I don't claim to know all that much about this sort of thing, but I do recall that Lotus Ami Pro 3.x had an absolutely badass equation editor that was insanely easy to use and gave great results. I was a chemistry major, so the amount of Real Math I expressed was small (mostly calculus and algebra, not higher stuff), but boy, could it put together some beautiful chemical equations. I forget the name of the chemistry structure drawing software I used, but if you imported your structures as images and used Ami Pro for the nuts and bolts, you could really shine.
They were generally slow as hell on the backend, too. That was the real advantage that AltaVista had (and Webcrawler before it). Lycos had great results but took forever (at least when they were still a project at CMU). Webcrawler's results weren't great, but they were fast. AltaVista was both good and fast.
Well, that, and the fact that the landmarks are visible long before the street name is. Plus, most street signs are in low contrast colors (e.g., white lettering on green background), and the lettering is very small. Much easier to see a Shell station from a long way away and get yourself into the correct lane, slow down, and look at the street name at the last minute to confirm you're at the correct Shell station.
The way I would explain how to get to my house to an out-of-town visitor minimizes the number of turns and includes landmarks. The way I would explain it to another local just references a nearby intersection and tells them how to get here from that. The way I explain it to someone who lives within a mile starts with "you know where the flashing light is that warns you of a car coming over the hill?".
A mercury sphygmomanometer does not need calibration (unless you've found somewhere that the variation in gravity is larger than the error of human measurement) or electricity, and mercury has a fairly low coefficient of expansion. mm Hg is a unit well suited to its most common function: measuring blood pressure. And it's what all the literature uses. You want it in kPa? Knock yourself out, but don't expect the medical world to come along.
I have one that I bought off eBay on a lark. I work with automated BP machines all day, and they are decent at spotting trends... so long as the patient doesn't have tremors, and the machine is calibrated on a regular basis, and nobody has put the wrong cuff size on the patient. But if you want to know, there's nothing better than good old mercury. Just leave it in its (mostly) sealed tube.
I've never done it, so I can't give you the ratios, but one important thing I've noticed from stories of those who have: do NOT do this indoors. Your house may be nigh-uninhabitable for a surprisingly large amount of time.
Cell phone doesn't work? Dang, man, that's about the first thing I usually arrange. Activate the international calling plan before you leave. Skip data until you get a local SIM (or a deal like Project Fi, which isn't the cheapest out there but certainly covers a lot of territory at a fair price). The airport probably has free WiFi that you can use for VOIP calls, and a number and a SIP app is cheap cheap cheap. I think my last SIP phone number cost around $3 a month, plus 1-2c/min, plus pretty reasonable international rates.
Really? I haven't seen a pay phone in an airport in a long, long time. Where are they? I don't know of any in Atlanta, which is the largest airport I regularly travel through, but I also can't remember any in DCA, LaGuardia, LAX, SFO, Miami, DFW, Denver, or Vegas in the past decade.
planning a whole day in advance built discipline in people before easy access to phones was common
It certainly affected efficiency. I once tried to meet a friend en route to a beach vacation. We were traveling from opposite directions, and we agreed to try to meet around noon, and to do so at the first gas station on the right after crossing a certain bridge. Well, the first gas station on the right was twenty miles down the road. I stopped, filled up, bought a snack, and sat down to wait a little while. After about twenty or thirty minutes, I decided to double back just to be sure he hadn't gone somewhere else (his route was more likely to have unexpected delays). A few minutes later, I saw his car headed the opposite way and did a quick U-turn. We ended up meeting around 12:45. If we had had cell phones, there would have been no question about where to go (I'd have pointed it out to him), and I probably would have had something more appetizing than a bag of pistachios for lunch (because I'd have known how far behind me he was). As it was, the only real option we had was to call his parents and leave messages for each other.
Plus, if you were headed somewhere specific but only knew the address, the solution was to find a mall, go to the bookstore, and crack open a high-resolution local map for directions. Not the easiest, and definitely slower than just popping an address into mapping software. We both drove a lot for fun, so we both had CB's (in the mid-90s, they were arguably better than cell phones if you drove in very rural areas - you would get assistance from nearby truckers or local police), but those were only useful for fairly short-range communication (2-3 miles typical range).
So yeah, it made you plan ahead, but you also had to have a lot more allowance for inefficiency. Nowadays, if my wife and I hit the road, we can just pull out the phone when we get tired and find the nearest decent hotel with a vacancy, even if it's not visible from the highway, and we can eat at (mostly-reliably reviewed) local joints instead of the junk chains located at the nearest exits. Or, hell, if you're going to eat at a junk chain, you at least can be certain that there's one within a relatively short distance.
Yeah, but it really pisses a lot of people off. I think that a comment suggesting zipper merge is still my most downvoted comment ever on Reddit. Like, thousands of people. I laughed.
