When I was a child, I loved books (still do). Consumed the local public library in every town we moved to.
One of the most important book giving experiences I had in my life happened when I was in 2nd/3rd grade. My father ran a fast food restaurant, and some high schooler had dumped his science textbooks in the trashcan. My dad fetched them out and brought them home to me. One was physics (which led me to degrees in physics) and the other was chemistry (which was also a wonderful eye opener, and a great source of practical recipes for fun things like nitroglycerin; a friend of mine had an older brother who was a military chemist who liked to keep chemicals in the shed, so we actually got to make nitro).
Other great gifts I received were: microscope kit, telescope (but once again, the books were more important), Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics experimenters kit.
Also great fun: wood burning kit (art), leather working kit (art), model rocketry kit (loved designing and launching own designs...learned lots about aerodynamics)
Frisbee --- spent many many hours for days on end in summer playing Frisbee with a similarly inclined friend.
The game of Risk --- spent days on a single game.
Oh, that Chemistry book? When I got to high school and actually took chemistry, we had the same book, just a newer edition. Even though this was only 1979, the publisher had already removed the recipe for nitroglycerin from the textbook. I brought in my copy to show how it USED to be.:)
:) Yep, At 47, in the software development world I guess I qualify as an "older guy".:)
That's what I've always enjoyed about my computer path; my first job out of college was writing distributed processing applications (there were plenty of ways to implement object-oriented design without an object-oriented language, but yes, we jumped on them when they came along), and I'm still writing multi-core and multi-node distributed processing applications, writing multi-media services, digital signal processing, etc. It's great fun!:)
I've always been puzzled about the focus on languages. A language is just a tool or a palette. The important thing is being able to design software in a clear and efficient manner. Languages can typically be picked up in a very short period of time. I understand that the people who only understand buzzwords are blindly seeking a particular match, but if they were smart, they would look instead for a person who was a skilled designer of software, rather than a person who knew a particular language.
In my career so far (I'm sure that many others have a much broader list), I've had to write software in: assembler (IBM mainframe, 6052, 8085, Z-80, 8051, Z-8, 68K, X86), BASIC, FORTH, FORTRAN (4, 66, 77), RATFOR, lisp, C, C++, PASCAL, PROTEL, perl, tcl, python. Java I've written a couple of example programs in, but have never written in it professionally. But I presume it is no harder to become proficient at than all the others. ADA is a good language; people are starting to realize the value of the rigorous protections it applies. But yeah, we were writing ADA code back in 1995, and it didn't seem widespread outside the military at the time.
My father used to be facilities supervisor for a large banking chain, and he told me about the incidents where elderly customers did damage to bank branches because of unintended acceleration. One woman hit the wrong pedal as she was attempting to park in front of the bank, floored her large american-made car through the front of the building, through the teller counter, through the wall behind the teller counter into the employee break room, pushing the refrigerator through the back wall of the building...she kept the tires spinning, melting through the tile floor, until a bank employee opened the driver door, reached in and turned off the engine.
She then hopped out and, since she was at her desired destination, tried to make her deposit.
My dad had quite a laugh over the mess he had to get fixed. He was glad no one was hurt, of course.
You lie to your children? Interesting. We never have. No, we never pretended that Santa Claus came down the chimney and left Christmas gifts; the kids knew that Mom and Dad gave the gifts. We really enjoy the season, and enjoyed watching all the Christmas animated specials, but it was always just fun pretend. You might think that I somehow deprived my children of some magic of childhood, but they never did have to suffer the sudden realization that all the adults around them had been lying to them and laughing at them. Consequently, my children trust me absolutely, and we have a great relationship. I have children 19/17/15/14, and they are an absolute delight to be around.
Took ill at work, massive, nasty diarrhea attack. As I stood up, my phone holster caught on the toilet paper dispenser and flipped my phone (a wonderful Samsung SCH-8500) into the still-full toilet...
Yes, I retrieved the phone from the toilet before flushing. Washed off the phone (and me). It still worked, even if it did smell really funky for a few months. My children called it the "D-Phone" for obvious reasons...
Aliens? How will they justify that?:) Didn't the robots secretly move humanity to an alternate dimension that was devoid of other sentient species to protect humanity? Or am I mixing my story lines?
Yep; that would be interesting to be able to transmit something other than data. Of course, it's already amazing what we're able to transmit just using data -- smells, surgery, sex (latter two using haptic devices). There are even 3D replicators that work over the internet.
