Yeah, they're not as high quality as the one's you'll get from an engraver or even Kinko's, but they'll do for most uses, and you can even customize them.
I think you're correct about IE6 holdouts being WinXP holdouts. However, IE7 works just fine on XP, and (though I haven't tried it), IE8 is also supposed to run on XP. When I got my current laptop, a year or so ago, Corporate IT was claiming to support XP and Vista, but in practice they were still shipping most new hardware with XP and are likely to jump to Win7 without doing any more Vista than they have to.
Slashdot thinks I'm running Firefox, because it never sees IE, but that doesn't mean I'm not also running IE.
For many years, I've run both Firefox and IE - Firefox for most browsing, and IE for running work-related connections that need IE, and for browsing the occasional internet site that's not compatible with Firefox. This year, Firefox has been crashing way too often, and Google Chrome has gotten a lot better, so I'm now running about half my browser windows and tabs on Chrome and half on Firefox. (There are lots of sites that also fail on Chrome, and I'd rather have Firefox just crash than Chrome turn all its tabs into the "Oh, Snap!" page, because it's easy to kill off Firefox and restart it.)
At $DAYJOB, I have a few applications that I use that are IE-only. About a year ago, the corporate IT department finally decided that we could use IE7, between compatibility issues and security fixes in IE7, so I now can use tabs in IE. You're also going to see more corporate IT departments forced to support newer IE versions as they replace older PCs with newer ones that don't support XP, so the waiting game's going to get accelerated.
When I was an undergrad, we had a few PLATO terminals in the computer lab. (To calibrate for age here, about six months before I turned 30, a couple of other guys had big birthday bashes, but unlike Bill and Steve, I hadn't yet made my first billion dollars...)
PLATO was not only the world's coolest Star Trek game terminal, it was also the home of Notesfiles, a system that influenced Netnews (=>Usenet) and also Lotus Notes. It took Bill a few years to catch on to how this Internetworking stuff might be important, but he would have been aware of it.
But long before PLATO, when I was in elementary school, we had programmed instruction materials, running on a medium called Dead Trees. Some of it was flashcard-based, most of it was workbooks with a lot of "for more on this topic, skip to page 43".
Daylight Savings Time is just getting your ass out of bed earlier while pretending you're not. If you like to have light in the afternoon after you get out of work, go to work earlier and leave earlier. You're probably a techie like most of us, so you can probably work flexible hours like most of us. It's different if you're a factory assembly line worker and everybody has to be there at once for the line to roll, or a schoolteacher who's got to be there when class starts. (It's also different if you're a farmer and your cows are going to get up at dawn whatever time the clock says, but since most small farmers tend to also have town jobs, having dawn be later is a real pain.)
So stop messing with everybody else's clocks and get your ass out of bed earlier if that's what you want to do. Real morning people do it anyway (as do people with little kids.) Non-morning people don't want to get up anyway, and often don't. It's only you half-assed morning people who insist on adjusting the clocks to pretend you're not getting up as early as you are.
Losing your patent because of prior art isn't the problem with secret military patents. It's losing your work, and your ability to publish it, that's a much more serious risk with the current system; RS&A and a couple of other people had to do end runs around the system to get their work published without the military stealing it. It's bad enough if you're in commercial business, where you can at least still sell it to military contractors or whatever, but if you're an academic, you need to be able to publish, and to do your work in a non-secret environment.
You can set Mozilla to always ask, always accept, always reject, do one of those except for exceptions, accept for session only, remember your choices or not remember them, etc. At this point I don't know what the default it:-)
1024x768 wasn't wide enough to play the graphical version of Nethack without scrolling. 1280x1024 is almost but not quite enough, and 1440 or above works just fine.
