A quick search on google reveals that these were probably published by 'Popular Mechanics Press' with titles starting 'There's Adventure in...", followed by 'Rockets', 'Atomic Energy', 'Geology', etc. Some were authored by Julian May. They were evidently some sort of 'Career Books'.
Here's one. That's about all I can help you with. Note: This took me about 15 minutes on Google. Might want to bone up on your searching skills.
Why is this on/.? They do stuff like this on rec.arts.sf.written. There's probably a similar newsgroup for non-fiction. The guys on r.a.s.w. could probably have pointed you there.
...how many PC's are shipped daily without mishap, why is this even a question? First of all, you don't have a G5. They're not out yet. So either wait until you get to where you're going and have Apple ship it to you there, or keep the original packaging and ship it in that. Most any carrier will do. If you're worried, insure it. Probably the smart thing to do anyway. And back up anything you don't want to lose.
God, I feel more and more like a curmudgeon every day. Is it just me?
400 billion stars in our galaxy. Billions of galaxies. Depending on how you do the math, you either get a lot of other civilizations or very few. Hard to say what the exact odds are, isn't it?
I remember reading it more like: 1 out of 10 chance for a star to have orbiting objects. 1 out of 10 of those at the right distance. 1 out of 10 of those the right size. 1/10 w/ an atmosphere. And so on, and so on. The Drake Equation. Look for it on Google.
Actually, since business phone numbers aren't covered by the DNC list, it's probably less than 3 billion possible numbers
Interesting that you thought about this problem from the viewpoint of possible phone numbers. If you'd thought about it from the other angle, i.e. how many probable phone numbers, you might have come closer to the actual number.
There's a little less than 300 million people in the US. This works out to a little more than 100 million households. Let's assume each of those households has a phone. (Actual number I've seen is about 97% penetration.) That's about 100 million phone numbers. Plus a fudge factor, which includes second lines (not business lines, that's separate) such as a separate phone for the kid(s) and cell phones. That fudge factor is (I would guess) anywhere from 0.01 to 1.0.
Before cell phones I would have put it at 0.1. Nowadays, I would venture to guess it's about 0.3 or 0.4 (and climbing, I'm sure). So maybe 135 million personal phone numbers in use. I'm sure it's not dead on, but I wouldn't think it's too far off.
Do I get the job, Mr. Microsoft tough-questions-guy?
1. Wife: Divorced. Check.
2. Kids: Military school. Check.
3. Dog: Euthanized. Check.
4. Cats: Who cares? Check.
5. Friends: Gone. Check.
6. Phone: Disconnected. Check.
7. Doorbell: Ditto. Check.
8. Food: $500 worth on Top Ramen in pantry. Check.
9. Breaks: 10 cases of adult diapers. Trash can with lid next to computer. Extra liners. Check, check, check.
10. Power bill, ISP; Paid ahead for the year. Check, check.
11. Job: Hmmm. Reconnect phone. Dial. Ring. "Hi, Dave? It's me. Yeah. Yeah. Listen. I quit. No, no time to explain. Do whatever you want with the crap on my desk. Later." Re-disconnect phone.
Well, that's about it. Time to rip open that CD. Good-bye cruel world and all that. Hmm, I wonder if/. karma erodes due to lack of use. Guess I can check that in a couple of years.
Mycroft Kenobi, Obi-Wan's smarter (and better looking) brother is about to kick the Force's ass!
This page not only resizes your browser window, it makes the fuxoring page too small. So I resize it bigger, then click another thumbnail and it again resizes itself too small. Why the fark should I need to have to scroll if my monitor resolution is big enough to display the whole page at once?
Apple has great hardware engineers. Their website fu)%ing designers need a baseball bat upside the back of their head. Repeatedly.
Yeah, yeah. Troll. Flamebait. Redundant. Offtopic. Yada-yada. This kinda stuff just pisses me off. I still want an ipod, though.
And, I, for one, will be ready when all the lights are out, all the paper and pens and pencils and burnt wood is gone, and the only thing we've got is conveniently located clay resevoirs...
There's an SF story in there somewhere. Not a good one, perhaps, but there's definitely a kernel or perhaps a nugget of a science fiction story. Short story, probably, unless you flesh the characters out to Jordanian proportions.
I sneer at your momentum and kinetic energy. My blind faith will see me through. If need be, I'll just buy a bunch of sand bags and pile them up to absorb all your meaningless physics terms. Take that!
