It certainly at least neck-and-neck with "Meet Me in St. Louis". They are both about how great it is to have a good home. The "Wizard of Oz" has better music. A pox on that Christmas song!
Frank Capra made many movies much better than "It's a Wonderful Life".
"White Heat" is memorable, but only because it was so overdone, not to mention Cody Jarrett.
If you are going to recognize Preston Sturgis, despite his somewhat abbreviated career, why not "Sullivan's Travels" instead of "Lady Eve".
Howcome WC Fields makes it but the Marx Brothers don't? I like them both, but if they are trying to make funny movies and you laugh twice as much at one as at the other, which is better?
"Ninotchka" and "Camille" can't hold a candle to her "Grand Hotel". Her "I want to be alone" character was her best, and the rest of the cast was stellar, too.
They should honor the guy who did those. He did not work at NASA when Apollo 13 happened. He had worked for them about five years previous as some kind of student intern or something. He figured out stuff like that and put it in the file. When they had a sudden need, they pulled the plan out, and it was good to go.
Facts are over-rated. Unless your marketing gets leverage from focused delivery of the enabling concepts of your value proposition to your target demographic, at the end of the day, your enterprise will have no traction.
For those of you who want a job in marketing, read my book on "Straight-Faced Inanity -- Taming the
Sharks in the Global Jungle" (when it comes out).
WRONG! Probabilities can't increase exponentially except in a narrow range in which they are small. After all, an upper bound on the probability of anything is 1.0. Exponentially increasing functions don't have any upper bound. They increase faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and eventually increase like really fast, faster than anything you can imagine. There is no limit to how fast they increase. There is no limit to how fast their rate of increase increases. There is no limit to how fast the rate of increase of their rate of increase increases. Etc... Take three derivatives and call me in the morning.
Take a look inside your walls. I'll bet you've got thermal insulation in there that is in those rolls sandwiched between aluminum foil. That will put a pretty good dent in the UHF and up, but the RF will leak out elsewhere.
Wonder why they excluded medical innovations?
Improvements in surgery -- heart, eye, and the kinds they do without cutting you open are bigger than the things on the list. But, outside of medicine, we have these innovations:
Reagan's Star Wars, which we will be paying for forever.
Bush & Rice's Missile Defense, which we will be paying for forever.
Al Gore's Global Disaster Information Network, which save 75,000 lives during the Christmas tsunami, except it didn't because the Republican Congress in 1998 wouldn't consider funding anything that came from Gore.
Miniature spare tires and
Car jacks that let you jack your car up but not down.
Cupholders
600-Watt stereos for cars
Cars where you open the hood and you can't figure out WTH anything does
Stereos where you open them up and you can't figure out WTH anything does
The Swiss Army Knife
Those impenetrable plastic packages that make it impossible to use anything that you buy unless you carry a Swiss Army knife.
Improved technology for growing marijuana indoors
Improved technology for finding people who grow marijuana indoors. (This one nets out to a
zero with the one preceding, but each produced a
big change, albeit in opposite directions.)
Improved technology (Roundup, satellite recon,
and arial spraying) for eliminating cocaine production in Columbia
Development of Roundup-impervious coca plants, permitting continued cocaine production in Columbia. Same situation as with marijuana above;
it's a net zero. But each one individually has a big impact.
The theory of intelligent design, which now significantly prolongs the careers of thousands of brain-dead politicians.
Printer ink cartridges that are smart enough to refuse to print any more when the manufacturer needs more money. This has made possible very inexpensive printers.
Certainly the containerized cargo ship has done more to change our world than any of those 'innovations'. But it pre-dates 1980. OTOH, I remember an inventor of airbags who toured the talk-show circuit in the mid-1960's promoting them, so the list is a little off.
Yes. There was an 'unpickable' lock developed in the late 1700's. It was unpickable until the 1850's, when the designer of a supposedly better lock picked one to show the superiority of his own locks. But it took him more than two days to pick it. Subsequently, Yale and others developed unpickable locks that were even more unpickable and have never been thus conquered.
The locks on bank vaults can't be picked or cracked or defeated except by brute force, because they are time locks. The vaults themselves are not designed to be impenetrable, but rather to simply to take an excessive amount of time to penetrate. A cheapo bank vault might be rated at only 45 minutes, better ones at several hours. Some manufacturers leave one spot weak where a safe can be penetrated more quickly than at other spots. That is "security by obscurity." If you don't know where that is, you've got a long night ahead of you. Perhaps some kinds of modern instruments can detect this spot, if it exists, from the outside.
