I live in the US and I prefer standard transmission. The gap isn't as big as it used to be, but typically you do get better performance and mileage with a stick shift. Also stick shifts typically require less maintenance. Unless you ride the clutch, a manual transmission should last for the life of the car with no maintenance whatsoever. With an automatic you have to change the fluid every 30-50,000 miles -- or at least you SHOULD change the fluid ( RTFM, if you don't you will probably end up buying a new transmission faster than you would like.)
I find that any more than 6 gears and shifting becomes a chore. These days you can expect to have at least six gears on your auto -- many cars have even more. Then you have CVT transmissions that basically have an infinite number of gears. As these transmissions become more popular then the advantages of a stick shift will start to go away (at least on paper -- stick shifts will always be more fun.) And if we ever switch to electric cars then transmissions in general will become all but useless.
I find that it is much more economical to buy a used car. Alas it is getting difficult to find a used car with standard transmission in the US. So my current car is an automatic. As much as I love standard transmission it didn't seem worth it to me to spend significantly more money for one. At least my car has flappy paddles on the wheel for shifting that let me engine break and get some of the control from a stick shift back -- of course the paddles respond slower than a real stick shift would. I love how when you put it in manual mode and use the paddles the odometer display will show no other information except what gear you are in. Since you are now shifting gears manually the car makers don't want to distract you with any more info. Funny, when I had a stick shift I would shift gears without even thinking about it -- now my cars doesn't think I am smart enough to do that. I bet most people who buy cars with those paddles never use them and really have no idea what they are there for.
All customary units used in the US have long since been defined to link to their metric counterparts. So if the mass of a kilogram changes (kilogram is a mass not a weight) then that means the mass of a customary US slug will also change (this will also change the weight of a US pound.)
Note that we use watts quiet a bit in the US. A watt is really equal to a kg m^2 s^-3. So if you change the definition of kg you change the definition of watts as well as a lot of other derived units.
Polarization in multimode fiber is out because the polarization tends to become random after it is transmitted through a long enough multimode fiber. They are therefore surely talking about single-mode fibers. You can buy polarization maintaining single-mode fiber but it is my understanding it only maintains polarization in one direction. If you had a fiber shaped to allow more than one polarization direction than I believe that by definition this would be multimode (i.e. one mode for each polarization direction, though not nearly as multimode as most multimode fibers) Come to think of it, could you then encode data in linear, elliptical, as well as circular polarization directions?
Anyway my next question would be how do you change the polarization of the light? Do you have a Q-switch laser that can not only turn the laser cavity on and off but can also change its shape to change the polarization of the transmitted light? I would like to see the design of that laser. Of course if you put too much stuff in your resonator cavity then that tends to make it longer which increases your pulse length. Then again they are talking about encoding the phase of the light. Does that mean that they have a very coherent CW laser and then change the phase and or polarity via some nonlinearity on the fiber? Can you do that fast enough to encode useful data?
Just some random thoughts that come up because the article isn't very technically detailed.
If Comcast agreed to give you free cable then I say they should give you free cable. If they are not honoring their 1982 agreement then maybe you could threaten to break that agreement. Try to see if some slightly less evil cable company can come in with a new franchise agreement that includes actual free cable to older government tv's with analog sets. Maybe those other companies will just give you the digital box for free?
Maybe Obama should just put the solar panels Carter put on the white house back on. Do you think they are sitting in storage somewhere or did Reagan just give them to his oil company masters so they could skeet shoot them?
Yes but the oil companies have been wanting to put a pipeline over Afghanistan for years. Just because there is no oil under Afghanistan doesn't mean the oil companies won't stand to make lots of money from us taking it over.
Yeah IE is faster, for awhile. It is faster right up to the point when someone uses one of the huge security holes to stick some serious malware onto your computer!