'400 foot high waves'? My little Garmin Emap says that I'm at 435' of altitude, here in Maryland. I guess I'll be laughing at all the guys down the hill a little ways, sitting on their roofs, trying to stay dry. Do I know how to pick 'em or do I know how to pick 'em? Some people say coincidence or blind luck, I say 'Asteroid Collision Simulation Software'. It's good to be a geek.
OK, I see your large financial institution, and raise. I work for Wells Fargo, in one of their divisions. 130,000 employees. I doubt it's the largest one in the world, but still pretty large. Back to you. Call?
We have a common Tech Library (in San Fran) where you can check out books. I see 3 C# books in the online listing. I imagine some division somewhere is toying with it. Everyone I know about in the company is doing C/C++/Perl/Java.
I was a sysadmin for a few years.
I've seen several instances where filters on "f-junk", where -junk is some subset of characters like '!@#%*', were implemented. Don't know what country/jurisdiction you live/work in, but not only is it a politeness issue, it's a sexual harassment issue. Just because some PHB somewhere decides to let the f-bomb slip in an all-employee email doesn't mean the company wants to open itself to a lawsuit. I never implemented one myself, but I've been on mailing lists/fora where the necessity and implementation details were discussed. (Also, internally, we've had emails from the Exchange people about inappropriate language. I don't know specifically that they filter on that word, but I'm pretty sure there's a flag somewhere that gets raised. Not sure what happens. No desire to find out, I like my job.)
So then, if you had moderator points what would you moderate me as? Offtopic? Nope, on-topic. Flamebait? Nope, don't think I qualify. Troll? No, not even. Best you could do is overrated, I guess. The coward moderator's choice (since it doesn't get meta-moderated.) I always like the guys who down-moderate you because they disagree with you.
Considering that most corporate mail servers filter pretty much all email containing variants of 'F*', 'F#', 'F###', etc., I really don't see how this could possibly catch on. Certainly not in large corporations. Maybe MS will need to start a grass-roots campaign.
And, you know, I've been working for a very large financial institution for 2.5 years. I've seen no sign of C# anywhere. Going to the programming racks at Borders would make you think differently. I honestly think there's more C# books out there now than all other programming language books put together. It's amazing.
So what are you gonna do when you're finished? Give him a ring? In this day and age, one guy giving another guy a ring? I have a hard time picturing Sauron as gay, although that would explain a couple of things.
I guess these days you'd have to give the rings to women. Don't know which ones, though. Hilary? Is Carla something-or-other still head of HPaq? Hmm, the president of the Philippines is a woman. Of course, the government would probably lock you up for polygamy.
Unless, of course, you're female. In that case, just ignore me.
The patron-sponsored musician has been talked about for a while. Wonder if IBM would sponsor Korn or Avril Lavigne?
What about this though - a young movie maker talks the owner of the local cineplex into showing his latest masterpiece on one of the 38 (or 56 or 99, whatever it ends up being) screens. Agrees to split the profits 50/50. That's way more than the cineplex normally gets to keep. Turns out it's pretty good and then the cineplex in the next town over wants to show it for a while.
This is, of course, assuming that there will eventually still be a reason to go the movies. The offsetting technological innovations will be better home TV's, sound systems, and people with disposable income making themselves movie rooms. Of course, at that point you distribute over the internet. Hollywood's distribution monopoly can be broken just as easily as the RIAA's.
I wasn't so much talking about working on the car, although technically your analogy is more correct. I was talking about giving people - with little or no knowledge - great power. What's worse: Driving a car into a crowd of people or typing 'rm * -rf' in the wrong directory?
We allow people to own guns, smoke, hang-glide, etc. In the case of PC's, since it's really just your own data, if you shoot yourself in the foot, it's really your own fault. Perhaps the OS shouldn't allow you to do it, but lessons learned that painfully usually stick.
Having been computing since about 1978, I can say that the capability to destroy your file system has existed in pretty much every operating system I have ever seen. (Not too conversant with mainframes.) It's a rite of passage for most sysadmins.
I think the default-login-as-root-is-bad argument is a canard put forward by people who see everything as a technical problem. The inability to see the human side of things is a common failing in geeks.
Think about something as simple as driving. It's pretty easy to screw up in a car and yet we pretty much let everybody drive. It's the same thing with PC's. It's your PC - if you want to run as root, who's to say you can't? We choose convenience over safety many times on any given day. It would be much safer to cross at the light, but how many of us don't jaywalk daily?
Other than a couple of grammatical errors I could find no fault in any of Michael's answers. His business logic seems to be very sound. I hope he does well.
