When I started at my current employer, we had a mainframe-based thing that listed out the tasks. You arrowed to next to the tasks you worked on and typed in your hours. It was written in-house years ago, by (among other people) the guy who was our Senior Director when I started. Everyone had a terminal emulator on their PC, just to get to this application.
Then they replaced it with some version of an Oracle time-keeping product. Web based, and almost unusable. You had to know projects and tasks, but you could give the tasks and projects you used "names" so you didn't have to remember them.
Then they upgraded the Oracle thing to the latest version. Even slower, and the personal names are gone.
A combustion heater for the passenger compartment (assuming the mechanism would work at all in cold weather) isn't entirely unreasonable or unheard of.
I seem to recall that there were a few American cars in the 50's or 60's (Cadillac or Lincoln, most likely) that had a gasoline-fired heater for the passenger compartment so they wouldn't have to wait for the engine to warm up.
You could, I suppose, put a small gasoline tank in somewhere for heating purposes; if the device buring it were designed to produce heat, I suspect it would last a good amount of time.
Unrelated to that, I wish I had a good description of how the "air engine" works - it may be that the conservation of energy people here are working through may not be valid if there is energy somehow extracted from the differential in temperature between the atmosphere and the temperature of the compressed air as it is released.
Me too, more or less. I was at U of Illinois from 86 - 90 and there were a few basic computer types in the various computer labs:
Macs
IBM PS/2 PCs running MS-DOS and a home-grown-looking menuing system to startup WordPerfect and a few other things.
Various Unix systems (some workstations, some multiuser with dumb terminals) that were pretty much dedicated to specific CS classes. For example, the assembly language class used AT&T 3B2s. The computer graphics class (I think - my memory is fuzzy on this) used IBM RT systems housed in a "temporary" classroom.
4 NeXT workstations in the student union; I was never clear WHAT those were for.
The labs owned and run by the residence halls were a 50/50 mix of Mac and PS/2. I occasionally used a PS/2 when I wanted a telnet client to get to one of the Unix labs for class instead of hiking across campus, but almost nobody used them for anything - people would stand around waiting for the Macs instead.
If students need extra credit in a science class, they should be doing something science related. Perhaps a nice research paper? Or something involving slicing up recently deceased animals?
I'm sorry, but nobody past about second grade should get extra credit for just reading a book.
If you really want a key component of the assignment to be them reading something, how about just telling them, in general, to write a book report about a book with a science-related theme, and the book they select must be approved by the teacher in advance. Then be a real SOB about approving the book, if necessary.
I only just found out last night that when my HS Junior says "took notes" in class what he means is "teacher gave us a copy of a PowerPoint, then proceeded to read it to us while we pretended to look at it on our laptops." I now understand why, when he tells us "took notes" in class, and we then ask "about what, exactly?" he, more often than not, cannot answer.
My step-son is in an "all laptop" highschool. They issue (well, sell) ThinkPads to all of the students, and replace them/fix them as they fail. As far as I can tell, a major use of them is to sit in class playing various sports and first person shooter games.
I can't fathom why they didn't lock these laptops down as tightly as possible, with only academic, approved software installed. At work, we're working to deploy Windows to our retail locations, and the user environment is going to be locked down so tightly that right click does nothing and the web browser doesn't have an address bar.
This is not a high tech gadget to "shield from the reality of war." It is a high tech gadget to give those who have had a first hand, up close and personal look at the reality of war a better chance of surviving that reality somewhat more intact.
And MAD is already shattered. I personally have little fear that the part of the former USSR your President Putin runs is going to launch missiles at the US.
I do worry about what happened to the nuclear devices the USSR had when it fell apart.
I worry about one of the countries my President called the Axis of Evil lobbing a missile at the US or a more geographically convenient US ally.
I worry about a terrorist group putting a device in a shipping container.
And I worry about the erosion of our liberties as our government tries to prevent some of these things from happening.
But mutually assured destruction is a quaint cold war concept - and the cold war is over.
I have a (roughly) 2-year old Inspirion 6000 and occasionally get a jolt off the chassis screws on the right side when I get up off the sofa and put it on the coffee table.
I've been worrying I'm zapping it with static electricity, but maybe it's zapping me. It feels like a pretty good jolt when it happens.
