As long as parents continue setting up their old computers for their pre-teen kids to play games on (and hopefully type papers and do homework research), there will be a market for game software developed for those computers.
I just had a colonoscopy on Friday, the first of what I expect will be several over the course of my remaining life, as there's colon cancer in the family and I'm now in the age range where Things Start To Go Kerflooey.
Frankly, given the build-up I'd heard, I was disappointed at how unpleasant the whole procedure was not. Yeah, going a day without solid food beforehand was a nuisance, and the induced diarrhea (and the accompanying lack of sleep, since my procedure was first thing in the morning, and the last dose of laxative has to be taken 5 hours prior) wasn't exactly fun. But by far the most unpleasant part of the whole experience was the mundane discomfort of repeated wiping. (Tip: instead of TP, use your bathtub as a bidet and a plush towel to dry off.)
The procedure itself? The drugs they give you send you so far into la-la land that it won't bother you, and the guys who find the very notion of someone exploring their rectum discomforting on a homophobic psychological level will be relieved that they won't even remember the experience. It's a bit like a drugged date rape with signed consent forms.:) Seriously, there was absolutely no residual pain, and a few days later it's as if it never happened... except for the fact that I now know that my colon is healthy, rather than hoping and wondering.
The bottom line (no pun intended): If there's any history of colon cancer in your family and you're over 40, or your doctor recommends it for any other reason, don't wait for nanobots or whatever to get your colon checked out. Better to have a camera shoved up your ass now than to have your colon turned into a semi-colon and get put on chemo a few years from now.
My next-cubicle neighbor at a previous job used a large fan under his desk to generate "white noise" to down out surrounding sounds. I referred to it as his Tesla coil, due to the amount of electromagnetic disruption it seemed to generate on our shared power circuit.
Someone give the writer of TFA a cookie. Like every geek of my generation (12 when the Atari 2600 came out) I used to play a lot of games on my computers. But the only thing I've seen in the past decade that interested me at all was Myst... or was that more than a decade ago? And some of the things this "manifesto" complains about are a large part of the reason: it's pretty much all just a bunch of high-frames-per-second eye candy in genres I find incredibly boring. Maybe when they start making games for people who aren't retarded 15-year-old boys with hard-ons for sports and the military, I'll give them a look. Until then, I'm gonna see if I can get an Infocom emulator running on my computer and play Zork.
The bottom line is that it's taking individuals longer and longer to "innovate" because there's more and more "foundation" for them to assimilate before they get far enough to come up with something more. To "stand on the shoulders of giants" now takes 30-40 years of climbing.
It was only for a couple weeks, but a few years ago I kept going way past the Bridge, all the way to Isle Royale. The PDA, the cell phone, etc. stayed at home, and the data center had to run itself. The only electricity-powered gear I brought with me were a flashlight and my 1980s-vintage 35mm SLR (which really only needs electricity for the light meter). I navigated with a map and compass. I kept a journal with pencil and paper. And of course I carried everything. It was difficult at times, but I quickly found myself more at peace than I'd been in years. I long to go back.
Nice snappy comeback, but you don't hear commercial stations just suddenly interrupt a song to bring you a station ID. Now, they have live DJ's, but....
Um, no they don't.
Not on overnights. Not at a commercial station in 2005.
OK, I'm over-generalising a little, but at most commercial radio stations, the only person in the building at 3am is the guy watching the monitors (usually covering several stations at once, because even if it isn't one of the several Clear-Channel stations in that market, it's probably owned by another multi-station company). It's simply not cost-effective to pay someone to actually push buttons (or open a mike and talk) at that hour, when you can get a computer to do it for you. If you turn on a commercial radio station and hear a voice talking during overnights, it was probably recorded the day before, and inserted by whatever proprietary software they have running the place. Top-of-hour (within FCC paramaters) station IDs are a standard feature of those systems.