... at least for people who aren't being obtuse willfully.
Obtuse!? Obtuse!? I'll show you who's being obtuse! I'll cast you down with the sodomites! You'll do the hardest time any... oh, uhm, excuse me. Sorry. Had a bit of a flashback. Carry on.
If I had a nickel for every time I've cringed at, "But it's not fair!" I wouldn't have to work for a living.
Either you have a ridiculously low cost of living or you hold an insane number of conversations with very whiny people. Or, you have a looped recording that you play all day.
By this definition of 'rollercoaster', I'm an airplane, monkey bars, horse, trampoline, race car, dog, pogo stick, elevator, escalator, and about half-a-dozen more things like that.
At least my four-year old thinks so. Wonder if I should start charging admission?
Wow! I never knew that. They did pretty much the same thing in the Doc Savage novels. The last one, #181 I think, had Doc and the gang fighting the devil in a cave somewhere. Can't remember the details. It's been far too long and the plots start to run together.
I would pay to see Kirk and gang fighting demons and devils and stuff. I remember that the river Lethe was supposed to remove your earthly memories. What did Styx and Acheron do? There could be some cool "transporter/photon torpedo/other advanced technology" against the power of Hell/Satan. Would be funny if you could beam people out of hell.
This is in Denmark. There's nothing of any concern to us Americans. We live in a free country, remember. No way anything like that will have any effect over here. We're protected by that Bill of Rights thing.
Even if this was the beginning of something, Denmark is like, really small, right? It would probably only take one nuke to clean their clock.
BTW, have we started kicking Iraqi ass yet? Gas prices are way high, here. They need to start coming down soon. I'm itching for a cross-country road trip in my new H2. It'll be sweet when we own all that oil. 10 cents a freakin' gallon, man.
(Note: The above was sarcasm. A little bit of irony, too. FTHI.)
A bicycle is a viable alternative to a car. Unless you work a long way from home or have to bring new furniture home, or have kids to drop off at daycare, or live someplace where it snows a lot.
So a bicylce is a viable alternative to a car, but there's lots of caveats.
Going naked is a viable alternative to clothing. Unless you're not a supermodel, or want to leave the house, or own lots of mirrors, or don't like to get arrested.
The Linux/Windows thing is not a true paradox. Linux is a viable alternative to Windows as long as your work doesn't require Windows, you don't want to play any of the games only available on Windows, you don't need any of the apps only available on Windows, and you're willing to spend a little time when things don't work right out of the box.
If you lost your car for some reason, you could probably get by: friends, bike, public transportation, taxi, rentals. If you lost Windows, you could probably get by - most Windows apps have an equivalent on Linux, and those that don't you could get from a friend's PC or at work or maybe on a Mac. We generally don't have to make the either/or choice, but we could if we just weren't so lazy/set in our ways.
Most of the time, I'm surfing from work, where it's all Windows on the desktops. At home, I dual-boot Win98 and Mandrake. Most of the free time I have at home, I play Moonbase Commander in Windows, so if I surf before or after, it's most likely in Windows, but at least I'm using Mozilla to surf.
The wife has a crappy laptop, so she uses my machine a lot. It's better if it's booted into Windows for that purpose, so I leave it there most of the time. Actually thinking about springing for a copy of VMWare. Would make switching OS's much quicker.
Just bought a new house. So I don't have much in the way of funds or free time at the moment. Maybe that'll change.
... I just finished my new PC-in-a-vacuum-chamber case mod. If the dye reacts with air to break down the disc, well, any self-respecting geek would just use the obvious solution of 'remove contact with air'.
I wonder if shellacking would work? Or some kind of Rustoleum all-weather coat? Maybe someone will invent an oil-bath immersible DVD drive.
Those seem like the most obvious solutions to me. Perhaps someone else can come up with something better. Hmm... maybe you could just copy it. No, that encryption system, what's it called, CSS? No, that would prevent copying. Well, vacuum chamber it is, then.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's one. That's about all I can help you with. Note: This took me about 15 minutes on Google. Might want to bone up on your searching skills.
Why is this on /.? They do stuff like this on rec.arts.sf.written. There's probably a similar newsgroup for non-fiction. The guys on r.a.s.w. could probably have pointed you there.
God, I feel more and more like a curmudgeon every day. Is it just me?
I remember reading it more like: 1 out of 10 chance for a star to have orbiting objects. 1 out of 10 of those at the right distance. 1 out of 10 of those the right size. 1/10 w/ an atmosphere. And so on, and so on. The Drake Equation. Look for it on Google.
