It ain't designing the next Power chip, but I know a few ASIC and other firms that spend their days taking problem and burping out custom solutions for car manufacturers, electronic gadget firms, avionics, etc.
And just a couple years ago I kept hearing about the analog/digital ASIC hybrid market. Is that at all interesting?
And then there are those 'brave new world' things like smart dust and nanomachines. This one tends to use skills from chip *manufacturing*, not design, and the guys I know in it have advanced degrees in physics or materials science, since they're often stumbling around in uncharted territory and need to know how physical properties might appear at that small scale.
I think your advice is rock-solid, by the way. My key reason for chiming in was to point out places (some are quite fun) that chip-geek friends of mine are working that might not come to mind from reading your msg.
Oh, and look toward whether anything big happening at overlap points between chip design and biology... that's one I don't know beans about, but I'd be surprised if there aren't skill overlaps, like my nanotech colleagues.
Background: I'm 42 and live in a pretty damn small rural city (75,000 people). That eliminates some of a big city's risk but not sicko abductions of kids and teens, which have always been around here in numbers enough to merit attention (a classmate of mine disappeared in '79 (one of several to disappear, whose remains were found years later by hunters and hikers). So, while I grew up in a similar relaxed era, I'm biased a bit but I think you're right and I've seen numbers to confirm your suspicion:
Stats I can google up and have read say the USA has a hundred thousand abductions per year. Just 600 of them are taken by strangers, according to ChildFind. 200 kids per year are abducted and killed by strangers. THE VAST MAJORITY OF ABDUCTIONS ARE NOT BY STRANGERS. They're custody-related.
At a conservative googling of 100k per year, abductions would be worrisome (that's 1 per couple thousand people, or 1 per 500 kids, assuming kids are 25% of the population). But at 1 in a million odds? For this, you're gonna deprive a kid from the outdoors and friends and such!? Heck, that's miniscule compared to the risk a kid faces from drowning, falling off a bike, being the one-in-several-hundred that dies tragically in high school (car wreck, suicide, drinking-related, etc).
We got a handbill several weeks ago (I forget from what official agency) that said 'Don't Talk to Strangers' isn't working. The focus needs to be on avoiding adults that act unusually, warning kids what an inappropriately-acting adult (friend of the family or otherwise) will say or do, who is more trustworthy, and how to run/holler/resist/tattle when an adult acts inappropriately.
So, I (absurdist that I am) take my guidance from Crush, the Sea Turtle in 'Finding Nemo'-- I try to reign in my irrational urge to overprotect, I look for reasonable opportunities to let my kids have more freedom, and my wife and I try to keep the kids outside as much as possible. If I had the time, I'd be subtly lobbying other parents in the neighborhood to do the same.
(links, including a nice geek-friendly Bruce Schneier... though I'd say you should look for something by Oprah if convincing your wife is the goal)
Oh, and my kids are too young for chemistry sets, but I bought one for my young-teen nephews on ebay. $40 for the same one we played with in '75, complete with a bunsen burner, meltable sulphur powder, iron and magnesium shavings, test tubes, and a dozen compounds that'd poison anyone dumb enough to ingest 'em. 40-some bottles of reagents... awesome.
[What] looked good in 1948, turned out bad (Tacoma bridge).
There's a huge difference between construction engineering and software engineering. In construction engineering, poorly understood physics and unforeseen weather patterns can create unpredictable situations and stresses. In software engineering, the rules of the system are predefined and well understood.
Software...
(snorts)
well-understood...
(busts into laughter)
rules... well defined...
(roars with laughter)
I don't know which is funnier, your post
(laughs louder)
or the fact that it is modded up for insightful instead of for funny.
(falls off chair, gasps, struggles to stop laughing so hard)
C'mon, 'fess up: you were being snarky. And if this was a successful trolling, you are da man...
(busts into giggles again)
Wow...
(wipes tears from eyes)
Software engineering being superior to civil engineering --
(starts laughing again).
Poorly understood physics --
(more laughter).
Man, I wanna party with you -- that's some fsckin' brilliant trollage.
Given that another post links to studies where overall accident rates are dropping, I'd submit a ban is overstepping the need. Most-importantly, I know that cellphone use while driving improves first-responder time to accidents, has let me report a dangerously-unsafe driver (road rage, apparently), and that I use my cellphone when I'm tired & 30 minutes from home -- to keep me alert and awake. Given the high number of highway accidents due to road fatigue, that last one is probably the biggest safety IMPROVEMENT that cellphones provide, although I wouldn't diss the impact of *IMMEDIATE* accident reporting.
