If you're not the manager, you probably shouldn't try to manage your coworkers, especially if they've got more seniority than you do. It's not your place.
You *should* continue, for your own part, to do what you know is right, i.e., to put in an honest day's work for your pay. This is your duty, since you are being paid for your time.
As for the others, that's between them and their superiors.
If it really bothers you, to the point where you don't like the work environment, you could consider looking for work elsewhere. I know, jobs are a little hard to find right now, but they *are* out there. Furthermore you aren't on a tight deadline, since you do already have a job that you can continue to work ad interim, so if it takes a few extra months to find the job you're looking for, that's no big disaster.
> Previous scientific theories weren't proven wrong, just incomplete
That depends which ones you're talking about. Newton's theories were merely proven incomplete, and in ways that don't much impact macroscopic objects in everyday life.
There are other ideas, however, that have, after being held as unassailable truth by the entire educated world for centuries, turned out to be not merely incomplete but in fact totally dead wrong. The poster boy for this phenomenon is, of course, Aristotle, but it's been repeated many times over the last three millennia.
String theory was never intended to be understood. It was designed to make the guys who write papers about it sound smart, without requiring them to actually figure anything out about how the universe works.
Also, this *should* be obvious -- both from the context (especially in light of the parent comment) and also from the closing remark -- but just in case you're especially dense even for a slashdotter, I'll go ahead and state outright that I was being facetious, i.e., I wasn't serious.
Sure, because versions of Donkey Kong have been released for every major gaming system from Atari 2600 right on up through Wii, not to mention for arcades. But this is not really germane to my point.
> A few slashdot people know Cmdr. Keen.
This *is* slashdot, and nearly everyone here knows about Commander Keen. Certainly everyone who played any significant quantity of PC games in the early and mid nineties played it (or the sequel), and that's... most of us.
Like I said, if you only want to talk about the games they sell at Wall-Mart, you're on the wrong forum. People on this slashdot tend to like computers, and we talk about computer things. So when we talk about games, we often talk about computer games. Besides the Id classics, we also talk about Nethack and occasionally even the Zork series.
On the contrary, Perl is more widely used now than it has ever been in the past.
Granted, there are also some other decent options now. Fifteen years ago, for certain kinds of things, Perl was the *only* decent option, and that's no longer the case.
> And you are to decide who does or does not deserve a > fair trial? If we deny the right of a fair trial
I didn't say anything about denying anyone a trial. On the contrary, I specifically said that we give them a fair trial whether they deserve it or not, better it's for society that way. The right to a trial protects the citizenry from certain kinds of systematic government abuses abuses that might otherwise arise.
> A criminal is not a criminal until they have been convicted.
The word you are looking for is "convict".
A "criminal" is a person who has committed a crime. The act of doing so makes them a criminal, by definition, whether or not anyone else ever finds out about it, and totally irrespective of whether they are ever brought to justice. You may notice that the words "crime" and "criminal" contain some of the same letters. This is not a coincidence.
> > The actual wording > Because a word written 200 years ago means > the same thing as it is does now.
Now you're just trolling. You couldn't even quote the rest of my sentence, because it would have obviated your point.
Sure, there are variations. Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python, Linux/Apache/mod_perl/Postgres, and a number of others... but the most common expansion has always been Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl.
As for *why* MySQL is so much more popular than Postgres, I'm sure I don't know. I've never heard anything bad about Postgres, ever, and my own experiences with it have all been positive as well. Not that my experiences with MySQL have been bad either, granted. (The one that annoys me is MS SQL Server, which has the nasty habit of not bothering to provide extremely basic features that people who use competing products take for granted, like case-sensitive comparison and regular expression matching. Thank goodness for the third-party xp_pcre add-on, but these are NOT features one should have to install a third-party add-on in order to get.)
> When did it change to Python and did something > happened to Apache while I wasn't looking?
Nothing happened to Apache. The grandparent poster is... confused.
Those costumes would be ridiculous no matter who wore them. Which was, I think, the point.
The people who do this (I mean the people with far too much time on their hands wo do the baiting) aren't making fun of them for being black. They're making fun of them for being gullible and greedy. Honest law-abiding Nigerians who don't try to scam people are not vulnerable to this kind of baiting.