There's a little less than 300 million people in the US. This works out to a little more than 100 million households. Let's assume each of those households has a phone. (Actual number I've seen is about 97% penetration.) That's about 100 million phone numbers. Plus a fudge factor, which includes second lines (not business lines, that's separate) such as a separate phone for the kid(s) and cell phones. That fudge factor is (I would guess) anywhere from 0.01 to 1.0.
Before cell phones I would have put it at 0.1. Nowadays, I would venture to guess it's about 0.3 or 0.4 (and climbing, I'm sure). So maybe 135 million personal phone numbers in use. I'm sure it's not dead on, but I wouldn't think it's too far off.
Do I get the job, Mr. Microsoft tough-questions-guy?
2. Kids: Military school. Check.
3. Dog: Euthanized. Check.
4. Cats: Who cares? Check.
5. Friends: Gone. Check.
6. Phone: Disconnected. Check.
7. Doorbell: Ditto. Check.
8. Food: $500 worth on Top Ramen in pantry. Check.
9. Breaks: 10 cases of adult diapers. Trash can with lid next to computer. Extra liners. Check, check, check.
10. Power bill, ISP; Paid ahead for the year. Check, check.
11. Job: Hmmm. Reconnect phone. Dial. Ring. "Hi, Dave? It's me. Yeah. Yeah. Listen. I quit. No, no time to explain. Do whatever you want with the crap on my desk. Later." Re-disconnect phone.
Well, that's about it. Time to rip open that CD. Good-bye cruel world and all that. Hmm, I wonder if /. karma erodes due to lack of use. Guess I can check that in a couple of years.
Mycroft Kenobi, Obi-Wan's smarter (and better looking) brother is about to kick the Force's ass!
Apple has great hardware engineers. Their website fu)%ing designers need a baseball bat upside the back of their head. Repeatedly.
Yeah, yeah. Troll. Flamebait. Redundant. Offtopic. Yada-yada. This kinda stuff just pisses me off. I still want an ipod, though.
There's an SF story in there somewhere. Not a good one, perhaps, but there's definitely a kernel or perhaps a nugget of a science fiction story. Short story, probably, unless you flesh the characters out to Jordanian proportions.
I sneer at your momentum and kinetic energy. My blind faith will see me through. If need be, I'll just buy a bunch of sand bags and pile them up to absorb all your meaningless physics terms. Take that!
'400 foot high waves'? My little Garmin Emap says that I'm at 435' of altitude, here in Maryland. I guess I'll be laughing at all the guys down the hill a little ways, sitting on their roofs, trying to stay dry. Do I know how to pick 'em or do I know how to pick 'em? Some people say coincidence or blind luck, I say 'Asteroid Collision Simulation Software'. It's good to be a geek.
They make pretty good Mice and Keyboards.
We have a common Tech Library (in San Fran) where you can check out books. I see 3 C# books in the online listing. I imagine some division somewhere is toying with it. Everyone I know about in the company is doing C/C++/Perl/Java.
I was a sysadmin for a few years. I've seen several instances where filters on "f-junk", where -junk is some subset of characters like '!@#%*', were implemented. Don't know what country/jurisdiction you live/work in, but not only is it a politeness issue, it's a sexual harassment issue. Just because some PHB somewhere decides to let the f-bomb slip in an all-employee email doesn't mean the company wants to open itself to a lawsuit. I never implemented one myself, but I've been on mailing lists/fora where the necessity and implementation details were discussed. (Also, internally, we've had emails from the Exchange people about inappropriate language. I don't know specifically that they filter on that word, but I'm pretty sure there's a flag somewhere that gets raised. Not sure what happens. No desire to find out, I like my job.)
So then, if you had moderator points what would you moderate me as? Offtopic? Nope, on-topic. Flamebait? Nope, don't think I qualify. Troll? No, not even. Best you could do is overrated, I guess. The coward moderator's choice (since it doesn't get meta-moderated.) I always like the guys who down-moderate you because they disagree with you.
HAND.
And, you know, I've been working for a very large financial institution for 2.5 years. I've seen no sign of C# anywhere. Going to the programming racks at Borders would make you think differently. I honestly think there's more C# books out there now than all other programming language books put together. It's amazing.
I guess these days you'd have to give the rings to women. Don't know which ones, though. Hilary? Is Carla something-or-other still head of HPaq? Hmm, the president of the Philippines is a woman. Of course, the government would probably lock you up for polygamy.
Unless, of course, you're female. In that case, just ignore me.