If being distracting was all it took to provoke a ban, we should look at banning chatty passengers, children (yes, bickering kids in the back seat DO cause accidents), talk-radio, and windows (since we'd drive better if we used our hearing to help us assess driving conditions). And at some point in this hypothetical, the idea becomes absurd.
My own take has been to *LITERALLY* discuss how etiquette changes with nontechie friends and family: given the simplicity of starting/stopping calls, they should be comfortable with saying or being told abrupt conversation-stoppers like 'gotta go', 'hold on', 'I'll call you back' when circumstances dictate. And, like kids-in-the-back-seat, people need to recognize when safety DEMANDS that they pull the car over before giving some non-driving crisis their complete attention.
A ban is a sledge hammer where etiquette changes are a sculpting hammer.
Wow, sparky, that comment's gonna get you some SERIOUS negative karma. Think of all the nerds lucky enough to have wives or girlfriends. Women that put up with our shit on a daily basis... for this post, I'm gonna call them nerd-wifes.
Now, imagine these socially-inept nerds discovering that a regular visit by the junk fairy just takes offering to take old junkers off friends' hands. To a nerd, that sounds like a time-shifter for getting winning lottery numbers or the first chain-letter that is guaranteed to pay off.
I'm a struggling/recovering accumulator of old hardware. Haven't found a 12-point plan to join yet, but a year or so ago, I carried 6 computers and a stack of monitors, SIMM's (yeah, THAT old!) to a charity/thrift store. This took weeks of my darling nerd-wife balancing some blunt requests, coaxing, and a machiavellian blend of passive-aggressive tactics and bedroom gymnastics to convince me. And even then, 4 more have grown back in my garage.
If people started droping random hardware on my porch, my wife'd leave me. I know this. And I can't be the only guy whose gadget fetish is driving some nerd-wife crazy. So you've just poured gasoline on HOW many thousands of these nerd-wife house-fires!?
Serious karma flammage, dude. But, hey... maybe you'll come back as THIS guy. That'd almost be worth it, wouldn't it!?
Thinkpads, Dells, Compaqs, sonys, toshibas... In a decade and under five major brands, including the last 4 doing software QA *USING* a lab of several different models of Sony's and Toshibas, I have *YET* to have a stock Windows laptop handle hibernate/awaken 100% properly. Some app or service or driver won't resurface, the machine corrupts a working file every tenth restart, some app starts hemorrhaging memory (forcing a reboot within an hour), rarely the machine locks up completely, or whatever.
It also takes 3 or 4 times as long to 'reawaken' a hibernated windows PC as my iBook ever needs.
OSX literally does this so efficiently that when working off battery, I routinely *close* my laptop temporarily for any pause in my work, even if it is just a minute or two.
That, coupled with enough processing power to do minor video edits, etc and a 6-hour battery life for conservative use (or 4 hrs of DVD-playing) and the computer itself just quietly mocks every other pc-owner in the room when I use it for meetings, conferences, in-flight, etc. I can't count how many times people have asked, muttered, or complained after seeing my iBook. A macBookPro is DEFINITELY in my near-term future.
Disclaimer: I own some Apple stock. Caveat: I 'switched', and then I bought stock because I was impressed by the above stuff. Curious to fanboy in less than a year.
Surely by now we've learned that there are nuances in translation. It's been decades since 'the wine is agreeable but the meat has spoiled' plopped out of some bit of literalist translation software. Likewise here: ultraman, superman, overman... they each have a distinctive flavor to their own meaning but none is a WRONG translation of the german uberman [ed: ubermensch, I mean].
Several others said the same thing I said in different ways. And life's too short to deal with rhetorical newbieisms like this, so you got foed and a brief sarcastic reply. Which is actually one of my favorite comments in months, on rereading. You really do come across as a bit too self-important when you refuse to admit that multiple translations exist here. And anyone unwilling to admit so simple a mistake, then further foul things up by ignoring your opponent's substance (the above paragraph)... it's nothin' personal, I just only have the 'foes read at -4' feature of slashdot to make sure I never see your posts again...
Oh, and Kudos to whoever troll-rated me. I shoulda unchecked my default +1 trusted bonus, and am FINE with getting a troll-rating on it.
Wow... you really ARE smarter than GBS *AND* the entire planet's accumulation of AI experts and linguists. There REALLY IS just one way to translate anything between two languages.
Pass me a kleenex and some windex so I can clean some scotch tape off this plexiglass -- then we've got to fedex it to our CPA. Oh, and grab a post-it so we can label it.
If superhero hasn't lost trademark after *DECADES* of neglect and noneforcement, nothing has.
