One year ago today: July 6, 2018, that’s ‘Democrat’, not democratic.
Five years ago today: July 6, 2014, WIP
Nine years ago today: July 6, 2010, remember ‘geoslavery’?
Random years ago today: July 6, xxxx, WIP
Here’s lots of reading for you. The rain made it impossible to even step outside. I braved the elements long enough to get to the library and stayed there till closing. This is a picture of what my first computer had looked like in fighting trim. This photo was taken at a Colorado museum around eight years ago. The days of individuals writing programs was over, their place taken by squadrons of coders producing enough code that something finally worked. One drive was for your program, which was self-contained on a disk, the way things should be. The other was your data. In the years of usage, I never did fill up one of those 5-1/4” floppies. You had the rational system of one data file per disk.
Later today, we’ll talk about how this dinosaur actually works better than anything on the market today, for what it was intended to do. It had a all the programs (no applications, they were real programs) as listed above. It had a couple demo games and capability to use on-line bulletin boards. Even then, most boards were dominated by a few psycho-nerds and the one sex site had one woman who always said what she thought you wanted to hear. No photos, it was all typing. Sample: Oh, you big *#$(, grab my @!&# and +@(?#> until #*(~!*#&!!!)
On the plus side, that computer always worked. It was immune to virus attacks. You could program it, but not change the opsys parameters. It was faster than anything you could throw at it, but I once key-entered a screen graphics program that took three days to draw a design. It had one-note music on the built-in speaker. Anything fancy, you bought a peripheral card and installed it in one of eight available slots. I had a modem and experimented with other card, but none of it was addicting, or possibly I had enough brains to not become addicted. This is the same gear on which I programmed my original Artificial Intelligence trials. My most ambitious project is described elsewhere in this blog, good luck finding it. I’ll recap what it did.
The screen was monochrome, but you could have 8 shades of green. I followed a description of the code, I forget the source, but some of the lines were in the magazine. Something like “Software Today”, the idea was to program a bright green rectangle around the screen. Inside you populated it with random dots. You then had a dot that moved (nowadays called animation) and you gave it instructions on how to survive. That’s the intelligence part, you did not tell it what to do in any rigid fashion. In this case, it was to “bounce” off the bright green frame, and if it encountered a dot, it could fight or flee.
You could vary the odds of either option, which became known as “fuzzy logic”. Nothing confusing about it. Then you could sit back and watch some pretty interesting behavior as the critter moved around the screen. You learned a lot about how stupid people think, especially since if you left it long enough, it would find a pattern and repeat it forever. The scary part was if you activated memory, and asked it to look back to see what worked best before. It quickly learned to kill everything in its path. You learned a lot about how the military thinks. And if you gave the obstacles a chance by letting them move out of harm’s way, the critter learned to corner track them down. That’s where you learn how the government thinks.
Now, tell me again about how new Artificial Intelligence is? Or are they simply using the existing mobs of C+ coders to crank out what looks like the real thing. If so, we can expect this pseudo-version to work out as well for people as the job that bunch has done with the Internet. And you should see the sharks circling now that Facebook and Google are under the Federal magnifying glass. In the late 80s, MicroSoft spent millions arguing that certain practices were not illegal if computer companies did them, things like product tie-ins, suppression of trade, and creating a monopoly. Yet, everyone intuitively knows this is how you get rich in America. You take a chance and run with it until you get caught. With any luck, it was your ancestors who ran the game because that lets you off scott free.
The big box stores are lined up to testify that Amazon and Google hit them with banned practices. Just you watch, none of it will stick. Not until the tax department steps in. That usually takes around seven years, not that the tax department has a thing against arrogant, cartelistic, irresponsible practices by those who think they are above the law. After all, the nice folks over in the ivory towers were tired of being told and were just giving money a fair chance to prove once and for all that it wasn’t everything. First in line will be the big box stores. Wal*Mart, Target, Whole Foods. Guess how they made their money?
