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Mac os had this back in the mid 90's!
https://www.pacifict.com/Story...

It's all in how you define "comfortably."

I was mostly-unemployed for a while, and spent some savings of about $10K for a year. I had a cheap rental house, no outstanding debt, and just enough income to cover groceries and expenses. I, too, was comfortable at the time.

Granted, I didn't take a vacation, or travel overseas, or and fortunately had no major medical expenses. I didn't eat fancy dinners, and I kept leftovers. I learned to be quite happy with a meal of ramen and sausage, and my old Nokia phone did its job as much as it was needed. To borrow a phrase from another engineer, I lived "simply".

Now, I'm not suggesting the lifestyle works for everyone. I have a family to support now, and they want to see the world and have clothes without patches. I enjoy steak a lot more than my arteries would prefer. My house is now a nice little two-story as the end of a private road. I've started looking at some major medical bills. A $10K income won't come close to being "comfortable" for me today.

Ultimately, it's a question of what you want from life. If you are comfortable and happy with what you have, why should anyone else expect you to have more?

The virtual boss will see - contrary to what the eyes of the real bosses tell them - employees who never get up from their desks, never go to the bathroom, and never hang around in the break room... because those badges are left behind on the desk all the time whenever the employees get up from their desks, go to the bathroom, and hang around the break room.

Because employees will quickly learn to "game" the system, rendering the whole thing useless.

Hell, most of the time those badges aren't even necessary to get into the office, since somebody inevitably will open the door for you. And inevitably the employees are going to discover that their badges are ratting them out.

Not that any of this matters. This is just another way for managers to collect "metrics" on their staff, to prove with the magic of numbers that their staff is working, rather than - oh, I don't know - looking to see if the work is actually getting done. But the latter would actually require the managers to understand what their reports are doing, and that requires knowledge and effort on their part. Better to just rely on computers to create a useless spreadsheet that they can point to during the yearly reviews.

How would an employer feel if he had a secret project in his company that had an unlimited budget?

Here is the primordial skunkware story..

Only a few dozen coveted PowerPC machines were even available in System Software for people working on the operating system. We had two. Engineers would come to our offices at midnight and practically slip machines under the door. One said, "Officially, this machine doesn't exist, you didn't get it from me, and I don't know you. Make sure it doesn't leave the building."

The difference to this story, however, is that the skunks in NSA ans FBI have taken over the entire show.

I'll bite.

Making awesome things takes a lot of cooperation. To a certain extent, that cooperation can be bought. Cooperation can be bought more cheaply and more easily, however, if the person being bought is already in favor of the project, and once they're involved, they're far more likely to be passionate about the project's ultimate success, rather than viewing it as yet another boring job in a long career.

Leaders like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk don't just do the "executive" part of the "Chief Executive Officer" role. They act as figureheads leading an army of supporters who believe in the project and are devoted to it. That fanatical love for the goal is seen as crazy by outsiders, but it leads to a quality product in the end - albeit after some major trials and tribulations. A bit of vision, a bit of business, and a bit of distorted reality are the secret ingredients to leadership.

See http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ for a corporate culture that managed, at one time, to embrace and extend that kind of enthusiasm.

Embrace, extend... and now it's extinguished.

Still looking for an open source equivalent of one of the greatest calculators ever written. It was bundled with OS8. This one "shows you the math". Every kid should have it.

It's got a really great geek story behind it too. If you don't already know this one, take a minute and enjoy.
http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Having had a job offer from a small company many many years ago where perks included free components and use of tooling and lab equipment for my own projects, I have no doubt that there must have been some other companies doing the same thing too. After all, it makes perfect sense to attract people that find joy in creating. They're the sort that as long as they've got enough to live on, are really more dedicated to what they're doing than to just collecting a check. You don't hire the best and brightest artists by treating people like hourly laborers.

The tale of the guy that developed the Graphing Calculator at Apple more than a decade ago makes for a good read. It's not quite the same thing, but does reflect people of the same mindset.

