Ah I don't want to start a holy war about that... I meant more along the lines of the actual buttons, how they're laid out and what they feel like, etc. As for old HP calculators, don't some of them have a bizarre tendency to drain batteries quickly because of some short in the keyboard membrane? I might be wrong but a guy at work brought in his old HP that killed its batteries in a few days.
How are they junk? A TI-83 can run for months on AAA batteries you can get at the dollar store, doesn't need constant software attention like upgrades, doesn't contain personal information and can't get trojaned or otherwise compromised.
It turns on instantly, does what it's supposed to do correctly the same way each time, and turns off instantly. I have a TI-83 on my desk at all times. The user interface can't be beat either.
I've breaded enough when the panko sticks to the croquette. Then I carefully sauté in medium hot olive oil until a golden crust forms. Why should I stop that!??
I just did my stint for the Quebec elections, and there's plenty of room for error. The people that work at the tables are basically paid volunteers. People can apply for the job, get a phone call and go to a training session. The first problem is that there's no IQ test, and the second problem is the training itself is the usual extremely boring and overly-detailed yet useless bureaucratic affair.
Each voting "office" is basically a cafeteria table with 3 to 4 people sitting at it, and a voting booth with a privacy screen.
The jobs are:
1) The scrutineer that hands the ballot to the elector
2) The secretary that checks voter ID and addresses
3) The electoral clerk that simply compiles the voter ID by line number. He compiles the list hourly as the voters come in.
4) Optional, a representative from one of the parties to act as a monitor.
The voting is held in specially designated buildings like school gyms, church basements, whatever. There are obviously more than one of these tables per building, usually 10 tables to cover a decent area. The voter list has about 300-400 names, so each building can handle at least 3000 voters over the 10.5 hours they're open.
There are also a bunch of other people that monitor the overall proceedings and help voters as they come in.
It's pretty straightforward until you realize that at the amount of people they hire, there are different interpretations and personalities at work. At my table, the scrutineer was an idiot. I seriously thought she was retarded. The ballot is torn off a block of paper, folded three times and initialed by the scrutineer. The ballot is handed to the voter, he votes, folds it back, hands it to the scrutineer who is supposed to check that his initals are still there, tears off a stub and hands the ballot back to the voter who then puts it in the sealed box.
Easy, right? Nope, the scrutineer was unable to make a coherent sentence and the voters thought THEY had to put THEIR initials on the ballot. Of course not, the vote is secret, but people vote every few years, how do they know? The scrutineer also managed to tear off more than one ballot at a time.
I know we lost a few votes that way.
Anyways, the training would have been better if it were hands-on, since most of this stuff is motor memory stuff. Just sitting at a session two weeks before the real thing is not enough. There should also be a dry run before we let electors in.
The next problem is that the workers can't really leave the building for the duration of the voting. It was hot and stuffy in my building, and I got a headache. I used to work in warehouses in the summer unloading 18 wheelers and never got a headache.
I only stayed 11.5 hours, but the people opening the ballot boxes and counting them stay even longer.
Me too. Found a complete all-in-one audio system in the trash one day. Remote, speakers, everything. CD player didn't work. A quick cleaning of the lens and it worked again. Put the thing on the Free section of CL. Hey one less item in the landfill.
Niven's fiction described a period of future human history where everyone is medicated to normalcy. Any violent imagery was censored. I don't know anymore how "future" that is...
Laumer really specialized in fast paced, two-fisted adventures that combine humor with sci-fi. Great fun. Try "A Trace of Memory" to see what I mean.
Now for Hjortsberg, he's basically written so few novels that he can't be underappreciated, he's just plain obscure. But he wrote this novel that's gotta be read to be appreciated.
The first chapter or so is quite dated, but once you get past that, oh wow.
Is Fred Pohl underappreciated? He's one of my favorites so I think that everyone must have heard of him. Try to find "The Way the Future Was", it's not sci-fi, more of a biography and how he worked with the greats of the Golden Age like Asimov.
Brian Aldiss not only wrote sci-fi, but wrote it well. Some of his short stories are the kind that stay stuck in your mind.
Norman Spinrad? Anyone ever hear of him? Great talent.
Let's not forget the software progress
on
Commodore 64 turns 30
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The most amazing thing to me is that coders are still trying to push the video chip to new heights. It is now possible to display all 16 colors any way you want in 320 x 200, and with enough external memory you can play back video...
How much math do you need to understand how a lease works, what rights you have as a renter, how annual rent increases work, how to expedite repairs, how the Regie du Logement (Rental Board) works? And how is what I said implying that we exclude math? I'm saying we're teaching too much math at the expense of everyday realities. It's not like we are teaching a little bit about the Civil Code, we are teaching NOTHING in high school. How will Newton's three laws help you when you rent or buy your first place? It's far easier to learn about Newton's laws in the comfort of your properly understood housing than it is to rent just knowing Newton's Laws.
