Ashton-Tate died because their main product, dBase IV, was declared to be in the public domain due to the fact that it was substantially based on NASA's Vulcan database. As a result, "pirating" it was not merely trivial, but legal, and even one's patriotic duty (for US citizens, at least). At that point, bailing out fast was the best deal for their shareholders, and they did.
They died before MS Access became big enough to care about, although FoxPro was beginning to eat their lunch with a better compiler than AT had (and they had no reasonable way to produce a better one without IT being placed in the public domain, as well, except to start from clean-room scratch, like FoxPro had, and then prove it after the inevitable lawsuits).
> Americans still aren't rational enough to switch to the metric system of measurement,
Since the Customary units are all officially defined in terms of metric units, your statement is clear evidence of your greater lack of rationality. That we Americans do not choose to apply criminal penalties to using units with historical precedence in favor of those without any such, seems MORE rational to me, if less dictatorial.
Except that financial instruments (which have the rip-off factor mentioned) work every day of every month of every year. And if you don't think so, try telling your loan shark that you don't owe the vigorish (sp?) on your outstanding because it is leap week, and see how your arms or legs like his response.
I don't know how anyone goes about researching something new without first exploring what has been done before.
Oh, that is easy. They were lazy asses, at least this time. Hell, I've done it, myself.
It's not a great show of research prowess on their behalf.
Well, yeah. I only hope that they don't get their PhD from this, and that anyone involved who passed on this idea gets theirs rescinded, retroactively.
It is also a stupid idea, given how much complaining we will be getting in a few days (and for months thereafter) about leap seconds being or not being included in the calendar.
Anyway, as Verner Vinge pointed out in A Deepness In The Sky, in a few thousand years people will assume that their clocks are synced to the first landing of people on the primary moon of their original planet, and be confused when it turns out that it is really almost but not quite 1/2 of a standard year later (i.e., the Unix Epoch point).
I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer. The fact that people get killed when people like him screw up is the reason that it would be a criminal expense for him to even claim to be a Professional Engineer without the proper license.
No, a Professional Engineer in one licensed in his/her state. Most engineers are not, whether they are Civil Engineers, or any other type. Most of the Professional Engineers that I have met were Mechanical Engineers, as it happens, but could be Chemical, Electrical, Nuclear, Welding, Aeronautical, or whatever other type you can remember. However, it would be a criminal offense for your friend to claim to be a Professional Engineer in any of the subtypes other than Civil, just as my friends could not legally claim to be Professional Civil Engineers.
> making it harder for schools to locate them and let them know about it.
High school reunions are organized by the officers of the high school class; the school is usually happy to help, of course, but does not take the lead.
Trust me, I know from my parents, who were two of their HS class officers, and have to do this every year. They were too busy to organize their 5th, did the 10th, and then just dropped the ball until their 50th or so. No one from their high school administration ever sent any mail or called about it.
Is there a remedy against Facebook taking over the lion's part of what many people consider as "social life" ? Can we bring Facebook down ?
Google+ ? Alternately, wait until no one goes there because it is too crowded (as Yogi Berra put it).
Neither solves the real problem that there are no general stores for people to sit around the cracker barrel and discuss what the upcoming weather was going to be and how it would affect the crops, and Prohibition killed the saloon.
Yeah, but the spectacle of what we call a High School/College reunion now is largely a product of the Boomers.
Don't tell that to my parents. They were their HS class president and secretary, and organized their 5th reunion, then skipped it until their 50th. Now, it is every year (mind you, at this point it is just a large table at a restaurant, but...).
Baby boomers pioneered nothing but snorting coke at reunions, rather than drinking rum and coke, the use of non-medical marijuana, and the Beatles and Stones playing rather than Perry Como or Frank Sinatra (or Artie Shaw and Glen Miller, in parents' case).
> It's increasingly dense atmosphere all the way down.