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Apple is the skunkware employer par excellence. Just read the following story.

We've all had the experience where a project that we were doing (maybe not at work, maybe as a hobby) becomes so engrossing that we willingly stay up to the wee hours of the morning, because we're really enjoying what we're doing. If a job can provide that on any sort of consistent basis, then it's a good place to be. The stuff that I read about Apple makes it sound like it's that sort of place for a lot of people.

You are insightful.

Here is the story of a guy who was laid off, but kept coming to work. He was literally sneaking in to work for free, and lots of people helped him. It does have a happy ending.

The Graphing Calculator Story

Copyright © 2004 Ron Avitzur.

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Try the Graphing Calculator. It's awesome. Try the demo/tour.

http://www.pacifict.com/

Congratulations: you've got some of the potentially most interesting classes to use technology in - but that potential will be wasted if you just use the tablet and projector to show Powerpoint slides.

When you're designing your class, think: what can the tablet do that would be useful that could not have been done without it. Powerpoint fails this test miserably - an overhead projector would do just as well.

Here are some possible uses that do pass the test:

• Use symbolic math software to help students visualize the math, and to explore interesting problems that cannot be handled without it. Mathematica is everybody's pet favorite, of course - but I would argue that it's grotesquely overpowered and complex for most of what you'll need. Instead, take a look at something like Ron Avitzur's Graphing Calculator - the name doesn't do justice to what is a particularly elegant little program.
• For Physics, use the tablet to analyze physical data. One of the best uses here is to film objects in motion, then transfer the video to the tablet (or get a cheap webcam and record directly on the tablet), and analyze the results frame-by-frame - your students will come out with a much better understanding of motion. A free package for video analysis is Physmo.
• For more sophisticated experiments, check out what the folks at PASCO have to offer - their sensors are reasonably inexpensive.
• If you do a Google search, you'll find a wealth of Java applets that simulate concepts in Physics - when contextualized by discussion, physical experiments, and "what if" explorations, these can be tremendously useful. Without this framework, though, they are no better than the film loops of old.

One last suggestion: don't hog the tablet - let your students use it too. You can set up a problem, and invite students to come up and work through it individually or in groups, showing their thought process to the rest of the class. The students will learn much more, and everybody - including you - will have a lot more fun.

Good luck!

"It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix! Yes, it's an excimer, frozen in its excited state ... As soon as we apply a field, we couple to a state that is radiatively coupled to the ground state. I figure we can extract at least 10 to the 21st photons per cubic centimeter which will give one kilojoule per cubic centimeter at 600 nanometers, or, one megajoule per liter."

"Looks at the facts: Very high power. Portable. Limited firing time. Unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space.

I was interested in learning more about (like Calculus) on Wikipedia and found that I couldn't even understand the description of the subject!

http://www.pacifict.com/Products.html

I suspect that this has actually been in development for quite a while as some nighttime/hobby project of one or more programmers at Apple that got "outed" somehow, & then became an official project. Kind of like the Graphing Calculator of the original PowerPC Macs...

I'm not a buisness expert, but can't you uninstall anything the hell you want from windows ('cept IE, admittedly) and make an image from that disk, and image it to 50,000+ PC's you sell? Also, can you put firefox on that 1st pc, and make it the default before you make the image? They do it with Symantec/Norton Security Suite all the time. And, can't Dell write a program to present the user with choices of defaults to use?

How much other stuff does OS X stuff in to an operating system? Safari. iChat, iTunes, iWeb, f**king DVD authoring. MS doesn't include half that stuff, and the Mac folks see iLife as a feature. You have to feel sorry for Microsoft.

Original publication: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20051005TDY01 003.htm They should definitely try social engineering techniques too. There was article [http://www.pacifict.com/Story/%5D written by a former Apple catractor that details how he worked on the graphing calculator app for a year without being an employee. Where I work, you just have to mention an employee's name and someone will assume that you work there. Of course I do work at Starbucks, but whatever [not really, I'm mean really not really].