Oh, and this case will get won by even a few years of silence when competing comic book or cartoon producers using the term themselves.
What a waste of time and a perversion of everything comic books used to mean to me...
Except by George Bernard Shaw. Who rolled Nietzshe's concept into a play, Man and Superman, a decade before Superman took wing.
Surely by now we've learned that there are nuances in translation. It's been decades since 'the wine is agreeable but the meat has spoiled' plopped out of some bit of literalist translation software. Likewise here: ultraman, superman, overman... they each have a distinctive flavor to their own meaning but none is a WRONG translation of the german uberman.
Um, maybe not. It is *paint* after all. You'd probably just shift from lookin' vaguely Devo to this (worksafe; I just picked a result from googling images with 'blue-hair'...)
Show me. Post some instructions or a URL. I'd like you to demo *FOR ME* your insanely-easy way for us to shared-edit an excel workbook. For simplicity's sake, your example must do only ONE thing to convince me:
I change a field and hit excel's save icon, you hit refresh and we're both on the same page again.
I won't hold my breath. And THAT is the generic case, not some in-LAN trusted share. A wiki does it. Web apps, as I mentioned and you ignored, have the advantage of platform/client being free and anywhere. Second time you've dissed Bricklin without hearing the underlying message. You may not personally in your narrow use-case see this as a need. Also my second and last attempt to explain that you've got tunnel vision. Nobody cares if YOU have a niche use for Excel's sharing that works for you. We're all looking at the same outside world you just mocked Bricklin for ignoring. Then again, you also took a potshot at me for using the word Not. It's a pity your grey matter is limited enough that you have storage quotas-- I heartily recommend you upgrade. Life and language are a lot more colorful if you keep all that slang around. Dip, dope, rube, moron, dolt, dullard, bozo, idiot, plank, toss-pot, wanker, plonker, dipstick, ding-dong, dickhead, dill, fathead, fsckwit, PHB, 1D10T, newbie, clueless... life's grey enough without datestamping cool slang.
One company I was at (several hundred very-distributed people) paid $45000 to put in a conference call server. It paid for itself in a few months, we'd gotten so addicted to conference calls without paying attention to the per-line per-minute costs. Even WITH the conference server and a VOIP or similar way of making intra-corporate calls insanely cheap, there's still a per-office broadband cost to shuttling a gig per day of voice data around, especially when you're talking about something as lightweight as a few fields changing in spreadsheet data.
Meanwhile, a wiki server runs on old crap hardware from anywhere, the client is ubiquitous and can run on even the oldest PC, and the wiki tracks changes automatically. I'd imagine a wiki-spreadsheet would allow people to create personal sheets that wander off on tangents (blue-sky ideas, projections, personalized metrics that they care about) and still retain source linkages to *real* data. Those tangents would be shared by default, which would be cool considering off uses like field-editing crappy company phone/email directories and etc. I've encountered over the years.
Don't get me wrong, there's *VALUE* to quick/easy solutions like conference-calls for discussing revisions. The best tools are ones easy enough to be widely used, after all. But don't mock a wiki for being useless just because other tools exist. Besides, hitting 'refresh' on a browser is faster and easier than any shared-Excel paradigm you can possibly contrive. It just IS.
Earth's gravity well technically goes to infinity but *escaping* isn't an infinity problem. Escape Velocity (11.2 km/s for Earth) is the convention... go outward faster than that and you're never returning. By definition, EV is the velocity needed to escape, so your statement that seems to deny the inevitable just seems like you spoke hastily.
Also, the universe is n-body, not 2-body. Once another planet or the sun dominates, you've escaped the earth forever. Yeah, I'm being semantic, but a precise and correct version of your first line probably shouldn't jump from an abstraction like an infinite well to stating that escape means being beyond that well. That's not how astrophysicists use the concept. Technically, Lagrange points also contradict your statement.
The mars rovers escaped Earth's well. Mars and the sun dominate. Earth's influence is orders of magnitude smaller than either of these two... smaller even than Deimos and Phobos. Saying they're in earth's well would get hoots and chuckles, wouldn't it? Saying that about something splatted into the sun would get the same reaction, I presume.
And the Pioneers/Voyagers are running outward so fast and so far away that the sun can't appreciably slow them down -- they're inevitably and completely gone. Yeah, it will be 100,000 years or more at more than 12km/s for something else to have more influence than the sun's... but the sun's been irrelevant since they did their gas-giant slingshot passes 20-30 years ago. And Earth's been irrelevant since a few months after launch.
G'nuff. Those details weren't made clear by your first post, and what I said wasn't meant to be a slur of newegg, just ingrained cynicism. Sometimes it really is cheaper to cut bait, which is what newegg did.
