I lived in the US from about 1995 to 2002. The first thing I did was get a bank account with a debit card, paying by debit card was how I was used to doing things. And all the supermarkets and typical retail places you went to, even then, supported at least a Visa debit card. I was surprised to see so many people my age (at the time I was 23) still using checks in a supermarket. Two of the things that surprised me the most when I arrived was the widespread use of checks in supermarkets, and that there were still quite a lot of people my age who believed in god (I don't know anyone my age over here who is even slightly religious).
Oh they know about it. But until recently, the computers also took weekends and bank holidays off. I paid my credit card bill using online banking, and it took 5 days for the payment to transfer meaning the payment was late. When I called to complain, "oh, Saturday and Sunday are non processing days, so is the Bank Holiday Monday, and it requires another couple of working days". No explanation of why a completely electronic transfer couldn't move on a weekend or within the same working day. I didn't get an answer when I asked "Do the computers get the weekends off, too?"
Now, at long last, electronic payments in most cases are actually instant here, but they unveiled this a year ago as if it were a huge advance, when in reality we should have had it 15 years ago. I suspect what they were doing for "electronic transfers" until a year ago was someone was reading a report off one screen, and typing it into another rather than the systems actually being linked.
Cheques don't clear immediately - usually it takes 2 or 3 days before you really have the money (or in some countries, like the United States, owing to the large distances they must travel, much longer). Right now bank transfers are already a lot faster. Virtually all of my bank transfers in the UK now complete in seconds. I have my online banking wherever I am thanks to a smart phone.
Banks charge businesses for processing cheques, too. As a business you cannot escape these charges except by taking cash and stuffing it under a matress (business accounts charge for cash deposits too).
When I was renting in the UK over 15 years ago, I paid the landlord with a "standing order", a monthly, regular payment done direct from bank to bank. Cheques haven't actually been necessary for things like this for decades in advanced countries like the UK.
I tried to do the same when I was renting in the US. It's not possible - well, it is, sort of - what the bank does is mails a check monthly to your landlord instead of making a direct transfer. Sometimes this check gets lost and you get home to a nasty letter telling you "pay up or get evicted". If you look at the statement you already find the money has gone from the bank, then it takes a month of wrangling to get it sorted out.
It looks great, but I think I'll stick with WordReference.com.
The great thing about Wordreference is not only does it give a definition and shows the word in several sentences in context (especially so in the English to Spanish and Spanish to English dictionaries) is that it has language forums, and posts about words and phrases are also linked from the dictionary lookup.
One thing I'd like from a search engine or dictionary is the ability to look up grammar examples. For example, if I want to see if a certain construct is valid (well, at least, is in wide usage) I'd like to be enter something like this into a search engine (as a really simple example) "Mary (verb) a (noun)" - where it would search for sentences constructed with that structure. Or perhaps something more complex, specifying that the verb be a certain tense and mood.
Sorry, it sounds like you're just resistant to change.
On the subject of outdoor lighting, I started using CFLs in outdoor lights 15 years ago, precisely because the incandescent ones lasted so little time (requiring a ladder to replace, and the associated falling-off-a-ladder risk). At that time, it was the only place I was using CFLs. Even then, they lasted several times longer than incandescent bulbs and used a lot less energy - they had no trouble getting their rated lifetime. At that point we lived in a part of a country that regularly falls well below freezing during the winter. Cold was never a problem. The very same heat you say will break the lamp soon gets the tube warm.
LEDs are expected to become more energy efficient than CFL, so the heat "problem" (which I've never observed) would be even less. LEDs would be absolutely perfect in refrigerators - less heat emitted into the refrigerator which means less work to do for the refrigeration machinery. Since I have built my own LED lighting units from components, I can tell you that (a) they don't have many and (b) no electrolytic capacitors either, and (c) the temperature never gets near exceeding the rated maximum on any of the components at least for 3W Lumiled cool white Luxeon Rebels. The circuit consists of a current regulating power supply (purpose made for LED lighting) - basically a small 5 pin IC, some ceramic chip capacitors, a sense resistor, an inductor, and a schottky diode. Electrolytic capacitors are inappropriate for this small switch mode power supply, their ESR is too high. The power supply circuit for two 3W Rebels is about the size of a postage stamp even on a home-etched PCB. With a factory made PCB you could probably make it half the size without much difficulty.
