it's the government that's stealing (taking without permission) over half the money I earn
Okay, so you mean that you do not use for example public health care or roads? You obviously do not mind an inflow of drugs, since customs are paid by... guess what? Yes, taxes. How about education - didn't you go to school?
You obviously do not use one single governmental service, since you see taxes as the government stealing from you.
The UK is a terrible country to live in, full of skint alcoholic bigots
Jefe: We have stuffed many pinatas for your birthday celebration! El Guapo: How many pinatas? Jefe: Many pinatas, many! El Guapo: Jefe, would you say I have a plethora of pinatas? Jefe: Yes, El Guapo. You have a plethora. El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora?
Ok, define how you do a good job in IT for me. Many confuse that with slavishly following RUP or with putting up watertight doors between the programmer, and the manager or customer.
For me, a good job is when you've made your customer happy, and I try to do this by...
Maintaing a democratic attitude towards the customer. If I, as the developer, have too much power, then it will probably result in a technically heavy project which a) does not fulfill the customers needs, and b) use advanced and untested (and therefore error prone) technology.
Trying to be as painfully clear as possible with every requirement. The goal is to fulfill the customer's requirements - both stated and not stated / implicit.
Know when I know something, or when I don't know something - somebody else knows better, so let that person write down requirements and translate them into something that I understand.
Understand group dynamics - why is your manager screaming? Perhaps it is not because of a specific problem - perhaps it is about the pecking order? Learn about Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or FIRO (Fundamental Interpersonal RelationshipOrientation) by William Schultz.
Sit down together and discuss priorities - how does functionality, quality, and time schedule conflict with each other?
You can do a good job (i.e. one that you and your customer are satisfied with), on time, and with a pat on your back.
If you still can't do it, hire me as a consultant, and I'll help you solve your problems.
Sun seems to send out two different messages at the same time...
On one hand: it is a conceptual software that is not intended for market ("experimental proof of concept", and the quote from Tom Murphy "I think in and of itself, it has a big wow effect. It's cute to see these things like 3D animations of stuff moving around and think of collaborative space, but how does it make my business more productive?")
On the other hand: it seems that Sun is quite serious about Looking Glass ("rapidly working to formalize the implementation", "Sun has made it clear they want Looking Glass to be a part of the open source community and to get open source community buy-in on the project").
I think that Sun has not made up their own minds yet - it will be quite interesting to see what Sun is going to do next, how the open source community will respond, and most importantly what does Sun really want out of Looking Glass? In the long run, more market shares, yes, but how?
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and - Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten? Nigel Tufnel: Exactly. Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder? Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? Marty DiBergi: I don't know. Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven. Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder. Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder? Nigel Tufnel: [Pause] These go to eleven.
Yes, I too love coffee, but drinking coffee in the morning is wasted, because your body is already full with adrenaline, elevated blood sugar, and so on - your body's normal way of getting you going after a full nights sleep. What you should do is drink your beloved cup of coffee six or eight hours after you woke up, since that is when you need it the most.
Another interesting tidbit: Gilberto Fisone, a researcher at Karolinska Institutet, found that a "medium sized" cup of coffee has a double effect in that it stimulates a key protein called DARPP-32, which amplifies the effect of coffee. For more information, read this article.
Unfortunately, there are few or none truths in psychology - what works for one person is horribly horribly wrong for another. For example, psychoanalysis is not the tool for me, if I may put it diplomatically:-) Those that I know that have undergone therapy, have initially tried one method, but then quickly switched over to another. The methods has also been vastly different: psychoanalysis, dream analysis, mental training, cognitive behavioural herapy [commonly abbreviated as CBT]).
NLP was developed during the 70's, so the books that you mention comes from its youth - perhaps that is why they were badly written and/or strange. If you seek a tool to hack your mind, and you are a overall healthy person, then I recommend mental training, similar to what ahtletes use. This involves, among other techniques, muscular relaxation, mental relaxation, stress handling, and goal pictures (and - incidentally - NLP). For more reading, see for example Coping.org, specifically Tools for Personal Growth.