A good coax can handle higher frequencies than the twisted pair used in cat 6 (Not sure if YOUR coax cable is good enough to handle higher frequencies than twisted pair but you can get a type of coax that can.) Of course the coax in your house might not be properly impedance matched and all that but for small distances it might not matter. I say take apart the twisted pair in a cat5 or cat 6 cable and solder it to the coax. Just make sure that you solder the stripped color wire to the same coax as the solid color wire. And yes ethernet only uses two of the twisted pair wires (meaning you only have to use two coax wires.) What is the worst that could happen? You waste a little cat 5 cable and a couple of connectors in a test that doesn't end up working? If it works then post the results of what happened and maybe you can get your sight slashdotted!
I prefer manual transmission. All of my previous cars were stick shifts but my new (to me) car is an automatic. I decided to give it up and go automatic because it is much more cost effective to by a used car and in North America it is difficult to find a used stick shift (you may end up paying more.) In fact the car I bought doesn't even come in NA with a stick shift option. My car does have flappy paddle shifters that allow me to pick the gear if I want (a lot of new automatics have some type of option like that.)
I also decided that automatic is the way of the future. It is fun to pick your gear if you only have 4-6 gears. More and more automatics these days have 6-8 or more gears with some being CVT. When you have more gears then shifting does become tedious, and what do you get with a stick shift CVT? Some type of gear knob? And as you add more and more gears the automatics become MORE efficient. I personally think that in the future all cars will be CVT automatics (assuming they have transmissions at all since electric cars don't really need them.)
Don't forget 29. You have to take 70 to get back to the Baltimore beltway (which ALWAYS backs up) but 29 has fewer lights so I would take it before I took route 1.
Keep in mind that there is no (or at least not much) water between Baltimore and Washington. It is much easier to build multiple roads between cities when you don't have to build a major bridge for each one! So in addition to those 4 highways there are dozens of back roads you can take to get between DC and charm city.
You do realize that neanderthals had bigger brains than we do (for the same body size.) It is quite probable that they were as smart as we are... maybe even smarter? I'd wager real money that if you brought one into the future they would have no problem at all adapting and blending into our modern society (in fact some of them may have survived to become some of us.)
I find that in VS c++ (2005, and 6.0,) if you allocate memory in a dll you must free it in the same dll or you get (a hard to track down) error while debugging and a program that can be flacky. This happens to me even when the dll's are compiled on the same computer, with the same compiler, at the same time (all in one project.) You would think you could free memory in one dll that was allocated in another but in my experience VS c++ just doesn't like it.
Because of the Model T's UI you were limited to gears (pedal down for first gear, pedal up for top gear.) So when they switched to a more modern car UI you got increased functionality (3 gears or more.) Also keep in mind that the model T had two levers on the wheel (throttle and spark advance) and like 4 pedals. I don't mind learning a new system if it give me increased functionality, or if it adds the ability for someone with less than 4 feet and less then 3 arms to drive a car.
It seems to me that this UI switch doesn't add functionality; it just makes it prettier and maybe easier for that one mythical person who has never seen a computer before to finally learn how to use them. It is as if a major car maker decided to move the clutch from the left pedal to being next to the parking break. Maybe that would make the UI prettier and would be easier to parallel park but not enough to justify having to learn two systems and then having to switch back and forth if you change cars.
My first car was a North American Escort from the early 80's. The engineers moved the horn from the wheel to a stalk on the side. When other people drove my car they would slam on the wheel to honk the horn with no affect. After I got a newer car it took me years to relearn the horn UI. Whenever I wanted to honk the horn I would turn on the wind shield wipers. Unlike MS, I think Ford learned their lesson and will never again move such a basic function to a strange location even if there probably is a good reason for the move.
Since the dreamcast didn't come bundled with windows either I have no idea what your point is.
It had the logo because some disks could have windows CE on them so that it would be easy to port windows games to the console. Windows was never bundled on the console and if you avoided those games (which were well in the minority) then billy gates never touched your console.
Honestly it has been 10 years people! Some FUD just won't die!
