My wife had Lasik done about a year ago. Yes, the night vision went away a little bit but came back some. But even though her optometrist supposedly tested her out to be nearly normal, she still feels that she does see as well as she used to corrected even with her current glasses. She wears glasses all the time now, albeit a lot weaker, and they're not like her old cokebottles. And she can read the alarm clock from across the bed.
As far as working on the computer, she wears her glasses, and she feels okay with it.
What it boils down to is: your mileage may vary. Bear in mind that you might not feel that you can get as good as your corrected vision back even with glasses, and that would be my concern if I was considering it. And if you're pushing 40, you're not going to be without glasses for long before presbyopia kicks in anyway.
I made a previous comment about PLATO
here, but if you want to cut to the chase and get to the PLATO games, you can find that info
here. Definitely hit the next links at the bottom of the page.
Most of the things we take for granted now, like email, chat rooms, and MMORPGs, we were doing back in the mid-70s.
Isn't the point of being a CS major of being able to learn new languages quickly and on your own?
In theory, yes. In the real world, companies that aren't IBM want graduates that can hit the ground running and know the language in that shop.
Or let me put it to you this way: if all other things being equal, your buddy knows the language that company X uses, or at least the language used in the hiring manager's project, your buddy gets the job and not you.
These days companies that aren't IBM don't have the time to invest in you; they want what you learned in school to freshen up their older members' stale skills to help make their product work. Besides, you won't be there two years later anyway.
Looking at the article, things are pretty much right on in my memory. All that we take for granted now, Usenet, multiplayer games, chat rooms, and email, we took for granted back in the 70s on the University of Illinois PLATO system.
It had bitmapped graphics (well, sorta), sprites (well, sorta), and wonderful monochrome orange plasma screens. The beauty of using plasma screens was that once you told a plasma pixel to turn on, it wouldn't turn off again, so you didn't have to have video memory. And you got your game graphics from downloadable fonts, called charsets, so you just "printed" different characters next to each other to get an orc or a mage.
And all this from a computer system that was made to let non-computer-science instructors create lessons for their students (hah!).
You can find more history on PLATO here. Definitely follow the NEXT links at the bottom of the pages.
I tried looking at what PLATO has, um, evolved into, but www.plato.com just doesn't do games.
No matter how controversial, the community needs RMS.
Um, the community needed RMS. I think we're standing at a crossroads here with Linux getting accepted and used by major corporations (e.g., Ebay), and any raving lunacy by a figurehead such as RMS may tip a corporate decision one way or the other. And I would really like to see Linux continue being a chooseable alternative to the two-letter evil.
I think that he did a wonderful job igniting the movement, but I can't see how he's helping now, other than to tell everyone that his tools aren't for the unenlightened or those that won't put GNU/ ahead of everything.
First note: If it's a tech article on MSNBC or Newsweek, it's suspicious since it's there with Microsoft's blessing or at least okay. Remember the WSJ article that was critical of MS a few months back? Got watered down by the time it made its way to MSNBC. They took a little heat for it, but kept feeding the public the filtered pablum anyway with no damage. My Newsweek subscription runs out in a couple months, and I'll let it lapse. After the last few months with Bill on the cover once and lauded inside regularly, it's time for my money to walk away from Newsweek.
But I digress.
My nephew is at that stellar CS institution in the middle of cornfields, the University of Illinois. And he's still a Microsoft zealot, and no amount of articles that I send him about MS shenanigans can dissuade him from the ideal that MS is the way to go professionally. No matter that it crashes on his computer -- that's supposed to happen, right? -- or that there's all sorts of ways (and more daily) to compromise a MS system.
But a little perserverence is starting to wear him down. He's actually thinking of putting a distro on another partition to see what all the fuss is about. There's hope yet.
On the other hand, with the market the way it is, especially in Austin, perhaps I should tell him to stick with MS so he won't be competition when he gets out of college. It's pretty bad here when a buddy of mine with 20+ years has to settle for entry-level wages in a contract job after getting laid off.
So, uh, yeah, Microsoft is a good thing to have on your resume, college kids.
