From what I've understood over the years, it is because those folks emit slightly more carbon dioxide than others and that is what the mosquitoes are attracted to. I, unfortunately, am one of those people. However, I am able to make the claim that "I'm full of hot air" as a result:-)
But to be serious, a mosquito trap basically uses CO2 as bait.
Actually, I think the problem was only on Windows 3.1. I can't say if it was on 3.0, but I've tried this in the past on Windows 2.03 (386) and even 1.0x and it returns the correct 0.01 result.
My question is how did they screw up something as simple as a standard calculator application? Isn't that almost a standard programming assignment in computer science 101 courses?
I was talking about "Photo Cops" this weekend while driving on the Garden State Parkway and saying "if they ever introduced [photo cops] on the GSP, people would be screwed." Referring, of course, to the fact that it is a 55 mph road and everyone was driving 70.
They tried having photo cops on Route 80 in NJ back in the late 80's or early 90's (don't quite remember) and it was simply a camera sticking out of the back of a van. Trip the speed limit, take a photo of the driver, mail summons to person. From what I remember at the time, it caused a bit of an uproar after a few politicians got pictures of them driving with their mistress and the summons envelope being opened by their wife.
Speed enforcement is fine; it keeps people relatively sane with their driving habits. I personally feel that the dangerous ones on the road are the ones who are driving more than 5-10 mph away from the average that everyone else on the section of road is driving. But sometimes you have a clear shot where there is nobody around you and goosing it up several mph to gain some time isn't that big a deal. If an automaton is going to penalize me without any context, that's where I draw the line.
I thought they meant 33 Thomas Street, which is another old switching building but has no windows, unlike the Verizon building they're talking about.
Back in the day (as recent as the late 80s or even early 90s) a lot of downtown Manhattan businesses had multiple phone lines going to every desk at those office high rises. These buildings existed just to house all that equipment, from what I always gathered. While I don't know what it looks like inside today, I'd imagine the technology of today requires only a fraction of that space now.
Forget studying in your dorm room. Go to a study hall and preferably find one of those desks with the walls on three sides so you can get into your own little world. Just try not to sit near the cute girl or that will distract you.
Tesla took this to another level. Their sedan has pretty much vertically rotated 23" LCD touch screen as their control center. Sure, that's great you can google while you're driving (uhh.. hang on..), but this screams "take your eyes off the road and focus on this screen to turn up your radio volume". Now introduce a software upgrade that rearranges buttons and I'm SURE there will be auto accidents because of this "innovation".
I have a feeling you mean 10.5.8; 10.6.x is Snow Leopard which dropped support for PowerPC.
Leopard's 10.5.8 release was in August 2009, according to Wikipedia.
Many years ago I read about how you were dedicating a lot of your time to teaching school kids how to use computers. I was always a fan of yours prior to that, but reading about your work there solidified you as a hero in my book. I think I even sent you an email years ago saying that if you were willing, I'd come out on my own dime to help out for a week (I've always been one of those highly technical people who can actually be patient and teach effectively as well).
Are you ever going to return to this? Sure, I can imagine that kids might not need as much help these days; for those of us who stopped our family VCRs from blinking 12:00, I've always thought that my kids are going to have something similar as they get older with me. But still, do you think you would ever do this again?
Actually, the button does work but in most cases is probably disabled.
In an apartment building, most likely the button does function.
In an office building, most likely the button is disabled. Specifically, the button is disabled by the operator switches (usually those fire marshall keys below the buttons) since they do need to control the doors in some situations. On some of the more advanced elevator systems, I think they might work after a period of specified delay (just an observation).
I forget where I read about this, but it was in the same article explaining how most of the cross walk buttons in NYC aren't even hooked up though at one time they were; when the systems were computerized and synchronized with the rest of the grid, the cost of removing the buttons outweighed the small perceived benefit of having people think they're making a difference.
