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Clifford Nelson wrote: To make it even worse sometimes not even sure what year the event was supposed to have taken place.
That is the worst thing to me.
Even with large companies like Microsoft you may look up a specific function or something and you just can't tell if it is the latest thing or 10 years old.
I just heard of this Silverlight thing and I'm trying to get it working. 
It really is a problem though.
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And if you read the "Intended Tuning" section, you'll see that there's quite a bit of evidence that JSB was illustrating an unequal temperament, where each key signature operates differently. The 3rds in keys with more sharps or flats have more energy, and push the harmony along.
To illustrate equal temperament, transposing the same piece into every key would have been a better illustration.
Quote: It is sometimes assumed that by "well-tempered" Bach intended equal temperament, the standard modern keyboard tuning which became popular after Bach's death, but modern scholars suggest instead a form of well temperament.[18] There is debate whether Bach meant a range of similar temperaments, perhaps even altered slightly in practice from piece to piece, or a single specific "well-tempered" solution for all purposes.
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Marc Clifton wrote: 432Hz.
I'll get one of these some day:
https://highspirits.com/pages/high-spirits-earthtone-flute-series
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So the document is a few years old, but:
- has the musical scale changed?
- how much room is that page taking up?
farcebook has millions of pictures of peoples dinners going back 14 years, once cute babies that have become ugly delinquents, dogs shitting on carpet that's long ago been replaced (in some cases the whole house and dog too) ...
some things should be allowed to stay, way too much other crap should never have been there in the first place.
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That is true in a whole lot of areas, not just internet googling. Out-of-fashion clothes may be a lot warmer than this year's fashion clothes. You will often learn as much from old documentaries in the days when they were not drowned with all sorts of visual effects and gimmicks. The old telephone receivers were a lot better than today's cellulars, both ergonomically and in sound quality. (From a sound quality point of view, cellulars is a long step backwards, compared to ISDN!)
Young people to a large degree reject anything that is not-invented-this-year. You can't even suggest a novel to read or a concert to listen to that is ten years old, without risking a blunt rejection or acidy remarks.
I've been around in computer software long enough to recognize a lot of "new" ideas and concepts as a new wrapping around the same core that we studied at the University 35-40 years ago. When I show my younger colleagues my old books, or old journals from ACM or whatever, a fair share of the youngsters get really crossed: I am sort of turning down their "revolutionary" new concept as something old and dusty ... I see it as a great thing that they revive the old and forgotten idea, but to them, the important thing is the newness, not the usefulness.
Of course I am exaggregating a little bit; a fair share of young people do see the value of well established knowledge and methods, and in areas that are not as much steered by fashions, old knowledge is far more accepted.
The musical scale hasn't changed; that part of it is perfectly accepted. But the web page layout is extremely non-fashionable. Web page fashions change every month. If this same information, word by word, had been presented in a last-month-webpage-style, noone would ever have noticed that the page is 20+ years old. What makes people stall is not the documentary contents, but the lack of stash and gimmicks to frame it, the way it "has to be" today to make it possible to absorb the information. Sort of "edutainment": Modern Westerners cannot learn anything unless they are "entertained". The web page information cannot be conveyed unless the page has the right typographical stash.
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That is a great post. I agree with you. There are often so many layers of style wrapped over real substance these days that people cannot even get to the actual substance. It really hampers deep learning.
I have gone back and read a couple of early books on OOP ("algorithms + data structures = programs[^]" and found that they talk about foundational things that modern books won't even touch upon because they waste so much time talking about stylish items.
And you're right about that page too, it has the info I need and is short and direct and valuable.
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You should try MMIX assembly then.
"My books focus on timeless truths"
--D. E. Knuth
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We were talking about "the bible" over lunch yesterday. I happened to state that The One Fundamental Flaw in the books is the use of assembly code to illustrate abstact concepts. He certainly could have defined a high level pseudocode language, as rigid in its definition as an assembly language (actually, in my first year of university study, that is exactly what the professor did - pseudocode certainly doesn't have to be loose and informal). The use of assembly narrowed down the audience to a small fraction of what it would have been with examples in a language that could be understood with minimal knowledge of hardware and machine instruction sets.
Granted, the series was started in 1968, at a time when the majority of systems programming was still done in assembler. But ALGOL60 (a predecessor of Pascal and C) had been around for eight years, object oriented Simula for a year, and Pascal was around the corner (1970). Knuth most certainly was familiar with algorithmic languages even at that time.
I'll stand by my claim that this is The Only Big Flaw of the books. Others around the table asked: The only flaw?  Surely not, but MIX makes the books a curiosity, rather than the great books they were intended to be.
(I haven't compared MIX to MMIX, but MMIX certainly wouldn't have made any fundamental difference.)
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Well, I am just a low level guy...
I think they are actually great books. The audience is not wide, though.
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We are offtracking now, but nevertheless:
Looking at the Wikipedia MMIX description, at a glance it seems like "just another CPU".
If you have studied it: Could you give a few clues to the architectural details that makes this one worthy of Knuth's signature on it?
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I have just started it (the books are difficult, I have to admit).
I believe it is not the CPU to be remarkable. The algorithms are. However he did need a CPU and existing ones didn't fit very well with his (regularity) requirements. As himself says MMIX is very similar to 'modern' 64 bit RISC CPUs, but less 'fat saturated'.
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lopati: roaming wrote: o the document is a few years old, but:
- has the musical scale changed?
- how much room is that page taking up?
Agreed.
That's why I marked the message as a joke.
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I have searched for an English translation of the Danish poet Piet Hein's "grook" about jokes and seriousness, but in vain. In my rough translation - with no poetic qualities, no rhyme - it says:
He who takes a joke for being merely a joke
and seriousness as only serious,
he sure has understand both of them
rather poorly.
(If anyone knows of a proper, poetic translation, please tell me! To see other Piet Hein grooks, you may go to Grooks of Piet Hein.)
I guess that this thread has shown clearly that the joke dose have some serious sides as well.
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Well, the page loads fast, and not just because it doesn't have any ads on it.
There's a lesson here that some people need to (re-)learn.
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We just announced our 1st spot prize winner in the Summer Fun with Arduino Challenge[^] - congrats raddevus! Your CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3B+ starter kit is on its way.
And we'd love to give away more of these so we've decided to pick 1 spot prize winner every day until the contest ends. The challenge is simple and only takes about 20 mins - so grab your Arduino and get in on the action!
modified 12-Jun-18 16:26pm.
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Congrats, raddevus! Thanks for completing the challenge.
And a note for anyone who wants to give it a try: you don't even need a real Arduino! There's a separate tutorial on completing the challenge using the Arduino simulator on Tinkercad.
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Thanks so much. I really thought the extra code was a lot of fun. And I'm totally blown away by TinkerCad. It is really amazing. I hope a lot of people get to try it because it is very cool and is a great first step to trying out Arduino if they never have.
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How is this determined? Is it random? I ask because I also submitted a code like on the first day of the challenge and never heard back (no confirmation, no error, ...).
Anyway congrats!
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Hi Florian,
One winner is chosen randomly every day.
If you still have the code you entered available, could you try submitting it again? If you don't still have the code, let us know and we'll dig deeper and fix this for you.
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Hi Florian, try submitting your code one more time.
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I refuse to develop on anything smaller than a MicroVAX.
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I just saw this (June 13, evening Eastern Standard Time). Thanks so much!!! I'm very excited that I won. Having a great time with the contest. 
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So glad you're enjoying yourself  It's a fun contest. Will be in touch on the prize.
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