I learned on a PDP-8; 16K of hand-strung RAM and a CPU slow enough that you could put an AM radio next to it and hear it compute.
This thing came with all sorts of neat tools, including assembler (of course) and a FORTRAN compiler.
You learned to program good, tight code and really, really thought about your data structures.
Sure, programming today is much, much easier and we can do lots more. I cringe when I look at FORTRAN IV code these days; it's painful. But it did teach me a lot.
I would think so.... Military doctors work in inner-city emergency rooms because it's the closest you can come to medicine in a war zone.
I'm an engineer, and was one in the Air Force for years. Heavy construction, working 12 on 12 off under combat conditions is a good way to get killed.
We had checklists for everything. I mean everything we could think of - we even had a checklist for when you didn't have a checklist.
We recognized that, after working a week of 12 hour shifts in the field, then 4-8 hours in the office planning the next day, your ability to made decisions is reduced. So you have a checklist. It kept our people from getting hurt or worse.
I was the disaster preparedness officer in the National Guard for a bunch of years. Whenever I did an evaluation (and some of these were full-scale deoployments with aircraft and 1,000 personnel) I'd start taking away all of the high tech stuff.
You depend on radios? I'll figure out a way to compromise them. Somebody will be careless and leave one laying around. I'll disconnect your computer network, jam your wireless. I'll steal cars, hide your keys. If nothing else, I'll overwhelm your digital network with too much information.
The good units had paper-and-pencil backups and runners. The bad units came apart.
Same with hiking; never let the technology override your ability. We hike with a GPS, but we always carry a paper map and and a compass. Last time we did this, my kids were 100' off from the GPS coordinates - after 3 hours of bushwhacking over broken terrain. You can stay found if you know what you are doing.
Typically business licenses have a flat fee plus a percentage of gross. In my case it was 1.7% of gross, which doesn't sound like much, but when you are in an industry where the profit margin is 10-15% of gross, that business license takes about 10% of your profit. Add to that that every juristiction you work in wants their 1.7%, and all of the sudden you are losing a third of your profits to business licenses.
Business licenses are enormously expensive for small businesses; we estimated that it took about 10 hours/week to keep up with all of the various licenses we had to have, at a cost of some $15/hr.
The kid made the money *after* they tried to shut her down, and the local businesses stepped in and gave her tons and tons of free publicity. Until her lemonade stand hit the papers, she was just another kid making a few $ a day.
RTFM - Les Schwab and a TV station stepped in and promoted her.
Right. In the meantime, you go through a huge amount of upheaval as large corporations go bankrupt, hundreds of thousands of workers cannot find jobs, homes get foreclosed on, banks go tits-up...
No, wait, didn't we just do that?
You can't handle people like a commodity. I friend of mine was a sharpshooter for the US Marine Corps. Do you know how many civilian jobs are open to someone like him?
While a lot of military jobs translate, many are specialized and do not. Even if they translate, how many do you think the economy can absorb?
You can't take a tank driver and put him in a classroom and expect him to handle a grade school class. Doesn't work that way. It's a generational change.
I agree with you... But the reality is that millions of US jobs depend on military spending. You don't wave a magic wand and make that reality go away.
If we spent a fraction of what we spend on the military on education, we'd have a great education system, etc etc.
But reality is what it is, and there's more money in blowing shit up than teaching people how to read and write.
Or... Maybe he did it himself? Now he's more bulletproof. The first charge was baseless; any additional "character assassination" charges will be met with tin-foil skepticism.
Can you think of a better way to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen?
But... Not only would that dump a lot of soldiers into a bad economy, it would also put a lot of large businesses out of business. Military spending is about the only thing keeping GM, Boeing, and a whole bunch of other large companies afloat.
They want to keep our troops over there, because then they get to sell Humvees, tanks, planes, weapons, uniforms, etc. If we cut that back, we'd see layoff in Detroit like you wouldn't believe, and the execs would find it harder to justify their $100M year-end bonuses.
OK, but you have to figure the total cost of travel. For a tourist/business person, the fare includes a night's accommodations. With a plane, you're getting up at 2AM, which means you've paid $150 for a hotel, and another $75 for a limo ride to the airport.
Plus you get 1/2 night's sleep, and you look like shit in the morning. And if you have business to conduct, you're not at your best, having only slept a couple of hours.
Now obviously trains cant compete with long-haul air travel such as New York to LA but for short haul, it could really work. (but only if its given proper high speed track and doesn't have to share that track with slow freight trains)
At 200 MPH, the trip would take 15 hours, give or take.
