I had the same thing. I also used it to teach myself BASIC... Just because there was no other way to communicate with the computer, really.
My "favorite" part was how long it would take to load a program from the cassette drive. At least 5-6 minutes, during which the screen would go weird colors (with time, you learned to distinguish - white/red means nothing happening, blue/yellow means program is loading) and make really weird sounds...
I'm going to provide a voice of discontent here ...
Although I agree with the author, for the most part, there's a flip side as well. There exists GOOD enterprise software. Difference between good enterprise software and open source software is enterprise software HAS to work. For open source software, it's "cool if it works."
Of course, I'm horribly overgeneralizing open source software (kind of the like the author does with enterprise software), but hear me out. A valid analogy would be enterprise software is an adult, as it does things out of necessity, and doesn't care about looks, code elegancy, fancy algorithms, etc... And open source software is the cool kid on the block, who doesn't really need to do anything, but does it for the coolness factor.
Sometimes with pretty bad results. For example - back in 2004, we here at large Dilbertian financial company that I'm working nights to escape have tried using Groovy. It worked pretty well, and we were happy.. until we went to production. It was then we discovered that Groovy had a memory leak, and our mission-critical application hung every day during crunch time.
Moral of the story? This kind of thing is NOT tolerated among enterprise software (at least where I work)... and that memory leak in Groovy hasn't been fixed in a couple of years, and I don't know if it has been fixed at all, actually... I haven't checked Groovy in a while.
That's where the author (and myself) disagree, I guess. Enterprise software SHOULD work, but there's no reason to believe that it does any better than other software.
The moral of the story for me is to test everything before it gets put in production (wasn't Groovy brand-new in 2004?) There's no reason to assume open-source software works, and there's no reason to assume enterprise software works. Even if it's used by hundreds of thousands of businesses with no problems, there might still be a problem with your specific setup, whether it's open-source or enterprise.
It still does not make sense. Humans were in a hunter-gathering mode for quite some time. If they were so much healthier, AND had more free time, why did the society start rapidly progressing only with the advent of agriculture? Did they just magically become smart? I'm sorry, but no. While this article is certainly interesting, and thought provoking, the thesis doesn't hold.
They didn't suddenly become smart and you certainly cannot attribute all the developments to the adoption of agriculture. Progress has been very... erratic (can't find the right word) throughout history.
To blindly attribute progress to a singular cause such as farming is short sighted. I'm sure there are many different variables (farming included) that influence progress and discovery.
Agriculture is not exactly the reason for technological advances; rather, progress became possible (but not guaranteed!) thanks to agriculture.
While a few hunter-gatherer societies lived in a place so abundant that they can settle in a single location and gather everything they needed, the vast majority of such societies were migratory, moving to wherever the food was.
In a migratory society, most technological advances are simply not useful. When you only keep the things you can carry on your back, anything that doesn't have a direct use is an active hindrance with a quantifiable opportunity cost. Civilization is only possible when people can settle in one place.
Further, even hunter-gatherer societies that are fortunate enough to settle in a single place have to remain small to survive, or they exceed their food supply. This means that the chance of a given society developing a new technology is much smaller (given a smaller supply of creative individuals). It also means that even if a society does develop a new technology, that technology spreads very slowly, leading to less cross-pollination with other individuals and ideas.
By contrast, agriculture concentrates people together. There are a variety of technologies that increased the productivity of an agricultural society as a whole, and it's very natural for those technologies to spread throughout a society. Furthermore, agricultural societies that are more productive than their neighbors can produce more soldiers (when a smaller percentage of the population can feed the whole society, there is excess labor for armies, as well as other pursuits), allowing them to conquer their neighbors and spread their advances to their newly conquered territories. Basically, in an agricultural society, technology spreads like a virus.
We use Ruby on Rails with a lot of JavaScript for Ajax-y thingies. So far there's only 2 of us, but looks like here in NYC there's more than a few RoR devs.
everyone is going to shoot me for this, but we are building our project in C# (debug time + .NET library),C++ (faster sockets), actionscript (not flex) and ajax
I had the same thing. I also used it to teach myself BASIC... Just because there was no other way to communicate with the computer, really.
My "favorite" part was how long it would take to load a program from the cassette drive. At least 5-6 minutes, during which the screen would go weird colors (with time, you learned to distinguish - white/red means nothing happening, blue/yellow means program is loading) and make really weird sounds...