One big difference between the First-to-File system and First-to-Invent is that with First-to-Invent, you can publish your invention and then file the patent within a year of publishing it, while it's very difficult to do that with first-to-file. I'm not sure how important that is in practice; one major impact it had in the US was the RSA patent and other patents that were affected by another US quirk, which is that the military can declare your patent application to be classified and prevent publication (nearly forever), and Publish-then-Patent made it possible for R, S, and A to get their work out.
Silicon Valley businesses large and small were mostly against it, IBM was for it. Dianne Feinstein attempted an amendment to remove the First-to-File part, but voted for it anyway after that failed. Barbara Boxer voted against.
The US patent system has been first-to-invent for a long time, while Europe has been first-to-file. There's lots of other detail, largely intended to reduce the amount of patent litigation, improve the coordination with non-US patents, potentially improve the problems with patents on things with prior art and obviousness, and affect some tax issues."
Winamp MP3 Player was originally freeware, but the author's mom told him he should really try offering it as shareware. Lots of people paid $10 in return for a player that they used for a lot of music that they didn't pay for:-)
Peter's email for Paypal donations is payments@petertattam.com, or the guy who wrote the article about it set up http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/ and you can go read the Back Story page on it.
And, yeah, Trumpet was what you used if you wanted your Windows machine to actually connect successfully to dialup IP back in the day.
This event didn't just happen in the US, it happened in New Hampshire, the state whose slogan is "Live Free or Die!". (And as some comic pointed out, where do they make the license plates with that slogan on them? In prison....)
Netgear's older wireless routers were horrible too. On the other hand, for basic Ethernet switches (or hubs, back when we used hubs), they've been fine.
I'd been very happy with the 3Com Travel Router wifi access point I used for a couple of years, other than a tendency to overheat (never did melt or catch fire, but always felt like it would), and you could use it as a dumb bridge instead of a router, which meant I could let my older wired Linksys do all the Layer 3 work. However, enough of my apartment neighbors got 802.11n gear that the spectrum was getting overcrowded, so I needed to get 802.11n to improve my connection, thus the newer Linksys.
Oh, yeah, there are definitely things at Radio Shack that are hopelessly overpriced. On the other hand, they've typically got a dozen drawers of electronics components (resistors, ICs, connectors, etc.) most of which are reasonable, and I can get them this afternoon (since I live in Silicon Valley, I can also drive a couple miles farther and go to Fry's for a bigger selection, or Hal-Ted for a much much bigger selection, but RS's pretty convenient.)
I've always had good luck with Linksys reliability and stability - I recently upgraded from my antique BEFSX41 to a newer model that had 802.11n support,and they're fine. (Of course, when I finally got around to looking at how to configure IPv6, and found that the answer was "folks on the net say it supports DD-WRT", I was much less happy:-)
By contrast, while I've always really liked Netgear's Layer 2 switches, the one Netgear router I bought (which did 802.11b) was a cretinous piece of junk, and I haven't felt motivated to try any of their newer Layer 3 equipment.
Yeah, there are The Others, and the dragons, but it's really mostly about character and conflicts, not about magic or even action.
Plus if you start the series now, you have the advantage that you won't have forgotten who most of the characters are by now or which ones of them are Not Dead Yet, which is a problem I had when Volume 4 came out a long time after I'd read Volume 3.
Sure, he's added Dragons (which always felt to me like they were just tacked on) and random religions and The Others and lots of good characterization, but a lot of it's basically the Wars of the Roses.
Oh, come on, GRRM long ago told us "I'm not your bitch", and that he'd finish writing when he was finished writing.
And it probably really only had about half the second half done by the time he published the first, since he'd taken the advice to tie off half the main stories rather than adding half as much to all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know - you can go out to Kinko's and have them make some for you, and they'll generally do a pretty good job....
Yeah, they're not as high quality as the one's you'll get from an engraver or even Kinko's, but they'll do for most uses, and you can even customize them.
If you print them on the back of the card, it doesn't leave you much room for writing grocery lists...
It's an arbitrary date - it could also be a random date, but it's not.
