Got me through engineering school, and after 20 years, I still use it every day. It is just a basic calculator, but it has most of the advanced operations, including polar-rect, complex math, hex, oct, binary, basic statictics, deg-rad-grad, deg-min-sec.
And it only cost me about $25. I don't know if there is a modern equivalent.
I do agree that HP's postfix is easier to use, but I always used paper for my intermediate steps, which was usually required anyway.
My advice, forget the graphing and other crap. If you need to write code for your problem, you need a laptop.
I really don't think there are that many people drinking the MS kool aid. People have been switching to Apple desktops and *nix servers fairly steadily, but you're not going to see an overnight change because the cost of migration is so high
I'd say you're drinking the Slashdot kool-aid. Apple desktop market share is not growing in any significant way - still below 3%, and Windows Server 2000/2003 is gaining market share against *nix.
That's because they persisted your scratch pad in the URL. I really like this feature as it allows me to share a scratch pad via a link without any server identity.
For me, the way Microsoft manages the search data is what makes Virtual Earth preferable to Google Maps. For example, when you interact with a map, the search results auto-update to reflect the current visible map.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Microsoft invent XMLHttpRequest? In which case, most AJAX, which uses XMLHttpRequest, is in fact built on Microsoft technology, and they deserve credit for having a played key role.
You are absolutely correct. In fact, Microsoft 5 years ago went far beyond what AJAX is today. The XMLHttpRequest object can act as a data source for binding directly to the IE DOM controls - without scripting to parse the data. I created an statewide budgeting app based on this technology 5 years ago for the Idaho Division of Financial Management. It allows a collaboration app like experience with reduced deployment effort. An ideal IT solution.
You're still going to have to notify everybody, because to make the security update effective, any affected processes will need to be restarted, likely including the web and applications services.
Racing games (and sports games in general) are trying to reproduce television reality, not actual reality. Television images are where the blur comes from.
you need all kinds of extra software just to keep windows running properly--virus scanners, spyware scanners, firewall.
Talk about FUD. All you need are Automatic Updates (notification only) and MBSA to help you located potential weak spots (passwords, unnecessary open ports, etc). Oh, and some common sense when it comes to running attachments. I've run my Win2000 box on static IPs for 5 years with neither firewall nor real-time anti-virus for 5 years, and have never been compromised - attacked yes, but not compromised.
When you see compromised systems, usually it can be tracked down to weak passwords, missing patches, or email delivered payloads that were unwittingly executed.
but calves born on dairy farms are taken from their mothers when they are just 1 day old and fed milk replacers (including cattle blood) so that humans can have the milk instead.(1,2)
While the use of milk replacer is common practice, many farms (including our own) used "cull" milk that cannot be sold for human consumption and would otherwise be dumped. Usually this was milk from cows undergoing anti-biotic treatment.
Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays.
Usually at 15 months, which is puberty for a cow - the same time a bull would have done it. It wouldn't work if the animal wasn't ready.
Cows have a lifespan of about 25 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years, but the stress caused by factory-farm conditions leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time they are 4 or 5 years old, at which time they are sent to the slaughterhouse.
The reason cows are often "culled" or sent for slaughter at 4-5 years is that dairies use the cull as a tool to accelerate natural selection for milk production. If a cow is producing well, they are milked for many more years, and produce more offspring which are more likely to be high producer themselves. If they don't produce well after the second lactation, they are sold for beef. Contrary to a previous response, milk cows are used for beef - they are natually lean and well suited for low fat ground beef production.
Although these animals would naturally make only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds a day), genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk a year (an average of 50 pounds a day).(8,9) Cows are also fed unnatural, high-protein diets, which include dead chickens, pigs, and other animals, because their natural diet of grass would not provide the nutrients necessary for them to produce the massive amounts of milk required by the industry.
That has happened for 100 years. Selective breeding is hardly genetic manipulation. You simply use the breeding stock that produces offspring with the highest milk production.
As for feeding cows "dead-chickens", cows diets are primarily alfalfa (protein), corn silage, chopped grass and legumes (protein), corn grain (protein), and sometimes high fat supplements like cotton seed or bakery waste (cookie crumbs). Most farmers cannot afford to risk feeding animal by-products to dairy cows due to the potential for disease transmission.
