I can't argue too much, but 100 years ago was 1912. Not exactly the dark ages. People were doing science as we would recognize it today, and they knew about stuff like germs, hand washing, and much more.
But your experience 10 years later might be much better. WW I led to quite a lot of medical advances. It would still seem primitive, but you would recognize it as "modern medicine."
I just don't agree with your argument, because splitting up funds among all employees isn't a rational use for funds.
There's only so much money in the pot. When executives in a failing company drain the pot into their own pockets, they accelerate the failure and make it harder to prevent it, because the company has fewer financial resources to do the things it needs to do in order to survive.
It doesn't matter if the pittance of a multi-million-dollar salary split up among all the employees wouldn't be noticeable. If the executives give up a million dollars a year of salary, that's a million dollars that can be put to productive use - whether research, finances, or keeping twenty people employed that your company needs but can't otherwise afford.
And yet, none of that is why most people are so outraged by exorbitant executive salaries at a failing company. They just think that if your bad judgement means people are losing their jobs and the company is failing, you shouldn't be living high. If the company is doing poorly, the people running the company should feel some pain. To do otherwise is bad for image, bad for morale, and immoral.
It's NCR, and the page calls it a POS system, so that was the "brains" for a point of sale system. I have no idea if it was an enterprise-wide system or for a single store. My guess is this consolidated sales information enterprise-wise, probably over dedicated lines to their stores, but that's strictly a guess.
It would be far from trivial to emulate this on a PC. If you look through the linked page, you find that the computer has a number of I/O boards, which probably have no comparable equivalent in the PC world. You have to be able to talk to the (equally elderly) systems in the stores for this to do the job that I'm speculating it did.
Ames Department Stores was a discount chain, but had smaller stores than a KMart or Walmart.
According to Wikipedia, Ames announced the closing of their remaining stores in August 2002, so I would guess that they used this to the end, then once they shut their doors, donated it since it had negligible value.
Point of sale systems are tremendously expensive, and Ames was under a lot of pressure from Walmart as they expanded into the northeast. It's possible that to replace this they would have had to upgrade the point of sale systems in all of their locations.
The laptop is generally a piece of crap, so I'm not sinking any more money into it. I've obviously learned my lesson. I did look at the specs and it seemed like a decent price for what it was - i7, 8GB, discrete graphics, big hard drive. I just missed the screen resolution spec - which manufacturers tend to hide these days.
But don't tell me to buy a desktop. I don't want a desktop. If I own a desktop I have to sit at a desk to use it, that's why it's called that. And I don't have a good place for a computer desk, except upstairs in a spare bedroom or somewhere in the basement.
I don't want to sit at a desk, I want to sit on the sofa and fool around online, check work email, check personal email, and look things up in the course of living my life. I want to carry it to the printer (in the basement) when I'm printing shipping labels. I want to take it to the kitchen if I'm cooking a recipe I found online. I want to watch the latest Dr. Who via streaming video (legally) while I clean up the kitchen and make lunch for tomorrow. I want to let my nephew use it sitting on the floor in our living room at the coffee table where I can see everything he's doing.
Sure, if I'm spending my day coding, I want a desktop-like environment. Multiple screens, proper keyboard and mouse. I do that at work. I don't do it at home.
MY advice to YOU? Ditch the fancy desktop and get a decent laptop to use at home instead of sitting at some fixed position in your home to Use The Computer.
I bought a laptop a couple years ago (2010) and didn't even think to look at screen resolution. It's a fairly high-spec Dell otherwise - i7 (when i7 was brand new), 8G, etc etc, so I assumed it would be comparable to my old one at least, maybe better. Spent $1200.
It's this shit 1366x768. I've been mad since I got it and realized how low res it is.
My prior laptop, also a Dell, had a "WUXGA" resolution. 1920 x 1200. I bought it in 2005. Spent $2200.
I don't have the money to blow on another laptop. I have, however, done some window-shopping, and it's darn frustrating. It's not even a search option on most sites, and there don't seem to be many laptops that have higher than 1366x768 anyhow. It was expensive in 2005, but it was an option at least. You can barely even buy it today, because of the commoditization of these screens.
So don't say "buy it if you want it" because you almost can't.
I"m sorry you never learned basic facts that most people learn at a fairly early age.
I'm not going to apologize for thinking that everyone should have single digit multiplication and addition committed to memory.
I'm not saying memorize 17 x 17 - or 1024 x 1024. that's pointless. (Although I bet there are a lot of people here who just know 1024 x 1024. 2^20.)
Even without a calculator or tricks, there are easy to understand ways to do those calculation that have been taught for decades (or much longer.) But they depend on knowing 7 x 7 and 7 x 1 and 1 x 7.
And as a practical matter, when math is hard for you, you can't afford to lose points because, when the teacher says "no calculators" you can't solve for "x" in "42 = 6x".