Some of the more known names in the field of positive mental training are Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Barbra Waggoner (spelling?), Jim Rohn, and Lars-Eric Unestahl. Unfortunately, Unestahl is swedish, and has not been translated, to the best of my knowledge - but hey! Take this as your reason to learn swedish;-)
Argh! Some day I'm going to start my own company, teaching people motivational and coping strategies. Does anyone have some surplus money to invest in me?
Yes! I wonder why I, as a patient, more and more often have to ask for pain relief... When I had me most recent coloscopy, the discussion went like this:
Nurse to me: Do you want pain relief beforehand? Me: Yes, definitely. The doctor (almost to himself): You should avoid taking pain relief. [pregnant pause] The doctor (to the nurse): Ok, give him 0.5 cc.
Five minutes later, I got some additional pain relief, but even then it wasn't enough...
Isn't it strange that a patient has to fight for, or beg for pain relief? As I understand, if you don't use pain relief, then moderate to high pain can create paths that makes it much easier for you to feel the pain again in the future.
Of course, too much pain relief can be bad too - I can't tell you how embarassed I was after they shot me up with a big load of morphine, and I started insulting everybody to the left and to the right of me. A sailor would have blushed...
Have you heard about NLP (neurolinguistic programming)? NLP is a therapy method which is based on reliving a traumatic period - and yes, this is used on PSTD patients, such as refugees from war ravaged countries (see Dr. Richard Bolstad's work), or rape victims. The basic idea of NLP is that the patient replays the traumatic event inside his/her head multiple times, while varying the playback speed, colours, pitch of the sound et cetera. The goal is to replay the event in such a way that it is so ridiculous, that you cannot help laughing at it, thereby creating a more positive (or less negative) feeling towards the traumatic event.
So: - NLP has been shown to work very well, and - NLP is very similar to the VR technique in that you relearn your response to a traumatic event with more positive feelings.
By the way - where did you learn to program? You should get your money back...
A similar technique has been used for cooling the whole body of a patient. This is done by letting the patient breathe a oxygen saturated liquid such as LiquiVent. Normally, when you apply liquid breathing, you pre-heat the liquid to body temperature, but in this case you could use a lower temperature. The total area of the lung alveoli is about 100 square meters. Compared to the area of the head (as used in the helmet approach), the area available for heat transfer is many times greater, which means that the cooling is done much faster.
Of course this technique is not useful in an ambulance, due to the fact that you have to apply local anasthetics to the lung in order to prevent the cough reflex when the liquid enters the lung/lungs. Also, you have to put the patient in a respirator, because breathing liquid is so taxing on the diaphragm muscles, that all your energy is spent on breathing - you can't do anything else.
I am not an aeronautical engineer, but hopefully someone who is can give an insightful answer to my question?
Why can't you construct an engine which can change its shape depending on the velocity of the gases flowing through? If you could shift position of the nozzle and/or the inlet, away from, or into, the engine, then you could combine the functionality of a ramjet and scramjet into one single engine. You could also apply the same principle to rocket nozzles - change the form of it in order to adapt to changing air pressure at higher altitude.
Of course, I understand that it would be difficult to construct such a complex design that can withstand the forces - but the idea is similar to that which is used in thrust vectoring, right?
A "normal day" is defined as working 08.00-16.27, monday through friday, excepting temps - for example consultants - or people working with service tasks - for example guards or those operating the production environment.
There are several reasons for following these rules, and some may even apply to you!:-) One reason is that you should not work too much and get burned out. Another, more important reason for me personally is that I think many forget or just do not care about is to have respect for others, because other people depend on you. One guy in my project always comes in before 07.00, and leaves sometime before 15.00, which suck for me, because I am following the flex rules, which means that when I want to ask him something sometime during the afternoon, he has already gone home. This means that a couple of hours each day can be spent on waiting for that guy.
I've tried to adjust my working hours to the rest of the project (which means coming in one hour earlier than at my previous job), but even then, that is not enough.
So - follow the flex rules because otherwise you can make the job of others so much more frustrating!