I think you're correct about IE6 holdouts being WinXP holdouts. However, IE7 works just fine on XP, and (though I haven't tried it), IE8 is also supposed to run on XP. When I got my current laptop, a year or so ago, Corporate IT was claiming to support XP and Vista, but in practice they were still shipping most new hardware with XP and are likely to jump to Win7 without doing any more Vista than they have to.
Or maybe Bill and Ted, but older, and that Yoda statue is filling in for George Carlin.
Slashdot thinks I'm running Firefox, because it never sees IE, but that doesn't mean I'm not also running IE.
For many years, I've run both Firefox and IE - Firefox for most browsing, and IE for running work-related connections that need IE, and for browsing the occasional internet site that's not compatible with Firefox. This year, Firefox has been crashing way too often, and Google Chrome has gotten a lot better, so I'm now running about half my browser windows and tabs on Chrome and half on Firefox. (There are lots of sites that also fail on Chrome, and I'd rather have Firefox just crash than Chrome turn all its tabs into the "Oh, Snap!" page, because it's easy to kill off Firefox and restart it.)
At $DAYJOB, I have a few applications that I use that are IE-only. About a year ago, the corporate IT department finally decided that we could use IE7, between compatibility issues and security fixes in IE7, so I now can use tabs in IE. You're also going to see more corporate IT departments forced to support newer IE versions as they replace older PCs with newer ones that don't support XP, so the waiting game's going to get accelerated.
When I was an undergrad, we had a few PLATO terminals in the computer lab. (To calibrate for age here, about six months before I turned 30, a couple of other guys had big birthday bashes, but unlike Bill and Steve, I hadn't yet made my first billion dollars...)
PLATO was not only the world's coolest Star Trek game terminal, it was also the home of Notesfiles, a system that influenced Netnews (=>Usenet) and also Lotus Notes. It took Bill a few years to catch on to how this Internetworking stuff might be important, but he would have been aware of it.
But long before PLATO, when I was in elementary school, we had programmed instruction materials, running on a medium called Dead Trees. Some of it was flashcard-based, most of it was workbooks with a lot of "for more on this topic, skip to page 43".
Is your birthday also Jan 1, or did you pick a random date?
Daylight Savings Time is just getting your ass out of bed earlier while pretending you're not. If you like to have light in the afternoon after you get out of work, go to work earlier and leave earlier. You're probably a techie like most of us, so you can probably work flexible hours like most of us. It's different if you're a factory assembly line worker and everybody has to be there at once for the line to roll, or a schoolteacher who's got to be there when class starts. (It's also different if you're a farmer and your cows are going to get up at dawn whatever time the clock says, but since most small farmers tend to also have town jobs, having dawn be later is a real pain.)
So stop messing with everybody else's clocks and get your ass out of bed earlier if that's what you want to do. Real morning people do it anyway (as do people with little kids.) Non-morning people don't want to get up anyway, and often don't. It's only you half-assed morning people who insist on adjusting the clocks to pretend you're not getting up as early as you are.
Losing your patent because of prior art isn't the problem with secret military patents. It's losing your work, and your ability to publish it, that's a much more serious risk with the current system; RS&A and a couple of other people had to do end runs around the system to get their work published without the military stealing it. It's bad enough if you're in commercial business, where you can at least still sell it to military contractors or whatever, but if you're an academic, you need to be able to publish, and to do your work in a non-secret environment.
You can set Mozilla to always ask, always accept, always reject, do one of those except for exceptions, accept for session only, remember your choices or not remember them, etc. At this point I don't know what the default it :-)
1024x768 wasn't wide enough to play the graphical version of Nethack without scrolling. 1280x1024 is almost but not quite enough, and 1440 or above works just fine.
Of course, 24x80 was enough for the real version.