Actually, at the "surface" it is an increasingly less hard vacuum. As I recall, the glowing surface is a vacuum, harder than we could achieve before 1960 or so, with the transparency or lack thereof of a London Pea-souper fog.
As long as the comet has a low enough albedo, I can see no problem with it diving below the chromosphere surface, given that it is a surface in the mathematical sense more than anything else, with very little heat conductance due to its low (effectively zero) pressure.
Comet Lovejoy flew through the hot atmosphere of the sun and emerged intact...
Should it have not went back in time? I seem to remember that being a rule...
Only if it was using Star Fleet technologies. Apparently, there is some interference between the warp or impulse engines and the solar core that causes it - perhaps there is a quantum black hole in the center or something, or else everyone would have done it at their own star and the Klingons, Romulans, or Borg would have conquered the galaxy by thousands or million of years before their founding.
That girl whose accent that you so hate is speaking a California dialect very similar to ValSpeak, the dialect that Frank Zappa satirized by having his daughter Moon Unit speak its characteristic slang in Valley Girl. It drives me up the wall (as a non-yinzer Pttsburgher), as well.
Signs of my employer being generous are that I get 7.5% of my salary paid into my pension plan. It was 5% last year, but they put it up this year for some reason.
Actually, no that is NOT being generous, and might even be particularly parsimonious. In my first job, I had to sit in on a business meeting and discovered that money paid into the 401-K pension plan was cheaper than the equivalent dollars paid as salary, as one had to be cash early in the period and the other could be a promissory note paid off in a year or so.
Matching the portion that you put in your pension plan might be called generous. As a general thing, your (publicly owned) company CANNOT be "generous" unless there is a reason that can be articulated why it increases shareholder value, like retaining already-trained staff or reducing labor problems, as Henry Ford found out when he tried increasing the rate for assembly line workers just because he wanted to (he believed himself to be a member of the skilled worker class who had made good, at least at that point in his career, and didn't want the profits to go just to his investors).
Please. Hummus isn't even as delicious as plain oatmeal. Adding spices to the plain hummus might improve it, but you can add things to oatmeal to improve its flavor, as well. We don't need your "antiracist" racism.
False. "Belief in evolution" means belief in "The Origin Of Species" not just the mathematics of transmission of probably pre-existing traits in a population over generations.
If you believe that smallpox is descended from monkeypox, how does this help you recognize that the relatively unrelated cowpox is close enough to smallpox to immunize milk maids from smallpox? Evolution may be an interesting theory as to why the strains differ, but it is not required, especially as germs can exchange plasmids without descent. Especially evolution driven by a purely godless random process rather than a random process that may or may not be directed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Azathoth, or YHWH, as you like.
The problem is not the engines but the tracks. They are owned by firms which ship bulk cargo, and so do not need speeds greater than about 45 MPH, as compared to 120 MPH, the top speed of the pre-WWII rail network, or the even higher speeds of 1970s era high speed rail links like the Hokkaido Express. Not needing such perfect rail links, they do not maintain them to handle 100+ MPH speeds (or even 60 MPH, for that matter). Not needing the high speeds, GE, etc., build the engines to work best at the speeds actually used. If the lines needed faster engines, they would order them, and the companies which build the engines would build them to go faster efficiently (as long as there were enough engines to make money building them, or the lines were willing to pay for individually designed engines).
Oh, and BTW, diesel train engines are actually electric trains with a co-located generator powered by a diesel engine, AKA hybrids. They aren't the poorly built and designed things that you apparently think that they are.
> Of all the things ever predicted by science-fiction writers, did any > of them predict that after we'd gotten to the moon, we'd let grass > grow on the Saturn launching pads?
Yes. Robert E. Heinlein, in his Future History series (collected together as "The Past Through Tomorrow") did. In fact, I think that he had several hiatus periods one after reaching orbit (broken by D.D. Harriman's consortium going to the Moon), and one after the Moon and Mars were settled (which stranded Lazarus Long off-world, working as a cathouse bouncer/owner). Both were caused by the economics of space travel disappearing for periods, much like the reason that the Chinese abandoned world-spanning sea voyages after getting at least as far as Madagascar, or why the Norse/Icelanders/Greenlanders abandoned North America before eventually conquering Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas (at least that is the way one old boss from there described it:-).