That said, it's nice when companies empower their staff to make small-price decisions, or to do small favors for established customers.
I'm betting your unrefunded shipping costs covered the wholesale value of a USB cable. That means they just got free goodwill, more or less. You're thrilled and buying everything from them because they let you keep a cable that wholesales for a buck and that you were willing to pay $18 for.
By the way... really? $18? That's the price I'm used to seeing from OfficeMax and BestBuy. From newegg, that price'd leave me speechless.
Amen! When/. did 20 q's with Neil, I thought this question was the funniest of a dozen or more that harped on Niel S's endings. According to other comments in the above story, his own take is that he writes the endings he likes and that's that. He's happy with 'em.
Heh, don't be sad, you're probably just gettin burned by slashdot's infamous search mechanism.
Reading the comments, there's plenty of references to IMSAI, ALTAIR, Heathkit, mondo luggables (so I imagine someone mentioned a CP/M kaypro or osborne), Sol, etc. Oh, and maybe you just needed to search for cp/m, not cpm.
LOL. I'd forgotten those days... Academic mainframes, complete with cpu accounting, storage accounting (but an unlimited inbox bypassed THAT limit), easily-duplicated login screens, tricks like using trusted apps to bypass command restrictions, etc.
First computer: Sinclair ZX-80. 1k, memory and screen-memory shared, so it blinked when it thinked. Funny quirk. Membrane keys sucked. I returned it under the free money-back period, though I forget specifically why.
I didn't have much money, and a few years earlier, the only thing I ever saved enough to afford was a Cosmac Elf, which would have been a catastrophic choice given what I wanted to do, and I'm glad I didn't buy it. I bought a baseball mitt. Still have the mitt. Oh, and during the first hobbyist years I wanted an Apple II or a Sol. Or that Cromenco with the huge palette of colors. Hell, I still want a Sol.
I learned to program in '78 at Radio Shack, standing there for an hour after school and plonkin' away on a TRS-80. In return for them letting me stand around for an hour there, I'd leave them some cute demo loop when I bolted on home to watch 4 pm's Star Trek rerun.
First computer I mastered: Apple II. At high school. Also the *last* computer I feel I ever mastered.
First computer I used: timeshare access to a server with a dozen or so text games like blackjack and wumpus.
First computer I owned for very long? A Radio Shack Color Computer. The early one with chiclet keys. Eew, nasty icky poo. My parents bought it, and I tried for years to wreak some semblance of usability out of that POS.
The one that still makes me sigh wistfully? Amiga 1000. I almost sold it several yrs ago on Classifieds2000. COD and the buyer didn't pay when the boxes got to him. I was a bit relieved and tucked it away, still in those boxes.
From comments here and asking friends, why is more interesting than what... I got into computers because of an article in a 1977 Games magazine: "From Spacewar to the Oregon Trail". I'm coming up on 30 years and still can't imagine ever getting bored with computers and the dozen hours a day I spend around 'em.
Oh, and to let Irony drag me a few miles off topic, I flunked typing in '78. Couldn't get past 30wpm with >20 years of computer-jockeying, Mavis Beacon said I clock in between 90 and 130 wpm, but I still hammer the everlovin' shit out of the backspace key.
You think dad's Packard Bell was a poor choice? I'd like to call and raise: my folks bought me a CoCo one Christmas. Money was tight and they meant well, but... damn, that machine was worthless. Utterly and completely. Chiclet keys, no parallel port and a retarded serial port so even printing sourcecode was problematic, dimwitted expansionability even with that 4-port expansion pack, etc. Tried upgrading with a floppy drive, with Edtasm, with OS9... and the OS9 was as close as I got to tolerable and even then I felt I needed another floppy drive (or a hard drive!!) to get anywhere. I had friends doing sprites on the Vic and the 64 and we'd long since become wizards with binary math and indexed-indirect addressing to master machine-language graphics for demos and games on the Apple II. Don't get me wrong: I could see all this crunchy goodness possible in the 6809 instruction set, but try as I might I couldn't get a platform stable enough to do anything. See the myth of Tantalus. I was in hell trying to do anything fun on the CoCo. When I could afford it, I bought an Amiga, and sold the disk drive, but by '86 I couldn't find anyone willing to pay me a nickel for the coco or a couple dozen rom carts.
Slashdot Mirror
What about ASIC (Application Specific IC's)?
It ain't designing the next Power chip, but I know a few ASIC and other firms that spend their days taking problem and burping out custom solutions for car manufacturers, electronic gadget firms, avionics, etc.
