IIRC, Linus's got a Commodore VIC from his uncle when he was 11. Games on tape or cartridge were unavailable in Finland so he had to type them in from magazines. He found the BASIC code comprehensible, and taught himself programming from there.
Maybe one should presume he couldn't be technically literate because started out in BASIC...
To top it off, HP calculators tend to be so much more durable than the offerings of TI, Casio, and Sharp and the keyboards can't be beat for feel and durability....snip... I have also heard that Hewlett Packard calcs are "too expensive".
I worked for a structural designer who had paid something like $600 for an HP67 wwhen they first came out. As of 1996 he still had it on his desk, because he had programs on magcard which could give him his answer in less time than it took to load a spreadsheet on his PC. The durability certainly outweight the "expense" here.
At that job, a TI30 was enough calculator for what I did, but I wore out the keyboard on 3 of them, and each time the keyboard layout got a bit worse.
Cool hack. I knew that there still had to be some intelligent people at CoreComm/Voyager/ExecPC still. (At least the WI side of the pond.)
ExecPC's roots go deep. Despite the two recent buyouts, there's no reason to switch dialup provider; I don't know of anyone better in the Milwaukee area. There are tradeoffs of course - if you move the account to Voyager you get two free mailboxes but lose the shell access. A whole lot less hip than my former Chicago ISP, the late, lamented Tezcat, of course.
If that were the case the reference wouldn't be bumblebee-specific. The analysis which worked for birds, bats and dragonflies didn't work for bumblebees. Turns out they flap their wings very differently and generate a trailing vortex which adds to the effective lift area. Determining this required high speed video and computer modeling not previously available. This may be the key to building a working 'thopter.
Let's roll back the clock to the day when American companies gave a damn about their workers and the workers gave a damn about their company.
And when was this, pray tell? There was a passing reference here last week to Matewan; every American needs to be aware of what happened there in 1920. I happen to be a libertarian who believes that unions have largely outlived their usefullness, but there was a time when firing was done at gunpoint.
Hey, I forgot about that one. I didn't use voicemail much myself, but it was a hassle for other folks at the company. They backset the date to the previous equivalent year, but a load of old messages got lost. I wouldn't call it a cover-up; this wasn't really newsworthy.
That's pretty much true on the desktop, but there are other realms of computing out there.
There is still a lot of business software running on mainframes which has been ported over for ages. One friend of mine is an old Cobol programmer who had her best year in ages cleaning up stuff for businesses that would have to have had their custom systems completely rebuilt. I spent the spring of 99 at a company which had been clinging to a package on an IBM midrange which had been written by Xerox and had been unsupported for a decade; they rushed out and bought the first Y2K certified business package for PC networks someone offered them a deal on, and then tried to fit it to their business model. I turned down a permenant position there so they ended my contract; they were trying to inventory pounds and feet of alloy bar in a module written for inventooorying widgets.
There were also Y2K issues in various embedded applications. At the time of the rollover I was at a company which sold and supported industrial controls and building control systems. A lot of companies were locked into data recorders which can no longer shoow the correct date, and several buildings _did_ need to have theconntrol systems reset.
In short, altho I witnessed no potential end of the world disasters, there was a lot of serious work to be done in areas other than the CP/M derived.
PC innovation never truely took off until IBM was opened up and anyone could make clones.
PC innovation virtually ground to a halt because of the PC clones. The Mac, the Amiga, even the Atari ST were innovative; the Compaq was not. I had a Tandy 2000 which ran rings around the XTs which were its contemporaries, but it wasn't "compatible" so it fell by the wayside. Hey, if it weren't for PC cloning, the Shack might have come out with a 68020 based Color Computer running OS/9 68K and cheap home *nix boxes would have swept the nation 12 years ago.
VoiceStream expects to have GSM up and running in southeastern Wisconsin, all the way down to Chicago, on March 1st. I've made successful calls thru 8 sites so far, but recent weather and glitches suggest that the target date may mean a lot of overtime in February.
Those aren't silly hats. They are *black*berets* which are of course the mark of an elite fighting force. They're just silly black berets. The Sardaukar were on bodyguard detail; I hope they don't wear those on a combat mission.
The waterbed was an invention for which RAH provided a functioning concept. The stereo tank was as much a speculative concept as the Libby Drive - just something they'll have in the future.
And at our ages I don't think you'll get much thrill out of my spice wearing less clothing. Actually my LSO has despised Heinlein ever since Lazarus Long committed incest.
I thought the Potemkin was an Armoured Battle Cruiser rather than a battleship, but in any case the film is worth seeing. Major step forward in its day; the first ever use of jump-cutting to convey action. It will also contribute to your understanding of the Woodie Allen film "Bananas".
Potemkin himself, after whom the warship was named, was minister of war for Catherine the Great. When she wanted to tour the country to see how her subjects were living he had fake showpiece villages constructed.
It's a way of assuring quality and conformance to a standard. That CAN'T be bad.
Sure it can, if it's applied inappropriately.
ISO requires adherence to _a_ standard, and provides guidelines for _adherance_ but a company could actually get certified for producing crap as long as its consistant, standard, crap. I was working for a job shop steel fabricator as the ISO9000 fad was sweeping the country. Most of what we built was one-shot custom work, designed either by us or by the customer, and about 10% of this was from companies that _had_ to have all ISO9000 vendors. ISO isn't valid unless applied to everything a company does, which would have meant subjecting most of our process, and customers, to irrelevant constraints. Our products were subject to OSHA regulations which first stated in effect that since we had experience and had shown we knew what we were doing we were a legitimate source, and then required that every item be subjected to very specific functional testing. Not "do you have a policy for how often you check the accuracy of your tape measures and has it been followed with every tape measure in the plant" but "has this item been subjected to a load twice what it will receive in use without failing."