Animal mistreatment is the exception, not the rule on diary farms. Most diary farmers take very good care of their cattle - it is a matter of profits. Unlike beef operations, they cannot affort to liberally use anti-biotics - most anti-biotics show up in the milk and every tank is tested - not just organic farms.
system failures stranding US Navy ships...never with any mention of the fact that these problems are specific to Microsoft platforms
That case was a lot of publicity blaming NT for what was an application failure: divide by zero in a distributed database app. The bad press was based on misleading statements from one Navy computer tech, sour about not being involved in the decision making process.
Not all bugs originate in Redmond, WA, as the Firefox team is learning.
Considering that the US is the leader of the market economies, something the French detest, its amazing to note that in many ways market economics is working more effectively for consumers in France than they are in the US.
I have to disagree. European mobile phone access typically carries a lower monthly cost, but a much higher per minute cost, which necessitates SMS and other non-voice protocols. Here digital phone plans met the market need with bundles of mintues. The eurpoean plans actually discourage talking on the phone. It that effective for consumers?
Free markets are the surest path to efficiency and freedom. What they don't deliver is protection from harm. That's what laws and regulation are for. As for fairness: that's not a constitutionally protected right.
Word wasn't "better" than WordPerfect (if you are running a transcription service or something similar, people have the FASTEST results with WP 5.1 than ANY modern system), and Excel wasn't "better" than Lotus 1-2-3. However, they were less than half the price and you could get the bundle for less than either program individually.
Word (DOS) may not have as good as WP51 (not even close), but Word for Windows 1.1 certainly was better that WordPerfect for Windows. WP4Win was utter crap - bad looking and unreliable: a bad rewrite of a great DOS app.
Windows was hot; everyone needed Windows apps. Windows took away WP's biggest advantage: good printer drivers. On top of that, the Windows products usually offered WYSIWYG, which necessary or not, was also hot, hot, hot in the mid 80's.
1-2-3 for Windows was OK, but Excel was better. With it's powerful macro language and OLE integration between Word and Excel, it was a better pick assuming you had chosen Word for Windows.
Windows killed WP and 1-2-3 by leveling the field with printer drivers and WYSIWYG, forcing Lotus and WP to rewrite - and fall on their face.
Don't assume Microsoft always wins despite quality - they have often delivered (even if acquired) the most innovative (PowerPoint, Visio, Visual Basic, COM, IE4 DOM) or best of class (Word4Win vs WP, Excel vs 123, IE5 vs Netscape 4, Visual Studio 6.0 vs Borland C++, Exchange vs Groupwise/Notes)
getting a socket you can't just do the normal socket procedure. You first have to make a WinSock call to set up the socket, then all the normal BSD calls can use it.
You create sockets with socket(domain, type, protocol) -- standard BSD. The only differece is that you have to call WSAStartup at least once in your process to establish the version of Winsock you want to use. This is for improved backwards compability and to allow third party IP stacks to start -- a legacy of Windows for Workgroups.
One undocumented trick that works to kill any process on an NT box is "drwtsn32 -p xxx" where xxx is the process number. Technically what you are doing is attaching the debugger (drwtsn32) and terminating the process that way. I found this by looking over the source for an old version of Dr. Watson.
Well that describes me, but like most geeks, but I'm clever enough not click "Yes" when asked to install the latest ActiveX spyware offer. I also know where to find plenty of good, free, pop-up blockers and browser tab add-ons, if I had such a need.
I switched to IE4 seven years ago when I got tired of the Netscape 4 GP faults. IE has served me well - I have no need for change at this point.
Security is not a problem for most Windows geeks. I don't need software firewalls, nor CPU sapping real-time anti-virus. I'm interested in reliability and capability. Call me when Longhorn ships - maybe I'll be impressed - probably not. Barring that, I'm good to 2010, or until the.NET team decides not to support IE6 for client side controls.
It's inspired me to start learning more about client-side development again.
I'm by no means a Linux zealot -- I'm an ASP/SQL programmer, have been using Windows since v3.1, and am a huge fan of Microsoft's development tools / languages.
