It's not up to the level of geek fantasy what-a-white-box-laptop-could-be. However, for practical purposes, if you get one of the big-chassis Thinkpads or Dell Latitudes (in the case of Dell, this would be a Latitude E-series today) then a ton of parts are interchangeable and upgradeable between models in the same chassis series. And it's been that way since the Latitude C-series at least. They're a lot easier to work on than the consumer-model laptops, too.
These days I just buy disposable junk like everybody else, though.
I don't know what's worse, dryly making fun of this kind of thing or even more dryly implicitly making fun the sheer number of folks that won't get the joke.
It's a self-published crank book with a hilarious title. The guy might be mentally ill. It's just sad. I know times are tough but still, this Gary Sorkin guy should be ashamed of taking Kemp's money to promote the book.
Re:What's the deal with eldavojohn
on
Beautiful Data
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· Score: 1
Some of us old farts have jobs and lives, you know.
As the child of a Maori man with a Chinese woman! Do you start arguing that pepperoni pizza is a social construct every time someone comes up with a new topping combination?
At least, for much of what passes for professional programming. But in my very humble experience, the guys that brag the loudest that they've never needed any math to do any real-world programming are the ones who end up getting assigned stuff that involves very simple calculations---often just the correct use of libraries---and still manage to bung it up.
Short answer: no. If you need to open a document in a older file format, and Office is mangling it, openoffice.org is worth a try, but that's the luck of the draw. Office will generally do a better job of that, but not always.
If you have a version of Office without Powerpoint or Visio, the openoffice.org Impress and Draw programs are serviceable.
On the flip side, I'd be scared to do anything significant in the database thingy, because it has that "95% complete" quality that the contemporary free software world takes as an indication they're at a good point to do a total rewrite.
I have a physics degree, have worked in basic research, and currently work as a EE.
I own a Tektronix TDS1012 (low end) which I chose to spend my own money on over the Agilent equivalent, haven't used a high-end scope since the nineties, and have rented midrange Agilent and Tektronix scopes for jobs that needed them in the last five years or so, but not in the last two.
From a UI standpoint I've found the Tektronix scopes to "feel" more like an analog scope than the Agilent models. The controls are where you'd expect, and the menus correlate to traditional analog scope settings. I.e. the button for "ch 1 menu" brings up, surprise, the settings that would be grouped together with the channel 1 position and volts/div dials on an analog scope. I don't recall how the Agilents were different, only that they were just awkward enough to be annoying.
Both Agilent and Tektronix scopes have been sort of a pain in the butt to hook up to a PC. There's always at least one little thing that keeps the process from being perfectly smooth. Having used the 30-day demos, I liked Agilent's PC interface software whose name I forget better than Tektronix's "Wavestar". I wouldn't pay money for either one, though: I'd pay the extra for LabView instead.
The nicest thing though about the mid-range Agilent scope I rented was that it had an SVGA port as standard on the back. This is or was only available as an option on the mid-range Tek scopes. Hooking it up to a 20" monitor made it real easy for four people, including one with bad eyesight, to examine and discuss measurements without having to fuss with a PC interface.
The hardcore analog guys I know tend to like LeCroy a hair better than Tektronix these days and to disregard Agilent's offerings. I've never used a LeCroy myself.
The controls of the best arcade games of the eighties are unparalleled IMO, and many of the console and home computer games of that era are comparable. Not nearly all.
I've found many emulators to be only good enough to give you an idea of what a game was like, incidentally. I don't know if you've played old games on the hardware they were meant to run on.
Funny, I found Doom I, II, Ultimate, etc. totally engrossing and addictive, but I could never get into Quake or any of it successors.
Wolfenstein 3D would be a better analogy. Even though it was a pretty amazing achievement on a 286, it lost its charm for me quickly after a few levels.
Noise, quiet, and music: if I don't have quiet working conditions, I wear earplugs while I'm working. If the boss doesn't like it, he or she can do something about the noise.