There are a number of companies out there that have systems that depend on SCO operating systems, and that need to deploy new systems based on those platforms.
Any good guesses who will own OpenServer and UnixWare after this all winds up, and whether they'll still be selling licenses?
I drive ten miles each way to work. Sometimes I drive a mile or two out of the way in one direction or the other to stop by a store or pick up my step-son, but if it's a firm 40 miles per charge, including sitting outdoors in Chicago winter weather for 8 hours in the middle, it'd suit me fine.
I wasn't really making a grammar issue, either. It's a matter of understanding. If you ask someone a yes/no question, they should be able to either select yes/no, or they should be able to select the button that describe what they do (as you advocate.)
As I recall, there are flags you can hand to the Windows MessageBox function that tells it to ask YES/NO rather than OK/CANCEL, so that is barely any harder than asking OK/Cancel.
The ones that REALLY frost me are the ones that say "Press Cancel to email your mother, or OK to turn off the computer." (An exageration.) These lazy SOB programmers are forcing their hapless users to do the meaning mapping rather than spending an extra few minutes figuring out how to make an actual dialog box.
Is it so hard to have it say, "Do you really want to throw this file away, (Throw it away)(Don't throw it away)." With such a message the user must read at least the button, at which point they know what action is being taken because the button is itself an action, not "OK."
You know, this touches on one of my pet peeves. The answer to "Do you want to insert action here" in English is "Yes" or "No." The answer is not "OK" or "Continue."
Also, if there's' no option, why do I have to click on something? They just added a "report spam" button to Lotus Notes at my job. When you click it, you get a succession of three single-button "OK" dialog boxes. One of them actually asks you a question - but it doesn't let you say anything except "OK." If you close the dialog box (upper right hand corner "X") instead of clicking OK, it still reports the email as spam. Why, why why?
As I understood the article, the point wasn't to see if people will "torture" a virtual character. Based on the Milgram experiments, it's a pretty safe bet that if people will torture and/or kill a real human they'll do it to a virtual character.
The point was to see whether people reacted to torturing a virtual character in a similar enough fashion to how they would react to torturing a human that doing Milgram-like experiments with a virtual "learner" would be valid.
I assume the "unethical" part comes in with respect to ordering people to "torture" and/or "kill" a character as part of academic research (as opposed to as part of playing any of a dozen FPS games.)
I don't really see any ethics problem here myself, but I guess I understand the point of view of people who do, and assume those people don't play violent video games or allow their children to do so (in the unlikely event that they are ethically consistent.)
I certainly could not keep the laptop if Microsoft give it to me. I can accept typical convention junk (pens, key chains, and other novelty items) or perhaps a meal, but certainly not a laptop. My employer's policy (a Fortune-200 company):
Never solicit or accept money, loans, credits or prejudicial discounts, gifts, entertainment, favors or services from our present or potential suppliers that might influence or appear to influence your decisions.
Never solicit gifts in any form for yourself or [the company].
Items of nominal value offered by suppliers for public relations purposes are acceptable when the value of such items is not "excessive in value" and would not be perceived by the offer or, receiver or others as posing an unethical breach.
Gifts offered exceeding nominal value should be returned with an explanation or donated to [the company sponsored charity] in the name of the supplier. A sample letter to the supplier can be found below.
In the case of any gift, care should be taken to evaluate the intent and perception of acceptance to ensure that it is legal, that it will not influence your decisions, and that it will not be perceived by your peers and others as unethical.
Perishable or consumable goods should be shared with your team/department.
Never request or accept personal services or favors from a supplier if you are directly responsible for making decisions regarding the use of that existing or prospective supplier. Your officer in charge should approve any such services or favors.
I'm obviously tweaking you a little, and this is almost certainly a less mature product than a proper compiler, but if you change a few words....
Well, for one, the assembly instructions produced by this tool are nowhere as simple and easy to understand as the ones written by the assembly expert (Sitting in the next cubicle) who understands the product better. And how do you debug a problem now? First you'll have to find the problem in the automatically produced assembly, then find out how that relates to your C files that were used to produce the assembly. What if the tool has a bug? It'll take you a very long time realizing that. Then, most of the times it's much more difficult to maintain a solution which depends on a framework producing files for you at compile time. And finally, how do you deal with mixing some manually written assembly instructions with some compiler produced assembly instructions? I am sure assembly experts can come up with more technical problems that they see in compiler based solutions.