Voice has been encoded and transmitted as data ever since the PSTN went digital. The G.711 voice encoding standard was released in 1972, so the concept of data encoding voice has been commonly known for many decades. The conversion of data into voice/text/braille is not patentable...that's been done for decades.
Perhaps you are simply using voice encoding as an example of processes that MIGHT be patentable, if they are not already known to one skilled in the art. But voice encoding itself is no longer patentable.
Since ONLY data can be transmitted across the internet, and you had already said that transmitting data across the internet is not patentable, then transmitting a stab in the face, or gravity, across the internet could not be patentable, since it would HAVE to be converted to data to be transmitted across the internet.
Book are not patentable. The idea of a book came into common usage centuries ago. However, the content of books can be copyrighted. Is this perhaps what you mean? It's the ordering of the symbols in the book, and the structure of any associated graphics, that are copyrighted.
The company I worked for, in the early 1990s, used Nortel Passport routers between our corporate sites. Both data and voice serving 100,000 employees passed over the connections between the routers. And we didn't have to do anything so primitive as dialing an access number to get to this intranet based system; it was tied into our PBXes, so that numbers for employees at any of our scores of locations would be routed through our intranet, and external numbers would be routed to the PSTN.
By 1994, we were already building and using applications where a click on a link on a web page would automatically connect you to an agent at a customer call center, whether by a phone call or a VoIP connection to your PC.
RTEMS is a very nice, robust, reliable deeply embedded RTOS with modern design philosophies and well defined maximum operational latencies. I worked with a specialty hardware design firm sometime around 1997 to get RTEMS ported to a new embedded board (PMC module with PPC processor, dual 100BaseT, and a boatload of DRAM) I had commissioned from them. RTEMS worked out so well for them that they sold quite a few other embedded board products with RTEMS after this, until being purchased by a larger company that was a VxWorks devotee.
:) I was in Rockford, Illinois for the winter of 1978, so I remember heavy snows and punishingly cold temperatures...our neighbors' house disappeared under a drift and was not seen for a couple of months (they were wintering in sunny Florida).
However, this was in the period that the rage in all the media was that we were entering a new ice age, because the global temperatures had been trending down for a while. Quite a few people were talking about how to handle shorter growing seasons, the possible necessity of moving populations south, blah blah blah.
Of course, we didn't have the internet then, so we didn't have this feedback loop that seems to amplify the voice of the alarmist, of whatever flavor. The media furor passed. Temperatures trended back to a more normal level. No new ice age.
Currently, I live in Arkansas. We had a couple of warm summers a few years ago, followed by a couple of cooler than average summers. But when I look back over all the temperature records for this area (going back 100 years, not a long time by global standards, but enough to see trends), it looks the same as it ever was...
The interesting thing is, as large as my electricity consumption is, I know many people with smaller homes but larger consumption than mine. There is quite a long tail of consumption above me, even.
There are things I could do still: 1) Install solar water heating. 2) Get power strips on a few remaining areas. 3) Get rid of several remaining computer CRTs
The interesting thing is, at 8 cents per KWH, the ROI on the investment just isn't there.
One example: when I was designing my house, I investigated the use of a ground source heat pump, rather than an air source heat pump. I met with numerous manufacturers and vendors, and ran all the calculations. All their equipment was so expensive that the ROI was 50 years, far longer than the life span of the equipment. I could actually power and replace an air source system several times over and still come out ahead of a GSHP...
Thanks for the response! Yes, I have a Kill-A-Watt and have used it a number of times (my washing machine consumes US$0.005 of electricity each time I use it. The Microwave, electric range, dish washer, freezer, fridge, electric clothes dryer, etc. all consume more, of course.
Yeah, Insulation was taken up to the point where there was no ROI with any more, when I built the house.
:) That consumption is WITH a high efficiency heat pump. When designing my house, I did all the heat loss calculations, beefed up on the insulation, designed the house for minimum external exposure, minimized west and east facing windows, all that stuff. Like I said, my electricity consumption in this 4000sqft house is roughly half of what the energy consumption was in my old, 1750sqft house.