I like the suggestion for a rug, btw. When I go back to an office from working from home, I'm getting one.
A professional-quality photograph of your family, girlfriend, or pet is good. Don't use a "wacky" frame.
I also always hang up my patent plaque from a previous employer. I'll happily hang up any new ones, too.
Hanging up diplomas is for medical doctors and the insecure. In most cases, it screams "I'm not getting what I expected from my fancy degree!".
A plant can be nice if you have enough sunlight for one.
A good high-output desk lamp is very nice.
Make sure you have enough shelves for your books. Make sure you have enough books for your shelves.
Schoolboy cynicism is a bottom-dog endeavor: no Dilbert cartoons or Demotivator posters for me, thanks.
The point of the "butterfly effect" is that a complex system can depend so sensitively on its initial values (i.e. the inputs to your simulation) that you can't possibly measure them accurately enough to predict its behavior to any kind of quantitative precision.
What you can predict, and how, now those are interesting questions.
Ever been in a position to compare FEA predictions with experimental data? Analysts rarely get it right the first time, and usually have to severely tweak their boundary conditions, initial values, etc to get in the ballpark of the real world.
You're still talking about the stages where it's more important to be plausible than correct. That's basically where FEA fits in.
I won't argue that it beats guessing, though. And the full-color plots seem to mesmerize people. Note too, though, that "PC-Crash" isn't even an finite element analysis program.
How do you think cars and airplanes were engineered before we had crummy, inaccurate computer simulations?
In the real world, when being right is more important than having a merely plausible prediction in vibrant colors, people do experiments and laboratory tests.
Simulations by experienced analysts often turn out wrong: data from crash tests is much more trustworthy than the best simulations, let alone simulations performed by cops or prosecutors with some two-bit PC software.
oh, to be clear, the 1440 is not a "BR-Script" printer, but if you need Postscript, you may be able to find one of those models for under $200 if you look around.
I recently replaced yet another clogged inkjet with the HL-1440, which is being closed out cheap all over the place right now.
For under $150, it's an absolute marvel. It has a standard slot for 72-pin SIMMS so you can put that old memory to work. You'll need to. I was digging in a drawer the first night I had it because something I printed wouldn't render in 2MB. Since I stuck a 16MB stick in it, I haven't had any problems. Odds are if you read slashdot you either have a 72-pin 32MB SIMM around or know where to buy one for about $10 these days.
It plays well with Linux (CUPS has become a marvel in and of itself), plays well with my little wireless access point's print server, and so on. The windows drivers have a neat n-pages-on-one feature that I occasionally actually use to print reference material. The box says "PCL4 emulation for DOS printing" so I bet it plays nice with old DOS apps that expect HP laserjets, too. One of these days I'll set up my old 486 with Generic CADD and see.
As someone points out below, the Brother printers with "BR-Script" are Postscript-compatible. I'm pretty sure, actually, that Brother is a Ghostscript licensee.
Print quality is fine within limits: not as rich and contrasty as a good inkjet, and the greyscales are not as nicely rendered as on the HP laserjets I've used in the past.
The downside is, I understand, that the drum will wear out, and replacing the drum is roughly as expensive as replacing the printer. You'll see negative reviews of the Brother from people who don't seem to understand this and are defiantly limping along with a worn-out drum.
I had to replace the toner cartridge fairly early on although it's not listed as a "starter" cartridge.
It does make the lights flicker when it powers on! If you've got crummy house wiring, you might be worried!
I've entertained the idea of supplanting it with an old HP before it wears out, but I don't have time or money right now to be experimenting with used or surplus printers.
I recently replaced yet another clogged inkjet with the HL-1440, which is being closed out cheap all over the place right now.