John Dillinger penetrated a bank vault and looted safe-deposit boxes within, but he did it by stealth, finding a closed-down bank, pretending to be an authorized workman, and taking a long time to extract the contents.
I'll believe it. I've seen the inside of a big ($500 million or so of annual revenue) software/systems operation that is supposedly soon releasing some.net add-ons to its vintage core products -- stuff that targets businesses about the same size as those the original poster probably aims at. They can't keep the.net kludge running on the machines in their development shop two days straight because of some unknown number of needles in some undetermined number of haystacks. How the thousands of customers, many of whom require close to 24x7 to keep one of America's top ten industries moving, are going to find it is a total turdshoot.
This approach follows the new mandate of the American people: Keep breaking eggs until God makes you an omelette. Between Microsoft and the Republicans, how can you hope for anything better? IDK anything about how java compares with this, so please tell me.
Our seven-day week doesn't trace back to any of the religions that anyone cares about today. Rome picked up the 7-day thing on account of an emperor who was devoted to some other wacked-out Middle-Eastern cult that is forgotten by most since times immoral. I think their week had seven days because they found seven easily observable celestial bodies in our solar system. When Rome later switched religions, they didn't have to switch weeks -- that's the remarkable power of coincidence.
If we go up to 13 months, will the "Women of AARP Field Hockey" calendar come with an extra picture?
There are five 100-minute hours in my week
on
New Calendar Proposal
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Lunch hours.
Did they fix the part about not saving sent emails
on
Mozilla 1.7.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
That's a big problem for me. And why wouldn't the subject box let me put a question mark on the end of my subject??
Sally Struthers is going to be on TV asking for money for aged COBOL weenies, and I learned PL1 when I heard that it was going to replace COBOL and Fortran. So, think of poor me -- almost forty years dealing with people who didn't know that COBOL was inferior, and all I've got to look forward to is 40 years having a hard time getting charity because I've got a disease that doesn't have a Sally Struthers, Mary Tyler Moore, or Jerry Lewis. I may have to start drinking and get depressed so that Jason Robards and Terry Bradshaw will be on my side.
IBM went multi-colored back in 1970-71 when the 370's came out. Before that they were blue only. They had pink, blue and what other colors I can't recall, but it was a big deal back then.
Re:Price and licensing killed Delphi
on
Delphi Renaissance
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You may have noticed that all the other vendors of affordable language vendors have also disappeared. Gone. (Watcom, Symantec, JPI, Utah, Marshall, Oregon, Stoney Brook,...) Used to be that you could stop at BDalton software and pick up the language of the week for $69. My first copy of Borland's Pascal was $49. And they gave free support.
Making money in that business with competition from Microsoft on one side and free software on the other must be so difficult. I never try to second-guess the pricing decisions of these firms.
Microsoft can decide to lose money on langauages, because languages make the OS business possible. They give away dotnet to anyone who will commit to develop products for it. Last I heard they had over 100 people creating and maintaining one of their language products.
Do the math. It takes 10 to 200 people to keep one of these full-reatured IDE products in good shape. You need about $500k of revenue each year per employee to make this work. It's a dismal business. If selling to corporations at high prices is the only way Borland can see, I'm not anyone to say that I know better.
I went to two presentations by traveling road shows about a year and a half back. The Borland guy using Delphi wrote all kinds of interesting apps in seconds. Never hit a problem, was able to handle any kind request from the audience (can you do this...), etc, etc.
The Microsoft VS C# guy started about 15 minutes late, since he couldn't figure out how to increase the font size in his IDE so that the audience could read the screens that he was demoing. He gave up on that. So, we couldn't read his screen too well, but it was no loss. He didn't get very much to work. He did show us screen after screen of inscrutable WSDL automatically generated for us, but he never got it to do 1/10th as much as the Borland guy accomplished in roughly the same time.
Maybe it would be premature to buy Borland's product based on just those two demos, but you'd have to be religiously insane to buy Microsoft's on the same evidence.
I've got a small corporation. No problem. But it's not going to get financing without me co-signing for the debt personally. Set up a corporation and apply for a corporate credit card and read the fine print.
Fortunately, software doesn't always require big financing. But if you want to do a 12 mo. $250k project and live on nothing while waiting to finish it, and hoping to finish it, and hoping to get paid, that's not something that many want to try.
You got it. Back around 1920 there were 300 automakers in Indiana alone. Now there are just as many lone coders heading the same way. Featuritis is a real killer. You can't hardly just write a good app anymore. It's got to run on umpteen incompatible versions of the OS, import and export every conceiable data format, run as a service, call home for updates, show a professional video to teach fools how to run it, look good with over 100 possible combinations screen and font size, have a secure free demo, be both extremely innovative while conforming to standards 100%, be web enabled, etc, etc.