I've seen this so many times it amazes me. Think you have a lot of mosquitoes on your property? I bet you have a lot of stagnant water pools. No, it isn't your neighbors pond because if they have fish, they're eating the pupa. Most likely, it is that bird bath or that wheelbarrow or that childrens see-saw with the foot wells that collect rain water or, as I see almost all the time, that tarp you have over your firewood that has ever so small puddles of water (like half a cup). Those little wiggling specs of dirt? You better believe they're flying tonight!
</public-service-announcement>
Besides file format, the only compelling reason I can think of is greatly improved speed.
Sure, for 95% of the users out there, they'd never notice and think that Office 2003 is fast enough. However, start working with a several hundred page document in Word. Any time you do anything, you'll see that it drags to a crawl.
Next, take a spreadsheet that includes thousands of rows across multiple sheets with references and calculations across them. You'll discover that 2003 was single threaded and can take 20 minutes to calculate a sheet (ever wonder why there is the option to disable automatic calculation?). Introduce Excel 2010 (never tried 2007) and you'll see that it will happily parallelize the problem across all CPUs.
Though I think the sound quality tends to be awesome, I would suggest avoiding buds that seal your ear canal with a gasket of some sort. For an example, see this picture of what I mean.
Why? Because if you put on your headphones after taking a shower these headphones will seal the moisture in your ear and if you don't keep both your ears AND headphones clean (I mean wiping with alcohol or something), it will create a perfect environment for an ear infection to form. I had two painful ones before I realized it was the headphones and switched to a different design.
It is a shame since you can hear everything beautifully with these kinds of headphones. I've realized it is either buy some cans (read: large whole ear covering kind) or "fits in your ear" type buds (like what comes with an iPod) for the best and least infection prone experience.
Interesting, I was under the impression that Rosetta emulated a G4. If you used the G5 specific functions I think you might have been out of luck, but I've never tried it.
If they're using standard components, then why is the darn thing so expensive? Sure, the Xeon processors gouge your wallet, but the fact that you're supplying your own display should at least put the cost on par with the high spec iMacs.
I have an early 2008 model and I think it is great, but after realizing that the only real upgrading I could do within a reasonable budget was RAM and hard disk (graphics card is price locked for Mac-usable ones), I think I'm fairly relegated to getting an iMac instead next time.
I've had data only plans for years. Unlimited international, at that.
The big difference is that if I actually make a phone call on that device, it costs me about $0.50/min domestic, and add on the roaming charge for international (e.g. about $2/min in the UK, $4/min in Poland, etc.)
I've had a BlackBerry since the 950 "belt clip 2-way pager with a AA battery" (circa 1999). Always from the company, never personal purchase. I've never had a battery that bad. You either have a defective battery or you are killing it with how you're draining or charging it (and this would go for ANY rechargable battery in ANY phone).
I will admit that my current Torch 9810's battery just got replaced at the AT&T warranty shop since it would no longer take a charge after letting it completely drain over 4 days. Device and battery isn't 7 months old. However, I have read on the forums that the F-S1 battery (which I think is only the Torch 9800 and 9810) seems to have had a bad batch or two out there. Funny though, it would hold a charge for 3 days with usage even though they said it was bad.
Usability? It freezes for minutes at a time.
This I won't argue too much with. I've had my 9810 freeze for 20 seconds at times for no reason. Memory management? Heavy garbage collection? No idea. Certainly not as fluid as my iPhone, but minutes? I think you're exaggerating.
1024*768 was pretty much the standard in 1999. Though a lot of idiots may have ran at 800*600 no one ran at 640 * 480 unless they were still running windows 3.0!
Actually, I knew of people running at 640x480 because "it was easier to read". Tried to show them that if they increased to 800x600 or 1024x768 they could increase the font size, but then your icons got smaller and thus the cycle repeats...
True, the revision A board wouldn't work. There was actually a jumper on the Apple Extended 80-column Card that existed because of this (I'm figuring it simply enabled/disabled the feature). However, since this only affected the initial run of motherboards and Apple did offer free upgrades, I left that detail out.
I got my//e in May 1984 and it wasn't a revision A.
Back then the Apple II had swappable video cards.