And now Xybernaut has joined Amazon and others on my list of Must-Avoid companies.
I avoid Amazon, 'cept I keep my book wish list on there so that friends & relatives can see what computer books I want, and then they go somewhere else, like here to find the best prices, usually not Amazon.
I love features that I don't have to pay for. Yeah, yeah, Amazon knows my personal preferences, and they even send me notices about new books that are like those on my list, but they still don't get my money.
Okay, I give. What were the hints? (movie only, please, not the book -- movies sometime have nothing to do with the books)
Of course, other than the eyes thingie (was that the director's cut only, or also theatrical release?).
Deckard did have a problem with pain, seemed to have normal human strength, etc. So, to me, nothing was obvious. I'm still in the he added it afterwards camp.
What I find ironic is how often I find myself on the other side of the interviewing table after I've done interviewing myself. Those of you coming out of failed startups know what I mean. I end up asking people [who I knew previously] that I've just interviewed if they know of any openings for me mere months after I interviewed them. So, be nice, because in small job markets, like, say, Austin, what goes around comes around. But I digress.
I guess I could be weaselly and say that it depends upon the interviewer and the position that you're going for (see here for my comments on positions then.
On most interviews I've done, we tend to make decisions that afternoon, or it takes a week or longer. Either way, after an interview, if I get an email or snail mail ack from the interviewee the next day or before, I tend to just file it (or not) with their paperwork (if I'm keeping it), and it doesn't really affect me. However, if I get something a few days afterwards, it does tend to refresh that person in my mind and I think that I've given them a couple additional points for that since they're showing continued interest in the position.
However, if I've gone past the deadline where I was supposed to give them an answer, they've got all the right to give me a call or otherwise inquire as to their status, and that raises them up a little bit more since they're continuing to show interest (even though I should have gotten back to them by then). But I think that I'd get annoyed (and it hasn't happened yet) if the candidate dogs me more than their initial note.
So be pleasant, persistant, yet not annoying. I'll be working on those traits myself here soon.
(from the article) Every effort will be made to avoid jeopardising military security, says Pranning, but it seems likely that this decommissioning project could set the framework for the future decommissioning of Russia's entire nuclear fleet.
Um, shall we take it that this means that this is going to be a trial run for how the Russian nuclear submarine fleet will eventually be decommissioned, or does it herald the decommissioning of their entire nuclear submarine fleet here Real Soon Now? If so, then why?
I've still got a circa 1991 Gateway '486/33MHz that I just use to connect to the Internet with. Do you think that I'd be grandfathered in since it's, ya know, pretty old, and it only runs Linux, or do you think that the PC police would mind?
I had a funny thing happen the other day. A Time/Warner/AOL salescritter came to the door of my middle-middle-class neighborhood house and asked me what they had done wrong that I wasn't a cable subscriber?
I replied that we had subscribed shortly after they finished construction of our house, but after having cable two months we found that we didn't watch it enough to justify subscribing. The next five minutes the salescritter entertained me by trying to list all of the reasons that I should subscribe to cable, and with each of them I replied that the particular feature/channel/program didn't appeal to us. I also mentioned that our TV is only on for about a couple hours per week (mostly when I slum late on Saturday nights to switch back & forth between SNL and MadTV -- okay, I did watch an extra hour for Survivor, sorry to say).
This admission of minimal TV watching time didn't sit well with our intrepid salescritter, and I'm sure that he must have reported us to somebody since no normal American watches so little television. If they ever tried accuse us of stealing cable, they'd find what little was left after the builder took it out when they put in the next-door-neighbor's front yard.
Where he almost got me was when he asked if we used a computer, since that's where we would have to have a cable modem. I replied that the neighbors do well during the off-peak times, but in the evenings they're down to ISDN speeds. Miraculously, that shut him up. I was surprised.
So anyway, I don't need a TiVO, I don't need more than a DVD or VCR player. There's nothing that the networks have that I really need to the point where I need cable -- well, the picture is a little fuzzy now and then.
