Re: Alltech Electronics-- full-speed accel?

["Otter" <otter@oz.net>]

On Thu, 19 Feb 1998 03:50:13 -0600, 
Rubywand   <rubywand@swbell.net> wrote:

>
>     No PC user has anything like the hardware and system documentation
>available to, even, GS users. Aside from a few users who over-clock
>their motherboards (by swapping around a few jumpers), "hardware
>experimentation" is swapping in a new video board.
>
>     More important, PC is not where Apple II was _15_ years ago. As you
>may recall, there was once a time when a large proportion of users could
>easily write at or near 'state of the art' programs. Today, about the
>most complex 'programming' task PC users even try is pasting together a
>web page.
>
>     The PC's message is that the vast majority of users must give up
>any hope of coming even remotely close to mastering their machines.
>Their PC is a black box crammed with other black boxes, none of which is
>ever well documented because the user has no 'need to know'. At best,
>these users can, maybe, learn to use a few applications without bombing
>Windows too often.
>
>     II users "bother" because they do not buy the PC message. As much
>as possible, the user _should_ be the master of his/her machine. That,
>really, is where you discover the power and the fun of being a computer
>user.  
>
>
>Rubywand
>

This reminds me of a thread that ran for a while on comp.sys.cbm.  I 
hope none of you mind my sharing it with you...
The thread was titled "Young Programmers".  Here is my favorite 
excerpts from it...

Carcass Creation Service wrote:

> I've actually wanted to get this off my chest for quite some time, and
> since this seems to be an appropriate thread for my commentary, here
> goes ..
>
> First of all, let me tell you a bit about my start in programming .  I
> was 10 years old, and with my paper route earnings, I managed to buy
> myself a used Vic-20 .. By the time I was 15, I had graduated to the
> Commodore 64 and was coding pure 6502/10 Asm .. I still, to this day,
> program C64 demos in pure Asm ..
>
> Today's "Young Programmers" are basically hacks .. they write a few
> lines of Qbasic code or steal some C source from an FTP site, compile it
> successfully and then proceed to openly advertise themselves as
> "Programmers" .. They consider Visual C++ a low level language .. they
> can barely read hexadecimal .. they use a calculator for binary
> conversions, if they ever even bother to learn binary at all .. they
> don't bother with memory management as the compiler will take care of
> that for them, thus resulting in a 100k "Hello World!" program ..
> Logical Operators? Huh? Direct bitmap manipulation? Huh? Any kind of
> sort except for bubble sorting? Huh?
>
> 1 - In this day and age, 15 year old "Programmers" are, by default, lame
> .. They really don't have a clue.. Your age is not something you want to
> be advertising .. there are ofcourse the rare exceptions to this rule ..
> I know a few really good 6502/10 Asm coders who happen to be young..
> 2 - Doing HTML does NOT qualify you as a "Programmer" .. There is more
> skill involved in using a pre-WYSIWYG word processor than there is in
> throwing together some HTML ..
> 3 - Including 300k .wav files in your programs for 5 seconds of audio is
> NOT COOL ..
> 4 - CODER sounds much cooler than PROGRAMMER .. for some reason,
> whenever someone claims they are a PROGRAMMER, I think to myself "DeVry
> Grad..."
> 5 - Having read "Learn to program C/C++ in 21 days" does not make you a
> "Programmer" ..
>
> Coding is about long nights staring at 1000 lines of code, wondering why
> it keeps messing up, and REFUSING to go to bed until you have debugged
> the fucker .. A coder is not afraid of low level stuff .. A coder does
> not think W95 is "Kewl" .. A coder wants to get the job done in as
> little bytes as possible, with the fastest code possible .. A coder
> realizes that there is no such thing as cheating, if tables will speed
> up the code by 10%, the coder will use tables ..
>

--Otter