And just a couple years ago I kept hearing about the analog/digital ASIC hybrid market. Is that at all interesting?
And then there are those 'brave new world' things like smart dust and nanomachines. This one tends to use skills from chip *manufacturing*, not design, and the guys I know in it have advanced degrees in physics or materials science, since they're often stumbling around in uncharted territory and need to know how physical properties might appear at that small scale.
I think your advice is rock-solid, by the way. My key reason for chiming in was to point out places (some are quite fun) that chip-geek friends of mine are working that might not come to mind from reading your msg.
Oh, and look toward whether anything big happening at overlap points between chip design and biology... that's one I don't know beans about, but I'd be surprised if there aren't skill overlaps, like my nanotech colleagues.
Background: I'm 42 and live in a pretty damn small rural city (75,000 people). That eliminates some of a big city's risk but not sicko abductions of kids and teens, which have always been around here in numbers enough to merit attention (a classmate of mine disappeared in '79 (one of several to disappear, whose remains were found years later by hunters and hikers). So, while I grew up in a similar relaxed era, I'm biased a bit but I think you're right and I've seen numbers to confirm your suspicion:
n _car.htmk ing_to_stra.htmlp eters.cfm
Stats I can google up and have read say the USA has a hundred thousand abductions per year. Just 600 of them are taken by strangers, according to ChildFind. 200 kids per year are abducted and killed by strangers. THE VAST MAJORITY OF ABDUCTIONS ARE NOT BY STRANGERS. They're custody-related.
At a conservative googling of 100k per year, abductions would be worrisome (that's 1 per couple thousand people, or 1 per 500 kids, assuming kids are 25% of the population). But at 1 in a million odds? For this, you're gonna deprive a kid from the outdoors and friends and such!? Heck, that's miniscule compared to the risk a kid faces from drowning, falling off a bike, being the one-in-several-hundred that dies tragically in high school (car wreck, suicide, drinking-related, etc).
We got a handbill several weeks ago (I forget from what official agency) that said 'Don't Talk to Strangers' isn't working. The focus needs to be on avoiding adults that act unusually, warning kids what an inappropriately-acting adult (friend of the family or otherwise) will say or do, who is more trustworthy, and how to run/holler/resist/tattle when an adult acts inappropriately.
So, I (absurdist that I am) take my guidance from Crush, the Sea Turtle in 'Finding Nemo'-- I try to reign in my irrational urge to overprotect, I look for reasonable opportunities to let my kids have more freedom, and my wife and I try to keep the kids outside as much as possible. If I had the time, I'd be subtly lobbying other parents in the neighborhood to do the same.
(links, including a nice geek-friendly Bruce Schneier... though I'd say you should look for something by Oprah if convincing your wife is the goal)
http://www.childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm
http://www.jfox.neu.edu/The_boogeyman_in_the_gree
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/tal
http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2002-09/04
http://www.childfindofamerica.org/prevention.htm
Oh, and my kids are too young for chemistry sets, but I bought one for my young-teen nephews on ebay. $40 for the same one we played with in '75, complete with a bunsen burner, meltable sulphur powder, iron and magnesium shavings, test tubes, and a dozen compounds that'd poison anyone dumb enough to ingest 'em. 40-some bottles of reagents... awesome.
Right, like that has ever crossed the hotel-industry management's minds...
(snorts)
well-understood...
(busts into laughter)
rules... well defined...
(roars with laughter)
I don't know which is funnier, your post
(laughs louder)
or the fact that it is modded up for insightful instead of for funny.
(falls off chair, gasps, struggles to stop laughing so hard)
C'mon, 'fess up: you were being snarky. And if this was a successful trolling, you are da man...
(busts into giggles again)
Wow...
(wipes tears from eyes)
Software engineering being superior to civil engineering --
(starts laughing again).
Poorly understood physics --
(more laughter).
Man, I wanna party with you -- that's some fsckin' brilliant trollage.
Given that another post links to studies where overall accident rates are dropping, I'd submit a ban is overstepping the need. Most-importantly, I know that cellphone use while driving improves first-responder time to accidents, has let me report a dangerously-unsafe driver (road rage, apparently), and that I use my cellphone when I'm tired & 30 minutes from home -- to keep me alert and awake. Given the high number of highway accidents due to road fatigue, that last one is probably the biggest safety IMPROVEMENT that cellphones provide, although I wouldn't diss the impact of *IMMEDIATE* accident reporting.
If being distracting was all it took to provoke a ban, we should look at banning chatty passengers, children (yes, bickering kids in the back seat DO cause accidents), talk-radio, and windows (since we'd drive better if we used our hearing to help us assess driving conditions). And at some point in this hypothetical, the idea becomes absurd.