To the east, instead. Embarrassingly, I missed it, entirely.
OTOH, my sister, who spent 15 years in Southern CA before returning to the Burgh, picked it up, and figured out its local rating to +- 0.2. Experience helps, I guess.
> I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
(from his sig, if you have set things to hide them)
Oh, I also watch another few episodes of Danger Man/Secret Agent. I bought the entire series on DVDs (I probably missed seeing their first run on PBS, although I *did* see The Prisoner, its sequel, from whence came the parent's signature), including the first year's 1/2 hour series that was never shown in the USA.
How else can I be sure that I can still hand-assemble MACRO-11 code for the PDP-11?
I still regret tossing all the DEC-20 manuals that I bought in college. Nothing like using 3 or 4 different bases to do anything with the operating system.
That is Adventure (aka Colossal Cave), not D&D, AD&D, etc.
It should be a randomly generated maze with ridiculously fatal traps every so often. Alas, we cannot have wandering monsters (presumably surviving by eating unsuccessful visitors) in the real world.
The diabetes story has been generally dismissed by more serious sources as disinformation from al Qaeda.
And punishing him, personally, has no more been the main goal of the Global War on Terror than was punishing Pierre Beauregard (who commanded the bombardment of Ft. Sumter) the goal of the US Civil War.
Finally, would you rather that we had to spend a few more billion and take a few more years to find him?
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Ashton-Tate died because their main product, dBase IV, was declared to be in the public domain due to the fact that it was substantially based on NASA's Vulcan database. As a result, "pirating" it was not merely trivial, but legal, and even one's patriotic duty (for US citizens, at least). At that point, bailing out fast was the best deal for their shareholders, and they did.
They died before MS Access became big enough to care about, although FoxPro was beginning to eat their lunch with a better compiler than AT had (and they had no reasonable way to produce a better one without IT being placed in the public domain, as well, except to start from clean-room scratch, like FoxPro had, and then prove it after the inevitable lawsuits).
> Americans still aren't rational enough to switch to the metric system of measurement,
Since the Customary units are all officially defined in terms of metric units, your statement is clear evidence of your greater lack of rationality. That we Americans do not choose to apply criminal penalties to using units with historical precedence in favor of those without any such, seems MORE rational to me, if less dictatorial.
Except that financial instruments (which have the rip-off factor mentioned) work every day of every month of every year. And if you don't think so, try telling your loan shark that you don't owe the vigorish (sp?) on your outstanding because it is leap week, and see how your arms or legs like his response.
I don't know how anyone goes about researching something new without first exploring what has been done before.
Oh, that is easy. They were lazy asses, at least this time. Hell, I've done it, myself.
It's not a great show of research prowess on their behalf.
Well, yeah. I only hope that they don't get their PhD from this, and that anyone involved who passed on this idea gets theirs rescinded, retroactively.
It is also a stupid idea, given how much complaining we will be getting in a few days (and for months thereafter) about leap seconds being or not being included in the calendar.
Anyway, as Verner Vinge pointed out in A Deepness In The Sky, in a few thousand years people will assume that their clocks are synced to the first landing of people on the primary moon of their original planet, and be confused when it turns out that it is really almost but not quite 1/2 of a standard year later (i.e., the Unix Epoch point).
I propose that Slashdot generates statistics of exactly how many posts it takes for every topic to turn into political, racial or Apple bashing.
No, it would be too easy for a meme to develop (like "First Post!") that every thread gets turned as soon as possible.
You Commie-loving, Apple-using (or abusing, as you happen to be), honky (or chink, jap, abo, coon, or whatever), you.
Now the INVERSE metric, how resistant a thread was, could help things.