Psion really only had two problems: not enough U.S. marketing, and product-design people who overestimated the durability of the materials that the devices would be made of. Otherwise their devices were first-rate. A couple years ago, my Revo broke beyond repair and I finally gave in and bought a PalmOS PDA. Within a couple months I was on eBay looking for Revo; PalmOS just couldn't hold a candle to EPOC. I take the Revo with me just about any time I leave the house, and use it frequently for logging ideas and so on. In a pinch, I use it to actually compose text, but the keyboard's a bit cramped for much of that. I have a Windows 98 machine with an RS232 serial port that I maintain specifically to run the backup/link software for it. I plan to hold out as long as I can, using it until something with a comparable combination of portability and usability comes along.
(The older Psion Series3a is worth considering for this sort of use. The software isn't as sophisticated, and the keyboard isn't as good, but it has the advantage of using replaceable AAs, so its prospects for long-term use are better than for the Revo, whose batteries will eventually refuse to hold a charge.)
Another example of old tech that would meet the OP's wants (if adapted for modern standards) is the old Poqet PC, a DOS-capable 8088 with an 80x25 character screen that runs for days on a couple AAs and a just-typable keyboard, in a package the size of a VHS cassette. Replace the PCMCIA slots with a recessed USB port and a fitted flash drive, load it with a wordprocessor app that can write RTF files, and you'd be good to go.
You seem to be thinking of the TRS-80 Model 1. He's talking about the TRS-80 Model 10x, which included a nice keyboard, a (by modern standards) barely adequate LCD, some basic software, and literally days of battery life into a package roughly the size of a ream of paper. They won't fit in a pocket, but other than that they're roughly the sort of tech the OP was asking for.
But can you run Linux on it?
on
Just a Phone?
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· Score: 1
When life begins isn't the question, since we routinely destroy life for far more trivial purposes than this. "What is a person?" is the real question, and the crux of the abortion and cloning debates.
Um, where exactly would you attach it, and what exactly would you do with it once it was in place? This sounds more like a guy's fantasy than any girlfriend's.
I can't see a person's "minor" making much of a difference beyond their first job out of college. It's kind of like how no one looks at your high school GPA except college admissions departments and maybe your first post-college employer, how you might as well drop the extra-curricular college activities from your resume when you go shopping for your second or third job, and after 10 years in the working world they might not even bother looking at your college GPA at all.
I was on track for a Math minor as an undergrad, but flunked a class (didn't bother doing the homework, which turned out to be essential to passing the tests), and suddenly had to think about whether I really needed to dig myself out of that hole and struggle through the last couple courses. I didn't. They really didn't interest me enough. And no one has cared. My employers have all been far more interested in my work experience and abilities, not whether I took Differential Equations.
I also didn't major in Philosophy, but was only a few courses short of that as well. I don't regret that either... both taking the classes and not taking them all. The point is that I took the non-major classes I took because I wanted to learn the material (and I mentioned them in my interviews to make sure my potential employers knew that). Getting a formal minor to put on my resume didn't really matter.
I'm not sure it's related to the profession necessarily. I've had tech jobs that I hated and which drove me into depression, and ones that left me feeling pretty good about my work and myself.
A year ago, I was so miserable in my then-new job that I hated getting up in the morning and so consistently irritable that my boss was convinced I had an anger management problem. But that's largely because I was working for a boss whose first instinct when he saw a new employee having difficulties was to diagnose him as having an anger management problem, and whose approach to "customer service" was based on being unfailingly polite to them... and doing as little as possible for them.
Now I work for a boss who trusts me to use my own judgment, assumes (without her constant supervision) that I'm working in good faith to do my best, and encourages looking at support requests as puzzles to solve, which is by far more interesting than treating them as tickets to answer and close as quickly as possible. It's almost exactly the same job... but so much better for my mental health.
Am I gloriously happy and eager to go every day? Of course not... but I'm a lot better, and most of the depression I drag around these days comes from my personal life, not from my job.