My own take has been to *LITERALLY* discuss how etiquette changes with nontechie friends and family: given the simplicity of starting/stopping calls, they should be comfortable with saying or being told abrupt conversation-stoppers like 'gotta go', 'hold on', 'I'll call you back' when circumstances dictate. And, like kids-in-the-back-seat, people need to recognize when safety DEMANDS that they pull the car over before giving some non-driving crisis their complete attention.
A ban is a sledge hammer where etiquette changes are a sculpting hammer.
Wow, sparky, that comment's gonna get you some SERIOUS negative karma. Think of all the nerds lucky enough to have wives or girlfriends. Women that put up with our shit on a daily basis... for this post, I'm gonna call them nerd-wifes.
Now, imagine these socially-inept nerds discovering that a regular visit by the junk fairy just takes offering to take old junkers off friends' hands. To a nerd, that sounds like a time-shifter for getting winning lottery numbers or the first chain-letter that is guaranteed to pay off.
I'm a struggling/recovering accumulator of old hardware. Haven't found a 12-point plan to join yet, but a year or so ago, I carried 6 computers and a stack of monitors, SIMM's (yeah, THAT old!) to a charity/thrift store. This took weeks of my darling nerd-wife balancing some blunt requests, coaxing, and a machiavellian blend of passive-aggressive tactics and bedroom gymnastics to convince me. And even then, 4 more have grown back in my garage.
If people started droping random hardware on my porch, my wife'd leave me. I know this. And I can't be the only guy whose gadget fetish is driving some nerd-wife crazy. So you've just poured gasoline on HOW many thousands of these nerd-wife house-fires!?
Serious karma flammage, dude. But, hey... maybe you'll come back as THIS guy. That'd almost be worth it, wouldn't it!?
Thinkpads, Dells, Compaqs, sonys, toshibas... In a decade and under five major brands, including the last 4 doing software QA *USING* a lab of several different models of Sony's and Toshibas, I have *YET* to have a stock Windows laptop handle hibernate/awaken 100% properly. Some app or service or driver won't resurface, the machine corrupts a working file every tenth restart, some app starts hemorrhaging memory (forcing a reboot within an hour), rarely the machine locks up completely, or whatever.
It also takes 3 or 4 times as long to 'reawaken' a hibernated windows PC as my iBook ever needs.
OSX literally does this so efficiently that when working off battery, I routinely *close* my laptop temporarily for any pause in my work, even if it is just a minute or two.
That, coupled with enough processing power to do minor video edits, etc and a 6-hour battery life for conservative use (or 4 hrs of DVD-playing) and the computer itself just quietly mocks every other pc-owner in the room when I use it for meetings, conferences, in-flight, etc. I can't count how many times people have asked, muttered, or complained after seeing my iBook. A macBookPro is DEFINITELY in my near-term future.
Disclaimer: I own some Apple stock. Caveat: I 'switched', and then I bought stock because I was impressed by the above stuff. Curious to fanboy in less than a year.
You ignored my stating this:
Surely by now we've learned that there are nuances in translation. It's been decades since 'the wine is agreeable but the meat has spoiled' plopped out of some bit of literalist translation software. Likewise here: ultraman, superman, overman... they each have a distinctive flavor to their own meaning but none is a WRONG translation of the german uberman [ed: ubermensch, I mean].
Several others said the same thing I said in different ways. And life's too short to deal with rhetorical newbieisms like this, so you got foed and a brief sarcastic reply. Which is actually one of my favorite comments in months, on rereading. You really do come across as a bit too self-important when you refuse to admit that multiple translations exist here. And anyone unwilling to admit so simple a mistake, then further foul things up by ignoring your opponent's substance (the above paragraph)... it's nothin' personal, I just only have the 'foes read at -4' feature of slashdot to make sure I never see your posts again...
Oh, and Kudos to whoever troll-rated me. I shoulda unchecked my default +1 trusted bonus, and am FINE with getting a troll-rating on it.
Wow... you really ARE smarter than GBS *AND* the entire planet's accumulation of AI experts and linguists. There REALLY IS just one way to translate anything between two languages.
Just because you say it twice.
So THAT was the underpants gnomes' business plan:
1 - Steal underpants.
2 - Wear over tights, trademark this as 'superhero' look.
2a - When the term becomes generic, sue Everyone.
3 - Profit!
Pass me a kleenex and some windex so I can clean some scotch tape off this plexiglass -- then we've got to fedex it to our CPA. Oh, and grab a post-it so we can label it.