You're such an MS centric web programmer, but you've never discovered the XMLHTTPRequest object in the five years since Microsoft created it, and hyped it as a solution for richer client side web applications. If you had, you would know that thanks to data binding, that old IE5 solution is still one step beyond the new "innovative" AJAX tripe these born again Javascript evangelists are selling.
Try reading up at MSDN every couple of years - you might not have to wait so long to discover solutions to your problems. And if you haven't done so already, try ASP.NET. It's an eye opener to ASP and PHP developers.
I don't see how you think these are arguments in favour of a shorter long.
My point was that the Unix groups' desire to "naturally grow" to 64 bit APIs won't happen on Windows anyway because the Windows style APIs are generally strictly sized. So it negates one of the criteria favoring LP64.
Space optimisation is a matter for the application developer - the OS design should not select a model based on a preference for data size over source code compatibility.
But your big bitch seems to be about source code compatibility between Unix64 and Windows64 ports. Source code compatibility is one of the foremost considerations for MS. That's what will keep their customers happy - quick and easy ports.
In reality, I think most code will stay 32 bit for a very long time. Unlike the 16 bit transition, most applications will not benefit as long as the OS runs 32 bit apps seemlessly with 64 bit apps.
I am curious to know what happens to 64 bit messages sent to 32 bit apps - how does it thunk? I'll have to look that one up.
I should have remembered this one - SendMessage caused lots of grief in the 16->32. Fortunately, this time around, none of my code uses SendMessage. The UI stuff is usually DHTML, VB, or.NET The C/C++ code I write are libraries, services, console apps, etc, and I use other types of IPC: usually named pipes or sockets.
Slashdot Mirror
They do make the control available for Vista: here
This is the "application" version - not the safe for scripting version. Wrap it in your own control if you have to.
My $40 GeForce 6200 runs Aero just fine.
Seems like there was a good reason to remove the control from Vista. Also, it appears there are solutions for desktop apps that use the control.
Intuit added Vista support to Quicken 2007 last October with R2. See this for their support of Quicken on Vista.
Got me through engineering school, and after 20 years, I still use it every day. It is just a basic calculator, but it has most of the advanced operations, including polar-rect, complex math, hex, oct, binary, basic statictics, deg-rad-grad, deg-min-sec.
And it only cost me about $25. I don't know if there is a modern equivalent.
I do agree that HP's postfix is easier to use, but I always used paper for my intermediate steps, which was usually required anyway.
My advice, forget the graphing and other crap. If you need to write code for your problem, you need a laptop.
Dave
I really don't think there are that many people drinking the MS kool aid. People have been switching to Apple desktops and *nix servers fairly steadily, but you're not going to see an overnight change because the cost of migration is so high
I'd say you're drinking the Slashdot kool-aid. Apple desktop market share is not growing in any significant way - still below 3%, and Windows Server 2000/2003 is gaining market share against *nix.
That's because they persisted your scratch pad in the URL. I really like this feature as it allows me to share a scratch pad via a link without any server identity.
For me, the way Microsoft manages the search data is what makes Virtual Earth preferable to Google Maps. For example, when you interact with a map, the search results auto-update to reflect the current visible map.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Microsoft invent XMLHttpRequest? In which case, most AJAX, which uses XMLHttpRequest, is in fact built on Microsoft technology, and they deserve credit for having a played key role.
You are absolutely correct. In fact, Microsoft 5 years ago went far beyond what AJAX is today. The XMLHttpRequest object can act as a data source for binding directly to the IE DOM controls - without scripting to parse the data. I created an statewide budgeting app based on this technology 5 years ago for the Idaho Division of Financial Management. It allows a collaboration app like experience with reduced deployment effort. An ideal IT solution.
You're still going to have to notify everybody, because to make the security update effective, any affected processes will need to be restarted, likely including the web and applications services.
Racing games (and sports games in general) are trying to reproduce television reality, not actual reality. Television images are where the blur comes from.
XMLHTTPRequest is not an open standard, but a de-facto standard based on proprietory Microsoft technology introduced in IE 5 many years ago. source
you need all kinds of extra software just to keep windows running properly--virus scanners, spyware scanners, firewall.
Talk about FUD. All you need are Automatic Updates (notification only) and MBSA to help you located potential weak spots (passwords, unnecessary open ports, etc). Oh, and some common sense when it comes to running attachments. I've run my Win2000 box on static IPs for 5 years with neither firewall nor real-time anti-virus for 5 years, and have never been compromised - attacked yes, but not compromised.