How much math? And the world also includes laws, bankers, lawyers, notary publics, etc. Sure, we can teach l'Hopital's rule in high school, but can we also please teach the social realities that can have much more of an impact in everyday life than math?
There is so much missing from high school and post high school education. I'm from Quebec so the system is a bit different, you go to CEGEP between high school and university here. Anyways, nobody learns about how the society works here. We need young people to learn about the Civil Code, how contracts work, how renting works, how buying real estate works. Nothing in depth, but at least a functional knowledge so you don't walk into bad situations.
Am I making sense? We are focusing on things that are easy to teach like piles of math. Things that are complex and can create aware citizens seems to interest the system less.
This goes back about 10 years. There were fuses on the PCB, little surface mount affairs that look like a 1206 resistor. So this goes back to the days of the bad capacitors, and sometimes power supplies would fail explosively and take out the entire electrical system of the PC. I guess the PS must have gone out of regulation when the capacitors fail, who knows.
The HD just didn't spin up or show up in the BIOS when taken to a new PC. I just traced out the PCB and found the open fuse and changed it. There you go, HD spins up again.
When I was a kid back in the '80s, I made a fake newspaper with geoPublish, a desktop publishing program on the C64. It was about cyborgs demanding their own Olympics... I just re-read it and it's cringe inducingly awful, but I like to think I thought of this first!
I guess you weren't around in the early to mid '90s. C6-7s would blow up on launch and E-15s for the Astro Blaster would too. Unlike what Nervous Nellie up there claims, it's not that dangerous. You're supposed to be far away from the rocket when you press the launcher button anyways. It does destroy the rocket though. That C6-7 was in an Astrocam. The camera survived but you needed that special tube so I had to buy a new one. Never did get the distributor to honor the warranty.
That Shelley Long and Jude Law lived together in the 1970s and had an Apple II in their kitchen? Even one of those magical ones that doesn't even need cables to work!
I was about to mention mumetal, but its claim to fame is very high permeability. It doesn't repel magnetic fields, it Shamwows them. I suppose if the mumetal is saturated from the inside, then it doesn't hide the object from an external field. Although it takes a lot to saturate properly treated mumetal.
Old man story time. My Tektronix 547 CRT oscilloscope has its CRT encased in a mumetal shield. I got a powerful magnet and put it on the side of the case, the trace didn't budge at all. Great stuff. Of course, mumetal loses its properites if it's dinged, deformed or otherwise mechanically abused.
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Ah I don't want to start a holy war about that... I meant more along the lines of the actual buttons, how they're laid out and what they feel like, etc. As for old HP calculators, don't some of them have a bizarre tendency to drain batteries quickly because of some short in the keyboard membrane? I might be wrong but a guy at work brought in his old HP that killed its batteries in a few days.
It turns on instantly, does what it's supposed to do correctly the same way each time, and turns off instantly. I have a TI-83 on my desk at all times. The user interface can't be beat either.
I've breaded enough when the panko sticks to the croquette. Then I carefully sauté in medium hot olive oil until a golden crust forms. Why should I stop that!??
Each voting "office" is basically a cafeteria table with 3 to 4 people sitting at it, and a voting booth with a privacy screen.
The jobs are:
1) The scrutineer that hands the ballot to the elector
2) The secretary that checks voter ID and addresses
3) The electoral clerk that simply compiles the voter ID by line number. He compiles the list hourly as the voters come in.
4) Optional, a representative from one of the parties to act as a monitor.
The voting is held in specially designated buildings like school gyms, church basements, whatever. There are obviously more than one of these tables per building, usually 10 tables to cover a decent area. The voter list has about 300-400 names, so each building can handle at least 3000 voters over the 10.5 hours they're open.
There are also a bunch of other people that monitor the overall proceedings and help voters as they come in.
It's pretty straightforward until you realize that at the amount of people they hire, there are different interpretations and personalities at work. At my table, the scrutineer was an idiot. I seriously thought she was retarded. The ballot is torn off a block of paper, folded three times and initialed by the scrutineer. The ballot is handed to the voter, he votes, folds it back, hands it to the scrutineer who is supposed to check that his initals are still there, tears off a stub and hands the ballot back to the voter who then puts it in the sealed box.
Easy, right? Nope, the scrutineer was unable to make a coherent sentence and the voters thought THEY had to put THEIR initials on the ballot. Of course not, the vote is secret, but people vote every few years, how do they know? The scrutineer also managed to tear off more than one ballot at a time.
I know we lost a few votes that way.
Anyways, the training would have been better if it were hands-on, since most of this stuff is motor memory stuff. Just sitting at a session two weeks before the real thing is not enough. There should also be a dry run before we let electors in.