Just give me internet connectivity, books, family time, outside activities such as Scouts, neighbors to visit with, and pleasant evenings.
On that note, the police should be here any minute to put me away.
Well, not to slam construction workers or anything (uh-huh), they're basically do what they're told, since it's the foreman's job to do the thinking. If the man says the wall goes there, the wall goes there.
If you ever want to see how, um, uninformed construction people can be, watch your house being built by a tract builder. You'd be absolutely amazed at the shenanigans that go on. Outlets covered over by drywall (and never to be found again), voids made specifically for ductwork left empty so that they can put the ductwork through bedroom closets instead, plumbing that doesn't quite match up with where the sink is supposed to go, a staircase with not enough steps in it... I could go on. And you know that there's half-full 7-11 cups and spit cans behind your walls.
A running server sheetrocked in? A walk in the park.
You really shouldn't let your friends' opinions dictate your tastes. If FreeBSD is good enough for your desktop and does what's needed, then that's just fine.
Be a rebel, push the envelope, drink Dr. Pepper, etc.
I had to put in some filler since the lameness filter kicked in and aborted my post. So how's the weather today? I hope that this is enough non-trivial ranting so that I can put my time in. So what do you think about Microsoft today? Hum, de dum, de dum... I hope this is enough.
I would say that in more than nine times out of ten (so, I guess nine-point-five is okay), it's management's fault. I've see it happen myself a few times.
The hardest part is when it's above the CTO when stuff goes wrong. We were working in a startup on a piece of [non-Internet, BTW] software, and were about halfway through and word came down from on high that we had to switch directions and build something almost totally different, or at least different enough so that we couldn't leverage anything -- okay, we reused the disk space.
But that turn lost us a lot of time, and considering that we were a startup and the first round of money had a finite life, it was definitely not a good thing to do. And to top that off, right after the first internal delivery, upper management discovered that the software really didn't look that good, so we had to "tweak" the UI. Right around this time, we ran out of money right when the NASDAQ was cratering, and the group that was providing the next round of funding pulled out after promising that they'd give us the money. Oops.
But nothing is as sad as seeing a good CTO that has to drag his people (me included) into a conference room to tell us all that we've run out of money and it's time to pack up. Especially after he worked his butt off getting the group put together. To give him more credit, he had the good sense (and humanity) to line us up with some job opportunities, especially for the young guys just out of college. There's nothing like seeing a lot of good talent that you've spent time developing just walk out the door. And what's even funnier, upper management acted like nothing happened, or at least nothing worse than a stubbed toe. One clueless upper management individual wanted more improvements done to the product when some of us came back in the next week gratis to put the software to bed proper.
Would I work for this CTO again? In a heartbeat.
As a coda, the second round investors are making their investment conditional on removing the clueless upper ones. But it may be too late to jump start it because the senior developers have left, and continuing to pay for the office space, etc., while any new developers come up to speed won't get the software out the door before the (minimal) funding runs out. Do I feel bad for leaving the company when they need the old developers so badly.? Nope.
But the competition is pretty much where we were, so it doesn't matter anyway.
For those of us that cut our teeth on an Apple ][ (not + , c, or e), the old Scott Adams Adventures are still available here. Click on the Classic Games Download link.
He's got Pirate Adventure, The Count, etc. Gotta love those two-word parsers. Also available for the Palm, tho I haven't tried them out.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as working on the computer, she wears her glasses, and she feels okay with it.
What it boils down to is: your mileage may vary. Bear in mind that you might not feel that you can get as good as your corrected vision back even with glasses, and that would be my concern if I was considering it. And if you're pushing 40, you're not going to be without glasses for long before presbyopia kicks in anyway.
Where's Al Gore?
Most of the things we take for granted now, like email, chat rooms, and MMORPGs, we were doing back in the mid-70s.
Enjoy!
In theory, yes. In the real world, companies that aren't IBM want graduates that can hit the ground running and know the language in that shop.
Or let me put it to you this way: if all other things being equal, your buddy knows the language that company X uses, or at least the language used in the hiring manager's project, your buddy gets the job and not you.