Not that that makes the thing a *worthwhile* endeavor. As I said, the baiters have *far* too much free time. One of their teachers should assign them some homework, or something.
But I've got no sympathy for the baited scammers. If they don't like it, they can stop running illegal scams that give their whole country a bad name.
> Sometimes I wonder if those Nigerians willing to > engage in these scams are not just the poor and desparate
On the contrary, they have internet access on a regular basis. This pretty much implies that they are necessarily upper-class, by local standards. (This is not entirely the same thing as being upper-class by American standards, granted. But it's a *long* way from being the poor and the desperate.) Additionally, poor people in Nigeria would never have been able to put together some of those costumes. Also, they wouldn't have cameras to take the photos.
One would think so, but unfortunately someone decided it would be a good idea to use a signed value for time, presumably in case you need to have system times prior to 1970 (even though, in practice, you can't actually do that).
So when people say "32-bit time_t", what they actually mean is "the effectively 31-bit time_t that is used on most 32-bit systems". Hence, 2038.
> I've seen that sort of thing on websites. It's easy - > just make sure you only use the left 22% of the screen,
That's what you get when the website is created by somebody who spends more time using Photoshop than creating the actual markup or -- worse yet -- uses a WYSIWYG HTML editor like FrontWeaver or DreamPage.
If the webmaster is competent, however, things can be designed so that they actually scale, taking up the whole screen at 1600x1200, but not requiring a horizontal scrollbar at 640x480, even if the user's minimum font size and/or zoom level is different from the default.
I'll put my design where my mouth is: http://www.galionlibrary.org/
(It may take a minute or so to load. Sorry. The ISP that hosts it for us has declined considerably in quality lately; we are considering moving it in-house, but such a decision involves non-IT people, so it can't happen overnight. Be that as it may, it's the content design that we're talking about here, not the server performance.)
Now, granted, that's not designed to scale down to mobile resolutions. For that we'd have to ditch all the bitmapped grapics, or at least style them away in the mobile stylesheet. If I start seeing a higher percentage of mobile devices in our User Agent stats, I'll start looking at that possibility. Though I'd probably need a mobile-device emulator for testing -- anybody know of a decent one?
> Compaq's business products (Deskpro line) were top-of-the-line
Oh, grrrrr... Don't even get me *started* on the Deskpro line.
Where I work we used to have some of them, when I first started, because some cretinous loser had selected them before I came on board. Gah.
Drivers for the hardware? Yeah, good luck. You see, in that era, every PC came with one or more removable disks containing the drivers -- every PC except for the Compaq Deskpro, that is. The OEM install included the right drivers pre-installed, but if you needed to reinstall for any reason whatsoever, you were screwed. Oh, you say, no problem, just go to the manufacturer's website and download the drivers. Yeah, you *could* do that... maybe... if you knew which ones you needed, which you had no way to know, because Compaq never bothered to update the model number when they changed which components they were putting in the things. Haha. And in some cases you'd download all of the available drivers for your model, every single one, try them all, and *none* of them would work, because your particular iteration of components wasn't very long-lived and they never bothered to get the drivers put up on the site. What fun! Did I mention that all these drivers had to be downloaded as "Softpaqs", which weren't labeled according to their contents, and that in many cases several different Softpaqs (including, in some instances, ones that you needed to support different components in the same computer) would have the same file name, but different sizes and contents? Such joy!
> In the next generation there's Wolfenstein 3D and later Doom, > but those games would never have been what they were... if > Apogee's shareware distribution hadn't already proved successful.
Come to think of it, in addition to being a major factor in making Apogee successful, Keen was also *the* game that put Id Software on the map (that's the company that later went on to make Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, among others). Keen is the game that made them, in much the same way Donkey Kong made Nintendo. (But Keen is a much better and more interesting game than Donkey Kong.)
(Commander Keen) > In any case, it's not a defining, pioneering > video game that most non-nerds can identify.
This is Slashdot. If you want to talk about games like Sorry and Life, you're in the wrong place.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what games of that era you think were more defining than Keen. In its era, I can't think of any.
In the next generation there's Wolfenstein 3D and later Doom, but those games would never have been what they were (indeed, might not even have been made) if Apogee's shareware model of game distribution hadn't already proved successful. Keen was one of the key games (perhaps, arguably, _the_ key game) that made it successful.