Huh? *If* such cards existed they were certainly so rare that hardly anyone had them, a real niche thing. Are you thinking of the 80 column card? It added 64K RAM too but I don't recall this card enhancing graphics. My recollection as a former Apple II,//e, and C-64 programmer is that on the Apple II you had bitmapped graphics and that on the C-64 you also had bitmapped graphics, but it was better, plus specialized hardware support for sprites. The Apple was primitive in comparison.
Actually, the 80 column card on the Apple//e did enhance the graphics capabilities. It added what was referred to as Double-LoRes and Double-HiRes modes.
On the Apple ][ series, there was always Lo-Res graphics that were 40x40 with 16 fixed colors. Good for things like Breakout and used the memory space of the text mode display. Hi-Res originally was 280x192 with 4 colors on revision 0 boards, but updated to 6 unique colors shortly thereafter (we're talking 1977). There were 80 column boards made by various companies back in the day for the Apple ][ series, but they tended to be separate output connectors and non-standard. As well, there was at least one graphics board that used some TMS chips (I think), but I don't recall ever seeing software utilizing it. As well, there were later RGB boards but similar fate, if I remember correctly.
When the Apple//e came out, most people installed 80 column boards in the AUX slot to enable a standard 80 column mode and add an additional 64KB with the "extended" version. The "double modes" were basically taking advantage of bank switching and doubled the horizontal resolution of text (80 cols!), lo-res (now 80x40) and hi-res (now 560x192). Lo-res didn't gain color capability, only resolution. Hi-res, on the other hand, since the original mode was basically an NTSC hack, it allowed the Apple to tweak the colorburst and phasing more to produce 16 colors instead of just the original 6.
So in short, the 80 column card in an Apple//e (and subsequent models) did enhance the graphics, but only for applications which used it. However, unlike other graphics boards that did exist, the double hi-res mode was far more commonly taken advantage of.
They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Sounds like Palm (pre-WebOS) all over again. This is what happens when a company takes over a market segment and then doesn't aggressively push forward. Nobody is steering the company vision.
money can be brought into existence regardless of whether it actually represents anything
This is exactly what new regulations like Basel 3 are addressing. In short, banks need to have a certain percentage of capital to backup any financial objects they create. In other words, with this regulation you can no longer just create money out of thin air.
I skipped my High School reunion primarily because the cost of going to it was pretty high considering that I already was in touch with everyone through Facebook.
There was a period a few years ago when it seems that I friended or was friended-by everyone I was friends with or socially on neutral terms with (I refused to connect with the few ass hats I never liked from those years). I can pretty much find out whatever I want at any time and if I felt compelled to make an impromtu reunion, I could (and "we" have, speaking from the network of people). When the official reunion came up asking for over $100/person, I had a hard time justifying it.
Sure, people went and now I actually regret somewhat not going since there is something to be said about having a proper organized place for all these people to get together. And for the folks who say that "why would I ever want to see XXXX?" The most common thing I heard from a range of friends was that they had a blast hanging out with people that they weren't friends with or never talked to in their life.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I've understood over the years, it is because those folks emit slightly more carbon dioxide than others and that is what the mosquitoes are attracted to. I, unfortunately, am one of those people. However, I am able to make the claim that "I'm full of hot air" as a result :-)
But to be serious, a mosquito trap basically uses CO2 as bait.
Actually, I think the problem was only on Windows 3.1. I can't say if it was on 3.0, but I've tried this in the past on Windows 2.03 (386) and even 1.0x and it returns the correct 0.01 result. My question is how did they screw up something as simple as a standard calculator application? Isn't that almost a standard programming assignment in computer science 101 courses?
Considering Jobs and Woz made no claims to knowing what it meant at the time, it was amusing to see Jean-Louis Gassée's book 20 years or so ago called "The First Apple". Had a picture of Sir Issac Newton sitting under an serpent-laden apple tree with a Macintosh. Birth of history (if you consider the bible as such), birth of science (if you consider Newton and the gravity apple as such), and birth of computer revolution (if you consider the Macintosh as such). Clever.