I mentioned this to a friend who is a Professional Engineer - that's the proper term for a Civil Engineer. The fact that people get killed when people like him screw up is the reason that it would be a criminal expense for him to even claim to be a Professional Engineer without the proper license.
No, a Professional Engineer in one licensed in his/her state. Most engineers are not, whether they are Civil Engineers, or any other type. Most of the Professional Engineers that I have met were Mechanical Engineers, as it happens, but could be Chemical, Electrical, Nuclear, Welding, Aeronautical, or whatever other type you can remember. However, it would be a criminal offense for your friend to claim to be a Professional Engineer in any of the subtypes other than Civil, just as my friends could not legally claim to be Professional Civil Engineers.
> making it harder for schools to locate them and let them know about it.
High school reunions are organized by the officers of the high school class; the school is usually happy to help, of course, but does not take the lead.
Trust me, I know from my parents, who were two of their HS class officers, and have to do this every year. They were too busy to organize their 5th, did the 10th, and then just dropped the ball until their 50th or so. No one from their high school administration ever sent any mail or called about it.
Is there a remedy against Facebook taking over the lion's part of what many people consider as "social life" ? Can we bring Facebook down ?
Google+ ? Alternately, wait until no one goes there because it is too crowded (as Yogi Berra put it).
Neither solves the real problem that there are no general stores for people to sit around the cracker barrel and discuss what the upcoming weather was going to be and how it would affect the crops, and Prohibition killed the saloon.
This is rated +2 Informative?
Swoosh, moderators.
Yeah, but the spectacle of what we call a High School/College reunion now is largely a product of the Boomers.
Don't tell that to my parents. They were their HS class president and secretary, and organized their 5th reunion, then skipped it until their 50th. Now, it is every year (mind you, at this point it is just a large table at a restaurant, but...).
Baby boomers pioneered nothing but snorting coke at reunions, rather than drinking rum and coke, the use of non-medical marijuana, and the Beatles and Stones playing rather than Perry Como or Frank Sinatra (or Artie Shaw and Glen Miller, in parents' case).
> It's increasingly dense atmosphere all the way down.
Actually, at the "surface" it is an increasingly less hard vacuum. As I recall, the glowing surface is a vacuum, harder than we could achieve before 1960 or so, with the transparency or lack thereof of a London Pea-souper fog.
As long as the comet has a low enough albedo, I can see no problem with it diving below the chromosphere surface, given that it is a surface in the mathematical sense more than anything else, with very little heat conductance due to its low (effectively zero) pressure.
Comet Lovejoy flew through the hot atmosphere of the sun and emerged intact. ..
Should it have not went back in time? I seem to remember that being a rule...
Only if it was using Star Fleet technologies. Apparently, there is some interference between the warp or impulse engines and the solar core that causes it - perhaps there is a quantum black hole in the center or something, or else everyone would have done it at their own star and the Klingons, Romulans, or Borg would have conquered the galaxy by thousands or million of years before their founding.
That girl whose accent that you so hate is speaking a California dialect very similar to ValSpeak, the dialect that Frank Zappa satirized by having his daughter Moon Unit speak its characteristic slang in Valley Girl. It drives me up the wall (as a non-yinzer Pttsburgher), as well.
Signs of my employer being generous are that I get 7.5% of my salary paid into my pension plan. It was 5% last year, but they put it up this year for some reason.
Actually, no that is NOT being generous, and might even be particularly parsimonious. In my first job, I had to sit in on a business meeting and discovered that money paid into the 401-K pension plan was cheaper than the equivalent dollars paid as salary, as one had to be cash early in the period and the other could be a promissory note paid off in a year or so.
Matching the portion that you put in your pension plan might be called generous. As a general thing, your (publicly owned) company CANNOT be "generous" unless there is a reason that can be articulated why it increases shareholder value, like retaining already-trained staff or reducing labor problems, as Henry Ford found out when he tried increasing the rate for assembly line workers just because he wanted to (he believed himself to be a member of the skilled worker class who had made good, at least at that point in his career, and didn't want the profits to go just to his investors).