This statement means next to nothing. The whole point of this section of SEC filings is ass-covering. Corporations list everything they can think of that might make their share price decline, so they can point to that statement when/if someone later accuses them of covering up the fact that it was coming.
Sure, it's a fun place to dig up speculative dirt, but that's all it is: speculation, and anyone who reads an SEC filing without this basic understanding of what he's actually looking at is... the kind of person who posts stories like this to Slashdot.
There appears to be a very strange mystical connection between warezed serial numbers and porn.
The connection is a certain class of "ethics". The people who distribute serialz on the net generally don't have any compunctions against distributing pornographic adware. Heck, serialz may simply be the bait they use to get eyeballs for their popup commissions.
On the occasions (like the one described here) in which I'm forced to go looking for a serial number, I make sure I do it on a machine that lacks the usual vulnerabilities to adware (e.g. Linux/OS X with Firefox/Konqueror/Safari).
I was hired a year ago to take over job responsibilities that used to be taken care of by student employees (on the principle that if you throw cheap enough labor at something it'll get done cost-effectively).
Oy.
Not pretty.
Now, as the responsible professional, I supervise a bunch of similar student employees, which is nearly a full-time job in itself. I ask them to do something, and they do something vaguely similar to what I asked, but not really. And they do it slightly different on each machine they do it to. Checking and fixing their work is still less work for me than doing it all myself... but not by a wide margin.
I'm sure there are a bunch of fully-developed options available, and probably even some nifty free-as-in-free ones. But every x years I get hired somewhere as "the tech guy" and before long I just build a simple database app to do this. In the past I've used M*cr*s*ft Acc*ss, but next time I'll probably do it with MySQL and a PHP-based browser interface. Using a home-grown system makes it easy to include just the functionality you need and to adapt as your needs change.
{sigh} LCARS was the interface, which (as all seasoned techs know) replaced KNOME but still ran on top of X11. The underlying OS, of course, was GNU, and at the time of NX-01's launch, used the HURD 1.0 as its kernel.
Except in Engineering, of course, where the systems ran OS/2 Warp 5. (Y'all heard Trip mention that from time to time, right?)
With an SE/30 and the rather modest requisite RAM, you should be able to run the free(beer) System 7.5.5 pretty nicely, which means you can use OpenTransport, which will give you pretty good TCP/IP support. And that, of course, means you can network it to anything.
FTP (e.g. Fetch) is probably your best means of transferring files between that box and any other machines. Put MacHTTP on it, and you've got a decent low-volume web server. iCab is your best option for a web browser; it's both modern and compatible with old Systems.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as parents continue setting up their old computers for their pre-teen kids to play games on (and hopefully type papers and do homework research), there will be a market for game software developed for those computers.
Frankly, given the build-up I'd heard, I was disappointed at how unpleasant the whole procedure was not . Yeah, going a day without solid food beforehand was a nuisance, and the induced diarrhea (and the accompanying lack of sleep, since my procedure was first thing in the morning, and the last dose of laxative has to be taken 5 hours prior) wasn't exactly fun. But by far the most unpleasant part of the whole experience was the mundane discomfort of repeated wiping. (Tip: instead of TP, use your bathtub as a bidet and a plush towel to dry off.)
The procedure itself? The drugs they give you send you so far into la-la land that it won't bother you, and the guys who find the very notion of someone exploring their rectum discomforting on a homophobic psychological level will be relieved that they won't even remember the experience. It's a bit like a drugged date rape with signed consent forms. :) Seriously, there was absolutely no residual pain, and a few days later it's as if it never happened... except for the fact that I now know that my colon is healthy, rather than hoping and wondering.
The bottom line (no pun intended): If there's any history of colon cancer in your family and you're over 40, or your doctor recommends it for any other reason, don't wait for nanobots or whatever to get your colon checked out. Better to have a camera shoved up your ass now than to have your colon turned into a semi-colon and get put on chemo a few years from now.