This is quite interesting - I'm looking into CD archiving quality right now, because I have to transfer my grandmother's story of her life from ordinary tapes to something more persistent.
Some things I've discovered so far are:
The swedish national archive recommends Kodak Gold Pro for archiving purposes. However, Kodak seems to have stopped selling them...
Gold CDs are better than silver CDs. The worst kind of CDs are the ones that you can see right through, if you hold them to a lamp.
You should store your CDs in their original packaging, if available. That is: store them in a hard plastic package, and avoid soft paper or plastic. Store them upright, in 22% humidity and 5 C (66 F).
Avoid humidity and light as the plague - even a couple of minutes of sunlight can have a great effect. If you are really paranoid, then you should use clean cotton gloves when you are touching your CDs. Of course, scratches, finger prints as such are not good...
You should use CDs with less storage space, because the bigger the room each bit has, the less risk is it that that bit can be destroyed.
If you must write something on the CD, then write as near the center hole as possible, and use you smallest handwriting. The color of the pen can actually affect the reading capability of the data, although the data is on the opposite side of your text.
The biggest problems seems to be that the CDs come and go, so it can be difficult to get the tested products. The tests that has been done has used "accelerated aging", which is just a simulation. That is, there is no real experience in aging CDs.
My advice would be to store valuable information on as many different formats as possible. Continually monitor the quality of these, and transfer to new backups when they start to degrade too much.
When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.
Er... I don't think that Cobol is an evolutionary dead-end; in the best world, it would be extinct, but it isn't. What makes a language widely used is something that we can't predict right now - we have to watch it evolve over time, and as it grows and matures look at different aspects.
Take architecture for example - new buildings are loved the first five years because of their freshly introduced ideas. After that, all the problems start to appear - mildew problems, asbestos in the walls, and so on. During the next ten years, the child diseases are fixed. It is only a HUNDRED YEARS after the new building (or in our case, the new programming language) can be properly evaluated. The language/building then has either been replaced, or it has survived.
So - the only proper way to measure the successfulness of a programming language is to measure its survivability. Sure, we can do guesstimates along the way:
During introduction: Does the language have a good development environment? Is the language backed/introduced by a market leader?
Somewhere during the "middle years" (after about ten years): Does the language have a large user base? Does the language have a large code base?
After twenty/thirty years: ask the programmers if it really is maintainable...
Well - you get the picture! Predicting the survability of something more than five years into the future is impossible, I'd say.
This is not a new technique, but not used as much as it should be: I've used code generation in several projects, and I think that superior of metadata and property files/databases for cases where the property file would consist of a large number of fields, that are repetitive. For example: a big finite state machine. The code generation tool is always written by hand, which is the tough part. After the code generator is finished, you can leave much of the work to less experienced programmers, or even non-programmers.
The pros: - the result is code that you can compile, which is more efficient, - you catch the problems during compile-time instead of run-time, - standardized code, which is easy to debug and maintain(worth how many millions to you, as the developer?:-)
The cons: - somewhat high initial cost in form of developing the code generator, - the code generator is sensitive to changing requirements - code generation is best used on requirements that has pretty much settled, and where you can take examples of hand-written code and use as a model for you code generation template.
[...] pray that the aid checks keep coming to help increase stability in your little world
Boohoo... Poor you! Are we talking about the same USA that helped Saddam in his coup back in 1968? CIA gave a list to Saddam, containing names of many of those who opposed Saddam. The result? Saddam killed off practically all his opposition. CIA has in fact supported the Baath party on several other occasions.
If you create the instability, then you can't be proud about restoring it, don't you agree?Alllllrighty then!
Not quite - the human have different kinds of sweat glands, which we have over all of our bodies. The greatest concentration of sweat glands are on the palms of our hands and soles of our feet.
The watery kind of sweat is secreted by eccrine sweat glands; this kind of sweat consists of mostly water and some dissolved salts.