Another problem with password rules that rotate too fast and have too many rules is that you end up with many users who are locked out of their accounts. I imagine if the helpless desk gets 100 requests a day to reset account passwords then after a while they become less careful to ensure that the person requesting a password reset is actually the person that owns the account. Personally the more stupid password rules I encounter the more likely I am to try to come up with a password that is easy to guess (since I will be the one guessing the password in a little while.)
Well, at least we still have NOVA on PBS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(TV_series) after 35 years still making good documentaries. I find that the Discovery channel won't do it by itself anymore, the signal to noise is too low. But if you have the science channel, all of the history channels, national geographic channel, etc then at any given moment there is an outside chance of finding something interesting.
As for the BBC not making anything that appeals to an internation audience anymore, BBC america likes to claim that they are the fastest growing cable network in America. When tourchwood came out a couple of years ago it made such a big splash that it got the highest ratings of any show in BBC america history. Even my wife who only watches reality show had heard of tourchwood, primeval, and the new doctor who as they must have become so popular that even non sci-fi freaks are talking about them.
At $50,000 do they think it is too expensive to call it the model T? Do they think calling it the model T would be too arrogant? Maybe the next one will be cheaper and then they will go ahead and give it the next name. After all we would all like to see the model T version of the electric car that will get us off of expensive oil.
He just needs to find a couple of inmates that are willing to do a couple more years of his jail time in order to be part of his plan. Those inmates need to find more people willing to do a couple more years of the jail time of all the people who got into the scheme before them, and those inmates need to get even more inmates willing to do more jail time. Soon Madoff will have enough sucker... I mean inmates to cover his time. Of course the last person in will need to do like 10000 years of jail time but then it will be up to the government to figure out how to keep the last inmate alive for that long.
Give the kid the USB drive version of the cassette. It would be a cassette with a bunch of numbers written on them that tell how far you need to fast forward the cassette to get to each program. Of course I was stupid enough to save my vic 20 programs all on one 90-minute cassette (that is all my mom would buy.) So to fast forward and rewind to get to a game in the middle usually ended up taking like 90 minutes.
Anyone remember the Fisher-price cassette camcorder? I still remember seeing the commercial on nickelodeon (probably while watching Mr. Wizard's World from the 80's -- the one that had a graphic of the challenger each time he had a science challenge) and thinking how much I wanted one. I seem to recall the camcorder was in black and white and the movies were stored on cassette. I had no concept of band-width back then so I was blissfully ignorant of how much the picture quality must have sucked. Anyone actually have one as a kid?
The Huffington Post and Salon have news with liberal commentary. The problem here is that the news is based on reality and facts. As Stephen Cobert pointed out (at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner,) reality and facts have a well known liberal bias. So you see it is difficult to have a fact and reality based site based on facts and reality without it being liberally biased. I supposed you could just make stuff up like Fox news does. Then you would have a "fair and balanced" site full of utter BS. Hmmm I wonder why that guy who keeps identifying republicans who have affairs as democrats hasn't been fired yet?
I have the pentax spotmatic. That is the one that came out before the K1000. It is similar to the K1000 but doesn't have the flash mount and has a screw mount for the lens. The thing is made out of solid brass (not like the newer plastic ones.) You could nail a nail into the wall with it and then use it to take a great picture. During the late 90's I took it through airport security and they had to run it through the x-ray a couple of times because they weren't used to seeing solid metal cameras. I guess if 35mm film goes away it will be little more than a toy and maybe a collectors item.