My next-cubicle neighbor at a previous job used a large fan under his desk to generate "white noise" to down out surrounding sounds. I referred to it as his Tesla coil, due to the amount of electromagnetic disruption it seemed to generate on our shared power circuit.
Someone give the writer of TFA a cookie. Like every geek of my generation (12 when the Atari 2600 came out) I used to play a lot of games on my computers. But the only thing I've seen in the past decade that interested me at all was Myst... or was that more than a decade ago? And some of the things this "manifesto" complains about are a large part of the reason: it's pretty much all just a bunch of high-frames-per-second eye candy in genres I find incredibly boring. Maybe when they start making games for people who aren't retarded 15-year-old boys with hard-ons for sports and the military, I'll give them a look. Until then, I'm gonna see if I can get an Infocom emulator running on my computer and play Zork.
The bottom line is that it's taking individuals longer and longer to "innovate" because there's more and more "foundation" for them to assimilate before they get far enough to come up with something more. To "stand on the shoulders of giants" now takes 30-40 years of climbing.
OK, technically it's brownian motion, but isn't that random enough?
It was only for a couple weeks, but a few years ago I kept going way past the Bridge, all the way to Isle Royale. The PDA, the cell phone, etc. stayed at home, and the data center had to run itself. The only electricity-powered gear I brought with me were a flashlight and my 1980s-vintage 35mm SLR (which really only needs electricity for the light meter). I navigated with a map and compass. I kept a journal with pencil and paper. And of course I carried everything. It was difficult at times, but I quickly found myself more at peace than I'd been in years. I long to go back.
There's a qualitative difference between "condemning" something as immoral (crimes) and "condemning" something as useless (technology).
Um, no they don't.
Not on overnights. Not at a commercial station in 2005.
OK, I'm over-generalising a little, but at most commercial radio stations, the only person in the building at 3am is the guy watching the monitors (usually covering several stations at once, because even if it isn't one of the several Clear-Channel stations in that market, it's probably owned by another multi-station company). It's simply not cost-effective to pay someone to actually push buttons (or open a mike and talk) at that hour, when you can get a computer to do it for you. If you turn on a commercial radio station and hear a voice talking during overnights, it was probably recorded the day before, and inserted by whatever proprietary software they have running the place. Top-of-hour (within FCC paramaters) station IDs are a standard feature of those systems.
Psion really only had two problems: not enough U.S. marketing, and product-design people who overestimated the durability of the materials that the devices would be made of. Otherwise their devices were first-rate. A couple years ago, my Revo broke beyond repair and I finally gave in and bought a PalmOS PDA. Within a couple months I was on eBay looking for Revo; PalmOS just couldn't hold a candle to EPOC. I take the Revo with me just about any time I leave the house, and use it frequently for logging ideas and so on. In a pinch, I use it to actually compose text, but the keyboard's a bit cramped for much of that. I have a Windows 98 machine with an RS232 serial port that I maintain specifically to run the backup/link software for it. I plan to hold out as long as I can, using it until something with a comparable combination of portability and usability comes along.
(The older Psion Series3a is worth considering for this sort of use. The software isn't as sophisticated, and the keyboard isn't as good, but it has the advantage of using replaceable AAs, so its prospects for long-term use are better than for the Revo, whose batteries will eventually refuse to hold a charge.)
Another example of old tech that would meet the OP's wants (if adapted for modern standards) is the old Poqet PC, a DOS-capable 8088 with an 80x25 character screen that runs for days on a couple AAs and a just-typable keyboard, in a package the size of a VHS cassette. Replace the PCMCIA slots with a recessed USB port and a fitted flash drive, load it with a wordprocessor app that can write RTF files, and you'd be good to go.
You seem to be thinking of the TRS-80 Model 1. He's talking about the TRS-80 Model 10x, which included a nice keyboard, a (by modern standards) barely adequate LCD, some basic software, and literally days of battery life into a package roughly the size of a ream of paper. They won't fit in a pocket, but other than that they're roughly the sort of tech the OP was asking for.
nuff said ;)
When life begins isn't the question, since we routinely destroy life for far more trivial purposes than this. "What is a person?" is the real question, and the crux of the abortion and cloning debates.