Not so strange. I work for a giant international company everyone in the world (literally) has heard of.
When I started working there a few years ago, I was assigned, as a desktop system (to be used both for development and for office stuff - word, email, etc) a Pentium-based system, with, err, 32M of memory I think. All the developers had them. The corporate standard OS was Win95.
I got upgraded to a PII-based system because a very nice gal in the QA group had some contacts and got the developers cast-off systems that were significantly better than what we had.
That's a little bit of an exageration. Yes, vehicles in the US have larger engines on average than in Europe. But we're not talking 4L+ in most vehicles.
For the most part, a 4-cyl will be 2L - 2.4L, a 6 anywhere from 2.6L (rare) to 3.8L (much more common.) One of GM's oldest, most-sold V6 motors is a 3.8L. My wife's new Camry is a 3.5L, I think.
There are very few passenger cars with a V8.
Personally, I drive a VW GTI (2-door Golf) with a 1.8L motor. Most of what I buy for the house fits in back if I fold down the seats and leave the parcel shelf at home. Sometimes it hangs out the back a little. We bought a couple 6-foot bookshelves at Ikea last week. Folded down 1/2 of the back seat, pushed the front passenger seat forward, one of us drove, the other sat in the remaining 1/2 back-seat. No real problem.
If it doesn't fit, I pay Home Depot the $19.99 for 70-minutes usage of their pickup, or rent a van from U-Haul or Enterprise.
All that said, I have been kind of drooling over a Dodge Magnum RT. Had a V6 as a rental, and it felt like a "real car." That's just what popped into my head when I drove it, "Now THIS is a REAL car." The RT has 5.7L of AWD V8 goodness:)
OK, first sentence, he says he's a self-employed programmer... Not sure how you do that unless you're working as a consultant to another company, but maybe he's got a product that he sells enough of to meet expenses.
Slashdot is international. Health insurance (in the US, at least) is regulated state-by-state, and priced at that level or smaller.
You really just need to look around, make sure you find a company that isn't fly-by-night, preferably with an agent who wants to help you.
Also, look at any organizations you belong to - IEEE, ACM, etc - some or all of them may have health insurance programs. Since you don't have an employer but don't have an income, around here that means you're probably a consultant. Is there a consultant's organization (national or local) that you can join? They probably have some discount program.
Or think outside the box. The lady who cuts my wife's hair also works part time at the local grocery store, because part-time people at the grocery store can get benefits, and that's the primary reason she works there. I've heard that's true at Starbuck's and Home Depot, too, but you'd need to check.
Slashdot Mirror
When I started at my current employer, we had a mainframe-based thing that listed out the tasks. You arrowed to next to the tasks you worked on and typed in your hours. It was written in-house years ago, by (among other people) the guy who was our Senior Director when I started. Everyone had a terminal emulator on their PC, just to get to this application.
Then they replaced it with some version of an Oracle time-keeping product. Web based, and almost unusable. You had to know projects and tasks, but you could give the tasks and projects you used "names" so you didn't have to remember them.
Then they upgraded the Oracle thing to the latest version. Even slower, and the personal names are gone.
We all miss the mainframe.
A combustion heater for the passenger compartment (assuming the mechanism would work at all in cold weather) isn't entirely unreasonable or unheard of.
I seem to recall that there were a few American cars in the 50's or 60's (Cadillac or Lincoln, most likely) that had a gasoline-fired heater for the passenger compartment so they wouldn't have to wait for the engine to warm up.
You could, I suppose, put a small gasoline tank in somewhere for heating purposes; if the device buring it were designed to produce heat, I suspect it would last a good amount of time.
Unrelated to that, I wish I had a good description of how the "air engine" works - it may be that the conservation of energy people here are working through may not be valid if there is energy somehow extracted from the differential in temperature between the atmosphere and the temperature of the compressed air as it is released.