Calculator.app is next to useless. Apple needs to resurrect the old Graphing Calculator, the one that used to be shipped with every Mac from 1994 until OS X. It's

http://www.pacifict.com/Develop.html talks about the Power Macintosh and developing apps for it, however the concepts are universal. Most of them even more so since most anything can beat a 60MHz PPC. THESE are the ways Linux can become better used on the "desktop" and not the developer thinking, "Hmm... I think I'll optimize the TCP/IP stack a bit and just make some text configuration files so that the user can set them to however they like!" And not realizing that the little documentation there means that nobody ends up giving a shit that their TCP/IP stack could go 1/2 second faster.

That reminds me of the graphing calculator story:
http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
that says a lot about corporate security.

At any rate, the main point of the article is that there is a cost/benefit to security (security is expensive and can hamper productivity), but that most of the time people/corporations don't even bother looking for simple effective measures that would reduce the risk for little or no extra cost.

A great story, thanks for the link. I wondered what happened to Graphing Calculator in OS X, interesting to see it is still provided as a free download.

After all, Apple can even get their engineers to continue working on projects after they're fired

People have gone mad pretending to be mad.

On a similar note, I wish more teachers, students and educators had adopted Hypercard and kept it alive! Poor documentation is a huge problem in both education and mainstream/alternative software. Greater usage and skills in Hypercard could have sustained educational computing through many of the dark years.

Unfortunately, history has shown that educational computing has been widely abused in the 90s and 2000s. Instead of using simple, inexpensive software to advance teaching, cheap PCs with poor software have been unloaded on hapless schools - costing a lot of money, and confounding teachers who haven't been provided with adequate training, or decent software tools. It was a crazy bonanza of spending on inappropriate technology when schools were encouraged to "adopt" IT and computing. But now the spending-spree is over, with schools and government having to live with their poor decisions, while not being able to afford replacements. If only some sensible decisions had been made a decade ago, we might not have to live with this crap today!

The calculator shipping with Tiger is a completely different product than the Graping Calculator from Pacific Tech (ie, the one that shipped with MacOS 9).

The "real" one is at: http://www.pacifict.com/

It never quite went away - on my Panther machine it's in the MacOS 9 Applications folder. But this means they've updated it to OS X, which is nice. I have an OS X version from the guy who wrote it for Apple. It's been a free download for ages. Try http://www.pacifict.com/FreeStuff.html.

When I was about 15 I got my first ZX81 and started mucking about on the school's very first Apple ][.

The first thing I would say is go for an interpreted language so that the kid gets immediate feedback. Make sure it is graphic intensive.

Personally I would recommend the superb free ACSLogo for Mac OS X. This is a truly excellent free implementation - so not just turtle graphics, but also full Lispish string handling - fun with recursion, fun writing programs that write programs etc.

Mucking about with AppleScript can be quite fun too. And don't forget the Graphing calculator which can make maths a little less tedious.

Our then-novel ideas now turn up not just in math software, but in applications as well as operating systems. User interfaces incorporate live animated feedback instead of dotted outlines, direct interaction instead of dialogs or configuration files, a functional rather than demanding starting point for new users, context-driven help, and in the best cases, minimal preference settings. We didn't patent the ideas or the algorithms; rather, we wrote about our goals and methods, and encouraged people to take the ideas and run with them.

So if the complaint is just that the source code isn't free for anyone to copy, rebuild, and redistribute, then give us a model for doing so. It needs to be a model where we can cover the cost of ongoing development by professionals; the calculator has evolved in the past 10 years, as have operating systems. Paid support isn't a good answer, as that would reward us for making crummy rather than excellent software; we want users to feel empowered, not dependent. And the idea that students or schools could or would pay for support contracts is silly.

Ron has never turned down a reasonable licensing request. Getting students to learn and enjoy math is the goal. But letting other programmers recompile our code isn't interesting, nor would that really move it very far on future platforms. Better that developers learn from our interface designs, deduce our algorithms (or just ask us), then build better software on the next generation of computer platforms.