Several things have lessened the role of the lone coder down to just about nil:
1. Marketing costs are high and price per unit that users are willing to pay are not high. Unless you've got way into six figures to for advertising and marketing, forget about getting your sales out of two figures.
2. This means that you've got to sell high-priced apps. And the best shot at these would be business-specific custom or semi-custom apps for medium-sized companies (big companies have IT shops to write their own custom apps). I used to do pretty well at that sort of thing. Unfoturnately, medium-sized businesses usually by now have some fool who can do just about as good with Excel or Access as you can do with whatever you lone code with. So why wouldn't they let their in-house code monkey enjoy a little job enrichment by writing the app instead of paying you thousands of dollars to write it?
3. Computers are everywhere now, and everyone knows of their risks. Few companies will trust a lone coder with anything important because of all the computer risks associated with 1-man project.
There are still a few that do it, but most of the ones who I've known to be successful in the past are moved on now.
The time since the Mediterranean flooded last is measured in megayears, not kiloyears. All he's got is sonar, and it's pretty easy to interpret unusual formations as signs of civilization. Take the interstate highways, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly at least neck-and-neck with "Meet Me in St. Louis". They are both about how great it is to have a good home. The "Wizard of Oz" has better music. A pox on that Christmas song!
"White Heat" is memorable, but only because it was so overdone, not to mention Cody Jarrett.
If you are going to recognize Preston Sturgis, despite his somewhat abbreviated career, why not "Sullivan's Travels" instead of "Lady Eve".
Howcome WC Fields makes it but the Marx Brothers don't? I like them both, but if they are trying to make funny movies and you laugh twice as much at one as at the other, which is better?
"Ninotchka" and "Camille" can't hold a candle to her "Grand Hotel". Her "I want to be alone" character was her best, and the rest of the cast was stellar, too.
Does it have generics?
They should honor the guy who did those. He did not work at NASA when Apollo 13 happened. He had worked for them about five years previous as some kind of student intern or something. He figured out stuff like that and put it in the file. When they had a sudden need, they pulled the plan out, and it was good to go.
We've mother-henned this idea and it's ready to hatch.
Let's throw this log on the fire and watch it spit back.
If we run this one up the right flagpole, everyone will salute.
For those of you who want a job in marketing, read my book on "Straight-Faced Inanity -- Taming the Sharks in the Global Jungle" (when it comes out).
WRONG! Probabilities can't increase exponentially except in a narrow range in which they are small. After all, an upper bound on the probability of anything is 1.0. Exponentially increasing functions don't have any upper bound. They increase faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and eventually increase like really fast, faster than anything you can imagine. There is no limit to how fast they increase. There is no limit to how fast their rate of increase increases. There is no limit to how fast the rate of increase of their rate of increase increases. Etc ... Take three derivatives and call me in the morning.
Take a look inside your walls. I'll bet you've got thermal insulation in there that is in those rolls sandwiched between aluminum foil. That will put a pretty good dent in the UHF and up, but the RF will leak out elsewhere.
Reagan's Star Wars, which we will be paying for forever.
Bush & Rice's Missile Defense, which we will be paying for forever.
Al Gore's Global Disaster Information Network, which save 75,000 lives during the Christmas tsunami, except it didn't because the Republican Congress in 1998 wouldn't consider funding anything that came from Gore.
Miniature spare tires and
Car jacks that let you jack your car up but not down.
Cupholders
600-Watt stereos for cars
Cars where you open the hood and you can't figure out WTH anything does
Stereos where you open them up and you can't figure out WTH anything does
The Swiss Army Knife
Those impenetrable plastic packages that make it impossible to use anything that you buy unless you carry a Swiss Army knife.
Improved technology for growing marijuana indoors
Improved technology for finding people who grow marijuana indoors. (This one nets out to a zero with the one preceding, but each produced a big change, albeit in opposite directions.)
Improved technology (Roundup, satellite recon, and arial spraying) for eliminating cocaine production in Columbia
Development of Roundup-impervious coca plants, permitting continued cocaine production in Columbia. Same situation as with marijuana above; it's a net zero. But each one individually has a big impact.
The theory of intelligent design, which now significantly prolongs the careers of thousands of brain-dead politicians.
Printer ink cartridges that are smart enough to refuse to print any more when the manufacturer needs more money. This has made possible very inexpensive printers.
