro-photography and found a good site to get me started: Astrophotography Techniques[^]. Now I just have to buy a new camera body (I'm stilling using my old D400/Rebel XTi). This[^] would also be really nice to have. Alas, priorities, priorities... 
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
me, in pictures
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Meanwhile, in Europe[^]
Also[^]
Plus others.
Today's youth will not feel the excitement as they hear their modems dialing out, or the sickening click as the provider hangs up, meaning no "artistic" pictures of ladies for you today!
“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”
Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535)
modified 20-May-13 11:50am.
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Yes, I remember reading about MiniTel. It was way ahead of what we had in the US.
/ravi
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Was that a Trash-80 that he was using? 
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What do you mean "Before the internet"? There has always been Internet. 
(At least, from my point of view  )
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Sorry, I meant to say "the web". 
/ravi
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That's still always been there from my point of view. If Wikipedia is accurate[^], the first web page ever created was created the same day I was born (November 13th, to save you some time searching the page).
modified 20-May-13 13:45pm.
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 Really? Only 1990? I'm pretty sure I have some tee-shirts older than that.
ps your link is bad.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
me, in pictures
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mark merrens wrote: <layer><layer>Really? Only 1990? I'm pretty sure I have some tee-shirts older than that.
That's why I come here, I get to feel young. 
mark merrens wrote: ps your link is bad.
Weird, apparently it didn't like me not having http on it...maybe that's why it refused to auto-format it for me too. Should be fixed now.
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You're off by a decade.
/ravi
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By that you mean from your video? But that's my point - in my lifetime, there has never been a time without the internet or even the web. (Arguably, there was a gap between the proof-of-concept and it's wider scale implementation, but that was still before I started forming long-term memories.)
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This script enables you to control your computer via text message. Think of it almost as a version of SSH over text message. It is designed to intelligently and quickly check unread Google voice messages. If certain parameters are passed, it runs the command you send and returns the result. Where autocorrect follies meet sysadmin nightmares.
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Usborne's 1983 classic Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners is an astounding book, written, designed and illustrated by Naomi Reed, Graham Round and Lynne Norman. It uses beautiful infographics and clear writing to provide an introduction to 6502 and Z80 assembler, and it's no wonder that used copies go for as much as $600. How did you learn machine code?
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I had almost forgotten that book but not quite. One of the few useful computing books I ever got out of a public library, a true classic.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: How did you learn machine code?
[ranty...]
I remember my math teacher in 10th grade programming hex codes into a 4K machine. I actually learned BASIC first on a PDP/11, and HP calculators were a bit like machine code, by the time I finished high school I was writing assembly language in 6502 with opcodes, not machine codes, though I could tell you what most opcodes were in hex. Wrote a bunch of image processing algorithms in 8086 and 80286, but then finally compilers got good enough that I could write performance code in C and coerce the compiler to produce what I wanted with various "hints." Lots of fun - I must say, nowadays I'm actually feeling rather dulled to the whole programming environment, OOP has lost its allure, functional programming is cute but ultimately a niche and can be done well enough in OO languages, and things like Ruby and Ruby on Rails feel like klunky hacks - when it works it's cool, when it doesn't it's hours googling for someone on stackoverflow that spent even more time figuring out the solution and was kind enough to post it. Not to mention how klunky the supporting technologies like javascript, jQuery, css, html feel. It's rather depressing how pathetic the web development environment and technology stack kludge actually is, and more depressing is that we all seem to just accept it. How did we get into this situation? Machine code was elegant, capable, and processors and hardware was well spec'd. Nowadays I read about how pathetic or non-existent the documentation for technology "X" is (like ajax support in Rails) but nobody seems to give a damn. We've come a long way, but have we really?
And don't forget - all those fancy layers of DI, IoC, OOP, reflection, dynamic, LINQ, etc.......it all compiles down to machine code. 
Marc
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People are always looking for the easy way to to hard things. Some tools do make the job easier others just make it easier to do badly or easier to do only if you're doing it exactly as the tool designer envisaged which you almost never are if you're doing something new.
Z80 machine code I could handle, it was human scale and the addressing modes were simple. Intel's mess on the other hand I'm still struggling with. Overall I always found really low level programming too slow, like a really stiff typewriter it could never keep up with my thought processes or I couldn't slow them down that much and remain creative. I too started with BASIC and that was cool until you ran out of RAM or you ran out of variable names you could remember to keep unique.
I moved directly to C++ without going via C really in order to get scoped variables. OO was just introduced another kind of scope which was great and namespaces gave me yet another scope dimension. I never really needed or wanted anything more than that.
I remain determined that the next time I return to Web development on my own account there will be C++ and the Web Server de jour and nothing else on the server side. Pure HTML from templates on the client side and anything and everything else will be autogenerated. I'm stubborn like that
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Matthew Faithfull wrote: Pure HTML from templates on the client side and anything and everything else will be autogenerated.
Hmmm...you've just given me an idea for how to crawl out of the primordial ooze of web development.
Matthew Faithfull wrote: <layer>I'm stubborn like that
Me too!
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: Not to mention how klunky the supporting technologies like javascript, jQuery, css, html feel. It's rather depressing how pathetic the web development environment and technology stack kludge actually is, and more depressing is that we all seem to just accept it.
I feel that way about all this CRAP!!! we're expected to accept as 'standards' (HTML/DOM). 
Committees for standards make unbearably slow progress. 
This is equally disadvantageous because of a larger user base which just grows from their ponderous time scales to appease interested parties (usually corporate bodies). This just adds more resistance to change and feeds back into the process.
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dusty_dex wrote: we're expected to accept as 'standards' (HTML/DOM).
What's particularly annoying is that the so-called standards are only implemented partially, or with deviation. I just today did an "inspect source" on a web page and grimaced in disgust as I saw 3 if-else blocks to handle differences in IE 7, 7, and 8, and this occurred in numerous places throughout the HTML.
Marc
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6502 opcodes which had to be converted into string format so that it could be called from ATARI BASIC.
A nightmare. BBC Basic had a built-in assembler which was far more friendly. I can be thankful for not having to enter code via hex keypad (KIM-1) or horror of horrors; toggle switches of the MITS Altair. 
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dusty_dex wrote: or horror of horrors; toggle switches of the MITS Altair.
That stuff was cool! I remember in 8th grade being taught by the chemistry teacher how to enter the bootstrap code into the PDP/11 with toggle switches. Unfortunately, he didn't teach me what exactly I was doing and why. It was only later that I realized I was entering opcodes and toggling the "increment memory" for each binary code.
But yeah, I'm glad we don't have to do that anymore.
Marc
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