Leave at 5 PM, get in the sleeper, drink some wine that you brought on board, eat your dinner, and go to sleep. At 8AM, you arrive at your destination, in the heart of the city, rested, and ready to go. No need to get your luggage, take a taxi, or a long ride to and from airports.
Now compare this to the red eye flight. Tell me it's not feasible.
We take sleepers in Europe whenever we can; they're so much nicer than planes.
There's the flip side, too. My kids are perfectly normal - that means they run, play, and have lots of energy. We don't have network TV, and we don't have too many computer games, so my kids go out and play. They run around and goof off.
So.... When they were a bit younger, they would come home from school, and all that pent up energy had to go somewhere. They would run around like... kids. Now they weren't breaking things or getting into fights; they would just run around, laugh, spray each other with the garden hose, that sort of thing.
Several times I've had other parents suggest to me that they be tested for ADHD and that we should consider drugging them with various psychoactive drugs. The mindset is that a) it's easier on the parent to have a kid who just sits quietly, and b) kids should be drugged if that's what it takes.
My kids are a bit older, they've learned to channel their energy. One is one of the best swimmers in the state and the other is a competitive triathlete. And they did it without drugs.
But some parents will insist that there's something wrong with little Johnny because he's "too active" so give him drugs. At one time, 10% of the kids in my neighborhood were on Prozac.
I remember when laptops came out. First there were the "luggables" like the Compaq. Then the big, heavy clamshells with 5" drives.
In 1995 I bought a Gateway Liberty, at the time the smallest, lightest laptop on the market. It was about the size of a hardback book and weighed 6 lbs. It was a marvel of miniaturization.
Then laptops got feature-itis, and got huge. ISTR a laptop with a 19" or 20" screen.
Then someone had a great idea: let's build a small, simple laptop and call it a "netbook"! What a concept!
So it seems to be with cell phones. The bag phone to the pocket phone, to the tiny phone, now much larger with "feature-itis".
I can't wait for the next generation of "simple small phones". Let's call them netphones.
Do an old fashioned album of the places you've been the things you've seen, then sit with your daughters on your wedding anniversary and tell them stories. Your story telling will make those memories come alive. Relive the joy of her being alive, not the pain of her death.
Put photographs, little bits of whatever, theater tickets, and so on. My father in law did this for my kids as he was dying while they were being born.
Great family history and lots of memories in those albums.
I agree with you but... If you're going to carry something into the woods, make sure it can do its job. I carry a GPS; my kids carry a compass and a map each. We constantly check each other.
While I think converting a phone to a GPS sounds really cool, I would never, ever rely on it in the woods for a lot of reasons; my Garmin will take getting dropped, soaked, frozen, baked, and will work in places where compasses don't (like a lava field miles wide).
I live in Oregon too; people die here every year on simple day hikes. Make sure the gear you carry is worth carrying.
Obese... Let's talk obese. Obesity is a bit more than 30#; more like 150# extra. Add to that that many people have families and if they're obese, the rest of their family has a higher likelihood of being obese. So the difference, for a 2 person vehicle may be 300# in a 3,000# vehicle; about 10%. That will impact your gas mileage.
I live across the street from one such family; the smaller of the two daughters is probably well over 250#; the larger one is, at a guess, close to 400#. Their little car can barely move with the two of them in there.
I can definitely see how that would impact gas mileage.
But back to the article. I love how CR can't bring themselves to say "fat" or "obese" when describing the problems. They say car manufacturers must adapt for "plus size people". What a bunch of PC crock. People are fat, they're not "plus".
Heinlein proposed this in one of his many sci-fi rants. He proposed 2 houses; one that passes laws and requires 2/3 majority to put a law into effect; the second whose sole purpose is to repeal laws and requires only a 1/3 of the votes to repeal any law.
I believe this is in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
Slashdot Mirror
But DOS doesn't have all the neat tools.
I learned on a PDP-8; 16K of hand-strung RAM and a CPU slow enough that you could put an AM radio next to it and hear it compute.
This thing came with all sorts of neat tools, including assembler (of course) and a FORTRAN compiler.
You learned to program good, tight code and really, really thought about your data structures.
Sure, programming today is much, much easier and we can do lots more. I cringe when I look at FORTRAN IV code these days; it's painful. But it did teach me a lot.
I would think so.... Military doctors work in inner-city emergency rooms because it's the closest you can come to medicine in a war zone.