For under $150, it's an absolute marvel. It has a standard slot for 72-pin SIMMS so you can put that old memory to work. You'll need to. I was digging in a drawer the first night I had it because something I printed wouldn't render in 2MB. Since I stuck a 16MB stick in it, I haven't had any problems. Odds are if you read slashdot you either have a 72-pin 32MB SIMM around or know where to buy one for about $10 these days.
It plays well with Linux (CUPS has become a marvel in and of itself), plays well with my little wireless access point's print server, and so on. The box says "PCL4 emulation for DOS printing" so I bet it plays nice with old DOS apps that expect HP laserjets, too. One of these days I'll set up my old 486 with Generic CADD and see.
Print quality is fine within limits: not as rich and contrasty as a good inkjet, and the greyscales are not as nicely rendered as on the HP laserjets I've used in the past.
The downside is, I understand, that the drum will wear out, and replacing the drum is roughly as expensive as replacing the printer. You'll see negative reviews of the Brother from people who don't seem to understand this and are defiantly limping along with a worn-out drum.
I had to replace the toner cartridge fairly early on although it's not listed as a "starter" cartridge.
I don't have time or money right now to be experimenting with used or surplus printers, but I plan to replace it with an old HP before it wears out. I needed something that would WORK right away.
Yup, it speaks volumes when a technology product, a TOOL, you canceled a couple years ago is changing hands briskly on ebay for more than it cost new. And not for "collector" value, either.
The HP32SII and 15C aren't the only ones, either. Around 2000 or so, HP made a handheld (about the size of a walkman) scanner with (flash?) memory and an LCD display that is another unreplaced niche product. It regularly sells for 2-3 times what it cost new on ebay.
Sure, it doesn't necessarily follow that HP could make a profit bringing these products back (the 33s is kind of funky) but...
Slashdot Mirror
Try chewing on: "Sunrise is at about 7 A.M. in autumn"
It's not up to the level of geek fantasy what-a-white-box-laptop-could-be. However, for practical purposes, if you get one of the big-chassis Thinkpads or Dell Latitudes (in the case of Dell, this would be a Latitude E-series today) then a ton of parts are interchangeable and upgradeable between models in the same chassis series. And it's been that way since the Latitude C-series at least. They're a lot easier to work on than the consumer-model laptops, too.
These days I just buy disposable junk like everybody else, though.
There's another Principia: older and even more famous. Look it up.
I don't know what's worse, dryly making fun of this kind of thing or even more dryly implicitly making fun the sheer number of folks that won't get the joke.
The review is by these guys: http://www.pacificbookreview.com/About-Us.php
It's a self-published crank book with a hilarious title. The guy might be mentally ill. It's just sad. I know times are tough but still, this Gary Sorkin guy should be ashamed of taking Kemp's money to promote the book.
Some of us old farts have jobs and lives, you know.
As the child of a Maori man with a Chinese woman! Do you start arguing that pepperoni pizza is a social construct every time someone comes up with a new topping combination?
At least, for much of what passes for professional programming. But in my very humble experience, the guys that brag the loudest that they've never needed any math to do any real-world programming are the ones who end up getting assigned stuff that involves very simple calculations---often just the correct use of libraries---and still manage to bung it up.
Short answer: no. If you need to open a document in a older file format, and Office is mangling it, openoffice.org is worth a try, but that's the luck of the draw. Office will generally do a better job of that, but not always.
If you have a version of Office without Powerpoint or Visio, the openoffice.org Impress and Draw programs are serviceable.
On the flip side, I'd be scared to do anything significant in the database thingy, because it has that "95% complete" quality that the contemporary free software world takes as an indication they're at a good point to do a total rewrite.
Lots of that kind of amusement at http://www.hamsexy.com/
When a smart person does something stupid, it's because he lacks common sense. When a stupid person does something stupid, it's because he's stupid.
I have a physics degree, have worked in basic research, and currently work as a EE.