That being said, now as my children prepare to graduate high school and leave for college, I regret building a house the size I did. I wish I had built a small cozy cottage with a dorm attached, instead.:)
I run about 30,000 KWH per year in my house. I was pretty distressed by this amount compared with both the Dutch and US averages, until I factored in: 1) All electric -- no gas 2) Climate where Heating Degree Days outnumber Cooling Degree Days 3 to 1 3) This house, even though it's all electric, consumes only half the electricity of my PREVIOUS house, which was not all electric 4) 6 people live here 5) I work at home, so the house is always occupied 6) I run a small datacenter at home, so not only does all the equipment have to be powered, it has a separate cooling unit.
Given that, I don't feel AS bad. However, it's still a lot of electricity. Yes, I replaced all incandescents with fluorescent about 10 years ago, so that helps.
Uber programmer does not mean arrogant. I know plenty of uber programmers who comply with the requirement for a weekly status report.
The good thing about weekly status reports is that it shows all the issues that impact schedule, and provide useful fodder for annual adjustment reviews.
Good programmer does not mean big ego. Immature people have big egos. Seasoned professionals are generally humble and easy to work with.
I seriously hope that is not really how you parent. You never, never, never give in just to make them shut up. That mis-parenting breeds monsters.
I have 4 children, and like all humans, they are not perfect people. However, they NEVER throw fits in public, and strangers come up to us all the time and comment on how well behaved our kids are and how grateful they are that we raised them properly.
Did they come by this naturally? Of course not! They tried their tantrums in the store. But our strategy was, park the shopping cart at the end of an aisle, take them outside, strap them in their car seat so they are restrained, adjust windows/air conditioner/heater so they are safe and comfortable, then shut them in the car and stand outside the facing away from the child until the tantrum is over. Then, take them out and continue shopping. My son was the hardest case with this; we had to do it about 6 times with him. But they all learned that whining and screaming earn them nothing but a time out.
Yes, absolute consistency is utterly essential. If you are inconsistent, you have failed. Fortunately, even if you have been inconsistent, it is never too late to start being inconsistent. They'll be upset at first, but then they'll come to appreciate it. My children are now 17/15/13/12, and we have a wonderful relationship with them. They all enjoy being with us, and they respect us, and we respect them.
I've sent email on a couple of occasions to President Bush stating my willingness to have a nuclear power plant in my back yard. I grew up in Iowa near the Mississippi River and toured nuclear power plants when I was a child, and I have degrees in physics, so I'm quite comfortable living around nuclear power plants.
My children glow, but that just means I never had to buy them night lights.;)
Since 1992, I've been using trackballs from ITAC (http://www.mousetrak.com/), first the professional, then the evolution trackball after that. I had pretty severe RSI after the birth of my first child, and went through just about every trackball on the market. The Logitech ones with the thumb controlled ball are absolutely horrible. The thumb is not designed for precision movements; it's for grasping. The MouseTrak stood alone as being a quality trackball that holds up to years of heavy use. The Evolution trackball that I bought back in the mid-late 1990s still gets 10 hours a day of heavy use. And the MouseTrak (and work surface height adjustment) completely cured my RSI problems. If you can't afford an Evolution MouseTrak, I recommend the Logitech MarbleMouse as my second choice. I have that trackball on all the other machines in the house, and my wife and kids all love them. My wife replaced the mouse at her work with a Logitech MarbleMouse, because she just can't stand mice.
Just went through a PC Refresh at work. My 1.2GHz PIII +1GB DRAM laptop with Win2K was replaced with a 3.2GHz P4 +2GB DRAM desktop with WinXP. I can barely feel any performance improvement (compiling is a little bit faster), and many things that used to work like a champ now work poorly. Seems like the majority of us designers are all in the same boat, longing for Win2K to come back. I even asked the IT department if I could reinstall Win2K, but that was not within the support parameters, of course.
My personal 3 year old Athlon XP 2500+ machine running Linux runs rings around the brand new WinXP machine. Sigh...
BTW, we don't intend to install Vista on company computers until the next PC refresh, 3-4 years from now. All new machines coming in are loaded with WinXP.
Oh, agreed. I'm aware there are souls out there who have it worse than I do. There are folks here who are just a little too far from the POP and only have dialup (and satellite, of course) available.
My suburban coworkers on FiOS grin at my "skinny" pipe, though...:)
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When I was a child, I loved books (still do). Consumed the local public library in every town we moved to.
One of the most important book giving experiences I had in my life happened when I was in 2nd/3rd grade. My father ran a fast food restaurant, and some high schooler had dumped his science textbooks in the trashcan. My dad fetched them out and brought them home to me. One was physics (which led me to degrees in physics) and the other was chemistry (which was also a wonderful eye opener, and a great source of practical recipes for fun things like nitroglycerin; a friend of mine had an older brother who was a military chemist who liked to keep chemicals in the shed, so we actually got to make nitro).