These days companies that aren't IBM don't have the time to invest in you; they want what you learned in school to freshen up their older members' stale skills to help make their product work. Besides, you won't be there two years later anyway.
Wake up and smell the Jolt.
Been there, done that, didn't get the job either.
It had bitmapped graphics (well, sorta), sprites (well, sorta), and wonderful monochrome orange plasma screens. The beauty of using plasma screens was that once you told a plasma pixel to turn on, it wouldn't turn off again, so you didn't have to have video memory. And you got your game graphics from downloadable fonts, called charsets, so you just "printed" different characters next to each other to get an orc or a mage.
And all this from a computer system that was made to let non-computer-science instructors create lessons for their students (hah!).
You can find more history on PLATO here. Definitely follow the NEXT links at the bottom of the pages.
I tried looking at what PLATO has, um, evolved into, but www.plato.com just doesn't do games.
I will stop discussions where I am the featured speaker until the miscreant says, "Linux," instead of "GNU/Linux."
(okay, so it only happened once...and it was my mom)
Um, the community needed RMS. I think we're standing at a crossroads here with Linux getting accepted and used by major corporations (e.g., Ebay), and any raving lunacy by a figurehead such as RMS may tip a corporate decision one way or the other. And I would really like to see Linux continue being a chooseable alternative to the two-letter evil.
I think that he did a wonderful job igniting the movement, but I can't see how he's helping now, other than to tell everyone that his tools aren't for the unenlightened or those that won't put GNU/ ahead of everything.
Let's vote on each story to see whether we think it's an ad or not.
Hooray for... something....
But I digress.
My nephew is at that stellar CS institution in the middle of cornfields, the University of Illinois. And he's still a Microsoft zealot, and no amount of articles that I send him about MS shenanigans can dissuade him from the ideal that MS is the way to go professionally. No matter that it crashes on his computer -- that's supposed to happen, right? -- or that there's all sorts of ways (and more daily) to compromise a MS system.
But a little perserverence is starting to wear him down. He's actually thinking of putting a distro on another partition to see what all the fuss is about. There's hope yet.
On the other hand, with the market the way it is, especially in Austin, perhaps I should tell him to stick with MS so he won't be competition when he gets out of college. It's pretty bad here when a buddy of mine with 20+ years has to settle for entry-level wages in a contract job after getting laid off.
So, uh, yeah, Microsoft is a good thing to have on your resume, college kids.
I avoid Amazon, 'cept I keep my book wish list on there so that friends & relatives can see what computer books I want, and then they go somewhere else, like here to find the best prices, usually not Amazon.
I love features that I don't have to pay for. Yeah, yeah, Amazon knows my personal preferences, and they even send me notices about new books that are like those on my list, but they still don't get my money.
Of course, other than the eyes thingie (was that the director's cut only, or also theatrical release?).
Deckard did have a problem with pain, seemed to have normal human strength, etc. So, to me, nothing was obvious. I'm still in the he added it afterwards camp.
Um, if you read the bottom of the piece, it says that the March article will deal with online cheating.
On most interviews I've done, we tend to make decisions that afternoon, or it takes a week or longer. Either way, after an interview, if I get an email or snail mail ack from the interviewee the next day or before, I tend to just file it (or not) with their paperwork (if I'm keeping it), and it doesn't really affect me. However, if I get something a few days afterwards, it does tend to refresh that person in my mind and I think that I've given them a couple additional points for that since they're showing continued interest in the position.
However, if I've gone past the deadline where I was supposed to give them an answer, they've got all the right to give me a call or otherwise inquire as to their status, and that raises them up a little bit more since they're continuing to show interest (even though I should have gotten back to them by then). But I think that I'd get annoyed (and it hasn't happened yet) if the candidate dogs me more than their initial note.
So be pleasant, persistant, yet not annoying. I'll be working on those traits myself here soon.
Sheesh, some people just don't get it....