> Sorry, you have a good point but everyone deserves a fair trial
No, actually, many of them don't.
But they are afforded* a fair trial, irrespective of what they deserve, because it's better for society that way.
Criminals, at least in most cases, don't deserve anything of the kind, but we give it to them anyway, partly because not everyone who goes to trial is a criminal, but mostly because it provides an important check against certain categories of systematic government abuse. If criminals could be punished without a trial, pretty soon we'd have the sort of government we don't want. Avoiding this is significantly more important, for society as a whole, than giving criminals the summary punishment many of them deserve.
* The actual wording in the sixth amendment is that the accused shall "enjoy" the right, but it's an alternate usage of the word "enjoy", referring not to the derivation of pleasure but to the receipt of a benefit -- i.e., the accused shall receive the benefit of a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed and so on and so forth. There is nothing in there about what the accused _deserves_, because that's not the point.
> we only vote in conformist 'never rock the boat' overly-religious > men, who turn out to be good at not cheating on their wives...
Right. Which President are you referring to?
Barack Obama is practically the opposite of conformist, ramming his program down everyone's throats, including the congresspersons of his own party. George W. Bush rocked the boat all over the place, taking us to war when a good chunk of the world was adamantly against it, not once but twice. Clinton is mostly known for cheating on his wife. Do I really need to go through the whole list?
> If it can stick anywhere, then why doesn't it > stick to the top of the street light lens?
Around here? Because streetlights are hot and melt it. But if they weren't and didn't, it certainly would. It sticks to the tops of other things, such as the sides of buildings.
If the disk has 128k free, it's unlikely to be NTFS. More likely FAT12. If we were talking about a hard drive partition, the numbers would be larger. I chose a small example so the numbers would be easy to follow, for clarity.
But my point was, disk space is always allocated in power-of-two units. Always. Even with NTFS. Consequently, it doesn't make sense to measure it any other way.
Commander Keen was a pretty major game, one of the ones that made Apogee such a success. In its day, it was significantly more popular than Duke Nukem. And I still think that after Duke Nukem 3D proved successful they should have made Keen 3D. A first-person shooter with a pogo stick and giant cartoon slugs would just be really really cool, IMO.
> When it starts getting close to the melting point, you get all > kinds of foul and undesirable precipitation. Warm, wet, heavy > snow... Slush... Sleet. Freezing rain.
Oh, and let's not forget freezing fog, which you only get when it's *really* close to the melting point (like, within a degree or two). For driving purposes, freezing fog is quite possibly the absolute worst weather condition.
> I honestly don't know how ya'll live up there with > such cold/bad weather for so long a part of the year?!?!
It's not the cold weather that's the problem. In cold weather, the snow is a nice dry fluffy powder that squeaks when you walk on it and then blows around some more. It's not slippery, doesn't stick to anything, and causes no significant problems.
The problem is the warm weather. When it starts getting close to the melting point, you get all kinds of foul and undesirable precipitation. Warm, wet, heavy snow that sticks to everything and makes a horrible mess. Slush, which is the most slippery substance known to man. Sleet. Freezing rain. Sometimes you can get all of that within the space of a few minutes.
If the temperature never rose above zero, winter would be much more pleasant. Maybe someday I'll move to northern Canada. I think I'd like the weather better up there.
> I live in New Orleans
Oh, man, I would die.
The summers in Ohio are bad enough, with temperatures sometimes in excess of eighty degrees, which is just nuts. You feel like you're going to melt, and you can't get dry, ever, and you feel like you're in an oven, or a sauna. Your brain bakes, and you can't sleep at night, and the longer it goes on the more you lose the ability to think clearly... Ugh.
I don't know how people survive any closer to the equator than this. Well, okay, these days they probably just spend a couple thousand dollars a month on air conditioning and never leave the house. But before air conditioning was developed, I have no idea how people managed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not the manager, you probably shouldn't try to manage your coworkers, especially if they've got more seniority than you do. It's not your place.
You *should* continue, for your own part, to do what you know is right, i.e., to put in an honest day's work for your pay. This is your duty, since you are being paid for your time.
As for the others, that's between them and their superiors.