They tried having photo cops on Route 80 in NJ back in the late 80's or early 90's (don't quite remember) and it was simply a camera sticking out of the back of a van. Trip the speed limit, take a photo of the driver, mail summons to person. From what I remember at the time, it caused a bit of an uproar after a few politicians got pictures of them driving with their mistress and the summons envelope being opened by their wife.
Speed enforcement is fine; it keeps people relatively sane with their driving habits. I personally feel that the dangerous ones on the road are the ones who are driving more than 5-10 mph away from the average that everyone else on the section of road is driving. But sometimes you have a clear shot where there is nobody around you and goosing it up several mph to gain some time isn't that big a deal. If an automaton is going to penalize me without any context, that's where I draw the line.
Back in the day (as recent as the late 80s or even early 90s) a lot of downtown Manhattan businesses had multiple phone lines going to every desk at those office high rises. These buildings existed just to house all that equipment, from what I always gathered. While I don't know what it looks like inside today, I'd imagine the technology of today requires only a fraction of that space now.
Lobbyists will have to email and thus hopefully get caught by spam filters?
Forget studying in your dorm room. Go to a study hall and preferably find one of those desks with the walls on three sides so you can get into your own little world. Just try not to sit near the cute girl or that will distract you.
Tesla took this to another level. Their sedan has pretty much vertically rotated 23" LCD touch screen as their control center. Sure, that's great you can google while you're driving (uhh.. hang on..), but this screams "take your eyes off the road and focus on this screen to turn up your radio volume". Now introduce a software upgrade that rearranges buttons and I'm SURE there will be auto accidents because of this "innovation".
I have a feeling you mean 10.5.8; 10.6.x is Snow Leopard which dropped support for PowerPC. Leopard's 10.5.8 release was in August 2009, according to Wikipedia.
Are you ever going to return to this? Sure, I can imagine that kids might not need as much help these days; for those of us who stopped our family VCRs from blinking 12:00, I've always thought that my kids are going to have something similar as they get older with me. But still, do you think you would ever do this again?
In an apartment building, most likely the button does function.
In an office building, most likely the button is disabled. Specifically, the button is disabled by the operator switches (usually those fire marshall keys below the buttons) since they do need to control the doors in some situations. On some of the more advanced elevator systems, I think they might work after a period of specified delay (just an observation).
I forget where I read about this, but it was in the same article explaining how most of the cross walk buttons in NYC aren't even hooked up though at one time they were; when the systems were computerized and synchronized with the rest of the grid, the cost of removing the buttons outweighed the small perceived benefit of having people think they're making a difference.
I've seen this so many times it amazes me. Think you have a lot of mosquitoes on your property? I bet you have a lot of stagnant water pools. No, it isn't your neighbors pond because if they have fish, they're eating the pupa. Most likely, it is that bird bath or that wheelbarrow or that childrens see-saw with the foot wells that collect rain water or, as I see almost all the time, that tarp you have over your firewood that has ever so small puddles of water (like half a cup). Those little wiggling specs of dirt? You better believe they're flying tonight!
</public-service-announcement>
Sure, for 95% of the users out there, they'd never notice and think that Office 2003 is fast enough. However, start working with a several hundred page document in Word. Any time you do anything, you'll see that it drags to a crawl.
Next, take a spreadsheet that includes thousands of rows across multiple sheets with references and calculations across them. You'll discover that 2003 was single threaded and can take 20 minutes to calculate a sheet (ever wonder why there is the option to disable automatic calculation?). Introduce Excel 2010 (never tried 2007) and you'll see that it will happily parallelize the problem across all CPUs.
Why? Because if you put on your headphones after taking a shower these headphones will seal the moisture in your ear and if you don't keep both your ears AND headphones clean (I mean wiping with alcohol or something), it will create a perfect environment for an ear infection to form. I had two painful ones before I realized it was the headphones and switched to a different design.
It is a shame since you can hear everything beautifully with these kinds of headphones. I've realized it is either buy some cans (read: large whole ear covering kind) or "fits in your ear" type buds (like what comes with an iPod) for the best and least infection prone experience.
Interesting, I was under the impression that Rosetta emulated a G4. If you used the G5 specific functions I think you might have been out of luck, but I've never tried it.