I'm an engineer, and was one in the Air Force for years. Heavy construction, working 12 on 12 off under combat conditions is a good way to get killed.
We had checklists for everything. I mean everything we could think of - we even had a checklist for when you didn't have a checklist.
We recognized that, after working a week of 12 hour shifts in the field, then 4-8 hours in the office planning the next day, your ability to made decisions is reduced. So you have a checklist. It kept our people from getting hurt or worse.
I was the disaster preparedness officer in the National Guard for a bunch of years. Whenever I did an evaluation (and some of these were full-scale deoployments with aircraft and 1,000 personnel) I'd start taking away all of the high tech stuff.
You depend on radios? I'll figure out a way to compromise them. Somebody will be careless and leave one laying around. I'll disconnect your computer network, jam your wireless. I'll steal cars, hide your keys. If nothing else, I'll overwhelm your digital network with too much information.
The good units had paper-and-pencil backups and runners. The bad units came apart.
Same with hiking; never let the technology override your ability. We hike with a GPS, but we always carry a paper map and and a compass. Last time we did this, my kids were 100' off from the GPS coordinates - after 3 hours of bushwhacking over broken terrain. You can stay found if you know what you are doing.
Typically business licenses have a flat fee plus a percentage of gross. In my case it was 1.7% of gross, which doesn't sound like much, but when you are in an industry where the profit margin is 10-15% of gross, that business license takes about 10% of your profit. Add to that that every juristiction you work in wants their 1.7%, and all of the sudden you are losing a third of your profits to business licenses.
Business licenses are enormously expensive for small businesses; we estimated that it took about 10 hours/week to keep up with all of the various licenses we had to have, at a cost of some $15/hr.
The kid made the money *after* they tried to shut her down, and the local businesses stepped in and gave her tons and tons of free publicity. Until her lemonade stand hit the papers, she was just another kid making a few $ a day.
RTFM - Les Schwab and a TV station stepped in and promoted her.
Right. In the meantime, you go through a huge amount of upheaval as large corporations go bankrupt, hundreds of thousands of workers cannot find jobs, homes get foreclosed on, banks go tits-up...
No, wait, didn't we just do that?
You can't handle people like a commodity. I friend of mine was a sharpshooter for the US Marine Corps. Do you know how many civilian jobs are open to someone like him?
While a lot of military jobs translate, many are specialized and do not. Even if they translate, how many do you think the economy can absorb?
You can't take a tank driver and put him in a classroom and expect him to handle a grade school class. Doesn't work that way. It's a generational change.
I agree with you... But the reality is that millions of US jobs depend on military spending. You don't wave a magic wand and make that reality go away.
If we spent a fraction of what we spend on the military on education, we'd have a great education system, etc etc.
But reality is what it is, and there's more money in blowing shit up than teaching people how to read and write.
Depends on where you live. Some places don't have easy access to landfills anymore and it's cheaper to subsidize recycling than to landfill.
And some places just believe it's the right thing to do and pay the costs anyway.
Or... Maybe he did it himself? Now he's more bulletproof. The first charge was baseless; any additional "character assassination" charges will be met with tin-foil skepticism.
Can you think of a better way to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen?
But... Not only would that dump a lot of soldiers into a bad economy, it would also put a lot of large businesses out of business. Military spending is about the only thing keeping GM, Boeing, and a whole bunch of other large companies afloat.
They want to keep our troops over there, because then they get to sell Humvees, tanks, planes, weapons, uniforms, etc. If we cut that back, we'd see layoff in Detroit like you wouldn't believe, and the execs would find it harder to justify their $100M year-end bonuses.
Or you can just get flightgear http://www.flightgear.org/ , which lets you fly against others, or fly planes, UFOs, even a Deux Cheveaux.
OK, but you have to figure the total cost of travel. For a tourist/business person, the fare includes a night's accommodations. With a plane, you're getting up at 2AM, which means you've paid $150 for a hotel, and another $75 for a limo ride to the airport.
Plus you get 1/2 night's sleep, and you look like shit in the morning. And if you have business to conduct, you're not at your best, having only slept a couple of hours.
eminent domain
Now obviously trains cant compete with long-haul air travel such as New York to LA but for short haul, it could really work. (but only if its given proper high speed track and doesn't have to share that track with slow freight trains)
At 200 MPH, the trip would take 15 hours, give or take.