Other great gifts I received were: microscope kit, telescope (but once again, the books were more important), Radio Shack 100-in-1 electronics experimenters kit.
Also great fun: wood burning kit (art), leather working kit (art), model rocketry kit (loved designing and launching own designs...learned lots about aerodynamics)
Frisbee --- spent many many hours for days on end in summer playing Frisbee with a similarly inclined friend.
The game of Risk --- spent days on a single game.
Oh, that Chemistry book? When I got to high school and actually took chemistry, we had the same book, just a newer edition. Even though this was only 1979, the publisher had already removed the recipe for nitroglycerin from the textbook. I brought in my copy to show how it USED to be. :)
:) Yep, At 47, in the software development world I guess I qualify as an "older guy". :)
That's what I've always enjoyed about my computer path; my first job out of college was writing distributed processing applications (there were plenty of ways to implement object-oriented design without an object-oriented language, but yes, we jumped on them when they came along), and I'm still writing multi-core and multi-node distributed processing applications, writing multi-media services, digital signal processing, etc. It's great fun! :)
I've always been puzzled about the focus on languages. A language is just a tool or a palette. The important thing is being able to design software in a clear and efficient manner. Languages can typically be picked up in a very short period of time. I understand that the people who only understand buzzwords are blindly seeking a particular match, but if they were smart, they would look instead for a person who was a skilled designer of software, rather than a person who knew a particular language.
In my career so far (I'm sure that many others have a much broader list), I've had to write software in: assembler (IBM mainframe, 6052, 8085, Z-80, 8051, Z-8, 68K, X86), BASIC, FORTH, FORTRAN (4, 66, 77), RATFOR, lisp, C, C++, PASCAL, PROTEL, perl, tcl, python. Java I've written a couple of example programs in, but have never written in it professionally. But I presume it is no harder to become proficient at than all the others. ADA is a good language; people are starting to realize the value of the rigorous protections it applies. But yeah, we were writing ADA code back in 1995, and it didn't seem widespread outside the military at the time.
I take it you've never been to Arkansas, then...
I moved to the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas (from Dallas, Texas) about 7 years ago...lovely area, genuinely kind people...
My father used to be facilities supervisor for a large banking chain, and he told me about the incidents where elderly customers did damage to bank branches because of unintended acceleration. One woman hit the wrong pedal as she was attempting to park in front of the bank, floored her large american-made car through the front of the building, through the teller counter, through the wall behind the teller counter into the employee break room, pushing the refrigerator through the back wall of the building...she kept the tires spinning, melting through the tile floor, until a bank employee opened the driver door, reached in and turned off the engine.
She then hopped out and, since she was at her desired destination, tried to make her deposit.
My dad had quite a laugh over the mess he had to get fixed. He was glad no one was hurt, of course.
You lie to your children? Interesting. We never have. No, we never pretended that Santa Claus came down the chimney and left Christmas gifts; the kids knew that Mom and Dad gave the gifts. We really enjoy the season, and enjoyed watching all the Christmas animated specials, but it was always just fun pretend. You might think that I somehow deprived my children of some magic of childhood, but they never did have to suffer the sudden realization that all the adults around them had been lying to them and laughing at them. Consequently, my children trust me absolutely, and we have a great relationship. I have children 19/17/15/14, and they are an absolute delight to be around.
Sorry to be gross, but the question was asked.
Took ill at work, massive, nasty diarrhea attack. As I stood up, my phone holster caught on the toilet paper dispenser and flipped my phone (a wonderful Samsung SCH-8500) into the still-full toilet...
Yes, I retrieved the phone from the toilet before flushing. Washed off the phone (and me). It still worked, even if it did smell really funky for a few months. My children called it the "D-Phone" for obvious reasons...
Aliens? How will they justify that? :) Didn't the robots secretly move humanity to an alternate dimension that was devoid of other sentient species to protect humanity? Or am I mixing my story lines?
Yep; that would be interesting to be able to transmit something other than data. Of course, it's already amazing what we're able to transmit just using data -- smells, surgery, sex (latter two using haptic devices). There are even 3D replicators that work over the internet.
not now, anyway.