Um, where exactly would you attach it, and what exactly would you do with it once it was in place? This sounds more like a guy's fantasy than any girlfriend's.
I was on track for a Math minor as an undergrad, but flunked a class (didn't bother doing the homework, which turned out to be essential to passing the tests), and suddenly had to think about whether I really needed to dig myself out of that hole and struggle through the last couple courses. I didn't. They really didn't interest me enough. And no one has cared. My employers have all been far more interested in my work experience and abilities, not whether I took Differential Equations.
I also didn't major in Philosophy, but was only a few courses short of that as well. I don't regret that either... both taking the classes and not taking them all. The point is that I took the non-major classes I took because I wanted to learn the material (and I mentioned them in my interviews to make sure my potential employers knew that). Getting a formal minor to put on my resume didn't really matter.
A year ago, I was so miserable in my then-new job that I hated getting up in the morning and so consistently irritable that my boss was convinced I had an anger management problem. But that's largely because I was working for a boss whose first instinct when he saw a new employee having difficulties was to diagnose him as having an anger management problem, and whose approach to "customer service" was based on being unfailingly polite to them... and doing as little as possible for them.
Now I work for a boss who trusts me to use my own judgment, assumes (without her constant supervision) that I'm working in good faith to do my best, and encourages looking at support requests as puzzles to solve, which is by far more interesting than treating them as tickets to answer and close as quickly as possible. It's almost exactly the same job... but so much better for my mental health.
Am I gloriously happy and eager to go every day? Of course not... but I'm a lot better, and most of the depression I drag around these days comes from my personal life, not from my job.
Sure, it's a fun place to dig up speculative dirt, but that's all it is: speculation, and anyone who reads an SEC filing without this basic understanding of what he's actually looking at is... the kind of person who posts stories like this to Slashdot.
The connection is a certain class of "ethics". The people who distribute serialz on the net generally don't have any compunctions against distributing pornographic adware. Heck, serialz may simply be the bait they use to get eyeballs for their popup commissions.
On the occasions (like the one described here) in which I'm forced to go looking for a serial number, I make sure I do it on a machine that lacks the usual vulnerabilities to adware (e.g. Linux/OS X with Firefox/Konqueror/Safari).
Which means that, instead of waiting 26 years between trilogies like last time, they'll have Episode VII out 2.6 years from now instead!
Oy.
Not pretty.
Now, as the responsible professional, I supervise a bunch of similar student employees, which is nearly a full-time job in itself. I ask them to do something, and they do something vaguely similar to what I asked, but not really. And they do it slightly different on each machine they do it to. Checking and fixing their work is still less work for me than doing it all myself... but not by a wide margin.
I'm sure there are a bunch of fully-developed options available, and probably even some nifty free-as-in-free ones. But every x years I get hired somewhere as "the tech guy" and before long I just build a simple database app to do this. In the past I've used M*cr*s*ft Acc*ss, but next time I'll probably do it with MySQL and a PHP-based browser interface. Using a home-grown system makes it easy to include just the functionality you need and to adapt as your needs change.
{sigh} LCARS was the interface, which (as all seasoned techs know) replaced KNOME but still ran on top of X11. The underlying OS, of course, was GNU, and at the time of NX-01's launch, used the HURD 1.0 as its kernel.
Except in Engineering, of course, where the systems ran OS/2 Warp 5. (Y'all heard Trip mention that from time to time, right?)
Au contraire! I'm sure mine isn't nearly as big as others', but what I can do with it is pretty amazing (IMHO). That's what really matters.
FTP (e.g. Fetch) is probably your best means of transferring files between that box and any other machines. Put MacHTTP on it, and you've got a decent low-volume web server. iCab is your best option for a web browser; it's both modern and compatible with old Systems.
And instead of the big UPS, I have several small ones plus a generator?