When you see compromised systems, usually it can be tracked down to weak passwords, missing patches, or email delivered payloads that were unwittingly executed.
but calves born on dairy farms are taken from their mothers when they are just 1 day old and fed milk replacers (including cattle blood) so that humans can have the milk instead.(1,2)
While the use of milk replacer is common practice, many farms (including our own) used "cull" milk that cannot be sold for human consumption and would otherwise be dumped. Usually this was milk from cows undergoing anti-biotic treatment.
Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays.
Usually at 15 months, which is puberty for a cow - the same time a bull would have done it. It wouldn't work if the animal wasn't ready.
Cows have a lifespan of about 25 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years, but the stress caused by factory-farm conditions leads to disease, lameness, and reproductive problems that render cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time they are 4 or 5 years old, at which time they are sent to the slaughterhouse.
The reason cows are often "culled" or sent for slaughter at 4-5 years is that dairies use the cull as a tool to accelerate natural selection for milk production. If a cow is producing well, they are milked for many more years, and produce more offspring which are more likely to be high producer themselves. If they don't produce well after the second lactation, they are sold for beef. Contrary to a previous response, milk cows are used for beef - they are natually lean and well suited for low fat ground beef production.
Although these animals would naturally make only enough milk to meet the needs of their calves (around 16 pounds a day), genetic manipulation, antibiotics, and hormones are used to force each cow to produce more than 18,000 pounds of milk a year (an average of 50 pounds a day).(8,9) Cows are also fed unnatural, high-protein diets, which include dead chickens, pigs, and other animals, because their natural diet of grass would not provide the nutrients necessary for them to produce the massive amounts of milk required by the industry.
That has happened for 100 years. Selective breeding is hardly genetic manipulation. You simply use the breeding stock that produces offspring with the highest milk production.
As for feeding cows "dead-chickens", cows diets are primarily alfalfa (protein), corn silage, chopped grass and legumes (protein), corn grain (protein), and sometimes high fat supplements like cotton seed or bakery waste (cookie crumbs). Most farmers cannot afford to risk feeding animal by-products to dairy cows due to the potential for disease transmission.
Animal mistreatment is the exception, not the rule on diary farms. Most diary farmers take very good care of their cattle - it is a matter of profits. Unlike beef operations, they cannot affort to liberally use anti-biotics - most anti-biotics show up in the milk and every tank is tested - not just organic farms.
That's my point - the OS (NT) did not fail. Multiple instances of an app using did fail due to invalid shared data. Not the fault of the OS.
Yes, I'd say you are the backwards one.
system failures stranding US Navy ships...never with any mention of the fact that these problems are specific to Microsoft platforms
That case was a lot of publicity blaming NT for what was an application failure: divide by zero in a distributed database app. The bad press was based on misleading statements from one Navy computer tech, sour about not being involved in the decision making process.
Not all bugs originate in Redmond, WA, as the Firefox team is learning.
Considering that the US is the leader of the market economies, something the French detest, its amazing to note that in many ways market economics is working more effectively for consumers in France than they are in the US.
I have to disagree. European mobile phone access typically carries a lower monthly cost, but a much higher per minute cost, which necessitates SMS and other non-voice protocols. Here digital phone plans met the market need with bundles of mintues. The eurpoean plans actually discourage talking on the phone. It that effective for consumers?
Free markets are the surest path to efficiency and freedom. What they don't deliver is protection from harm. That's what laws and regulation are for. As for fairness: that's not a constitutionally protected right.
Word wasn't "better" than WordPerfect (if you are running a transcription service or something similar, people have the FASTEST results with WP 5.1 than ANY modern system), and Excel wasn't "better" than Lotus 1-2-3. However, they were less than half the price and you could get the bundle for less than either program individually.
Word (DOS) may not have as good as WP51 (not even close), but Word for Windows 1.1 certainly was better that WordPerfect for Windows. WP4Win was utter crap - bad looking and unreliable: a bad rewrite of a great DOS app.