As a matter of fact, I do have a solution to many of America’s small business woes. Change, and then tighten up partnership law. I’ll bet there’s a million good business startups out there right now, but they are too much for the individual. But he hesitates to go partners because he isn’t given enough protection if one partner goes bad. That’s crazy, nobody in fact should ever be held that accountable for the actions of others. The age of credit has made traditional partnership rules obsolete, especially how one partner can run up bills in the other’s name. There are ways to cope but they are cumbersome. Changes are overdue, but basically, I’d like to see jail terms for people who over-promise and under-deliver.
The most common partnership abuse is when an obligation is due from A to B. A simply stalls and stalls until some other circumstance changes and then claims frustration. It’s a reminder that marriage is a partnership. She promised you what after you were married?
I’m still trying to finish the DVD “Fifty First Dates”. Great premise, routine acting. And face it, Barrymore isn’t something I’d hit on even if she learned the right way to apply eye shadow. The dialogue sucks anyway. All the wimp terms that always did irk me, like “taking advantage”, “feel-skis”, “going all the way”, “making out”. But then, when you think of how poorly most men do in that department, it’s probably best loaded with euphemisms. Myself, I just ask. Which reminds me, y’day I bumped into Dawn, obviously single again. Time’s a-wastin’, lady. I let her know the invitation to the museum is still open, but she’s long since destroyed any of the customary thrills of just meeting. That’s the gal whose mother is my age and looks twenty years older. They both have been through their share of local boyfriends. You know how I view that.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll station.
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This is what the pirated version of “Already Gone” looks like. It is lifted of youTube for learning purposes—heaven forbid anyone suggest I would otherwise listen to The Eagles. The tie-in here is that up at the library, I often see teens trying to download free music. So much for the sophistication of the wired-in generation. They can’t do it, and resort to asking the staff for “help”. The first thing the staff does is ask if they have an account with one of the streaming services. The teens try to lie about this. My point is the staff does not appear to know how to grab the music, even if they won’t tell.
What you see here is streamed music, but think of it this way. When you listen to streaming music, you are paying by having them control what your equipment can do. The recording shown here can’t be deactivated by some sinister on-line “update”. I see how youTube and other hosts are enacting software to limit their liability for plagiarized material, which is so totally wrong because they do not originate the content. It would be easy to design programs to take care of the problem, but big business sees this is an excuse to seize control, so why bother with fixing anything?
How it works is this computer is not on-line except to copy the music using a program like Audacity, shown here. Audacity records what actually plays on your computer output leads, so there’s no such thing as embedded switches and codes to disable it. I imagine Audacity will soon implement those controls, but I have older copies that work on XP, as depicted here, than work just fine. So, the question is why don’t all the kids at the library do what I’m doing. Easy answer. Because Audacity is not automatic. One must learn to use it, especially as to volume, recording speeds, glitches, and items like Nyquist levels and purging DC offsets that throw off your gain software. That’s way to much work for people entitled to free music.
Is there a hurricane I didn’t hear about? What is with this rain? I had to skip coffee over not wanting to walk out to the car. Umbrellas? Fine, if you know how to keep hold of them and maybe train them to sit in a nearby corner until needed. Another communication from the Nashville band, showing something I rather like. A constantly updated song list. Contrast this with here, where I have yet to meet a guitar player who has learned a new song per year. I kept copies of every list and Ray-B has said he’s in Miami. I should get his new list and see the changes in ten years.
Back to reality, for a changing song list, success is still based on learning the bulk of material that forms the core sets. This is a monumental undertaking, my saving grace is I’ve done it before. A couple situations are helping out, the first being that this new band plays the hits, not the b-sides, so tabs are generally available. I’ve downloaded all I could find, in the process noticing how it is getting harder to find the originals of more and more music on youTube. The squabbling is now down to the pennies and will likely get worse unless by some miracle there is a new world-changing invention about to emerge.