If superhero hasn't lost trademark after *DECADES* of neglect and noneforcement, nothing has.
Oh, and this case will get won by even a few years of silence when competing comic book or cartoon producers using the term themselves.
What a waste of time and a perversion of everything comic books used to mean to me...
Except by George Bernard Shaw. Who rolled Nietzshe's concept into a play, Man and Superman, a decade before Superman took wing.
Surely by now we've learned that there are nuances in translation. It's been decades since 'the wine is agreeable but the meat has spoiled' plopped out of some bit of literalist translation software. Likewise here: ultraman, superman, overman... they each have a distinctive flavor to their own meaning but none is a WRONG translation of the german uberman.
Yet so many worthless congresscritters manage to do just that. I've got this theory: they're not really empty, but full of s**t.
Um, maybe not. It is *paint* after all. You'd probably just shift from lookin' vaguely Devo to this (worksafe; I just picked a result from googling images with 'blue-hair'...)
Show me. Post some instructions or a URL. I'd like you to demo *FOR ME* your insanely-easy way for us to shared-edit an excel workbook. For simplicity's sake, your example must do only ONE thing to convince me:
I change a field and hit excel's save icon, you hit refresh and we're both on the same page again.
I won't hold my breath. And THAT is the generic case, not some in-LAN trusted share. A wiki does it. Web apps, as I mentioned and you ignored, have the advantage of platform/client being free and anywhere. Second time you've dissed Bricklin without hearing the underlying message. You may not personally in your narrow use-case see this as a need. Also my second and last attempt to explain that you've got tunnel vision. Nobody cares if YOU have a niche use for Excel's sharing that works for you. We're all looking at the same outside world you just mocked Bricklin for ignoring. Then again, you also took a potshot at me for using the word Not. It's a pity your grey matter is limited enough that you have storage quotas-- I heartily recommend you upgrade. Life and language are a lot more colorful if you keep all that slang around. Dip, dope, rube, moron, dolt, dullard, bozo, idiot, plank, toss-pot, wanker, plonker, dipstick, ding-dong, dickhead, dill, fathead, fsckwit, PHB, 1D10T, newbie, clueless... life's grey enough without datestamping cool slang.
Yeah, that's as good as a wiki.
Not.
One company I was at (several hundred very-distributed people) paid $45000 to put in a conference call server. It paid for itself in a few months, we'd gotten so addicted to conference calls without paying attention to the per-line per-minute costs. Even WITH the conference server and a VOIP or similar way of making intra-corporate calls insanely cheap, there's still a per-office broadband cost to shuttling a gig per day of voice data around, especially when you're talking about something as lightweight as a few fields changing in spreadsheet data.
Meanwhile, a wiki server runs on old crap hardware from anywhere, the client is ubiquitous and can run on even the oldest PC, and the wiki tracks changes automatically. I'd imagine a wiki-spreadsheet would allow people to create personal sheets that wander off on tangents (blue-sky ideas, projections, personalized metrics that they care about) and still retain source linkages to *real* data. Those tangents would be shared by default, which would be cool considering off uses like field-editing crappy company phone/email directories and etc. I've encountered over the years.
Don't get me wrong, there's *VALUE* to quick/easy solutions like conference-calls for discussing revisions. The best tools are ones easy enough to be widely used, after all. But don't mock a wiki for being useless just because other tools exist. Besides, hitting 'refresh' on a browser is faster and easier than any shared-Excel paradigm you can possibly contrive. It just IS.
Earth's gravity well technically goes to infinity but *escaping* isn't an infinity problem. Escape Velocity (11.2 km/s for Earth) is the convention... go outward faster than that and you're never returning. By definition, EV is the velocity needed to escape, so your statement that seems to deny the inevitable just seems like you spoke hastily.
Also, the universe is n-body, not 2-body. Once another planet or the sun dominates, you've escaped the earth forever. Yeah, I'm being semantic, but a precise and correct version of your first line probably shouldn't jump from an abstraction like an infinite well to stating that escape means being beyond that well. That's not how astrophysicists use the concept. Technically, Lagrange points also contradict your statement.
The mars rovers escaped Earth's well. Mars and the sun dominate. Earth's influence is orders of magnitude smaller than either of these two... smaller even than Deimos and Phobos. Saying they're in earth's well would get hoots and chuckles, wouldn't it? Saying that about something splatted into the sun would get the same reaction, I presume.
And the Pioneers/Voyagers are running outward so fast and so far away that the sun can't appreciably slow them down -- they're inevitably and completely gone. Yeah, it will be 100,000 years or more at more than 12km/s for something else to have more influence than the sun's... but the sun's been irrelevant since they did their gas-giant slingshot passes 20-30 years ago. And Earth's been irrelevant since a few months after launch.