I own a Tektronix TDS1012 (low end) which I chose to spend my own money on over the Agilent equivalent, haven't used a high-end scope since the nineties, and have rented midrange Agilent and Tektronix scopes for jobs that needed them in the last five years or so, but not in the last two.
From a UI standpoint I've found the Tektronix scopes to "feel" more like an analog scope than the Agilent models. The controls are where you'd expect, and the menus correlate to traditional analog scope settings. I.e. the button for "ch 1 menu" brings up, surprise, the settings that would be grouped together with the channel 1 position and volts/div dials on an analog scope. I don't recall how the Agilents were different, only that they were just awkward enough to be annoying.
Both Agilent and Tektronix scopes have been sort of a pain in the butt to hook up to a PC. There's always at least one little thing that keeps the process from being perfectly smooth. Having used the 30-day demos, I liked Agilent's PC interface software whose name I forget better than Tektronix's "Wavestar". I wouldn't pay money for either one, though: I'd pay the extra for LabView instead.
The nicest thing though about the mid-range Agilent scope I rented was that it had an SVGA port as standard on the back. This is or was only available as an option on the mid-range Tek scopes. Hooking it up to a 20" monitor made it real easy for four people, including one with bad eyesight, to examine and discuss measurements without having to fuss with a PC interface.
The hardcore analog guys I know tend to like LeCroy a hair better than Tektronix these days and to disregard Agilent's offerings. I've never used a LeCroy myself.
"contributed by: Stephen Wolfram"
The controls of the best arcade games of the eighties are unparalleled IMO, and many of the console and home computer games of that era are comparable. Not nearly all.
I've found many emulators to be only good enough to give you an idea of what a game was like, incidentally. I don't know if you've played old games on the hardware they were meant to run on.
Funny, I found Doom I, II, Ultimate, etc. totally engrossing and addictive, but I could never get into Quake or any of it successors.
Wolfenstein 3D would be a better analogy. Even though it was a pretty amazing achievement on a 286, it lost its charm for me quickly after a few levels.
Oh yes, as big a whiteboard as you can fit in your space is another good thing.
Noise, quiet, and music: if I don't have quiet working conditions, I wear earplugs while I'm working. If the boss doesn't like it, he or she can do something about the noise.
I like the suggestion for a rug, btw. When I go back to an office from working from home, I'm getting one.
A professional-quality photograph of your family, girlfriend, or pet is good. Don't use a "wacky" frame.
I also always hang up my patent plaque from a previous employer. I'll happily hang up any new ones, too.
Hanging up diplomas is for medical doctors and the insecure. In most cases, it screams "I'm not getting what I expected from my fancy degree!".
A plant can be nice if you have enough sunlight for one.
A good high-output desk lamp is very nice.
Make sure you have enough shelves for your books. Make sure you have enough books for your shelves.
Schoolboy cynicism is a bottom-dog endeavor: no Dilbert cartoons or Demotivator posters for me, thanks.
That's because most of the time correctness doesn't actually matter that much. At all.
Read the sentence you quote, over and over again, until you understand it.
Um no.
The point of the "butterfly effect" is that a complex system can depend so sensitively on its initial values (i.e. the inputs to your simulation) that you can't possibly measure them accurately enough to predict its behavior to any kind of quantitative precision.
What you can predict, and how, now those are interesting questions.
Ever been in a position to compare FEA predictions with experimental data? Analysts rarely get it right the first time, and usually have to severely tweak their boundary conditions, initial values, etc to get in the ballpark of the real world.
You're still talking about the stages where it's more important to be plausible than correct. That's basically where FEA fits in.
I won't argue that it beats guessing, though. And the full-color plots seem to mesmerize people. Note too, though, that "PC-Crash" isn't even an finite element analysis program.
How do you think cars and airplanes were engineered before we had crummy, inaccurate computer simulations?
In the real world, when being right is more important than having a merely plausible prediction in vibrant colors, people do experiments and laboratory tests.