If it really bothers you, to the point where you don't like the work environment, you could consider looking for work elsewhere. I know, jobs are a little hard to find right now, but they *are* out there. Furthermore you aren't on a tight deadline, since you do already have a job that you can continue to work ad interim, so if it takes a few extra months to find the job you're looking for, that's no big disaster.
> Previous scientific theories weren't proven wrong, just incomplete
That depends which ones you're talking about. Newton's theories were merely proven incomplete, and in ways that don't much impact macroscopic objects in everyday life.
There are other ideas, however, that have, after being held as unassailable truth by the entire educated world for centuries, turned out to be not merely incomplete but in fact totally dead wrong. The poster boy for this phenomenon is, of course, Aristotle, but it's been repeated many times over the last three millennia.
> No one really understands string theory
String theory was never intended to be understood. It was designed to make the guys who write papers about it sound smart, without requiring them to actually figure anything out about how the universe works.
> [I]s that you, Guy Kawasaki?
Never heard of him.
Also, this *should* be obvious -- both from the context (especially in light of the parent comment) and also from the closing remark -- but just in case you're especially dense even for a slashdotter, I'll go ahead and state outright that I was being facetious, i.e., I wasn't serious.
> EVERYONE knows Donkey Kong
Sure, because versions of Donkey Kong have been released for every major gaming system from Atari 2600 right on up through Wii, not to mention for arcades. But this is not really germane to my point.
> A few slashdot people know Cmdr. Keen.
This *is* slashdot, and nearly everyone here knows about Commander Keen. Certainly everyone who played any significant quantity of PC games in the early and mid nineties played it (or the sequel), and that's... most of us.
Like I said, if you only want to talk about the games they sell at Wall-Mart, you're on the wrong forum. People on this slashdot tend to like computers, and we talk about computer things. So when we talk about games, we often talk about computer games. Besides the Id classics, we also talk about Nethack and occasionally even the Zork series.
> And yeah, Perl has seen better times.
On the contrary, Perl is more widely used now than it has ever been in the past.
Granted, there are also some other decent options now. Fifteen years ago, for certain kinds of things, Perl was the *only* decent option, and that's no longer the case.
But Perl is still going strong as well.
> And you are to decide who does or does not deserve a
> fair trial? If we deny the right of a fair trial
I didn't say anything about denying anyone a trial. On the contrary, I specifically said that we give them a fair trial whether they deserve it or not, better it's for society that way. The right to a trial protects the citizenry from certain kinds of systematic government abuses abuses that might otherwise arise.
> A criminal is not a criminal until they have been convicted.
The word you are looking for is "convict".
A "criminal" is a person who has committed a crime. The act of doing so makes them a criminal, by definition, whether or not anyone else ever finds out about it, and totally irrespective of whether they are ever brought to justice. You may notice that the words "crime" and "criminal" contain some of the same letters. This is not a coincidence.
> > The actual wording
> Because a word written 200 years ago means
> the same thing as it is does now.
Now you're just trolling. You couldn't even quote the rest of my sentence, because it would have obviated your point.
> The P of LAMP used to by PHP.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's always been Perl.
Sure, there are variations. Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python, Linux/Apache/mod_perl/Postgres, and a number of others... but the most common expansion has always been Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl.
As for *why* MySQL is so much more popular than Postgres, I'm sure I don't know. I've never heard anything bad about Postgres, ever, and my own experiences with it have all been positive as well. Not that my experiences with MySQL have been bad either, granted. (The one that annoys me is MS SQL Server, which has the nasty habit of not bothering to provide extremely basic features that people who use competing products take for granted, like case-sensitive comparison and regular expression matching. Thank goodness for the third-party xp_pcre add-on, but these are NOT features one should have to install a third-party add-on in order to get.)
> When did it change to Python and did something
> happened to Apache while I wasn't looking?
Nothing happened to Apache. The grandparent poster is... confused.
Those costumes would be ridiculous no matter who wore them. Which was, I think, the point.
The people who do this (I mean the people with far too much time on their hands wo do the baiting) aren't making fun of them for being black. They're making fun of them for being gullible and greedy. Honest law-abiding Nigerians who don't try to scam people are not vulnerable to this kind of baiting.
Not that that makes the thing a *worthwhile* endeavor. As I said, the baiters have *far* too much free time. One of their teachers should assign them some homework, or something.