I live in Catonsville which is very close to the city (I don't live in the city because I do have kids and can't afford private school) and I too work in Columbia. I wouldn't live in Columbia either for a bunch of reasons, but check out the housing prices in Columbia! Things have slowed down quiet a bit but it still seems that if there are a couple of square feet with nothing on them in Howard County it doesn't take long for there to be a suburban McMansion to be built there. So I think we are in the minority; clearly there are a ton of people with a bunch of cash who would rather live in Columbia. And although I wouldn't live in Columbia, if you are into the suburban hell hole thing then Columbia isn't a bad place to: hang out, to eat at a nice chain restaurant, go to a mall with all the same shops as any other mall in America. Yeah know, basic suburban hell hole stuff. I understand there was a time when you could go into a main street or mall in America and tell where you were based on the locally owned shops there. Of course now everything is owned by giant companies that are all too big to fail; I guess that is another story!
A lot of cities were hit by middle and upper class people leaving the city and going to the suburbs but I think Baltimore may have been hit even worse than most. Why live in Baltimore when you can live in Columbia and have access to the jobs of Washington DC as well as Baltimore? When people leave they take their tax base with them. The drop in taxes cause drops in services such as schools and police -- this forces even more people to leave. Wash rinse repeat and soon you have a city that once had a population of 1 million but now has a population closer to 500,000. You also have a school system and police force that can barely keep up (and often can't keep up at all) with a poorer and poorer population that needs the services even more. Maryland has one of the highest median house hold incomes of any state in the union but Baltimore hardly gets enough money to try and keep the city going. So Baltimore has these problems but I don't think you can say that Maryland is part of the rust belt. Baltimore does have a handful of trendy neighborhoods that middle class people do want to live in, but sadly those neighborhoods are the exception. I guess if you bulldoze those houses that aren't used anymore you would increase the value of the houses that are still standing. I guess a large number of parks that people might be able to enjoy would be better than vast number of boarded-up houses we have now.
First thing I did was try to get x-windows to work. Once x-windows worked (with all the glory of twm) I got netscape to work. This despite the fact that the computer I was working on (386dx-20 old even then) didn't really have internet access (outside of a 1200 baud external modem -- I was cheap back then, and lynx was my friend for a very long time.) Don't ask me why but getting netscape to work seemed like a big deal to me back in 1995.
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My first thought, how would steroids help in chess? Guess chess isn't like other sports.
I live in the US and I prefer standard transmission. The gap isn't as big as it used to be, but typically you do get better performance and mileage with a stick shift. Also stick shifts typically require less maintenance. Unless you ride the clutch, a manual transmission should last for the life of the car with no maintenance whatsoever. With an automatic you have to change the fluid every 30-50,000 miles -- or at least you SHOULD change the fluid ( RTFM, if you don't you will probably end up buying a new transmission faster than you would like.)
I find that any more than 6 gears and shifting becomes a chore. These days you can expect to have at least six gears on your auto -- many cars have even more. Then you have CVT transmissions that basically have an infinite number of gears. As these transmissions become more popular then the advantages of a stick shift will start to go away (at least on paper -- stick shifts will always be more fun.) And if we ever switch to electric cars then transmissions in general will become all but useless.
I find that it is much more economical to buy a used car. Alas it is getting difficult to find a used car with standard transmission in the US. So my current car is an automatic. As much as I love standard transmission it didn't seem worth it to me to spend significantly more money for one. At least my car has flappy paddles on the wheel for shifting that let me engine break and get some of the control from a stick shift back -- of course the paddles respond slower than a real stick shift would. I love how when you put it in manual mode and use the paddles the odometer display will show no other information except what gear you are in. Since you are now shifting gears manually the car makers don't want to distract you with any more info. Funny, when I had a stick shift I would shift gears without even thinking about it -- now my cars doesn't think I am smart enough to do that. I bet most people who buy cars with those paddles never use them and really have no idea what they are there for.
All customary units used in the US have long since been defined to link to their metric counterparts. So if the mass of a kilogram changes (kilogram is a mass not a weight) then that means the mass of a customary US slug will also change (this will also change the weight of a US pound.)
Note that we use watts quiet a bit in the US. A watt is really equal to a kg m^2 s^-3. So if you change the definition of kg you change the definition of watts as well as a lot of other derived units.