Leave at 5 PM, get in the sleeper, drink some wine that you brought on board, eat your dinner, and go to sleep. At 8AM, you arrive at your destination, in the heart of the city, rested, and ready to go. No need to get your luggage, take a taxi, or a long ride to and from airports.
Now compare this to the red eye flight. Tell me it's not feasible.
We take sleepers in Europe whenever we can; they're so much nicer than planes.
There's the flip side, too. My kids are perfectly normal - that means they run, play, and have lots of energy. We don't have network TV, and we don't have too many computer games, so my kids go out and play. They run around and goof off.
So.... When they were a bit younger, they would come home from school, and all that pent up energy had to go somewhere. They would run around like... kids. Now they weren't breaking things or getting into fights; they would just run around, laugh, spray each other with the garden hose, that sort of thing.
Several times I've had other parents suggest to me that they be tested for ADHD and that we should consider drugging them with various psychoactive drugs. The mindset is that a) it's easier on the parent to have a kid who just sits quietly, and b) kids should be drugged if that's what it takes.
My kids are a bit older, they've learned to channel their energy. One is one of the best swimmers in the state and the other is a competitive triathlete. And they did it without drugs.
But some parents will insist that there's something wrong with little Johnny because he's "too active" so give him drugs. At one time, 10% of the kids in my neighborhood were on Prozac.
You have obviously never used the TRS Model 100.
One day laptops may again aspire to 6 weeks runtime (yes, that's 6 weeks!) on a single set of AA batteries.
That was perfection in its day.
One day we'll have little hand held thingies that just.. make.. phone calls.
I remember when laptops came out. First there were the "luggables" like the Compaq. Then the big, heavy clamshells with 5" drives.
In 1995 I bought a Gateway Liberty, at the time the smallest, lightest laptop on the market. It was about the size of a hardback book and weighed 6 lbs. It was a marvel of miniaturization.
Then laptops got feature-itis, and got huge. ISTR a laptop with a 19" or 20" screen.
Then someone had a great idea: let's build a small, simple laptop and call it a "netbook"! What a concept!
So it seems to be with cell phones. The bag phone to the pocket phone, to the tiny phone, now much larger with "feature-itis".
I can't wait for the next generation of "simple small phones". Let's call them netphones.
Mold my butt. If the kids are getting sick from radio waves, take away their cell phones. That'll cure'm quick!
The available source code is 2 years old; the linux and mac versions are too. The linux version segfaults on finding my joystick.
Any good car racing sims that work with linux?
Do an old fashioned album of the places you've been the things you've seen, then sit with your daughters on your wedding anniversary and tell them stories. Your story telling will make those memories come alive. Relive the joy of her being alive, not the pain of her death.
Put photographs, little bits of whatever, theater tickets, and so on. My father in law did this for my kids as he was dying while they were being born.
Great family history and lots of memories in those albums.
I agree with you but... If you're going to carry something into the woods, make sure it can do its job. I carry a GPS; my kids carry a compass and a map each. We constantly check each other.
While I think converting a phone to a GPS sounds really cool, I would never, ever rely on it in the woods for a lot of reasons; my Garmin will take getting dropped, soaked, frozen, baked, and will work in places where compasses don't (like a lava field miles wide).
I live in Oregon too; people die here every year on simple day hikes. Make sure the gear you carry is worth carrying.
Obese... Let's talk obese. Obesity is a bit more than 30#; more like 150# extra. Add to that that many people have families and if they're obese, the rest of their family has a higher likelihood of being obese. So the difference, for a 2 person vehicle may be 300# in a 3,000# vehicle; about 10%. That will impact your gas mileage.
I live across the street from one such family; the smaller of the two daughters is probably well over 250#; the larger one is, at a guess, close to 400#. Their little car can barely move with the two of them in there.
I can definitely see how that would impact gas mileage.
But back to the article. I love how CR can't bring themselves to say "fat" or "obese" when describing the problems. They say car manufacturers must adapt for "plus size people". What a bunch of PC crock. People are fat, they're not "plus".
1. It's their computer, not yours, they make the rules.
2. If it's a position where you interface with the public, you create the appearance of wasteful/incompetent behavior.
So, no personal use at any time.
Heinlein proposed this in one of his many sci-fi rants. He proposed 2 houses; one that passes laws and requires 2/3 majority to put a law into effect; the second whose sole purpose is to repeal laws and requires only a 1/3 of the votes to repeal any law.
I believe this is in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
I for one would support this.
Fill'em with drives?
Isn't that what they are for?