Chemtrails
Tinfoil hats
Certainly the containerized cargo ship has done more to change our world than any of those 'innovations'. But it pre-dates 1980. OTOH, I remember an inventor of airbags who toured the talk-show circuit in the mid-1960's promoting them, so the list is a little off.
Yes. There was an 'unpickable' lock developed in the late 1700's. It was unpickable until the 1850's, when the designer of a supposedly better lock picked one to show the superiority of his own locks. But it took him more than two days to pick it. Subsequently, Yale and others developed unpickable locks that were even more unpickable and have never been thus conquered.
John Dillinger penetrated a bank vault and looted safe-deposit boxes within, but he did it by stealth, finding a closed-down bank, pretending to be an authorized workman, and taking a long time to extract the contents.
This approach follows the new mandate of the American people: Keep breaking eggs until God makes you an omelette. Between Microsoft and the Republicans, how can you hope for anything better? IDK anything about how java compares with this, so please tell me.
If we go up to 13 months, will the "Women of AARP Field Hockey" calendar come with an extra picture?
Lunch hours.
That's a big problem for me. And why wouldn't the subject box let me put a question mark on the end of my subject??
Sally Struthers is going to be on TV asking for money for aged COBOL weenies, and I learned PL1 when I heard that it was going to replace COBOL and Fortran. So, think of poor me -- almost forty years dealing with people who didn't know that COBOL was inferior, and all I've got to look forward to is 40 years having a hard time getting charity because I've got a disease that doesn't have a Sally Struthers, Mary Tyler Moore, or Jerry Lewis. I may have to start drinking and get depressed so that Jason Robards and Terry Bradshaw will be on my side.
IBM went multi-colored back in 1970-71 when the 370's came out. Before that they were blue only. They had pink, blue and what other colors I can't recall, but it was a big deal back then.
Making money in that business with competition from Microsoft on one side and free software on the other must be so difficult. I never try to second-guess the pricing decisions of these firms. Microsoft can decide to lose money on langauages, because languages make the OS business possible. They give away dotnet to anyone who will commit to develop products for it. Last I heard they had over 100 people creating and maintaining one of their language products.
Do the math. It takes 10 to 200 people to keep one of these full-reatured IDE products in good shape. You need about $500k of revenue each year per employee to make this work. It's a dismal business. If selling to corporations at high prices is the only way Borland can see, I'm not anyone to say that I know better.
The Microsoft VS C# guy started about 15 minutes late, since he couldn't figure out how to increase the font size in his IDE so that the audience could read the screens that he was demoing. He gave up on that. So, we couldn't read his screen too well, but it was no loss. He didn't get very much to work. He did show us screen after screen of inscrutable WSDL automatically generated for us, but he never got it to do 1/10th as much as the Borland guy accomplished in roughly the same time.
Maybe it would be premature to buy Borland's product based on just those two demos, but you'd have to be religiously insane to buy Microsoft's on the same evidence.
Fortunately, software doesn't always require big financing. But if you want to do a 12 mo. $250k project and live on nothing while waiting to finish it, and hoping to finish it, and hoping to get paid, that's not something that many want to try.
You got it. Back around 1920 there were 300 automakers in Indiana alone. Now there are just as many lone coders heading the same way. Featuritis is a real killer. You can't hardly just write a good app anymore. It's got to run on umpteen incompatible versions of the OS, import and export every conceiable data format, run as a service, call home for updates, show a professional video to teach fools how to run it, look good with over 100 possible combinations screen and font size, have a secure free demo, be both extremely innovative while conforming to standards 100%, be web enabled, etc, etc.
1. Marketing costs are high and price per unit that users are willing to pay are not high. Unless you've got way into six figures to for advertising and marketing, forget about getting your sales out of two figures.
2. This means that you've got to sell high-priced apps. And the best shot at these would be business-specific custom or semi-custom apps for medium-sized companies (big companies have IT shops to write their own custom apps). I used to do pretty well at that sort of thing. Unfoturnately, medium-sized businesses usually by now have some fool who can do just about as good with Excel or Access as you can do with whatever you lone code with. So why wouldn't they let their in-house code monkey enjoy a little job enrichment by writing the app instead of paying you thousands of dollars to write it?
3. Computers are everywhere now, and everyone knows of their risks. Few companies will trust a lone coder with anything important because of all the computer risks associated with 1-man project.
There are still a few that do it, but most of the ones who I've known to be successful in the past are moved on now.
The time since the Mediterranean flooded last is measured in megayears, not kiloyears. All he's got is sonar, and it's pretty easy to interpret unusual formations as signs of civilization. Take the interstate highways, for example.