Polarization in multimode fiber is out because the polarization tends to become random after it is transmitted through a long enough multimode fiber. They are therefore surely talking about single-mode fibers. You can buy polarization maintaining single-mode fiber but it is my understanding it only maintains polarization in one direction. If you had a fiber shaped to allow more than one polarization direction than I believe that by definition this would be multimode (i.e. one mode for each polarization direction, though not nearly as multimode as most multimode fibers) Come to think of it, could you then encode data in linear, elliptical, as well as circular polarization directions?
Anyway my next question would be how do you change the polarization of the light? Do you have a Q-switch laser that can not only turn the laser cavity on and off but can also change its shape to change the polarization of the transmitted light? I would like to see the design of that laser. Of course if you put too much stuff in your resonator cavity then that tends to make it longer which increases your pulse length. Then again they are talking about encoding the phase of the light. Does that mean that they have a very coherent CW laser and then change the phase and or polarity via some nonlinearity on the fiber? Can you do that fast enough to encode useful data?
Just some random thoughts that come up because the article isn't very technically detailed.
If Comcast agreed to give you free cable then I say they should give you free cable. If they are not honoring their 1982 agreement then maybe you could threaten to break that agreement. Try to see if some slightly less evil cable company can come in with a new franchise agreement that includes actual free cable to older government tv's with analog sets. Maybe those other companies will just give you the digital box for free?
Maybe Obama should just put the solar panels Carter put on the white house back on. Do you think they are sitting in storage somewhere or did Reagan just give them to his oil company masters so they could skeet shoot them?
Yes but the oil companies have been wanting to put a pipeline over Afghanistan for years. Just because there is no oil under Afghanistan doesn't mean the oil companies won't stand to make lots of money from us taking it over.
Yeah IE is faster, for awhile. It is faster right up to the point when someone uses one of the huge security holes to stick some serious malware onto your computer!
A good coax can handle higher frequencies than the twisted pair used in cat 6 (Not sure if YOUR coax cable is good enough to handle higher frequencies than twisted pair but you can get a type of coax that can.) Of course the coax in your house might not be properly impedance matched and all that but for small distances it might not matter. I say take apart the twisted pair in a cat5 or cat 6 cable and solder it to the coax. Just make sure that you solder the stripped color wire to the same coax as the solid color wire. And yes ethernet only uses two of the twisted pair wires (meaning you only have to use two coax wires.) What is the worst that could happen? You waste a little cat 5 cable and a couple of connectors in a test that doesn't end up working? If it works then post the results of what happened and maybe you can get your sight slashdotted!
I prefer manual transmission. All of my previous cars were stick shifts but my new (to me) car is an automatic. I decided to give it up and go automatic because it is much more cost effective to by a used car and in North America it is difficult to find a used stick shift (you may end up paying more.) In fact the car I bought doesn't even come in NA with a stick shift option. My car does have flappy paddle shifters that allow me to pick the gear if I want (a lot of new automatics have some type of option like that.)
I also decided that automatic is the way of the future. It is fun to pick your gear if you only have 4-6 gears. More and more automatics these days have 6-8 or more gears with some being CVT. When you have more gears then shifting does become tedious, and what do you get with a stick shift CVT? Some type of gear knob? And as you add more and more gears the automatics become MORE efficient. I personally think that in the future all cars will be CVT automatics (assuming they have transmissions at all since electric cars don't really need them.)
Don't forget 29. You have to take 70 to get back to the Baltimore beltway (which ALWAYS backs up) but 29 has fewer lights so I would take it before I took route 1.
Keep in mind that there is no (or at least not much) water between Baltimore and Washington. It is much easier to build multiple roads between cities when you don't have to build a major bridge for each one! So in addition to those 4 highways there are dozens of back roads you can take to get between DC and charm city.