G'nuff. Those details weren't made clear by your first post, and what I said wasn't meant to be a slur of newegg, just ingrained cynicism. Sometimes it really is cheaper to cut bait, which is what newegg did.
That said, it's nice when companies empower their staff to make small-price decisions, or to do small favors for established customers.
I'm betting your unrefunded shipping costs covered the wholesale value of a USB cable. That means they just got free goodwill, more or less. You're thrilled and buying everything from them because they let you keep a cable that wholesales for a buck and that you were willing to pay $18 for.
By the way... really? $18? That's the price I'm used to seeing from OfficeMax and BestBuy. From newegg, that price'd leave me speechless.
Amen! When /. did 20 q's with Neil, I thought this question was the funniest of a dozen or more that harped on Niel S's endings. According to other comments in the above story, his own take is that he writes the endings he likes and that's that. He's happy with 'em.
Tragic.
Heh, don't be sad, you're probably just gettin burned by slashdot's infamous search mechanism.
Reading the comments, there's plenty of references to IMSAI, ALTAIR, Heathkit, mondo luggables (so I imagine someone mentioned a CP/M kaypro or osborne), Sol, etc. Oh, and maybe you just needed to search for cp/m, not cpm.
LOL. I'd forgotten those days... Academic mainframes, complete with cpu accounting, storage accounting (but an unlimited inbox bypassed THAT limit), easily-duplicated login screens, tricks like using trusted apps to bypass command restrictions, etc.
First computer: Sinclair ZX-80. 1k, memory and screen-memory shared, so it blinked when it thinked. Funny quirk. Membrane keys sucked. I returned it under the free money-back period, though I forget specifically why.
I didn't have much money, and a few years earlier, the only thing I ever saved enough to afford was a Cosmac Elf, which would have been a catastrophic choice given what I wanted to do, and I'm glad I didn't buy it. I bought a baseball mitt. Still have the mitt. Oh, and during the first hobbyist years I wanted an Apple II or a Sol. Or that Cromenco with the huge palette of colors. Hell, I still want a Sol.
I learned to program in '78 at Radio Shack, standing there for an hour after school and plonkin' away on a TRS-80. In return for them letting me stand around for an hour there, I'd leave them some cute demo loop when I bolted on home to watch 4 pm's Star Trek rerun.
First computer I mastered: Apple II. At high school. Also the *last* computer I feel I ever mastered.
First computer I used: timeshare access to a server with a dozen or so text games like blackjack and wumpus.
First computer I owned for very long? A Radio Shack Color Computer. The early one with chiclet keys. Eew, nasty icky poo. My parents bought it, and I tried for years to wreak some semblance of usability out of that POS.
The one that still makes me sigh wistfully? Amiga 1000. I almost sold it several yrs ago on Classifieds2000. COD and the buyer didn't pay when the boxes got to him. I was a bit relieved and tucked it away, still in those boxes.
From comments here and asking friends, why is more interesting than what... I got into computers because of an article in a 1977 Games magazine: "From Spacewar to the Oregon Trail". I'm coming up on 30 years and still can't imagine ever getting bored with computers and the dozen hours a day I spend around 'em.
Oh, and to let Irony drag me a few miles off topic, I flunked typing in '78. Couldn't get past 30wpm with >20 years of computer-jockeying, Mavis Beacon said I clock in between 90 and 130 wpm, but I still hammer the everlovin' shit out of the backspace key.
You think dad's Packard Bell was a poor choice? I'd like to call and raise: my folks bought me a CoCo one Christmas. Money was tight and they meant well, but... damn, that machine was worthless. Utterly and completely. Chiclet keys, no parallel port and a retarded serial port so even printing sourcecode was problematic, dimwitted expansionability even with that 4-port expansion pack, etc. Tried upgrading with a floppy drive, with Edtasm, with OS9... and the OS9 was as close as I got to tolerable and even then I felt I needed another floppy drive (or a hard drive!!) to get anywhere. I had friends doing sprites on the Vic and the 64 and we'd long since become wizards with binary math and indexed-indirect addressing to master machine-language graphics for demos and games on the Apple II. Don't get me wrong: I could see all this crunchy goodness possible in the 6809 instruction set, but try as I might I couldn't get a platform stable enough to do anything. See the myth of Tantalus. I was in hell trying to do anything fun on the CoCo. When I could afford it, I bought an Amiga, and sold the disk drive, but by '86 I couldn't find anyone willing to pay me a nickel for the coco or a couple dozen rom carts.