Me too, more or less. I was at U of Illinois from 86 - 90 and there were a few basic computer types in the various computer labs:
The labs owned and run by the residence halls were a 50/50 mix of Mac and PS/2. I occasionally used a PS/2 when I wanted a telnet client to get to one of the Unix labs for class instead of hiking across campus, but almost nobody used them for anything - people would stand around waiting for the Macs instead.
... and I'm not even that old.
If students need extra credit in a science class, they should be doing something science related. Perhaps a nice research paper? Or something involving slicing up recently deceased animals?
I'm sorry, but nobody past about second grade should get extra credit for just reading a book.
If you really want a key component of the assignment to be them reading something, how about just telling them, in general, to write a book report about a book with a science-related theme, and the book they select must be approved by the teacher in advance. Then be a real SOB about approving the book, if necessary.
I only just found out last night that when my HS Junior says "took notes" in class what he means is "teacher gave us a copy of a PowerPoint, then proceeded to read it to us while we pretended to look at it on our laptops." I now understand why, when he tells us "took notes" in class, and we then ask "about what, exactly?" he, more often than not, cannot answer.
I didn't realize that Notes servers use real Dominoes, it explains their awful performance and quirkiness.
My step-son is in an "all laptop" highschool. They issue (well, sell) ThinkPads to all of the students, and replace them/fix them as they fail. As far as I can tell, a major use of them is to sit in class playing various sports and first person shooter games.
I can't fathom why they didn't lock these laptops down as tightly as possible, with only academic, approved software installed. At work, we're working to deploy Windows to our retail locations, and the user environment is going to be locked down so tightly that right click does nothing and the web browser doesn't have an address bar.
This is not a high tech gadget to "shield from the reality of war." It is a high tech gadget to give those who have had a first hand, up close and personal look at the reality of war a better chance of surviving that reality somewhat more intact.
And MAD is already shattered. I personally have little fear that the part of the former USSR your President Putin runs is going to launch missiles at the US.
I do worry about what happened to the nuclear devices the USSR had when it fell apart.
I worry about one of the countries my President called the Axis of Evil lobbing a missile at the US or a more geographically convenient US ally.
I worry about a terrorist group putting a device in a shipping container.
And I worry about the erosion of our liberties as our government tries to prevent some of these things from happening.
But mutually assured destruction is a quaint cold war concept - and the cold war is over.
I have a (roughly) 2-year old Inspirion 6000 and occasionally get a jolt off the chassis screws on the right side when I get up off the sofa and put it on the coffee table.
I've been worrying I'm zapping it with static electricity, but maybe it's zapping me. It feels like a pretty good jolt when it happens.
So if the penny were rebased, my penny jar would be worth 5x as much?
If that happened there's be a lot of POS systems to rework - or you'd have to stop putting pennies in the automatic change makers.
Wish I had a link to the fed economist's original paper instead of an article about it.
I
There are a number of companies out there that have systems that depend on SCO operating systems, and that need to deploy new systems based on those platforms. Any good guesses who will own OpenServer and UnixWare after this all winds up, and whether they'll still be selling licenses?
You seem to have confused QA and BA.
It's OK, our QA group tends to as well.
I drive ten miles each way to work. Sometimes I drive a mile or two out of the way in one direction or the other to stop by a store or pick up my step-son, but if it's a firm 40 miles per charge, including sitting outdoors in Chicago winter weather for 8 hours in the middle, it'd suit me fine.
I wasn't really making a grammar issue, either. It's a matter of understanding. If you ask someone a yes/no question, they should be able to either select yes/no, or they should be able to select the button that describe what they do (as you advocate.)
As I recall, there are flags you can hand to the Windows MessageBox function that tells it to ask YES/NO rather than OK/CANCEL, so that is barely any harder than asking OK/Cancel.
The ones that REALLY frost me are the ones that say "Press Cancel to email your mother, or OK to turn off the computer." (An exageration.) These lazy SOB programmers are forcing their hapless users to do the meaning mapping rather than spending an extra few minutes figuring out how to make an actual dialog box.
You know, this touches on one of my pet peeves. The answer to "Do you want to insert action here" in English is "Yes" or "No." The answer is not "OK" or "Continue."
Also, if there's' no option, why do I have to click on something? They just added a "report spam" button to Lotus Notes at my job. When you click it, you get a succession of three single-button "OK" dialog boxes. One of them actually asks you a question - but it doesn't let you say anything except "OK." If you close the dialog box (upper right hand corner "X") instead of clicking OK, it still reports the email as spam. Why, why why?