The next boost is that the replacement songs are being chosen by a non-guitarist. You know I like to over-document these goings-on and there is a definite different hand at the wheel. It’s a combination of factors but the dead giveaway is playing the music in the original keys. Guitarists avoid certain chords or will transpose to avoid keys like C# and Eb. It’s recognizable that the same person is doing the chosing, but that person has not yet matured to the point of giving every musician something interesting to play. Bryan Adams is fine, but the bass lines require more endurance than talent.
Still, this is a delightful and important step away from letting a guitarist dictate the music. I’ve noticed that my suggestions take about a week to get through, and we now have another emerging “coincidence”. Some of the tunes I’ve already learned with the Reb are starting to appear on the big band list. I’ve not yet played through the entire sets as provided, but I’m leaving the worst until last. That means no Eagles, Clapton, Petty, Young, or Hendrix yet. That is stale music for an outdated crowd and should be limited to one tune max, and in the case of Hendrix, eliminated altogether. He is just not audience music these days. My spreadsheet says I’m 15.737% along the way.
Despite my lack of commitment, I am thoroughly enjoying learning this music. To keep my promise, I need only learn enough tunes to stand in for a set when in town. I’m already well past that, but this isn’t the advantage it might seem. Analysis of the Elm Street gig showed the sets are pre-planned. Guessing the set list doesn’t change much gig to gig, I still have to target a range of songs, a range that gets expanded because I don’t know which set they’ll call me up.
Now, 15.737% doesn’t sound so great. But it is a ratio and you know stats. That percentage represents 312 times I’ve gone over material. For example, the Beatles tune that appeared this week, “I Feel Fine”, I had to play 24 times to nail it. It’s probable I got less than half way through the song more than triple that to get past snags. Like that C chord which is really an Am with the median missing. But attention to that level is important to keep the guitar player thinking he’s finally starting to sound good.
A better count would be to say that of the 65-ish tunes on the ever-varying list, I’ve got a handle on 51 of them, a 78% ratio. If I used music sheets, I could probably pull off a gig now. Something for non-musicians to consider is the tabs, a pictoral way of showing what frets are used. Why not take those on stage? You can’t, it would muddle you up. Unlike sheet music, tabs have no formal structure. It can be tasking to figure out what the writer was thinking. I use tabs to get the general feel of the bass line when I can’t be bothered to figure out riffs on my own. Like that “Friends In Low Places” big hit. Memorize the first verse off the tab and repeat it. Then fake the refrains and bridges.
This works well if you play fills that most of the audience can’t quite place. For example, the mediocre bass line in “Baggage Claim” sounds, when I play it, a bit like that old Joe Cocker tune, “Feeling Alright”. If you know both tunes, can you hear in your mind what I did? Like I said, I’m enjoying this.
ADDENDUM
The criticisms over the state of the Internet are increasing almost daily. It was primarily an American undertaking and the world isn’t that tender about our business practices. A lot of international business always did take place because of the lag time with laws catching up to new situation. Hey, it took France 20 years to figure out the American practice of putting your headquarters in some area with no or low corporate tax. At the same time, France probably acted fairly quickly when the size of the problem was evident. Watch for many countries to follow. The Americans are on to that one as well, which is to just pass the cost on to the final consumer. So what starts as a tax on American companies winds up on the backs of their own.
I’ve often criticized the “IBM” model computers, both for their software and hardware. The comparison was always to Apple, but falling standards there have largely erased the big differences. I recall accurately what I did not like about IBM units in 1981, so let me scribble the major points down here, to put them side-by-side with some of what’s going on nowadays. Some may be surprised that a lot of the “features” in newer equipment were once malfunctions, that many were fixed, but many more became standards because the crop of users after 1984 just were not that sophisticated. I mean that as an insult, in case anyone missed it, and double the insult after 1994.