The next problem is that the workers can't really leave the building for the duration of the voting. It was hot and stuffy in my building, and I got a headache. I used to work in warehouses in the summer unloading 18 wheelers and never got a headache.
I only stayed 11.5 hours, but the people opening the ballot boxes and counting them stay even longer.
Me too. Found a complete all-in-one audio system in the trash one day. Remote, speakers, everything. CD player didn't work. A quick cleaning of the lens and it worked again. Put the thing on the Free section of CL. Hey one less item in the landfill.
Or Commodore.
He has vocal chords, I only have vocal cords.
Niven's fiction described a period of future human history where everyone is medicated to normalcy. Any violent imagery was censored. I don't know anymore how "future" that is...
I liked Commitment Hour and Expendable. I'd say the books go steadily downhill from there.
Have you read Psychohistorical Crisis? I can't decide if it's nuts or genius, but as usual with Kingsbury, very well written.
How could I forget Smith? Another one of those great talents that wrote memorable characters and stories, much more so than most sci-fi authors, IMHO.
1) Keith Laumer
2) William Hjortsberg
Laumer really specialized in fast paced, two-fisted adventures that combine humor with sci-fi. Great fun. Try "A Trace of Memory" to see what I mean.
Now for Hjortsberg, he's basically written so few novels that he can't be underappreciated, he's just plain obscure. But he wrote this novel that's gotta be read to be appreciated.
Gray Matters.
The first chapter or so is quite dated, but once you get past that, oh wow.
Is Fred Pohl underappreciated? He's one of my favorites so I think that everyone must have heard of him. Try to find "The Way the Future Was", it's not sci-fi, more of a biography and how he worked with the greats of the Golden Age like Asimov.
Brian Aldiss not only wrote sci-fi, but wrote it well. Some of his short stories are the kind that stay stuck in your mind.
Norman Spinrad? Anyone ever hear of him? Great talent.
The most amazing thing to me is that coders are still trying to push the video chip to new heights. It is now possible to display all 16 colors any way you want in 320 x 200, and with enough external memory you can play back video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QATUjaFYbJ4&feature=player_detailpage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QATUjaFYbJ4&feature=player_detailpage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QATUjaFYbJ4&feature=player_detailpage
Surely it is simple to understand.
How much math? And the world also includes laws, bankers, lawyers, notary publics, etc. Sure, we can teach l'Hopital's rule in high school, but can we also please teach the social realities that can have much more of an impact in everyday life than math?
There is so much missing from high school and post high school education. I'm from Quebec so the system is a bit different, you go to CEGEP between high school and university here. Anyways, nobody learns about how the society works here. We need young people to learn about the Civil Code, how contracts work, how renting works, how buying real estate works. Nothing in depth, but at least a functional knowledge so you don't walk into bad situations.
Am I making sense? We are focusing on things that are easy to teach like piles of math. Things that are complex and can create aware citizens seems to interest the system less.
This goes back about 10 years. There were fuses on the PCB, little surface mount affairs that look like a 1206 resistor. So this goes back to the days of the bad capacitors, and sometimes power supplies would fail explosively and take out the entire electrical system of the PC. I guess the PS must have gone out of regulation when the capacitors fail, who knows.
The HD just didn't spin up or show up in the BIOS when taken to a new PC. I just traced out the PCB and found the open fuse and changed it. There you go, HD spins up again.
That was my boring story for today.
When I was a kid back in the '80s, I made a fake newspaper with geoPublish, a desktop publishing program on the C64. It was about cyborgs demanding their own Olympics... I just re-read it and it's cringe inducingly awful, but I like to think I thought of this first!
I guess that's why they never called me back. I just set fire to the speakers. OK, the sound extinguishes the *fire*, got it.
billions! It's so much money even the singular takes an "s"!
I guess you weren't around in the early to mid '90s. C6-7s would blow up on launch and E-15s for the Astro Blaster would too. Unlike what Nervous Nellie up there claims, it's not that dangerous. You're supposed to be far away from the rocket when you press the launcher button anyways. It does destroy the rocket though. That C6-7 was in an Astrocam. The camera survived but you needed that special tube so I had to buy a new one. Never did get the distributor to honor the warranty.
That Shelley Long and Jude Law lived together in the 1970s and had an Apple II in their kitchen? Even one of those magical ones that doesn't even need cables to work!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_Harrier
From wiki:
Length 642.5 Meters
Width 467.0 Meters
Height 137.5 Meters
This is not trivial. There are no structural integrity fields in the real world. 150M$ for that? Doubtful.
Old man story time. My Tektronix 547 CRT oscilloscope has its CRT encased in a mumetal shield. I got a powerful magnet and put it on the side of the case, the trace didn't budge at all. Great stuff. Of course, mumetal loses its properites if it's dinged, deformed or otherwise mechanically abused.