One big difference between the First-to-File system and First-to-Invent is that with First-to-Invent, you can publish your invention and then file the patent within a year of publishing it, while it's very difficult to do that with first-to-file. I'm not sure how important that is in practice; one major impact it had in the US was the RSA patent and other patents that were affected by another US quirk, which is that the military can declare your patent application to be classified and prevent publication (nearly forever), and Publish-then-Patent made it possible for R, S, and A to get their work out.
The Senate bill is S.23, aka "America Invents", sponsor Patrick Leahy, who's been trying to get patent reform done for years.
Bill status query at thomas.loc.gov (not sure if these are persistent), Computerworld article, National Journal with some brief comments from pro/neutral/con parties, SF Chron article.
Silicon Valley businesses large and small were mostly against it, IBM was for it. Dianne Feinstein attempted an amendment to remove the First-to-File part, but voted for it anyway after that failed. Barbara Boxer voted against.
The US patent system has been first-to-invent for a long time, while Europe has been first-to-file. There's lots of other detail, largely intended to reduce the amount of patent litigation, improve the coordination with non-US patents, potentially improve the problems with patents on things with prior art and obviousness, and affect some tax issues."
Winamp MP3 Player was originally freeware, but the author's mom told him he should really try offering it as shareware. Lots of people paid $10 in return for a player that they used for a lot of music that they didn't pay for :-)
Peter's email for Paypal donations is payments@petertattam.com, or the guy who wrote the article about it set up http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/ and you can go read the Back Story page on it.
And, yeah, Trumpet was what you used if you wanted your Windows machine to actually connect successfully to dialup IP back in the day.
This event didn't just happen in the US, it happened in New Hampshire, the state whose slogan is "Live Free or Die!".
(And as some comic pointed out, where do they make the license plates with that slogan on them? In prison....)
Netgear's older wireless routers were horrible too. On the other hand, for basic Ethernet switches (or hubs, back when we used hubs), they've been fine.
I'd been very happy with the 3Com Travel Router wifi access point I used for a couple of years, other than a tendency to overheat (never did melt or catch fire, but always felt like it would), and you could use it as a dumb bridge instead of a router, which meant I could let my older wired Linksys do all the Layer 3 work. However, enough of my apartment neighbors got 802.11n gear that the spectrum was getting overcrowded, so I needed to get 802.11n to improve my connection, thus the newer Linksys.
Oh, yeah, there are definitely things at Radio Shack that are hopelessly overpriced. On the other hand, they've typically got a dozen drawers of electronics components (resistors, ICs, connectors, etc.) most of which are reasonable, and I can get them this afternoon (since I live in Silicon Valley, I can also drive a couple miles farther and go to Fry's for a bigger selection, or Hal-Ted for a much much bigger selection, but RS's pretty convenient.)
I've always had good luck with Linksys reliability and stability - I recently upgraded from my antique BEFSX41 to a newer model that had 802.11n support,and they're fine. (Of course, when I finally got around to looking at how to configure IPv6, and found that the answer was "folks on the net say it supports DD-WRT", I was much less happy :-)
By contrast, while I've always really liked Netgear's Layer 2 switches, the one Netgear router I bought (which did 802.11b) was a cretinous piece of junk, and I haven't felt motivated to try any of their newer Layer 3 equipment.
Yeah, there are The Others, and the dragons, but it's really mostly about character and conflicts, not about magic or even action.
Plus if you start the series now, you have the advantage that you won't have forgotten who most of the characters are by now or which ones of them are Not Dead Yet, which is a problem I had when Volume 4 came out a long time after I'd read Volume 3.
Sure, he's added Dragons (which always felt to me like they were just tacked on) and random religions and The Others and lots of good characterization, but a lot of it's basically the Wars of the Roses.
Oh, come on, GRRM long ago told us "I'm not your bitch", and that he'd finish writing when he was finished writing.
And it probably really only had about half the second half done by the time he published the first, since he'd taken the advice to tie off half the main stories rather than adding half as much to all of them.