The Elder Polls MMXII: Obama

[Leopolds Ghost]

You should have acted, Republicans.

They're already here.

The Elder Polls told of his return.

Their defeat in 2010 was merely... a delay.

Until the time after Occupy started,

When the sons of Wall Street would spill their own blood.

But no one wanted to believe...

Believe that the 47% even existed.

And when the truth finally dawned,

It dawned in a SEA OF BLUE!

There is one man they fear.

In their tongue, he is OBAMA-KIIN...

HAWAII-BORN!


[font size="+4"](FUS RO DAH![/font]

O-bamahkiin, o-bamahkiin,

Naal ok zin los vahriin,

Wah dien vokul mahfaeraak ahst vaal,

Ahrk fin norok paal graan,

Fod nust hon zindro zaan,

Obamahkiin, fah hin kogaan mu draal.

Ahrk fin kel lost prodah,

Do ved viing ko fin krah,

Tol fod zyemah win kien meyz Koch fundien

Axelrod fyen do jun,

Kruziik vokun staadnau,

Voth aan bahlok wah diivon fin mortgage lien.

[font face="Times" size="1"]

[/font][font size="1"](for best results, play the two musics simultaneously.)[/font][font face="Times" size="1"]

[/font]( *Translation from the ferriner Hawaiian tongue: )

Hawaii-born, Hawaii-born,

By his honor, is sworn,

To keep Romney forever at bay,

And the fiercest foes rout,

When they hear triumph's shout,

Hawaii-born, for his election we pray,

As the Polls have foretold,

Of black voters in the cold,

That when fundie Koch brothers wage war come unfurled,

Axelrod bane of kings,

Ancient super-PACs unbound,

With a hunger to swallow the world.

YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!
YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!

[HopeHoops]

1. What's really freaky is that I saw "MMXII" and saw "2012". Then again, I also read ASCII.

Some habits are hard to break. I can read hex and see the characters. It's sort of like "The Matrix". "I don't even see the code anymore. I just see blonde, brunette, redhead."

Shit. Kids aren't even learning cursive anymore - how the FUCK are they going to come up with a signature? Yes, yes, yes. It's depressing. Machine code is pretty much non-existent as a coding method now, and even assembly is dying. You can't count clock cycles if you don't get into the cores. Yeah, a 3.33 GHz machine with 24GB of memory is pretty fast, but I'm still longing for the 1 MHz CPU days when memory was counted in Ks. My era is over.

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. Well, you were supposed to read 2012. Some can't read latin numbers? Kids these days :-)

Cursive, when I heard they weren't teaching that anymore... but then again I read that they're very proud that in some schools, all the kids are fingerpainting (not in art class, they don't teach art or music in public school because it does not benefit a corporate education) because they're learning without keyboards or mouse -- touch tablet only. They had never even heard of a keyboard or mouse and the teachers were very proud that they were ignorant of such concepts. Who needs to write or plot things with tools when in the future, everything will be served to us as passive consumer media?? Just look at Windows 8.

I don't know hex but I can read color codes because I understand it's numerals in mod 16...
As for machine code... you should meet a friend of mine. He's all about that sort of thing.

Then again, a friend of a friend here on DU was some kind of ancient Mr. Miyagi type dude who was an Apple (not Mac) purist who rebuilt Apple IIEs.



[font color="white"]..[/font] My Little Oregon Trail

[HopeHoops]

3. I'm an old-school geek too. I pre-date the Apple IIE, but only by six or so years.

[Leopolds Ghost]

4. I could have been an old school geek if I hadn't transferred

to an artsy-fartsy school instead. I shall just have to bask in the technical knowledge of others.

[font size="3"]GEEK EYESIGHT TEST[/font]


[font face="Times" color="#222222"](spoiler: they are [/font] [font face="Times" color="white"]8-bit ponies in 2-D, facing the camera.
How many ponies can you name?[/font] [font face="Times" color="#222222"] OK, now that's just scary.)[/font]

[HopeHoops]

5. The ponies aren't that scary. What IS scary are the evangelists who see too much in video games.

Example: In the late 70's there was an Apple II game that involved a four square "shooter" (like Space Invaders, but not as complicated) that fired 2 square missiles at a series of 3 square targets on top of a line near the top of the screen. VERY simple graphics here.

X
X
X
-----


.X
.X



.X
XXX


- Some preacher saw a penis shooting sperm at prostitutes and tried to get video games banned. I still laugh anytime I think about that. (The periods are just there to hold the space. DU collapses leading spaces and extra spaces)

[Leopolds Ghost]

6. Um, yeah that's pretty silly.

Especially because there's much better ASCII art for both of the aforementioned purposes. /)~-~

The first computer I wever owned came pre-installed with a bunch of wonderful ASCII art animations.