Never forget, it was porn that drove the success of the Internet in the early days. And the worst kinds of porn. Prior to the browsers, you rarely saw what was to become the ass-ender generations in a computer store ordering six month’s salary worth of equipment and storage capacity without a clue how the gear operated other than how to get on-line. On the other hand, this did remove a lot of weirdness that was going on at the time about sex education and urban legends about females being mysterious. Up to that date, those misconceptions had caused infinitely more social damage that computers ever did, but that’s another story. I know guys who got married just to see what a naked woman looked like. The fate of such marriages is legendary, at least to the taxpayer.
To make more sense of this, there were two models back then. Apple and everything non-Apple with was all the others. Dell, HP, Acer, Orange. They all ran DOS because it was cheap to license and even cheaper to pirate the installation disks. Home computers were new and I was no more or less knowledgeable than the next guy, except that I knew how to program. But I had only ever programmed on an Apple, and only in the classic languages. This doesn’t mean I fixed problems, only that I spotted them more quickly, or as the class of 2013 would say, quicker.
Slow boot times were another IBM hallmark. It was needed because the motherboards were, how can I put this, welded instead of properly soldered? They were so cheap, the computer needed to check all its own memory before using any. The problem is still there today, but bad memory is just bypassed. By comparison, Apples were instant-on, and you never had to keep rebooting them because they never crashed.
Here is an authentic picture of my original computer. The cover is off and you can see how it was nearing the end of its tether by this time, probably 1986. As far as I know, this is the only surviving photo of that unit, an illegal (in those days) Apple clone. The bulky disk reader is visible (I had two) and that primitive game controller did most of what is available today. You had to program it, and your own games, which I did. This is the model referred to when I say I could build a computer, if I had to.
One selling point of early IBMs was that the architecture was “open”, a nerd-like expression meaning anybody could write software. The trade-off was it attracted the wrong kind of people. Those who could not type, spell, think, and people obsessed with changing the behavior of the function keys and contriving lunatic uses for punctuation marks. The C+ languages of today shows this brand of mental weakling was by no means in the minority. As for their output, they are all wet behind the ears. That’s presuming you could find any.
Most useful business software could be made standalone, but IBM wanted them as installed software, which they called “applications”. The consequences were seen only by a few like myself. It is this scheme that opened the back door. Every virus attack, malware, invasion of privacy, identity theft, and abuse was a direct result of that approach. We were told it was to share libraries, but all it did was make the internal workings of the computer unfathomable to most users. This served IBM well, but look at what became of it.
IBM pioneered the field of planned computer obsolescence. They patterned it after the way Detroit made cars, and enforced it in much the same way. Just quit making replacement parts. They could afford this by adopted tactics from MicroSoft. These included gems like releasing software before it was tested and then doing “upgrades”, which evolved into spyware, and everybody’s favorite—releasing a new version without fixing problems in the old one.
It might surprise many Android users how many of the persistent problems with that product were solved back in the late 80s. Same with many of the current toy devices with Android-like software. The first one comes to mind is the little hourglass that told you an instruction had been received and being acted on. Think of the time wasted when nothing happens and people press the instruction a second or third time. Can you millennials believe it, somebody solved that problem before you were born. What? You don’t believe it. That figures.
Here’s some other items that are failures which were adopted by the masses. You can deliberate on your own how they came to be. Track pads. I don’t know the correct term, but laptop computers that have the keyboard recessed back so your wrists have to be held at an unnatural angle. Unresponsive touch screens. And that is not even getting to software and Internet mess-ups like screen clutter, bad search features, mystery filing systems, and “shortcuts” that let a typo really screw with your work.
Sigh, the world would be better if Apple had not foundered. They lost their way after the iMac and by overpricing their units. Their programming and operating system eventually fell victim to the temptations of making the computer something it is not. We understand that is how you sell them to the proletariat, but they did so by downgrading their product to the point where most of them are never used as computers. I remember the last series of computer lectures I attended in Ft. Lauderdale. I was the only person who did not identify myself as a “power user”, and the only one who knew what truncation and collating were.
Y et those are the people who today are writing apps that people trust, sometimes with their lives. The authorities are finally getting antsy about all the bogus medical advice. Must have something to do with how the tax system works. Hey, anything for a buck.