Don’t know how Nissan does it, but Toyota was based on DVD’s. Pretty easy to get on ebay and buy a pirated one to update your maps for a fraction of the cost of the official DVD. I use my phone for nav, but the built-in has a much larger screen and is useful for interpreting the instructions the phone puts out.
No, it’s because they need two things: a vehicle to take them places, and a truck. The cost and inconvenience of renting a truck ten times a year outweighs the savings of buying a commuter car and renting a truck when needed.
Hungary has entry checks. Rented a car in Germany, drove around in Central Europe for a couple of weeks, but they did stop us at the Austrian-Hungarian border. No questions were asked, no passports were pulled out, but we were also in a German-tagged car and were clearly of European ancestry. Also, we were driving a station wagon (no trunk to hide things), and we’re both in our forties, so not exactly the kind of people trying to smuggle stuff or ourselves into the country.
I drove into Canada for a vacation, and on return to the US got a fair number of nonsensical questions. Where do you live? Where do you work? I could see the half-dozen cameras I drove past as I approached the booth, so I knew he already had that stuff on his screen. Whatever. I look like the guy pictured in my passport, my wife looks like the woman pictured in her passport, and yeah, I know about the border exemption, so knock yourself out if you want to look in my trunk, but please just speed it up.
Is it even retail space anymore? Or just empty? There’s a 60’s era suburban strip mall near me that today is mostly low-end retail (check cashing, fly-by-night tax returns, that kind of thing) if it’s occupied at all. The department store that was its anchor is now a datacenter, but only because it’s across the street from an AT&T central office and the rent is next to nothing. From the outside, it looks boarded up (to disguise its function, no doubt).
Tech rental is not particularly cheap, as the goods have a very limited time frame in which they can be rented before people want the next best thing. And who wants a used laptop that has God-only-knows-what malware/keyloggers/etc on it? Or cameras and lenses that have been treated less than perfectly? I'd take that kind of stuff from family, or friends that I trust, but from Joe Blow? If I can't verifiably nuke it and start over, no way.
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I don't claim to know all that much about this sort of thing, but I do recall that Lotus Ami Pro 3.x had an absolutely badass equation editor that was insanely easy to use and gave great results. I was a chemistry major, so the amount of Real Math I expressed was small (mostly calculus and algebra, not higher stuff), but boy, could it put together some beautiful chemical equations. I forget the name of the chemistry structure drawing software I used, but if you imported your structures as images and used Ami Pro for the nuts and bolts, you could really shine.
Well, it was a pretty damned good documentary film, even if you never thought you'd find the field interesting. Fantastic cinematography, really.
They were generally slow as hell on the backend, too. That was the real advantage that AltaVista had (and Webcrawler before it). Lycos had great results but took forever (at least when they were still a project at CMU). Webcrawler's results weren't great, but they were fast. AltaVista was both good and fast.
Well, that, and the fact that the landmarks are visible long before the street name is. Plus, most street signs are in low contrast colors (e.g., white lettering on green background), and the lettering is very small. Much easier to see a Shell station from a long way away and get yourself into the correct lane, slow down, and look at the street name at the last minute to confirm you're at the correct Shell station.
The way I would explain how to get to my house to an out-of-town visitor minimizes the number of turns and includes landmarks. The way I would explain it to another local just references a nearby intersection and tells them how to get here from that. The way I explain it to someone who lives within a mile starts with "you know where the flashing light is that warns you of a car coming over the hill?".
Yeah, you think ole Zuck didn’t have some very, very juicy tidbits on at least a few of those legislators and their staffers? Ha.
Hell, the criminals will have an easier time of it than Apple. The criminals already know crooked cops who will, for a fee, order one for them.
A mercury sphygmomanometer does not need calibration (unless you've found somewhere that the variation in gravity is larger than the error of human measurement) or electricity, and mercury has a fairly low coefficient of expansion. mm Hg is a unit well suited to its most common function: measuring blood pressure. And it's what all the literature uses. You want it in kPa? Knock yourself out, but don't expect the medical world to come along.
I have one that I bought off eBay on a lark. I work with automated BP machines all day, and they are decent at spotting trends... so long as the patient doesn't have tremors, and the machine is calibrated on a regular basis, and nobody has put the wrong cuff size on the patient. But if you want to know, there's nothing better than good old mercury. Just leave it in its (mostly) sealed tube.
I've never done it, so I can't give you the ratios, but one important thing I've noticed from stories of those who have: do NOT do this indoors. Your house may be nigh-uninhabitable for a surprisingly large amount of time.
Encrypt the hell out of them.
Verizon. Let the jokes ensue.
Never been in Penn, GC, or JFK. Newark has been almost 20 years. But good to know.