Slashdot Mirror
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
ummm... better wordsmith than myself?
Turns out to be a post by Ted Frank; in his younger days he was one of the most noteworthy, subtlest trolls on Usenet.
Maybe one should presume he couldn't be technically literate because started out in BASIC...
I worked for a structural designer who had paid something like $600 for an HP67 wwhen they first came out. As of 1996 he still had it on his desk, because he had programs on magcard which could give him his answer in less time than it took to load a spreadsheet on his PC. The durability certainly outweight the "expense" here.
At that job, a TI30 was enough calculator for what I did, but I wore out the keyboard on 3 of them, and each time the keyboard layout got a bit worse.
ExecPC's roots go deep. Despite the two recent buyouts, there's no reason to switch dialup provider; I don't know of anyone better in the Milwaukee area. There are tradeoffs of course - if you move the account to Voyager you get two free mailboxes but lose the shell access. A whole lot less hip than my former Chicago ISP, the late, lamented Tezcat, of course.
Not just you; every Anonymous Coward.
If that were the case the reference wouldn't be bumblebee-specific. The analysis which worked for birds, bats and dragonflies didn't work for bumblebees. Turns out they flap their wings very differently and generate a trailing vortex which adds to the effective lift area. Determining this required high speed video and computer modeling not previously available. This may be the key to building a working 'thopter.
And when was this, pray tell? There was a passing reference here last week to Matewan; every American needs to be aware of what happened there in 1920. I happen to be a libertarian who believes that unions have largely outlived their usefullness, but there was a time when firing was done at gunpoint.
Hey, I forgot about that one. I didn't use voicemail much myself, but it was a hassle for other folks at the company. They backset the date to the previous equivalent year, but a load of old messages got lost. I wouldn't call it a cover-up; this wasn't really newsworthy.
There is still a lot of business software running on mainframes which has been ported over for ages. One friend of mine is an old Cobol programmer who had her best year in ages cleaning up stuff for businesses that would have to have had their custom systems completely rebuilt. I spent the spring of 99 at a company which had been clinging to a package on an IBM midrange which had been written by Xerox and had been unsupported for a decade; they rushed out and bought the first Y2K certified business package for PC networks someone offered them a deal on, and then tried to fit it to their business model. I turned down a permenant position there so they ended my contract; they were trying to inventory pounds and feet of alloy bar in a module written for inventooorying widgets.
There were also Y2K issues in various embedded applications. At the time of the rollover I was at a company which sold and supported industrial controls and building control systems. A lot of companies were locked into data recorders which can no longer shoow the correct date, and several buildings _did_ need to have theconntrol systems reset.
In short, altho I witnessed no potential end of the world disasters, there was a lot of serious work to be done in areas other than the CP/M derived.
PC innovation virtually ground to a halt because of the PC clones. The Mac, the Amiga, even the Atari ST were innovative; the Compaq was not. I had a Tandy 2000 which ran rings around the XTs which were its contemporaries, but it wasn't "compatible" so it fell by the wayside. Hey, if it weren't for PC cloning, the Shack might have come out with a 68020 based Color Computer running OS/9 68K and cheap home *nix boxes would have swept the nation 12 years ago.
Yeh, D00D, ping me. I've got one of those new Anonymous Coward NICs in my box.
VoiceStream expects to have GSM up and running in southeastern Wisconsin, all the way down to Chicago, on March 1st. I've made successful calls thru 8 sites so far, but recent weather and glitches suggest that the target date may mean a lot of overtime in February.
Those aren't silly hats. They are *black*berets* which are of course the mark of an elite fighting force. They're just silly black berets. The Sardaukar were on bodyguard detail; I hope they don't wear those on a combat mission.
http://www.restrooms.org/standing.html
The waterbed was an invention for which RAH provided a functioning concept. The stereo tank was as much a speculative concept as the Libby Drive - just something they'll have in the future.
And at our ages I don't think you'll get much thrill out of my spice wearing less clothing. Actually my LSO has despised Heinlein ever since Lazarus Long committed incest.
I thought the Potemkin was an Armoured Battle Cruiser rather than a battleship, but in any case the film is worth seeing. Major step forward in its day; the first ever use of jump-cutting to convey action. It will also contribute to your understanding of the Woodie Allen film "Bananas". Potemkin himself, after whom the warship was named, was minister of war for Catherine the Great. When she wanted to tour the country to see how her subjects were living he had fake showpiece villages constructed.
Yes, but it was the style of writing in the Manifesto which led his brother to the conclusion that his brother was a likely suspect.
Sure it can, if it's applied inappropriately.
ISO requires adherence to _a_ standard, and provides guidelines for _adherance_ but a company could actually get certified for producing crap as long as its consistant, standard, crap. I was working for a job shop steel fabricator as the ISO9000 fad was sweeping the country. Most of what we built was one-shot custom work, designed either by us or by the customer, and about 10% of this was from companies that _had_ to have all ISO9000 vendors. ISO isn't valid unless applied to everything a company does, which would have meant subjecting most of our process, and customers, to irrelevant constraints. Our products were subject to OSHA regulations which first stated in effect that since we had experience and had shown we knew what we were doing we were a legitimate source, and then required that every item be subjected to very specific functional testing. Not "do you have a policy for how often you check the accuracy of your tape measures and has it been followed with every tape measure in the plant" but "has this item been subjected to a load twice what it will receive in use without failing."