You do realize that neanderthals had bigger brains than we do (for the same body size.) It is quite probable that they were as smart as we are ... maybe even smarter? I'd wager real money that if you brought one into the future they would have no problem at all adapting and blending into our modern society (in fact some of them may have survived to become some of us.)
I find that in VS c++ (2005, and 6.0,) if you allocate memory in a dll you must free it in the same dll or you get (a hard to track down) error while debugging and a program that can be flacky. This happens to me even when the dll's are compiled on the same computer, with the same compiler, at the same time (all in one project.) You would think you could free memory in one dll that was allocated in another but in my experience VS c++ just doesn't like it.
Because of the Model T's UI you were limited to gears (pedal down for first gear, pedal up for top gear.) So when they switched to a more modern car UI you got increased functionality (3 gears or more.) Also keep in mind that the model T had two levers on the wheel (throttle and spark advance) and like 4 pedals. I don't mind learning a new system if it give me increased functionality, or if it adds the ability for someone with less than 4 feet and less then 3 arms to drive a car.
It seems to me that this UI switch doesn't add functionality; it just makes it prettier and maybe easier for that one mythical person who has never seen a computer before to finally learn how to use them. It is as if a major car maker decided to move the clutch from the left pedal to being next to the parking break. Maybe that would make the UI prettier and would be easier to parallel park but not enough to justify having to learn two systems and then having to switch back and forth if you change cars.
My first car was a North American Escort from the early 80's. The engineers moved the horn from the wheel to a stalk on the side. When other people drove my car they would slam on the wheel to honk the horn with no affect. After I got a newer car it took me years to relearn the horn UI. Whenever I wanted to honk the horn I would turn on the wind shield wipers. Unlike MS, I think Ford learned their lesson and will never again move such a basic function to a strange location even if there probably is a good reason for the move.
Since the dreamcast didn't come bundled with windows either I have no idea what your point is.
It had the logo because some disks could have windows CE on them so that it would be easy to port windows games to the console. Windows was never bundled on the console and if you avoided those games (which were well in the minority) then billy gates never touched your console.
Honestly it has been 10 years people! Some FUD just won't die!
Another problem with password rules that rotate too fast and have too many rules is that you end up with many users who are locked out of their accounts. I imagine if the helpless desk gets 100 requests a day to reset account passwords then after a while they become less careful to ensure that the person requesting a password reset is actually the person that owns the account. Personally the more stupid password rules I encounter the more likely I am to try to come up with a password that is easy to guess (since I will be the one guessing the password in a little while.)
Well, at least we still have NOVA on PBS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(TV_series) after 35 years still making good documentaries. I find that the Discovery channel won't do it by itself anymore, the signal to noise is too low. But if you have the science channel, all of the history channels, national geographic channel, etc then at any given moment there is an outside chance of finding something interesting.
As for the BBC not making anything that appeals to an internation audience anymore, BBC america likes to claim that they are the fastest growing cable network in America. When tourchwood came out a couple of years ago it made such a big splash that it got the highest ratings of any show in BBC america history. Even my wife who only watches reality show had heard of tourchwood, primeval, and the new doctor who as they must have become so popular that even non sci-fi freaks are talking about them.
At $50,000 do they think it is too expensive to call it the model T? Do they think calling it the model T would be too arrogant? Maybe the next one will be cheaper and then they will go ahead and give it the next name. After all we would all like to see the model T version of the electric car that will get us off of expensive oil.
He just needs to find a couple of inmates that are willing to do a couple more years of his jail time in order to be part of his plan. Those inmates need to find more people willing to do a couple more years of the jail time of all the people who got into the scheme before them, and those inmates need to get even more inmates willing to do more jail time. Soon Madoff will have enough sucker... I mean inmates to cover his time. Of course the last person in will need to do like 10000 years of jail time but then it will be up to the government to figure out how to keep the last inmate alive for that long.