The smelly type of sweat comes from the apocrine, or specialized, sweat glands. The reason that the sweat smells is that the apocrine sweat glands in the armpits and genital-anal areas produce sweat that 1) stimulates bacterial growth, and 2) is oilier and is broken down into smelly components.
As a sidenote: yes, we "sweat" in our ear, but the apocrine sweat glands there produce earwax instead of normal sweat.
Sir Clive Sinclair invented a "bike with an engine" in 1992. First came the Zike, which was an electric bike. Two years after that came the Zeta (check out the Zeta II) which was a electric motor that you could fit on your regular bike, converting it to an electric bike.
Need I say that both were commercial failures? Anyway, the history now repeats itself with SEGway. The difference between the Zike/Zeta and Stephen Katsaros' IC motor driven bike is minimal...
Is it just me that is reminded of Monty Python? "Well, of course, we had it tough! We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick the road clean with our tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing cold gravel, work twenty-four hours a day at mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our dad would slice us in two with a breadknife!"
Slashdot Mirror
it's the government that's stealing (taking without permission) over half the money I earn
... guess what? Yes, taxes. How about education - didn't you go to school?
Okay, so you mean that you do not use for example public health care or roads? You obviously do not mind an inflow of drugs, since customs are paid by
You obviously do not use one single governmental service, since you see taxes as the government stealing from you.
The UK is a terrible country to live in, full of skint alcoholic bigots
Well, move to another country then!
Jefe: We have stuffed many pinatas for your birthday celebration!
El Guapo: How many pinatas?
Jefe: Many pinatas, many!
El Guapo: Jefe, would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?
Jefe: Yes, El Guapo. You have a plethora.
El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora?
For me, a good job is when you've made your customer happy, and I try to do this by
You can do a good job (i.e. one that you and your customer are satisfied with), on time, and with a pat on your back.
If you still can't do it, hire me as a consultant, and I'll help you solve your problems.
Sun seems to send out two different messages at the same time...
On one hand: it is a conceptual software that is not intended for market ("experimental proof of concept", and the quote from Tom Murphy "I think in and of itself, it has a big wow effect. It's cute to see these things like 3D animations of stuff moving around and think of collaborative space, but how does it make my business more productive?")
On the other hand: it seems that Sun is quite serious about Looking Glass ("rapidly working to formalize the implementation", "Sun has made it clear they want Looking Glass to be a part of the open source community and to get open source community buy-in on the project").
I think that Sun has not made up their own minds yet - it will be quite interesting to see what Sun is going to do next, how the open source community will respond, and most importantly what does Sun really want out of Looking Glass? In the long run, more market shares, yes, but how?
Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and -
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [Pause] These go to eleven.
Yes, I too love coffee, but drinking coffee in the morning is wasted, because your body is already full with adrenaline, elevated blood sugar, and so on - your body's normal way of getting you going after a full nights sleep. What you should do is drink your beloved cup of coffee six or eight hours after you woke up, since that is when you need it the most.
Another interesting tidbit: Gilberto Fisone, a researcher at Karolinska Institutet, found that a "medium sized" cup of coffee has a double effect in that it stimulates a key protein called DARPP-32, which amplifies the effect of coffee. For more information, read this article.
Unfortunately, there are few or none truths in psychology - what works for one person is horribly horribly wrong for another. For example, psychoanalysis is not the tool for me, if I may put it diplomatically :-) Those that I know that have undergone therapy, have initially tried one method, but then quickly switched over to another. The methods has also been vastly different: psychoanalysis, dream analysis, mental training, cognitive behavioural herapy [commonly abbreviated as CBT]).
;-)
NLP was developed during the 70's, so the books that you mention comes from its youth - perhaps that is why they were badly written and/or strange. If you seek a tool to hack your mind, and you are a overall healthy person, then I recommend mental training, similar to what ahtletes use. This involves, among other techniques, muscular relaxation, mental relaxation, stress handling, and goal pictures (and - incidentally - NLP). For more reading, see for example Coping.org, specifically Tools for Personal Growth.