Voice has been encoded and transmitted as data ever since the PSTN went digital. The G.711 voice encoding standard was released in 1972, so the concept of data encoding voice has been commonly known for many decades. The conversion of data into voice/text/braille is not patentable...that's been done for decades.
Perhaps you are simply using voice encoding as an example of processes that MIGHT be patentable, if they are not already known to one skilled in the art. But voice encoding itself is no longer patentable.
Since ONLY data can be transmitted across the internet, and you had already said that transmitting data across the internet is not patentable, then transmitting a stab in the face, or gravity, across the internet could not be patentable, since it would HAVE to be converted to data to be transmitted across the internet.
Book are not patentable. The idea of a book came into common usage centuries ago. However, the content of books can be copyrighted. Is this perhaps what you mean? It's the ordering of the symbols in the book, and the structure of any associated graphics, that are copyrighted.
Absolutely agree with your suggestion.
The company I worked for, in the early 1990s, used Nortel Passport routers between our corporate sites. Both data and voice serving 100,000 employees passed over the connections between the routers. And we didn't have to do anything so primitive as dialing an access number to get to this intranet based system; it was tied into our PBXes, so that numbers for employees at any of our scores of locations would be routed through our intranet, and external numbers would be routed to the PSTN.
By 1994, we were already building and using applications where a click on a link on a web page would automatically connect you to an agent at a customer call center, whether by a phone call or a VoIP connection to your PC.
RTEMS is a very nice, robust, reliable deeply embedded RTOS with modern design philosophies and well defined maximum operational latencies. I worked with a specialty hardware design firm sometime around 1997 to get RTEMS ported to a new embedded board (PMC module with PPC processor, dual 100BaseT, and a boatload of DRAM) I had commissioned from them. RTEMS worked out so well for them that they sold quite a few other embedded board products with RTEMS after this, until being purchased by a larger company that was a VxWorks devotee.
:) I was in Rockford, Illinois for the winter of 1978, so I remember heavy snows and punishingly cold temperatures...our neighbors' house disappeared under a drift and was not seen for a couple of months (they were wintering in sunny Florida).
However, this was in the period that the rage in all the media was that we were entering a new ice age, because the global temperatures had been trending down for a while. Quite a few people were talking about how to handle shorter growing seasons, the possible necessity of moving populations south, blah blah blah.
Of course, we didn't have the internet then, so we didn't have this feedback loop that seems to amplify the voice of the alarmist, of whatever flavor. The media furor passed. Temperatures trended back to a more normal level. No new ice age.
Currently, I live in Arkansas. We had a couple of warm summers a few years ago, followed by a couple of cooler than average summers. But when I look back over all the temperature records for this area (going back 100 years, not a long time by global standards, but enough to see trends), it looks the same as it ever was...
The interesting thing is, as large as my electricity consumption is, I know many people with smaller homes but larger consumption than mine. There is quite a long tail of consumption above me, even.
There are things I could do still:
1) Install solar water heating.
2) Get power strips on a few remaining areas.
3) Get rid of several remaining computer CRTs
The interesting thing is, at 8 cents per KWH, the ROI on the investment just isn't there.
One example: when I was designing my house, I investigated the use of a ground source heat pump, rather than an air source heat pump. I met with numerous manufacturers and vendors, and ran all the calculations. All their equipment was so expensive that the ROI was 50 years, far longer than the life span of the equipment. I could actually power and replace an air source system several times over and still come out ahead of a GSHP...
Thanks for the response! Yes, I have a Kill-A-Watt and have used it a number of times (my washing machine consumes US$0.005 of electricity each time I use it. The Microwave, electric range, dish washer, freezer, fridge, electric clothes dryer, etc. all consume more, of course.
Yeah, Insulation was taken up to the point where there was no ROI with any more, when I built the house.
:) 4 children, 2 offices (which can be converted to additional bedrooms), 1 master suite, 1 elder care suite.
Services (plumbing, septic, etc.) are sized to handle 20 people long term if necessary.
:) That consumption is WITH a high efficiency heat pump. When designing my house, I did all the heat loss calculations, beefed up on the insulation, designed the house for minimum external exposure, minimized west and east facing windows, all that stuff. Like I said, my electricity consumption in this 4000sqft house is roughly half of what the energy consumption was in my old, 1750sqft house.