Give the kid the USB drive version of the cassette. It would be a cassette with a bunch of numbers written on them that tell how far you need to fast forward the cassette to get to each program. Of course I was stupid enough to save my vic 20 programs all on one 90-minute cassette (that is all my mom would buy.) So to fast forward and rewind to get to a game in the middle usually ended up taking like 90 minutes.
Anyone remember the Fisher-price cassette camcorder? I still remember seeing the commercial on nickelodeon (probably while watching Mr. Wizard's World from the 80's -- the one that had a graphic of the challenger each time he had a science challenge) and thinking how much I wanted one. I seem to recall the camcorder was in black and white and the movies were stored on cassette. I had no concept of band-width back then so I was blissfully ignorant of how much the picture quality must have sucked. Anyone actually have one as a kid?
The Huffington Post and Salon have news with liberal commentary. The problem here is that the news is based on reality and facts. As Stephen Cobert pointed out (at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner,) reality and facts have a well known liberal bias. So you see it is difficult to have a fact and reality based site based on facts and reality without it being liberally biased. I supposed you could just make stuff up like Fox news does. Then you would have a "fair and balanced" site full of utter BS. Hmmm I wonder why that guy who keeps identifying republicans who have affairs as democrats hasn't been fired yet?
I have the pentax spotmatic. That is the one that came out before the K1000. It is similar to the K1000 but doesn't have the flash mount and has a screw mount for the lens. The thing is made out of solid brass (not like the newer plastic ones.) You could nail a nail into the wall with it and then use it to take a great picture. During the late 90's I took it through airport security and they had to run it through the x-ray a couple of times because they weren't used to seeing solid metal cameras. I guess if 35mm film goes away it will be little more than a toy and maybe a collectors item.
I live in Catonsville which is very close to the city (I don't live in the city because I do have kids and can't afford private school) and I too work in Columbia. I wouldn't live in Columbia either for a bunch of reasons, but check out the housing prices in Columbia! Things have slowed down quiet a bit but it still seems that if there are a couple of square feet with nothing on them in Howard County it doesn't take long for there to be a suburban McMansion to be built there. So I think we are in the minority; clearly there are a ton of people with a bunch of cash who would rather live in Columbia. And although I wouldn't live in Columbia, if you are into the suburban hell hole thing then Columbia isn't a bad place to: hang out, to eat at a nice chain restaurant, go to a mall with all the same shops as any other mall in America. Yeah know, basic suburban hell hole stuff. I understand there was a time when you could go into a main street or mall in America and tell where you were based on the locally owned shops there. Of course now everything is owned by giant companies that are all too big to fail; I guess that is another story!
A lot of cities were hit by middle and upper class people leaving the city and going to the suburbs but I think Baltimore may have been hit even worse than most. Why live in Baltimore when you can live in Columbia and have access to the jobs of Washington DC as well as Baltimore? When people leave they take their tax base with them. The drop in taxes cause drops in services such as schools and police -- this forces even more people to leave. Wash rinse repeat and soon you have a city that once had a population of 1 million but now has a population closer to 500,000. You also have a school system and police force that can barely keep up (and often can't keep up at all) with a poorer and poorer population that needs the services even more. Maryland has one of the highest median house hold incomes of any state in the union but Baltimore hardly gets enough money to try and keep the city going. So Baltimore has these problems but I don't think you can say that Maryland is part of the rust belt. Baltimore does have a handful of trendy neighborhoods that middle class people do want to live in, but sadly those neighborhoods are the exception. I guess if you bulldoze those houses that aren't used anymore you would increase the value of the houses that are still standing. I guess a large number of parks that people might be able to enjoy would be better than vast number of boarded-up houses we have now.
First thing I did was try to get x-windows to work. Once x-windows worked (with all the glory of twm) I got netscape to work. This despite the fact that the computer I was working on (386dx-20 old even then) didn't really have internet access (outside of a 1200 baud external modem -- I was cheap back then, and lynx was my friend for a very long time.) Don't ask me why but getting netscape to work seemed like a big deal to me back in 1995.