---

The ponies aren't scary; being able to identify them when presented with a set of 1-D color codes is.
I imagine that should be a prerequisite test for hard-core tech geeks, like reading the Silmarillion in Elvish.

[font face="Times New Roman" size="5"]One OS To Rule Them All[/font]

[font face="Times New Roman" size="3"]Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows CD. Too my astonishment and distress he threw it into my microwave oven and turned it on. I was upset because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold, and it seemed to have become thicker and heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, in lines finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:[/font]

[font face="Courier New, monospace" size="3"]4F6E65204F5320746F2072756C65207468656D20616C6C2C204F6E65204F5320746F
2066696E64207468656D2C0D0A4F6E65204F5320746F206272696E67207468656D20
616C6C20616E6420696E20746865206461726B6E6573732062696E64207468656D[/font]

[font face="Times New Roman" size="3"]'I cannot read the fiery letters,' I said.
'No,' he said, 'but I can. The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here.
But in common English this is what it says:

One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. [/font]

Source: comp.groups, mid-90s

[HopeHoops]

9. What's REALLY disturbing is that I read it in HEX before moving on to the English.

I'd never heard of that microwave trick, but it's really cool!!!

And yes, I remember quite a bit of ASCII art, some porn, but most of it was things like Snoopy. Also, the first printout of the Mandelbrot set (1980, by Mandelbrot) was done on a 9-pin printer (Epson if I recall correctly). What freaks me out is that Julia understood the imagery in 1917, obviously before computers, and all Mandelbrot was doing was plotting the 0,0 points of the connected Julia sets.

Only seven years later, I worked with two buddies for two days on a Mac II to create animations of movement in both the Julia and Mandelbrot sets using a logarithmic color table (for my mathematics seminar course). They were awesome. I had my C=64, my Apple II+, and three Apple IIEs in the science hall running around the clock for two weeks on 50 iteration plots, six to a screen, to pick the points for the animations. My current 3.33 GHz 24GB i7 6-core server could do all of that work in seconds and not even nail the CPU meter. AND, I could save the results on a 64GB thumb drive. Things, they have ah changed.

[HopeHoops]

10. Oh, and I cheated with the pony thing. If you highlight the blank areas in the text...

...below the image, the letters become white on a blue background. It says "ponies" in there, although the rainbow was my first clue.

[Leopolds Ghost]

11. I vaguely remember the first color printouts of the Mandelbrot set.

Fractals are definitely a fascinating thing.

Regarding 8-bit eyesight test, I got 34 out of 36 and could name 29, but I have a pony reaction pics folder so that doesn't even peg the nerd-o-meter.

[HopeHoops]

12. I've never actually seen the show, but I know about them. And, for the record,...

The Mandelbrot and Julia sets are not technically fractals. They're self-similar, but they differ in specifics to infinite levels (except along the real axis). An actual fractal looks the same at any level (the Koch - pronounced "kotch", not "coke" - curve, snowflake, and cube are the best known examples). I used Logo on the Apple II+ attached to an overhead projector unit to demonstrate that concept. Logo is perfect for doing true fractals.

[Leopolds Ghost]

13. So what do you call them then? The fractals that is. Also... Re: Mac

I'm looking to get the following... you know anything about these?

Pen-based OS X tablet returns as a converted 13-inch MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion
Modbook Pro - Hack Laptops - Reviews

Oh, and this:



I'd probably get the old model tablet since it's going for much cheaper remanufactured and can be upgraded. Besides, the people making these things (the rebuilt laptop) seem to be a "fan project" for Mac, so there's not much support.

Where's my TRON desk?

[HopeHoops]

14. They're commonly mislabeled "fractals", but they are just self-similar.

As for the tablet, I've never had an interest in them. The closes I got was the original Handspring Visor. I still have them, but I'd have to fire up a Win98SE box to use them again. Historical artifacts at this point.

Curiously, the first book I read on the Mandelbrot set actually was called "The Beauty of Fractals", but even it acknowledged that there was a difference.

[Leopolds Ghost]

15. The neat thing about this tablet is that it's got an OS laptop inside.

[HopeHoops]

16. That's cool. I've heard a lot of complaints about tablet OSs.

[eqfan592]

7. lol, well done!

Hmmm, now I gotta load up Skyrim again I think... Lol

[Leopolds Ghost]

8. Love the gif!

how apropos.

[reflection]

17. Big Skyrim fan here.

Thoroughly enjoying the Hearthfire expansion pack. Plowed through the main quest and the Dawnguard quest some time ago. Bethesda did a great job on that game. Simply beautiful.