Some of the more known names in the field of positive mental training are Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Barbra Waggoner (spelling?), Jim Rohn, and Lars-Eric Unestahl. Unfortunately, Unestahl is swedish, and has not been translated, to the best of my knowledge - but hey! Take this as your reason to learn swedish
Argh! Some day I'm going to start my own company, teaching people motivational and coping strategies. Does anyone have some surplus money to invest in me?
Yes! I wonder why I, as a patient, more and more often have to ask for pain relief... When I had me most recent coloscopy, the discussion went like this:
Nurse to me: Do you want pain relief beforehand?
Me: Yes, definitely.
The doctor (almost to himself): You should avoid taking pain relief. [pregnant pause]
The doctor (to the nurse): Ok, give him 0.5 cc.
Five minutes later, I got some additional pain relief, but even then it wasn't enough...
Isn't it strange that a patient has to fight for, or beg for pain relief? As I understand, if you don't use pain relief, then moderate to high pain can create paths that makes it much easier for you to feel the pain again in the future.
Of course, too much pain relief can be bad too - I can't tell you how embarassed I was after they shot me up with a big load of morphine, and I started insulting everybody to the left and to the right of me. A sailor would have blushed...
Have you heard about NLP (neurolinguistic programming)? NLP is a therapy method which is based on reliving a traumatic period - and yes, this is used on PSTD patients, such as refugees from war ravaged countries (see Dr. Richard Bolstad's work), or rape victims. The basic idea of NLP is that the patient replays the traumatic event inside his/her head multiple times, while varying the playback speed, colours, pitch of the sound et cetera. The goal is to replay the event in such a way that it is so ridiculous, that you cannot help laughing at it, thereby creating a more positive (or less negative) feeling towards the traumatic event.
So:
- NLP has been shown to work very well, and
- NLP is very similar to the VR technique in that you relearn your response to a traumatic event with more positive feelings.
By the way - where did you learn to program? You should get your money back...
A similar technique has been used for cooling the whole body of a patient. This is done by letting the patient breathe a oxygen saturated liquid such as LiquiVent. Normally, when you apply liquid breathing, you pre-heat the liquid to body temperature, but in this case you could use a lower temperature. The total area of the lung alveoli is about 100 square meters. Compared to the area of the head (as used in the helmet approach), the area available for heat transfer is many times greater, which means that the cooling is done much faster.
Of course this technique is not useful in an ambulance, due to the fact that you have to apply local anasthetics to the lung in order to prevent the cough reflex when the liquid enters the lung/lungs. Also, you have to put the patient in a respirator, because breathing liquid is so taxing on the diaphragm muscles, that all your energy is spent on breathing - you can't do anything else.
Those nice little rubber keys are pretty nice on your fingers too...
I am not an aeronautical engineer, but hopefully someone who is can give an insightful answer to my question?
Why can't you construct an engine which can change its shape depending on the velocity of the gases flowing through? If you could shift position of the nozzle and/or the inlet, away from, or into, the engine, then you could combine the functionality of a ramjet and scramjet into one single engine. You could also apply the same principle to rocket nozzles - change the form of it in order to adapt to changing air pressure at higher altitude.
Of course, I understand that it would be difficult to construct such a complex design that can withstand the forces - but the idea is similar to that which is used in thrust vectoring, right?
Sure (most of these references are in swedish, but
What there IS a shortage of is ENERGY.
Do you agree now that recycling is scientifically based, and saves energy?
"Hey Mike?"
"Yeah, Gabe?"
"We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah."
"I thought you fixed that last century!"
"No, no, not that. Someone's found a loophole in the physics program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
"Blessit! Lemme check..." "Hey, I thought I fixed that! All right, let me find my terminal." "There, that ought to patch it."
(from Rec.Humor.Funny)
There are several reasons for following these rules, and some may even apply to you!
I've tried to adjust my working hours to the rest of the project (which means coming in one hour earlier than at my previous job), but even then, that is not enough.
So - follow the flex rules because otherwise you can make the job of others so much more frustrating!