For that matter, what, exactly, is so evil about McDonald's?
As I understood the article, the point wasn't to see if people will "torture" a virtual character. Based on the Milgram experiments, it's a pretty safe bet that if people will torture and/or kill a real human they'll do it to a virtual character.
The point was to see whether people reacted to torturing a virtual character in a similar enough fashion to how they would react to torturing a human that doing Milgram-like experiments with a virtual "learner" would be valid.
I assume the "unethical" part comes in with respect to ordering people to "torture" and/or "kill" a character as part of academic research (as opposed to as part of playing any of a dozen FPS games.)
I don't really see any ethics problem here myself, but I guess I understand the point of view of people who do, and assume those people don't play violent video games or allow their children to do so (in the unlikely event that they are ethically consistent.)
I certainly could not keep the laptop if Microsoft give it to me. I can accept typical convention junk (pens, key chains, and other novelty items) or perhaps a meal, but certainly not a laptop. My employer's policy (a Fortune-200 company):
Never solicit or accept money, loans, credits or prejudicial discounts, gifts, entertainment, favors or services from our present or potential suppliers that might influence or appear to influence your decisions.
So....
What is it about GWT that makes it may folds more difficult?
Not so strange. I work for a giant international company everyone in the world (literally) has heard of.
When I started working there a few years ago, I was assigned, as a desktop system (to be used both for development and for office stuff - word, email, etc) a Pentium-based system, with, err, 32M of memory I think. All the developers had them. The corporate standard OS was Win95.
I got upgraded to a PII-based system because a very nice gal in the QA group had some contacts and got the developers cast-off systems that were significantly better than what we had.
The managers, of course, all had new ThinkPads.
That's a little bit of an exageration. Yes, vehicles in the US have larger engines on average than in Europe. But we're not talking 4L+ in most vehicles.
:)
For the most part, a 4-cyl will be 2L - 2.4L, a 6 anywhere from 2.6L (rare) to 3.8L (much more common.) One of GM's oldest, most-sold V6 motors is a 3.8L. My wife's new Camry is a 3.5L, I think.
There are very few passenger cars with a V8.
Personally, I drive a VW GTI (2-door Golf) with a 1.8L motor. Most of what I buy for the house fits in back if I fold down the seats and leave the parcel shelf at home. Sometimes it hangs out the back a little. We bought a couple 6-foot bookshelves at Ikea last week. Folded down 1/2 of the back seat, pushed the front passenger seat forward, one of us drove, the other sat in the remaining 1/2 back-seat. No real problem.
If it doesn't fit, I pay Home Depot the $19.99 for 70-minutes usage of their pickup, or rent a van from U-Haul or Enterprise.
All that said, I have been kind of drooling over a Dodge Magnum RT. Had a V6 as a rental, and it felt like a "real car." That's just what popped into my head when I drove it, "Now THIS is a REAL car." The RT has 5.7L of AWD V8 goodness
OK, first sentence, he says he's a self-employed programmer... Not sure how you do that unless you're working as a consultant to another company, but maybe he's got a product that he sells enough of to meet expenses.
Slashdot is international. Health insurance (in the US, at least) is regulated state-by-state, and priced at that level or smaller.
You really just need to look around, make sure you find a company that isn't fly-by-night, preferably with an agent who wants to help you.
Also, look at any organizations you belong to - IEEE, ACM, etc - some or all of them may have health insurance programs. Since you don't have an employer but don't have an income, around here that means you're probably a consultant. Is there a consultant's organization (national or local) that you can join? They probably have some discount program.
Or think outside the box. The lady who cuts my wife's hair also works part time at the local grocery store, because part-time people at the grocery store can get benefits, and that's the primary reason she works there. I've heard that's true at Starbuck's and Home Depot, too, but you'd need to check.
Exactly. We're not all videophiles. Some of us just want a giant Oprah.
As far as I'm concerned, "cell" is fine.
And unlikely to change, anyhow. I mean, I don't know about you, but I still "dial" my phone.
When's the last time you saw a phone that really applied to? (Aside from your grandma's house.)