But I've got no sympathy for the baited scammers. If they don't like it, they can stop running illegal scams that give their whole country a bad name.
> Sometimes I wonder if those Nigerians willing to
> engage in these scams are not just the poor and desparate
On the contrary, they have internet access on a regular basis. This pretty much implies that they are necessarily upper-class, by local standards. (This is not entirely the same thing as being upper-class by American standards, granted. But it's a *long* way from being the poor and the desperate.) Additionally, poor people in Nigeria would never have been able to put together some of those costumes. Also, they wouldn't have cameras to take the photos.
No, no, see, the Haiku guys have brought BeOS back from the dead now, so really 2010 will actually be the Year of the BeOS Desktop.
HTH.HAND.
One would think so, but unfortunately someone decided it would be a good idea to use a signed value for time, presumably in case you need to have system times prior to 1970 (even though, in practice, you can't actually do that).
So when people say "32-bit time_t", what they actually mean is "the effectively 31-bit time_t that is used on most 32-bit systems". Hence, 2038.
> I've seen that sort of thing on websites. It's easy -
> just make sure you only use the left 22% of the screen,
That's what you get when the website is created by somebody who spends more time using Photoshop than creating the actual markup or -- worse yet -- uses a WYSIWYG HTML editor like FrontWeaver or DreamPage.
If the webmaster is competent, however, things can be designed so that they actually scale, taking up the whole screen at 1600x1200, but not requiring a horizontal scrollbar at 640x480, even if the user's minimum font size and/or zoom level is different from the default.
I'll put my design where my mouth is:
http://www.galionlibrary.org/
(It may take a minute or so to load. Sorry. The ISP that hosts it for us has declined considerably in quality lately; we are considering moving it in-house, but such a decision involves non-IT people, so it can't happen overnight. Be that as it may, it's the content design that we're talking about here, not the server performance.)
Now, granted, that's not designed to scale down to mobile resolutions. For that we'd have to ditch all the bitmapped grapics, or at least style them away in the mobile stylesheet. If I start seeing a higher percentage of mobile devices in our User Agent stats, I'll start looking at that possibility. Though I'd probably need a mobile-device emulator for testing -- anybody know of a decent one?
> Compaq's business products (Deskpro line) were top-of-the-line
Oh, grrrrr... Don't even get me *started* on the Deskpro line.
Where I work we used to have some of them, when I first started, because some cretinous loser had selected them before I came on board. Gah.
Drivers for the hardware? Yeah, good luck. You see, in that era, every PC came with one or more removable disks containing the drivers -- every PC except for the Compaq Deskpro, that is. The OEM install included the right drivers pre-installed, but if you needed to reinstall for any reason whatsoever, you were screwed. Oh, you say, no problem, just go to the manufacturer's website and download the drivers. Yeah, you *could* do that... maybe... if you knew which ones you needed, which you had no way to know, because Compaq never bothered to update the model number when they changed which components they were putting in the things. Haha. And in some cases you'd download all of the available drivers for your model, every single one, try them all, and *none* of them would work, because your particular iteration of components wasn't very long-lived and they never bothered to get the drivers put up on the site. What fun! Did I mention that all these drivers had to be downloaded as "Softpaqs", which weren't labeled according to their contents, and that in many cases several different Softpaqs (including, in some instances, ones that you needed to support different components in the same computer) would have the same file name, but different sizes and contents? Such joy!
> In the next generation there's Wolfenstein 3D and later Doom, ... if
> but those games would never have been what they were
> Apogee's shareware distribution hadn't already proved successful.
Come to think of it, in addition to being a major factor in making Apogee successful, Keen was also *the* game that put Id Software on the map (that's the company that later went on to make Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, among others). Keen is the game that made them, in much the same way Donkey Kong made Nintendo. (But Keen is a much better and more interesting game than Donkey Kong.)
(Commander Keen)
> In any case, it's not a defining, pioneering
> video game that most non-nerds can identify.
This is Slashdot. If you want to talk about games like Sorry and Life, you're in the wrong place.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what games of that era you think were more defining than Keen. In its era, I can't think of any.
In the next generation there's Wolfenstein 3D and later Doom, but those games would never have been what they were (indeed, might not even have been made) if Apogee's shareware model of game distribution hadn't already proved successful. Keen was one of the key games (perhaps, arguably, _the_ key game) that made it successful.