Windows was hot; everyone needed Windows apps. Windows took away WP's biggest advantage: good printer drivers. On top of that, the Windows products usually offered WYSIWYG, which necessary or not, was also hot, hot, hot in the mid 80's.
1-2-3 for Windows was OK, but Excel was better. With it's powerful macro language and OLE integration between Word and Excel, it was a better pick assuming you had chosen Word for Windows.
Windows killed WP and 1-2-3 by leveling the field with printer drivers and WYSIWYG, forcing Lotus and WP to rewrite - and fall on their face.
Don't assume Microsoft always wins despite quality - they have often delivered (even if acquired) the most innovative (PowerPoint, Visio, Visual Basic, COM, IE4 DOM) or best of class (Word4Win vs WP, Excel vs 123, IE5 vs Netscape 4, Visual Studio 6.0 vs Borland C++, Exchange vs Groupwise/Notes)
getting a socket you can't just do the normal socket procedure. You first have to make a WinSock call to set up the socket, then all the normal BSD calls can use it.
You create sockets with socket(domain, type, protocol) -- standard BSD. The only differece is that you have to call WSAStartup at least once in your process to establish the version of Winsock you want to use. This is for improved backwards compability and to allow third party IP stacks to start -- a legacy of Windows for Workgroups.Well, it must be understood that jumping on the latest patches is not always an option in the corporate environment.
Waiting almost 2 years to deploy Win2K SP4 is not exactly "jumping".
One undocumented trick that works to kill any process on an NT box is "drwtsn32 -p xxx" where xxx is the process number. Technically what you are doing is attaching the debugger (drwtsn32) and terminating the process that way. I found this by looking over the source for an old version of Dr. Watson.
a lot of geeks prefer 2k to XP
Well that describes me, but like most geeks, but I'm clever enough not click "Yes" when asked to install the latest ActiveX spyware offer. I also know where to find plenty of good, free, pop-up blockers and browser tab add-ons, if I had such a need.
I switched to IE4 seven years ago when I got tired of the Netscape 4 GP faults. IE has served me well - I have no need for change at this point. Security is not a problem for most Windows geeks. I don't need software firewalls, nor CPU sapping real-time anti-virus. I'm interested in reliability and capability. Call me when Longhorn ships - maybe I'll be impressed - probably not. Barring that, I'm good to 2010, or until the .NET team decides not to support IE6 for client side controls.
It's inspired me to start learning more about client-side development again.
I'm by no means a Linux zealot -- I'm an ASP/SQL programmer, have been using Windows since v3.1, and am a huge fan of Microsoft's development tools / languages.
You're such an MS centric web programmer, but you've never discovered the XMLHTTPRequest object in the five years since Microsoft created it, and hyped it as a solution for richer client side web applications. If you had, you would know that thanks to data binding, that old IE5 solution is still one step beyond the new "innovative" AJAX tripe these born again Javascript evangelists are selling.
Try reading up at MSDN every couple of years - you might not have to wait so long to discover solutions to your problems. And if you haven't done so already, try ASP.NET. It's an eye opener to ASP and PHP developers.
Have you tried Google Suggest? Auto complete is very useful when it doesn't slow down the typing, and when the results are in a useful order.
I don't see how you think these are arguments in favour of a shorter long.
My point was that the Unix groups' desire to "naturally grow" to 64 bit APIs won't happen on Windows anyway because the Windows style APIs are generally strictly sized. So it negates one of the criteria favoring LP64.
Space optimisation is a matter for the application developer - the OS design should not select a model based on a preference for data size over source code compatibility. But your big bitch seems to be about source code compatibility between Unix64 and Windows64 ports. Source code compatibility is one of the foremost considerations for MS. That's what will keep their customers happy - quick and easy ports.
In reality, I think most code will stay 32 bit for a very long time. Unlike the 16 bit transition, most applications will not benefit as long as the OS runs 32 bit apps seemlessly with 64 bit apps.
I am curious to know what happens to 64 bit messages sent to 32 bit apps - how does it thunk? I'll have to look that one up.
I should have remembered this one - SendMessage caused lots of grief in the 16->32. Fortunately, this time around, none of my code uses SendMessage. The UI stuff is usually DHTML, VB, or .NET The C/C++ code I write are libraries, services, console apps, etc, and I use other types of IPC: usually named pipes or sockets.