Um, shall we take it that this means that this is going to be a trial run for how the Russian nuclear submarine fleet will eventually be decommissioned, or does it herald the decommissioning of their entire nuclear submarine fleet here Real Soon Now? If so, then why?
Hold on, someone's at the door...
DT
--
I replied that we had subscribed shortly after they finished construction of our house, but after having cable two months we found that we didn't watch it enough to justify subscribing. The next five minutes the salescritter entertained me by trying to list all of the reasons that I should subscribe to cable, and with each of them I replied that the particular feature/channel/program didn't appeal to us. I also mentioned that our TV is only on for about a couple hours per week (mostly when I slum late on Saturday nights to switch back & forth between SNL and MadTV -- okay, I did watch an extra hour for Survivor, sorry to say).
This admission of minimal TV watching time didn't sit well with our intrepid salescritter, and I'm sure that he must have reported us to somebody since no normal American watches so little television. If they ever tried accuse us of stealing cable, they'd find what little was left after the builder took it out when they put in the next-door-neighbor's front yard.
Where he almost got me was when he asked if we used a computer, since that's where we would have to have a cable modem. I replied that the neighbors do well during the off-peak times, but in the evenings they're down to ISDN speeds. Miraculously, that shut him up. I was surprised.
So anyway, I don't need a TiVO, I don't need more than a DVD or VCR player. There's nothing that the networks have that I really need to the point where I need cable -- well, the picture is a little fuzzy now and then.
Just give me internet connectivity, books, family time, outside activities such as Scouts, neighbors to visit with, and pleasant evenings.
On that note, the police should be here any minute to put me away.
DT
--
If you ever want to see how, um, uninformed construction people can be, watch your house being built by a tract builder. You'd be absolutely amazed at the shenanigans that go on. Outlets covered over by drywall (and never to be found again), voids made specifically for ductwork left empty so that they can put the ductwork through bedroom closets instead, plumbing that doesn't quite match up with where the sink is supposed to go, a staircase with not enough steps in it... I could go on. And you know that there's half-full 7-11 cups and spit cans behind your walls.
A running server sheetrocked in? A walk in the park.
DT
--
Be a rebel, push the envelope, drink Dr. Pepper, etc.
DT
--
2001-03-18 16:12:00
DT
--
The hardest part is when it's above the CTO when stuff goes wrong. We were working in a startup on a piece of [non-Internet, BTW] software, and were about halfway through and word came down from on high that we had to switch directions and build something almost totally different, or at least different enough so that we couldn't leverage anything -- okay, we reused the disk space.
But that turn lost us a lot of time, and considering that we were a startup and the first round of money had a finite life, it was definitely not a good thing to do. And to top that off, right after the first internal delivery, upper management discovered that the software really didn't look that good, so we had to "tweak" the UI. Right around this time, we ran out of money right when the NASDAQ was cratering, and the group that was providing the next round of funding pulled out after promising that they'd give us the money. Oops.
But nothing is as sad as seeing a good CTO that has to drag his people (me included) into a conference room to tell us all that we've run out of money and it's time to pack up. Especially after he worked his butt off getting the group put together. To give him more credit, he had the good sense (and humanity) to line us up with some job opportunities, especially for the young guys just out of college. There's nothing like seeing a lot of good talent that you've spent time developing just walk out the door. And what's even funnier, upper management acted like nothing happened, or at least nothing worse than a stubbed toe. One clueless upper management individual wanted more improvements done to the product when some of us came back in the next week gratis to put the software to bed proper.
Would I work for this CTO again? In a heartbeat.
As a coda, the second round investors are making their investment conditional on removing the clueless upper ones. But it may be too late to jump start it because the senior developers have left, and continuing to pay for the office space, etc., while any new developers come up to speed won't get the software out the door before the (minimal) funding runs out. Do I feel bad for leaving the company when they need the old developers so badly.? Nope. But the competition is pretty much where we were, so it doesn't matter anyway.
DT
--
Or is that just a dirty rumor?
DT
--
He's got Pirate Adventure, The Count, etc. Gotta love those two-word parsers. Also available for the Palm, tho I haven't tried them out.
DT
--