> Sorry, you have a good point but everyone deserves a fair trial
No, actually, many of them don't.
But they are afforded* a fair trial, irrespective of what they deserve, because it's better for society that way.
Criminals, at least in most cases, don't deserve anything of the kind, but we give it to them anyway, partly because not everyone who goes to trial is a criminal, but mostly because it provides an important check against certain categories of systematic government abuse. If criminals could be punished without a trial, pretty soon we'd have the sort of government we don't want. Avoiding this is significantly more important, for society as a whole, than giving criminals the summary punishment many of them deserve.
* The actual wording in the sixth amendment is that the accused shall "enjoy" the right, but it's an alternate usage of the word "enjoy", referring not to the derivation of pleasure but to the receipt of a benefit -- i.e., the accused shall receive the benefit of a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed and so on and so forth. There is nothing in there about what the accused _deserves_, because that's not the point.
> And how the hell did Bush get reelected?
The other option was John Kerry. Weren't you paying attention?
> we only vote in conformist 'never rock the boat' overly-religious
> men, who turn out to be good at not cheating on their wives...
Right. Which President are you referring to?
Barack Obama is practically the opposite of conformist, ramming his program down everyone's throats, including the congresspersons of his own party. George W. Bush rocked the boat all over the place, taking us to war when a good chunk of the world was adamantly against it, not once but twice. Clinton is mostly known for cheating on his wife. Do I really need to go through the whole list?
> If it can stick anywhere, then why doesn't it
> stick to the top of the street light lens?
Around here? Because streetlights are hot and melt it. But if they weren't and didn't, it certainly would. It sticks to the tops of other things, such as the sides of buildings.
If the disk has 128k free, it's unlikely to be NTFS. More likely FAT12. If we were talking about a hard drive partition, the numbers would be larger. I chose a small example so the numbers would be easy to follow, for clarity.
But my point was, disk space is always allocated in power-of-two units. Always. Even with NTFS. Consequently, it doesn't make sense to measure it any other way.
> Well, no, that is exactly what I don't want. I don't want ...
> admin permissions to add a repository,
Sounds like what you want is Windows 98 plus ActiveX, where any website you visit can install any software the website wants.
What?
Commander Keen was a pretty major game, one of the ones that made Apogee such a success. In its day, it was significantly more popular than Duke Nukem. And I still think that after Duke Nukem 3D proved successful they should have made Keen 3D. A first-person shooter with a pogo stick and giant cartoon slugs would just be really really cool, IMO.
> When it starts getting close to the melting point, you get all
> kinds of foul and undesirable precipitation. Warm, wet, heavy
> snow... Slush... Sleet. Freezing rain.
Oh, and let's not forget freezing fog, which you only get when it's *really* close to the melting point (like, within a degree or two). For driving purposes, freezing fog is quite possibly the absolute worst weather condition.
> I honestly don't know how ya'll live up there with
> such cold/bad weather for so long a part of the year?!?!
It's not the cold weather that's the problem. In cold weather, the snow is a nice dry fluffy powder that squeaks when you walk on it and then blows around some more. It's not slippery, doesn't stick to anything, and causes no significant problems.
The problem is the warm weather. When it starts getting close to the melting point, you get all kinds of foul and undesirable precipitation. Warm, wet, heavy snow that sticks to everything and makes a horrible mess. Slush, which is the most slippery substance known to man. Sleet. Freezing rain. Sometimes you can get all of that within the space of a few minutes.
If the temperature never rose above zero, winter would be much more pleasant. Maybe someday I'll move to northern Canada. I think I'd like the weather better up there.
> I live in New Orleans
Oh, man, I would die.
The summers in Ohio are bad enough, with temperatures sometimes in excess of eighty degrees, which is just nuts. You feel like you're going to melt, and you can't get dry, ever, and you feel like you're in an oven, or a sauna. Your brain bakes, and you can't sleep at night, and the longer it goes on the more you lose the ability to think clearly... Ugh.
I don't know how people survive any closer to the equator than this. Well, okay, these days they probably just spend a couple thousand dollars a month on air conditioning and never leave the house. But before air conditioning was developed, I have no idea how people managed.