LEDs are very commonly used for bicycle headlamps, they have almost totally displaced filament lights. I have a 3W LED front light for my bike. It is a sealed, self contained unit complete with battery, about 50% larger than a D-cell battery in each dimension, and will last over an hour off a charge at full brightness. No overheating problems.
The dimming of CFLs as they get old and fail is a much more graceful failure mode than sudden complete failure by an incandescent. It gives you more warning the lamp needs replacing, and doesn't leave you grovelling in the dark trying to replace a bulb when it fails just when it's inconvenient.
I couldn't give a stuff what they call me. People at work generally know if they want their PC to be fixed, we have two people in the department who spend much time fixing PCs. They know if they need something developing, they go the developers. But it's all the "IT department" and the "IT guys". People seem to be able to figure out that we're not all the same, regardless.
Similarly, we call everyone in finance "the bean counters" right from the lowliest of them all the way up to the CFO.
...If it were me, I wouldn't be being extradited: at the first hint of trouble, off to Venezuela - whatever a pit Venezuela is, it's not even a fraction as bad as US "pound me in the ass" prison. And Venezuela hates the United States and would never extradite.
MySQL could be a future competitor in many markets. Take two hypothetical situations:
1. MySQL not owned by Oracle. Owners of the "reference implementation" want to enter new markets, and significantly develop MySQL until it becomes a competitor in some markets currently dominated by Oracle.
2. MySQL owned by Oracle. Oracle keeps MySQL well maintained and active, but deliberately does not develop it into anything more powerful. Oracle essentially gain in low end markets, and keep a potential competitor from developing further.
While MySQL is open source, it would take a really serious effort for a fork to take off and overtake the "reference implementation". With most sticking with the "reference implementation" while it is well supported and maintained, Oracle can keep it from becoming a competitor, despite it being open source. There's more to MySQL than a body of code, there's also the organization behind it - documenting it, maintaining it, paying people to work on it etc.
So why do native English speakers fail to correctly apply rules of grammar that they should have learned and mastered as children?
That question ought to be "So why do human beings fail to correctly apply rules of grammar..." - it's hardly something unique to native English speakers. At least, the talibanes ortográficos seem to have a full time job over on barrapunto.com.
Microsoft and Murdoch is who they will side with, of course. Look at which OS is on 90% of desktops, look at whose papers/"news" shows are most watched.
The British Isles aren't a set of lowlands barely above sea level. Most of the British Isles is significantly above sea level, and indeed there are mountainous regions. Bits of it (East Anglia, the flood plains around the Thames and other major estuaries) would get swamped, but most of it is sufficiently high above sea level.
Don't be distracted by absolute quantities. A non-car analogy. Imagine you have a funnel - 1 litre per second of water can pass through this funnel. Indeed, 1 litre per second is passing through it. Call that "nature". The level in the funnel remains the same, since it's draining at the rate that it's being filled. Then comes a human, and adds just 1ml per second (i.e. 0.1%). As surely as night follows day, the funnel begins to fill up until it eventually overflows.
Except in this analogy, not only do humans add 1ml extra input, they also reduce the exit of the funnel by 1ml/sec (reducing the "sink", in the real world, deforestation etc.)
You're confusing weather forecasting and climatology. They aren't the same thing. An analogy (not using cars this time): imagine you have a pot of water on the stove, and the temperature turned to a certain point. The weather forecaster is the person who predicts where the eddies and bubbles will be in this pot of water. Obviously this gets incredibly difficult for predictions more than a few seconds in the future. The climatologist, however, says "after X time, the temperature will have changed to Y", or "Put the lid on the pot, and the temperature will increase to Z".
No, he's probably coding something that should be on The Daily WTF while you're trying to understand a problem.
Coding isn't just about churning out lines of code. If you're just churning out lines of code, you're a glorified typist, not a software developer. The coder who writes less, but writes correct lines of code is a lot more productive than the one who writes lots of buggy code.
The site doesn't make it clear - was Faggin shafted by Intel while working for him (and left to form Zilog as a consequence), or did Faggin leave and start Zilog, and then Intel tried to discredit him as an act of sour grapes?
Slashdot Mirror
I lived in the US from about 1995 to 2002. The first thing I did was get a bank account with a debit card, paying by debit card was how I was used to doing things. And all the supermarkets and typical retail places you went to, even then, supported at least a Visa debit card. I was surprised to see so many people my age (at the time I was 23) still using checks in a supermarket. Two of the things that surprised me the most when I arrived was the widespread use of checks in supermarkets, and that there were still quite a lot of people my age who believed in god (I don't know anyone my age over here who is even slightly religious).