The patron-sponsored musician has been talked about for a while. Wonder if IBM would sponsor Korn or Avril Lavigne?
What about this though - a young movie maker talks the owner of the local cineplex into showing his latest masterpiece on one of the 38 (or 56 or 99, whatever it ends up being) screens. Agrees to split the profits 50/50. That's way more than the cineplex normally gets to keep. Turns out it's pretty good and then the cineplex in the next town over wants to show it for a while.
This is, of course, assuming that there will eventually still be a reason to go the movies. The offsetting technological innovations will be better home TV's, sound systems, and people with disposable income making themselves movie rooms. Of course, at that point you distribute over the internet. Hollywood's distribution monopoly can be broken just as easily as the RIAA's.
EA, Maxis, Namco, Nintendo, Sony, MS, etc.
We allow people to own guns, smoke, hang-glide, etc. In the case of PC's, since it's really just your own data, if you shoot yourself in the foot, it's really your own fault. Perhaps the OS shouldn't allow you to do it, but lessons learned that painfully usually stick.
Having been computing since about 1978, I can say that the capability to destroy your file system has existed in pretty much every operating system I have ever seen. (Not too conversant with mainframes.) It's a rite of passage for most sysadmins.
I think the default-login-as-root-is-bad argument is a canard put forward by people who see everything as a technical problem. The inability to see the human side of things is a common failing in geeks.
Think about something as simple as driving. It's pretty easy to screw up in a car and yet we pretty much let everybody drive. It's the same thing with PC's. It's your PC - if you want to run as root, who's to say you can't? We choose convenience over safety many times on any given day. It would be much safer to cross at the light, but how many of us don't jaywalk daily?
Other than a couple of grammatical errors I could find no fault in any of Michael's answers. His business logic seems to be very sound. I hope he does well.
Obtuse!? Obtuse!? I'll show you who's being obtuse! I'll cast you down with the sodomites! You'll do the hardest time any ... oh, uhm, excuse me. Sorry. Had a bit of a flashback. Carry on.
Or you're still living with your parents.
At least my four-year old thinks so. Wonder if I should start charging admission?
I would pay to see Kirk and gang fighting demons and devils and stuff. I remember that the river Lethe was supposed to remove your earthly memories. What did Styx and Acheron do? There could be some cool "transporter/photon torpedo/other advanced technology" against the power of Hell/Satan. Would be funny if you could beam people out of hell.
Even if this was the beginning of something, Denmark is like, really small, right? It would probably only take one nuke to clean their clock.
BTW, have we started kicking Iraqi ass yet? Gas prices are way high, here. They need to start coming down soon. I'm itching for a cross-country road trip in my new H2. It'll be sweet when we own all that oil. 10 cents a freakin' gallon, man.
(Note: The above was sarcasm. A little bit of irony, too. FTHI.)
A bicycle is a viable alternative to a car. Unless you work a long way from home or have to bring new furniture home, or have kids to drop off at daycare, or live someplace where it snows a lot.
So a bicylce is a viable alternative to a car, but there's lots of caveats.
Going naked is a viable alternative to clothing. Unless you're not a supermodel, or want to leave the house, or own lots of mirrors, or don't like to get arrested.
The Linux/Windows thing is not a true paradox. Linux is a viable alternative to Windows as long as your work doesn't require Windows, you don't want to play any of the games only available on Windows, you don't need any of the apps only available on Windows, and you're willing to spend a little time when things don't work right out of the box.
If you lost your car for some reason, you could probably get by: friends, bike, public transportation, taxi, rentals. If you lost Windows, you could probably get by - most Windows apps have an equivalent on Linux, and those that don't you could get from a friend's PC or at work or maybe on a Mac. We generally don't have to make the either/or choice, but we could if we just weren't so lazy/set in our ways.
Not a true paradox, but funny, I guess.
The wife has a crappy laptop, so she uses my machine a lot. It's better if it's booted into Windows for that purpose, so I leave it there most of the time. Actually thinking about springing for a copy of VMWare. Would make switching OS's much quicker.
Just bought a new house. So I don't have much in the way of funds or free time at the moment. Maybe that'll change.
I wonder if shellacking would work? Or some kind of Rustoleum all-weather coat? Maybe someone will invent an oil-bath immersible DVD drive.
Those seem like the most obvious solutions to me. Perhaps someone else can come up with something better. Hmm... maybe you could just copy it. No, that encryption system, what's it called, CSS? No, that would prevent copying. Well, vacuum chamber it is, then.