If you are bothered that you can't recompile our ten year old application yourself to fix a bug, then you really aren't in the target audience we are aiming to reach, nor are you among the people who will deliver the next leap forward in software design.

I can fully expect O'Grady's Power Page to say they got the leak from AppleInsider, while AppleInsider will say they got the leak from Think Secret, who in turn were revealed all by O'Grady's Power Page.

Either that or they all just hung out by the front doors, piggybacking off of an Apple employee. My money is on Jobs himself was the one who unwittingly let them in, all three of them, cloaked by his Reality Distortion Field(tm).

I just RTA which is an interesting story. To be honest I've never played with Graphing Calculator, but then I only seriously got into Mac's after OSX.

After reading the article I wanted to play with the software, and found it under the old OS9 applications folder. It runs under Classic.

Looking a at the examples on the web page that have some really cool looking colour images that have been generated by math and wondering if I would be able to do that with my relatively limited math knowledge, I copied the basic example equation

x^2 - y^2 = 1

Into the calculator and pressed enter...

Version 1.3 can't graph equations of this form. Visit www.PacificT.com to order Version 3.

I just RTA which is an interesting story. To be honest I've never played with Graphing Calculator, but then I only seriously got into Mac's after OSX.

After reading the article I wanted to play with the software, and found it under the old OS9 applications folder. It runs under Classic.

Looking a at the examples on the web page that have some really cool looking colour images that have been generated by math and wondering if I would be able to do that with my relatively limited math knowledge, I copied the basic example equation

x^2 - y^2 = 1

Into the calculator and pressed enter...

Version 1.3 can't graph equations of this form. Visit www.PacificT.com to order Version 3.

That is 1.4b3. It is still in beta testing. We're still working on it. I need to do is fix those example files which were created for the full version. If you type y=x^2 into a new empty document, it will work. For a comparison of the features in 1.4 vs. 3.5, see http://www.pacifict.com/FreeStuff.html. The 150-page PDF book, "Learning Math" in the help menu is almost entirely devoted to the features of the free version. You can download that by itself or browse it at http://www.pacifict.com/Books.html

That is 1.4b3. It is still in beta testing. We're still working on it. I need to do is fix those example files which were created for the full version. If you type y=x^2 into a new empty document, it will work. For a comparison of the features in 1.4 vs. 3.5, see http://www.pacifict.com/FreeStuff.html. The 150-page PDF book, "Learning Math" in the help menu is almost entirely devoted to the features of the free version. You can download that by itself or browse it at http://www.pacifict.com/Books.html

I'm too lazy to figure out what my account is, so I guess I'm an anonymous coward, but I worked with Ron at the time, and still hang out with him. The story is true, and NuCalc/Graphing Calculator got started just as he describes. I even have the embroidered NuCalc shirt he gave me as a memento.

Now, should you see anything similar in some upcoming release of some unspecified operating system, check to see whether it's the real deal (Graphing Calculator from PacificT http://www.pacifict.com/Gallery.html), or something else.

heh. If there are any PovRay developers reading this, send me an e-mail. I'd like to discuss this. It's on the big list of features for future releases. http://www.PacificT.com/TheList.html

Looking at pacifict it looks like you could just slap a front end on povray.

Gee, this looks a lot like NuCalc http://www.nucalc.com/

In fact, the domain of this story http://www.pacifict.com/ is mirror of NuCalc's site.

>No, the graphing calculator doesn't come with OS X.
It is available for OS X now. You can download the free release from http://www.PacificT.com/FreeStuff.html (Well, at least you will be able to after the server recovers from the Slashdot Effect. :)

http://www.PacificT.com/ComplexFunctions.html ,

http://www.PacificT.com/Exponential.html.

http://www.PacificT.com/ComplexFunctions.html ,

http://www.PacificT.com/Exponential.html.