Oh they know about it. But until recently, the computers also took weekends and bank holidays off. I paid my credit card bill using online banking, and it took 5 days for the payment to transfer meaning the payment was late. When I called to complain, "oh, Saturday and Sunday are non processing days, so is the Bank Holiday Monday, and it requires another couple of working days". No explanation of why a completely electronic transfer couldn't move on a weekend or within the same working day. I didn't get an answer when I asked "Do the computers get the weekends off, too?"
Now, at long last, electronic payments in most cases are actually instant here, but they unveiled this a year ago as if it were a huge advance, when in reality we should have had it 15 years ago. I suspect what they were doing for "electronic transfers" until a year ago was someone was reading a report off one screen, and typing it into another rather than the systems actually being linked.
Cheques don't clear immediately - usually it takes 2 or 3 days before you really have the money (or in some countries, like the United States, owing to the large distances they must travel, much longer). Right now bank transfers are already a lot faster. Virtually all of my bank transfers in the UK now complete in seconds. I have my online banking wherever I am thanks to a smart phone.
Banks charge businesses for processing cheques, too. As a business you cannot escape these charges except by taking cash and stuffing it under a matress (business accounts charge for cash deposits too).
When I was renting in the UK over 15 years ago, I paid the landlord with a "standing order", a monthly, regular payment done direct from bank to bank. Cheques haven't actually been necessary for things like this for decades in advanced countries like the UK.
I tried to do the same when I was renting in the US. It's not possible - well, it is, sort of - what the bank does is mails a check monthly to your landlord instead of making a direct transfer. Sometimes this check gets lost and you get home to a nasty letter telling you "pay up or get evicted". If you look at the statement you already find the money has gone from the bank, then it takes a month of wrangling to get it sorted out.
Music on headphones in *not* public music.
It looks great, but I think I'll stick with WordReference.com.
The great thing about Wordreference is not only does it give a definition and shows the word in several sentences in context (especially so in the English to Spanish and Spanish to English dictionaries) is that it has language forums, and posts about words and phrases are also linked from the dictionary lookup.
One thing I'd like from a search engine or dictionary is the ability to look up grammar examples. For example, if I want to see if a certain construct is valid (well, at least, is in wide usage) I'd like to be enter something like this into a search engine (as a really simple example) "Mary (verb) a (noun)" - where it would search for sentences constructed with that structure. Or perhaps something more complex, specifying that the verb be a certain tense and mood.
[citation needed]
Sorry, it sounds like you're just resistant to change.
On the subject of outdoor lighting, I started using CFLs in outdoor lights 15 years ago, precisely because the incandescent ones lasted so little time (requiring a ladder to replace, and the associated falling-off-a-ladder risk). At that time, it was the only place I was using CFLs. Even then, they lasted several times longer than incandescent bulbs and used a lot less energy - they had no trouble getting their rated lifetime. At that point we lived in a part of a country that regularly falls well below freezing during the winter. Cold was never a problem. The very same heat you say will break the lamp soon gets the tube warm.
LEDs are expected to become more energy efficient than CFL, so the heat "problem" (which I've never observed) would be even less. LEDs would be absolutely perfect in refrigerators - less heat emitted into the refrigerator which means less work to do for the refrigeration machinery. Since I have built my own LED lighting units from components, I can tell you that (a) they don't have many and (b) no electrolytic capacitors either, and (c) the temperature never gets near exceeding the rated maximum on any of the components at least for 3W Lumiled cool white Luxeon Rebels. The circuit consists of a current regulating power supply (purpose made for LED lighting) - basically a small 5 pin IC, some ceramic chip capacitors, a sense resistor, an inductor, and a schottky diode. Electrolytic capacitors are inappropriate for this small switch mode power supply, their ESR is too high. The power supply circuit for two 3W Rebels is about the size of a postage stamp even on a home-etched PCB. With a factory made PCB you could probably make it half the size without much difficulty.
LEDs are very commonly used for bicycle headlamps, they have almost totally displaced filament lights. I have a 3W LED front light for my bike. It is a sealed, self contained unit complete with battery, about 50% larger than a D-cell battery in each dimension, and will last over an hour off a charge at full brightness. No overheating problems.
The dimming of CFLs as they get old and fail is a much more graceful failure mode than sudden complete failure by an incandescent. It gives you more warning the lamp needs replacing, and doesn't leave you grovelling in the dark trying to replace a bulb when it fails just when it's inconvenient.