Some things I've discovered so far are:
The biggest problems seems to be that the CDs come and go, so it can be difficult to get the tested products. The tests that has been done has used "accelerated aging", which is just a simulation. That is, there is no real experience in aging CDs.
My advice would be to store valuable information on as many different formats as possible. Continually monitor the quality of these, and transfer to new backups when they start to degrade too much.
Hope this helps!
When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.
Er... I don't think that Cobol is an evolutionary dead-end; in the best world, it would be extinct, but it isn't. What makes a language widely used is something that we can't predict right now - we have to watch it evolve over time, and as it grows and matures look at different aspects.
Take architecture for example - new buildings are loved the first five years because of their freshly introduced ideas. After that, all the problems start to appear - mildew problems, asbestos in the walls, and so on. During the next ten years, the child diseases are fixed. It is only a HUNDRED YEARS after the new building (or in our case, the new programming language) can be properly evaluated. The language/building then has either been replaced, or it has survived.
So - the only proper way to measure the successfulness of a programming language is to measure its survivability. Sure, we can do guesstimates along the way:
During introduction: Does the language have a good development environment? Is the language backed/introduced by a market leader?
Somewhere during the "middle years" (after about ten years): Does the language have a large user base? Does the language have a large code base?
After twenty/thirty years: ask the programmers if it really is maintainable...
Well - you get the picture! Predicting the survability of something more than five years into the future is impossible, I'd say.
Probably because engineers are conservative - "don't fix it if it's working".
Do we work at the same company? People here always asks why there are no parachutes on planes...
This is not a new technique, but not used as much as it should be: I've used code generation in several projects, and I think that superior of metadata and property files/databases for cases where the property file would consist of a large number of fields, that are repetitive. For example: a big finite state machine. The code generation tool is always written by hand, which is the tough part. After the code generator is finished, you can leave much of the work to less experienced programmers, or even non-programmers.
:-)
The pros:
- the result is code that you can compile, which is more efficient,
- you catch the problems during compile-time instead of run-time,
- standardized code, which is easy to debug and maintain(worth how many millions to you, as the developer?
The cons:
- somewhat high initial cost in form of developing the code generator,
- the code generator is sensitive to changing requirements - code generation is best used on requirements that has pretty much settled, and where you can take examples of hand-written code and use as a model for you code generation template.
[...] pray that the aid checks keep coming to help increase stability in your little world
Boohoo... Poor you! Are we talking about the same USA that helped Saddam in his coup back in 1968? CIA gave a list to Saddam, containing names of many of those who opposed Saddam. The result? Saddam killed off practically all his opposition. CIA has in fact supported the Baath party on several other occasions.
If you create the instability, then you can't be proud about restoring it, don't you agree?Alllllrighty then!
... when you can get one of these?
It's not _sweat_ that smells, it's _stale sweat_.
Not quite - the human have different kinds of sweat glands, which we have over all of our bodies. The greatest concentration of sweat glands are on the palms of our hands and soles of our feet.
The watery kind of sweat is secreted by eccrine sweat glands; this kind of sweat consists of mostly water and some dissolved salts.
The smelly type of sweat comes from the apocrine, or specialized, sweat glands. The reason that the sweat smells is that the apocrine sweat glands in the armpits and genital-anal areas produce sweat that 1) stimulates bacterial growth, and 2) is oilier and is broken down into smelly components.
As a sidenote: yes, we "sweat" in our ear, but the apocrine sweat glands there produce earwax instead of normal sweat.
Sir Clive Sinclair invented a "bike with an engine" in 1992. First came the Zike, which was an electric bike. Two years after that came the Zeta (check out the Zeta II) which was a electric motor that you could fit on your regular bike, converting it to an electric bike.
Need I say that both were commercial failures? Anyway, the history now repeats itself with SEGway. The difference between the Zike/Zeta and Stephen Katsaros' IC motor driven bike is minimal...
Is it just me that is reminded of Monty Python? "Well, of course, we had it tough! We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick the road clean with our tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing cold gravel, work twenty-four hours a day at mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our dad would slice us in two with a breadknife!"