Cell phone doesn't work? Dang, man, that's about the first thing I usually arrange. Activate the international calling plan before you leave. Skip data until you get a local SIM (or a deal like Project Fi, which isn't the cheapest out there but certainly covers a lot of territory at a fair price). The airport probably has free WiFi that you can use for VOIP calls, and a number and a SIP app is cheap cheap cheap. I think my last SIP phone number cost around $3 a month, plus 1-2c/min, plus pretty reasonable international rates.
Really? I haven't seen a pay phone in an airport in a long, long time. Where are they? I don't know of any in Atlanta, which is the largest airport I regularly travel through, but I also can't remember any in DCA, LaGuardia, LAX, SFO, Miami, DFW, Denver, or Vegas in the past decade.
planning a whole day in advance built discipline in people before easy access to phones was common
It certainly affected efficiency. I once tried to meet a friend en route to a beach vacation. We were traveling from opposite directions, and we agreed to try to meet around noon, and to do so at the first gas station on the right after crossing a certain bridge. Well, the first gas station on the right was twenty miles down the road. I stopped, filled up, bought a snack, and sat down to wait a little while. After about twenty or thirty minutes, I decided to double back just to be sure he hadn't gone somewhere else (his route was more likely to have unexpected delays). A few minutes later, I saw his car headed the opposite way and did a quick U-turn. We ended up meeting around 12:45. If we had had cell phones, there would have been no question about where to go (I'd have pointed it out to him), and I probably would have had something more appetizing than a bag of pistachios for lunch (because I'd have known how far behind me he was). As it was, the only real option we had was to call his parents and leave messages for each other.
Plus, if you were headed somewhere specific but only knew the address, the solution was to find a mall, go to the bookstore, and crack open a high-resolution local map for directions. Not the easiest, and definitely slower than just popping an address into mapping software. We both drove a lot for fun, so we both had CB's (in the mid-90s, they were arguably better than cell phones if you drove in very rural areas - you would get assistance from nearby truckers or local police), but those were only useful for fairly short-range communication (2-3 miles typical range).
So yeah, it made you plan ahead, but you also had to have a lot more allowance for inefficiency. Nowadays, if my wife and I hit the road, we can just pull out the phone when we get tired and find the nearest decent hotel with a vacancy, even if it's not visible from the highway, and we can eat at (mostly-reliably reviewed) local joints instead of the junk chains located at the nearest exits. Or, hell, if you're going to eat at a junk chain, you at least can be certain that there's one within a relatively short distance.
Google Maps integrates the traffic data from Waze, though you won't get the warnings about radar.
Yeah, but it really pisses a lot of people off. I think that a comment suggesting zipper merge is still my most downvoted comment ever on Reddit. Like, thousands of people. I laughed.
Don’t know how Nissan does it, but Toyota was based on DVD’s. Pretty easy to get on ebay and buy a pirated one to update your maps for a fraction of the cost of the official DVD. I use my phone for nav, but the built-in has a much larger screen and is useful for interpreting the instructions the phone puts out.
No, it’s because they need two things: a vehicle to take them places, and a truck. The cost and inconvenience of renting a truck ten times a year outweighs the savings of buying a commuter car and renting a truck when needed.
Hungary has entry checks. Rented a car in Germany, drove around in Central Europe for a couple of weeks, but they did stop us at the Austrian-Hungarian border. No questions were asked, no passports were pulled out, but we were also in a German-tagged car and were clearly of European ancestry. Also, we were driving a station wagon (no trunk to hide things), and we’re both in our forties, so not exactly the kind of people trying to smuggle stuff or ourselves into the country.
I drove into Canada for a vacation, and on return to the US got a fair number of nonsensical questions. Where do you live? Where do you work? I could see the half-dozen cameras I drove past as I approached the booth, so I knew he already had that stuff on his screen. Whatever. I look like the guy pictured in my passport, my wife looks like the woman pictured in her passport, and yeah, I know about the border exemption, so knock yourself out if you want to look in my trunk, but please just speed it up.
Monarchy. The king can overrule any bureaucrat. It has its own problems, such as insane or idiot kings.
Is it even retail space anymore? Or just empty? There’s a 60’s era suburban strip mall near me that today is mostly low-end retail (check cashing, fly-by-night tax returns, that kind of thing) if it’s occupied at all. The department store that was its anchor is now a datacenter, but only because it’s across the street from an AT&T central office and the rent is next to nothing. From the outside, it looks boarded up (to disguise its function, no doubt).
As a current doctor, I’m only slightly less suspicious than you are.
That has more to do with the kind of people who get into Harvard or Yale than the kind of education that goes on there.
Tech rental is not particularly cheap, as the goods have a very limited time frame in which they can be rented before people want the next best thing. And who wants a used laptop that has God-only-knows-what malware/keyloggers/etc on it? Or cameras and lenses that have been treated less than perfectly? I'd take that kind of stuff from family, or friends that I trust, but from Joe Blow? If I can't verifiably nuke it and start over, no way.