Simulations by experienced analysts often turn out wrong: data from crash tests is much more trustworthy than the best simulations, let alone simulations performed by cops or prosecutors with some two-bit PC software.
oh, to be clear, the 1440 is not a "BR-Script" printer, but if you need Postscript, you may be able to find one of those models for under $200 if you look around.
I recently replaced yet another clogged inkjet with the HL-1440, which is being closed out cheap all over the place right now.
For under $150, it's an absolute marvel. It has a standard slot for 72-pin SIMMS so you can put that old memory to work. You'll need to. I was digging in a drawer the first night I had it because something I printed wouldn't render in 2MB. Since I stuck a 16MB stick in it, I haven't had any problems. Odds are if you read slashdot you either have a 72-pin 32MB SIMM around or know where to buy one for about $10 these days.
It plays well with Linux (CUPS has become a marvel in and of itself), plays well with my little wireless access point's print server, and so on. The windows drivers have a neat n-pages-on-one feature that I occasionally actually use to print reference material. The box says "PCL4 emulation for DOS printing" so I bet it plays nice with old DOS apps that expect HP laserjets, too. One of these days I'll set up my old 486 with Generic CADD and see.
As someone points out below, the Brother printers with "BR-Script" are Postscript-compatible. I'm pretty sure, actually, that Brother is a Ghostscript licensee.
Print quality is fine within limits: not as rich and contrasty as a good inkjet, and the greyscales are not as nicely rendered as on the HP laserjets I've used in the past.
The downside is, I understand, that the drum will wear out, and replacing the drum is roughly as expensive as replacing the printer. You'll see negative reviews of the Brother from people who don't seem to understand this and are defiantly limping along with a worn-out drum.
I had to replace the toner cartridge fairly early on although it's not listed as a "starter" cartridge.
It does make the lights flicker when it powers on! If you've got crummy house wiring, you might be worried!
I've entertained the idea of supplanting it with an old HP before it wears out, but I don't have time or money right now to be experimenting with used or surplus printers.
I recently replaced yet another clogged inkjet with the HL-1440, which is being closed out cheap all over the place right now.
For under $150, it's an absolute marvel. It has a standard slot for 72-pin SIMMS so you can put that old memory to work. You'll need to. I was digging in a drawer the first night I had it because something I printed wouldn't render in 2MB. Since I stuck a 16MB stick in it, I haven't had any problems. Odds are if you read slashdot you either have a 72-pin 32MB SIMM around or know where to buy one for about $10 these days.
It plays well with Linux (CUPS has become a marvel in and of itself), plays well with my little wireless access point's print server, and so on. The box says "PCL4 emulation for DOS printing" so I bet it plays nice with old DOS apps that expect HP laserjets, too. One of these days I'll set up my old 486 with Generic CADD and see.
Print quality is fine within limits: not as rich and contrasty as a good inkjet, and the greyscales are not as nicely rendered as on the HP laserjets I've used in the past.
The downside is, I understand, that the drum will wear out, and replacing the drum is roughly as expensive as replacing the printer. You'll see negative reviews of the Brother from people who don't seem to understand this and are defiantly limping along with a worn-out drum.
I had to replace the toner cartridge fairly early on although it's not listed as a "starter" cartridge.
I don't have time or money right now to be experimenting with used or surplus printers, but I plan to replace it with an old HP before it wears out. I needed something that would WORK right away.
Yup, it speaks volumes when a technology product, a TOOL, you canceled a couple years ago is changing hands briskly on ebay for more than it cost new. And not for "collector" value, either.
The HP32SII and 15C aren't the only ones, either. Around 2000 or so, HP made a handheld (about the size of a walkman) scanner with (flash?) memory and an LCD display that is another unreplaced niche product. It regularly sells for 2-3 times what it cost new on ebay.
Sure, it doesn't necessarily follow that HP could make a profit bringing these products back (the 33s is kind of funky) but...