I have an early 2008 model and I think it is great, but after realizing that the only real upgrading I could do within a reasonable budget was RAM and hard disk (graphics card is price locked for Mac-usable ones), I think I'm fairly relegated to getting an iMac instead next time.
The big difference is that if I actually make a phone call on that device, it costs me about $0.50/min domestic, and add on the roaming charge for international (e.g. about $2/min in the UK, $4/min in Poland, etc.)
I've had a BlackBerry since the 950 "belt clip 2-way pager with a AA battery" (circa 1999). Always from the company, never personal purchase. I've never had a battery that bad. You either have a defective battery or you are killing it with how you're draining or charging it (and this would go for ANY rechargable battery in ANY phone).
I will admit that my current Torch 9810's battery just got replaced at the AT&T warranty shop since it would no longer take a charge after letting it completely drain over 4 days. Device and battery isn't 7 months old. However, I have read on the forums that the F-S1 battery (which I think is only the Torch 9800 and 9810) seems to have had a bad batch or two out there. Funny though, it would hold a charge for 3 days with usage even though they said it was bad.
This I won't argue too much with. I've had my 9810 freeze for 20 seconds at times for no reason. Memory management? Heavy garbage collection? No idea. Certainly not as fluid as my iPhone, but minutes? I think you're exaggerating.
Shh! I think there's one hiding in the lamp!
Damn, those suckers have gotten small...
Actually, I knew of people running at 640x480 because "it was easier to read". Tried to show them that if they increased to 800x600 or 1024x768 they could increase the font size, but then your icons got smaller and thus the cycle repeats...
I got my //e in May 1984 and it wasn't a revision A.
Actually, the 80 column card on the Apple //e did enhance the graphics capabilities. It added what was referred to as Double-LoRes and Double-HiRes modes.
On the Apple ][ series, there was always Lo-Res graphics that were 40x40 with 16 fixed colors. Good for things like Breakout and used the memory space of the text mode display. Hi-Res originally was 280x192 with 4 colors on revision 0 boards, but updated to 6 unique colors shortly thereafter (we're talking 1977). There were 80 column boards made by various companies back in the day for the Apple ][ series, but they tended to be separate output connectors and non-standard. As well, there was at least one graphics board that used some TMS chips (I think), but I don't recall ever seeing software utilizing it. As well, there were later RGB boards but similar fate, if I remember correctly.
When the Apple //e came out, most people installed 80 column boards in the AUX slot to enable a standard 80 column mode and add an additional 64KB with the "extended" version. The "double modes" were basically taking advantage of bank switching and doubled the horizontal resolution of text (80 cols!), lo-res (now 80x40) and hi-res (now 560x192). Lo-res didn't gain color capability, only resolution. Hi-res, on the other hand, since the original mode was basically an NTSC hack, it allowed the Apple to tweak the colorburst and phasing more to produce 16 colors instead of just the original 6.
So in short, the 80 column card in an Apple //e (and subsequent models) did enhance the graphics, but only for applications which used it. However, unlike other graphics boards that did exist, the double hi-res mode was far more commonly taken advantage of.
Sounds like Palm (pre-WebOS) all over again. This is what happens when a company takes over a market segment and then doesn't aggressively push forward. Nobody is steering the company vision.
This is exactly what new regulations like Basel 3 are addressing. In short, banks need to have a certain percentage of capital to backup any financial objects they create. In other words, with this regulation you can no longer just create money out of thin air.
There was a period a few years ago when it seems that I friended or was friended-by everyone I was friends with or socially on neutral terms with (I refused to connect with the few ass hats I never liked from those years). I can pretty much find out whatever I want at any time and if I felt compelled to make an impromtu reunion, I could (and "we" have, speaking from the network of people). When the official reunion came up asking for over $100/person, I had a hard time justifying it.
Sure, people went and now I actually regret somewhat not going since there is something to be said about having a proper organized place for all these people to get together. And for the folks who say that "why would I ever want to see XXXX?" The most common thing I heard from a range of friends was that they had a blast hanging out with people that they weren't friends with or never talked to in their life.
I'll definitely go to the next one.