I couldn't give a stuff what they call me. People at work generally know if they want their PC to be fixed, we have two people in the department who spend much time fixing PCs. They know if they need something developing, they go the developers. But it's all the "IT department" and the "IT guys". People seem to be able to figure out that we're not all the same, regardless.
Similarly, we call everyone in finance "the bean counters" right from the lowliest of them all the way up to the CFO.
Who cares.
...If it were me, I wouldn't be being extradited: at the first hint of trouble, off to Venezuela - whatever a pit Venezuela is, it's not even a fraction as bad as US "pound me in the ass" prison. And Venezuela hates the United States and would never extradite.
MySQL could be a future competitor in many markets. Take two hypothetical situations:
1. MySQL not owned by Oracle. Owners of the "reference implementation" want to enter new markets, and significantly develop MySQL until it becomes a competitor in some markets currently dominated by Oracle.
2. MySQL owned by Oracle. Oracle keeps MySQL well maintained and active, but deliberately does not develop it into anything more powerful. Oracle essentially gain in low end markets, and keep a potential competitor from developing further.
While MySQL is open source, it would take a really serious effort for a fork to take off and overtake the "reference implementation". With most sticking with the "reference implementation" while it is well supported and maintained, Oracle can keep it from becoming a competitor, despite it being open source. There's more to MySQL than a body of code, there's also the organization behind it - documenting it, maintaining it, paying people to work on it etc.
That question ought to be "So why do human beings fail to correctly apply rules of grammar..." - it's hardly something unique to native English speakers. At least, the talibanes ortográficos seem to have a full time job over on barrapunto.com.
Microsoft and Murdoch is who they will side with, of course. Look at which OS is on 90% of desktops, look at whose papers/"news" shows are most watched.
The British Isles aren't a set of lowlands barely above sea level. Most of the British Isles is significantly above sea level, and indeed there are mountainous regions. Bits of it (East Anglia, the flood plains around the Thames and other major estuaries) would get swamped, but most of it is sufficiently high above sea level.
Don't be distracted by absolute quantities. A non-car analogy. Imagine you have a funnel - 1 litre per second of water can pass through this funnel. Indeed, 1 litre per second is passing through it. Call that "nature". The level in the funnel remains the same, since it's draining at the rate that it's being filled. Then comes a human, and adds just 1ml per second (i.e. 0.1%). As surely as night follows day, the funnel begins to fill up until it eventually overflows.
Except in this analogy, not only do humans add 1ml extra input, they also reduce the exit of the funnel by 1ml/sec (reducing the "sink", in the real world, deforestation etc.)
Wear a stainless steel backed watch - it won't give you a rash. Lots of people (including me) will get a rash from non-stainless watches.
I did for a time go without a watch, but I have one again. I find it very convenient.
You're confusing weather forecasting and climatology. They aren't the same thing. An analogy (not using cars this time): imagine you have a pot of water on the stove, and the temperature turned to a certain point. The weather forecaster is the person who predicts where the eddies and bubbles will be in this pot of water. Obviously this gets incredibly difficult for predictions more than a few seconds in the future. The climatologist, however, says "after X time, the temperature will have changed to Y", or "Put the lid on the pot, and the temperature will increase to Z".
Two quite different disciplines.
Typical PV cells are guaranteed for 25 years, hardly short lived. Certainly a lot more long lived than a gallon of gasoline or a kilo of coal.
I moved to another country when I was in my early 20s. I knew no one in this new country, I had very few reference points... but somehow, I survived.
It would be more difficult if you suddenly found yourself 500 years in the future, but it's really just a matter of learning the new society.
No, he's probably coding something that should be on The Daily WTF while you're trying to understand a problem.
Coding isn't just about churning out lines of code. If you're just churning out lines of code, you're a glorified typist, not a software developer. The coder who writes less, but writes correct lines of code is a lot more productive than the one who writes lots of buggy code.
The site doesn't make it clear - was Faggin shafted by Intel while working for him (and left to form Zilog as a consequence), or did Faggin leave and start Zilog, and then Intel tried to discredit him as an act of sour grapes?
Although a great deal of those transistors will be the same thing over and over again - the cache.
Learning about designing your own CPU from scratch? Snore?
I think you may be on the wrong course.
I think you need to recalibrate your humour/sarcasm detector on the subject of the parent poster's sig. It's obvious it's a joke.
Sarchasm: The gulf between the teller of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
It still doesn't know what the question to life, the universe and everything is.