> Yum mm. Hummus is most yummous.
Please. Hummus isn't even as delicious as plain oatmeal. Adding spices to the plain hummus might improve it, but you can add things to oatmeal to improve its flavor, as well. We don't need your "antiracist" racism.
False. "Belief in evolution" means belief in "The Origin Of Species" not just the mathematics of transmission of probably pre-existing traits in a population over generations.
If you believe that smallpox is descended from monkeypox, how does this help you recognize that the relatively unrelated cowpox is close enough to smallpox to immunize milk maids from smallpox? Evolution may be an interesting theory as to why the strains differ, but it is not required, especially as germs can exchange plasmids without descent. Especially evolution driven by a purely godless random process rather than a random process that may or may not be directed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Azathoth, or YHWH, as you like.
Damn, and me without mod points.
The problem is not the engines but the tracks. They are owned by firms which ship bulk cargo, and so do not need speeds greater than about 45 MPH, as compared to 120 MPH, the top speed of the pre-WWII rail network, or the even higher speeds of 1970s era high speed rail links like the Hokkaido Express. Not needing such perfect rail links, they do not maintain them to handle 100+ MPH speeds (or even 60 MPH, for that matter). Not needing the high speeds, GE, etc., build the engines to work best at the speeds actually used. If the lines needed faster engines, they would order them, and the companies which build the engines would build them to go faster efficiently (as long as there were enough engines to make money building them, or the lines were willing to pay for individually designed engines).
Oh, and BTW, diesel train engines are actually electric trains with a co-located generator powered by a diesel engine, AKA hybrids. They aren't the poorly built and designed things that you apparently think that they are.
> Of all the things ever predicted by science-fiction writers, did any
> of them predict that after we'd gotten to the moon, we'd let grass
> grow on the Saturn launching pads?
Yes. Robert E. Heinlein, in his Future History series (collected together as "The Past Through Tomorrow") did. In fact, I think that he had several hiatus periods one after reaching orbit (broken by D.D. Harriman's consortium going to the Moon), and one after the Moon and Mars were settled (which stranded Lazarus Long off-world, working as a cathouse bouncer/owner). Both were caused by the economics of space travel disappearing for periods, much like the reason that the Chinese abandoned world-spanning sea voyages after getting at least as far as Madagascar, or why the Norse/Icelanders/Greenlanders abandoned North America before eventually conquering Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas (at least that is the way one old boss from there described it :-).
To the east, instead. Embarrassingly, I missed it, entirely.
OTOH, my sister, who spent 15 years in Southern CA before returning to the Burgh, picked it up, and figured out its local rating to +- 0.2. Experience helps, I guess.
Given that I first discovered them because the then-local Border's had a great computer books section, you may be right.
> I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
(from his sig, if you have set things to hide them)
Oh, I also watch another few episodes of Danger Man/Secret Agent. I bought the entire series on DVDs (I probably missed seeing their first run on PBS, although I *did* see The Prisoner, its sequel, from whence came the parent's signature), including the first year's 1/2 hour series that was never shown in the USA.
How else can I be sure that I can still hand-assemble MACRO-11 code for the PDP-11?
I still regret tossing all the DEC-20 manuals that I bought in college. Nothing like using 3 or 4 different bases to do anything with the operating system.
That is Adventure (aka Colossal Cave), not D&D, AD&D, etc.
It should be a randomly generated maze with ridiculously fatal traps every so often. Alas, we cannot have wandering monsters (presumably surviving by eating unsuccessful visitors) in the real world.
The diabetes story has been generally dismissed by more serious sources as disinformation from al Qaeda.
And punishing him, personally, has no more been the main goal of the Global War on Terror than was punishing Pierre Beauregard (who commanded the bombardment of Ft. Sumter) the goal of the US Civil War.
Finally, would you rather that we had to spend a few more billion and take a few more years to find him?