That being said, now as my children prepare to graduate high school and leave for college, I regret building a house the size I did. I wish I had built a small cozy cottage with a dorm attached, instead. :)
I run about 30,000 KWH per year in my house. I was pretty distressed by this amount compared with both the Dutch and US averages, until I factored in:
1) All electric -- no gas
2) Climate where Heating Degree Days outnumber Cooling Degree Days 3 to 1
3) This house, even though it's all electric, consumes only half the electricity of my PREVIOUS house, which was not all electric
4) 6 people live here
5) I work at home, so the house is always occupied
6) I run a small datacenter at home, so not only does all the equipment have to be powered, it has a separate cooling unit.
Given that, I don't feel AS bad. However, it's still a lot of electricity. Yes, I replaced all incandescents with fluorescent about 10 years ago, so that helps.
Uber programmer does not mean arrogant. I know plenty of uber programmers who comply with the requirement for a weekly status report.
The good thing about weekly status reports is that it shows all the issues that impact schedule, and provide useful fodder for annual adjustment reviews.
Good programmer does not mean big ego. Immature people have big egos. Seasoned professionals are generally humble and easy to work with.
So says my 25 years in the industry, anyway...
I seriously hope that is not really how you parent. You never, never, never give in just to make them shut up. That mis-parenting breeds monsters.
I have 4 children, and like all humans, they are not perfect people. However, they NEVER throw fits in public, and strangers come up to us all the time and comment on how well behaved our kids are and how grateful they are that we raised them properly.
Did they come by this naturally? Of course not! They tried their tantrums in the store. But our strategy was, park the shopping cart at the end of an aisle, take them outside, strap them in their car seat so they are restrained, adjust windows/air conditioner/heater so they are safe and comfortable, then shut them in the car and stand outside the facing away from the child until the tantrum is over. Then, take them out and continue shopping. My son was the hardest case with this; we had to do it about 6 times with him. But they all learned that whining and screaming earn them nothing but a time out.
Yes, absolute consistency is utterly essential. If you are inconsistent, you have failed. Fortunately, even if you have been inconsistent, it is never too late to start being inconsistent. They'll be upset at first, but then they'll come to appreciate it. My children are now 17/15/13/12, and we have a wonderful relationship with them. They all enjoy being with us, and they respect us, and we respect them.
I wouldn't say NOBODY...
;)
I've sent email on a couple of occasions to President Bush stating my willingness to have a nuclear power plant in my back yard. I grew up in Iowa near the Mississippi River and toured nuclear power plants when I was a child, and I have degrees in physics, so I'm quite comfortable living around nuclear power plants.
My children glow, but that just means I never had to buy them night lights.
Since 1992, I've been using trackballs from ITAC (http://www.mousetrak.com/), first the professional, then the evolution trackball after that. I had pretty severe RSI after the birth of my first child, and went through just about every trackball on the market. The Logitech ones with the thumb controlled ball are absolutely horrible. The thumb is not designed for precision movements; it's for grasping. The MouseTrak stood alone as being a quality trackball that holds up to years of heavy use. The Evolution trackball that I bought back in the mid-late 1990s still gets 10 hours a day of heavy use. And the MouseTrak (and work surface height adjustment) completely cured my RSI problems. If you can't afford an Evolution MouseTrak, I recommend the Logitech MarbleMouse as my second choice. I have that trackball on all the other machines in the house, and my wife and kids all love them. My wife replaced the mouse at her work with a Logitech MarbleMouse, because she just can't stand mice.
Inexpensive phone, good reception. Excellent holster. Loud ring.
I paid $29 with AllTel for the phone with their $0.15/min national prepaid plan.
Just went through a PC Refresh at work. My 1.2GHz PIII +1GB DRAM laptop with Win2K was replaced with a 3.2GHz P4 +2GB DRAM desktop with WinXP. I can barely feel any performance improvement (compiling is a little bit faster), and many things that used to work like a champ now work poorly. Seems like the majority of us designers are all in the same boat, longing for Win2K to come back. I even asked the IT department if I could reinstall Win2K, but that was not within the support parameters, of course.
My personal 3 year old Athlon XP 2500+ machine running Linux runs rings around the brand new WinXP machine. Sigh...
BTW, we don't intend to install Vista on company computers until the next PC refresh, 3-4 years from now. All new machines coming in are loaded with WinXP.
Oh, agreed. I'm aware there are souls out there who have it worse than I do. There are folks here who are just a little too far from the POP and only have dialup (and satellite, of course) available.
:)
My suburban coworkers on FiOS grin at my "skinny" pipe, though...