Is basic calculation skills needed for further math education? How about in algebra when they aren't using calculators and are expected to be able to solve for x in something as simple as "4x -5 = 15" ? Teachers expect you to get the basic math right on that sort of thing. They pick the numbers so they're easy but you still have to get the arithmetic right.
But forget future math education. She probably isn't going to do one bit more of it than someone makes her do.
And the truth is, most people don't need to understand more math than basic arithmetic, geometry and algebra anyway.
When they essentially fail at arithmetic it affects the rest of their life. They can't make change. They can't check that they got the right change. They can't estimate tax or calculate a tip. They can't build a bookcase except with the flat-pack from Ikea.
For a current middle-school student, not knowing "5+9" or "6 x 8" makes them feel stupid, because most of the rest of the class does know it. She needs to not feel stupid at math to do well in future math classes. When you're in 5th grade, that means circling back and learning basic sums and times tables.
She should have learned the sums by 2nd grade and multiplications by 3rd, 4th at the latest. She didn't, and now someone needs to help her fix that, not tell her she doesn't need it.
Only if you're in a state whose outcome isn't essentially decided.
I have usually voted Republican. I live in Illinois. This year I'm voting Libertarian, because I actually like and respect Gov. Johnson.
It doesn't matter. No matter how I vote, Obama is going to win Illinois.
By voting for Johnson, he and/or the Libertarian party may get more federal funding next time around, it sends a nice "neither one" message, and Johnson may get more respect when he runs again in 4 years, which he has pretty much said he intends to do. Doesn't sound like a wasted vote to me.
Now a vote for Romney in Illinois. There's a wasted vote!
A 5th or 6th grader should be able to do mental calculations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication of single digit numbers virtually instantaneously.
She may not enjoy achieving that, but once she does she will be happier in math class, not less happy. Right now she's the dumb girl who doesn't know that 7 + 5 = 12. Fix that and she'll do better in math going forward.
I was speaking merely of the greater impermanence of software compared to things in the more physical world, and the emotional ties that would make its end harder.
If the OP doesn't think that will bother him, put a little thing about her in HTML comments, and a dedication in the About.
Books are different than software. If 5,000 copies were sold, it's likely that the book will exist for a very long time somewhere - but, more importantly, the not sold copies can persist on the author's bookshelf, and the author's family's bookshelf, for generations.
My great-grandfather wrote a book in 1932 about Herbert Hoover. Since Hoover was then the current president, I suppose it might be considered part of his re-election campaign. To the best of my knowledge, all of his living descendants have a copy, and those copies will no doubt be passed on to our children, and persist in the family until the paper crumbles to dust. In fact, thanks to the questionable tactics of someone called "Kessinger Publishing", it's once again available new in print.
A song or poem about his grandmother? That will likely persist in some form until the OP dies, whether in his papers, or his memory, or those of his friends and family. Since I was only talking about emotional ties and the OP, that's plenty.
Whatever it is, it probably has an expected life span of a few years.
If you tie a tribute to your departed grandmother up in it, you're going to be even more bummed when your project's life ends.
My grandfather died slightly over a decade ago. Nothing I was working on then is still in use in any meaningful way. Both facts make me sad, but having them tied together would be worse.
Find the local park district and buy a little plaque on a park bench if you want something. Or a brick in the humane society sidewalk, or whatever people do wherever it is you are.
Or better yet, honor her memory by doing something with your life that would make her proud of you. You probably had a hard time explaining to her what you even do, why would you memorialize her with it?
My high school had a room full of TRS-80 Model III and a few Model IV. They used them to teach BASIC programming, two different one-semester classes. I was a pretty good TRS-80 BASIC programmer already so I didn't intend to take them.
I remember them being networked somehow, with four floppy drives and a printer attached to the Model III that was the "server." The other Model III computers had no drives. Printer contention was handled by announcing that you were going to print, then nobody else would print until you were done.
Then my senior year they got a lab full of Apple II and were doing Pascal on them. But I couldn't get in the Pascal class because I didn't have the BASIC prereq. They at least let me skip the first BASIC class and take the second one, as a sort of consolation prize.
A month or two ago, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I took my nephew to a very nice public park in a very expensive suburb two towns over. (For those in the Chicago area, Harvester Park in Burr Ridge.)
It was like there had been a bomb scare or something. There were two guys using one of the baseball diamonds and one kid on a bike moping around. That was it.
I had been worried about the place being mobbed. But instead I got to go on the swings, the cable ride and go down the slides, then we walked the mile long trail. (The slides hurt, I didn't really fit.) We had a blast, but I really wondered where everyone was and what was wrong with people for being home and indoors on that beautiful day.
My only qualm with MSE: My mother-in-law (and my wife's sister, who lived with the m-i-l) managed to impressively infect a Windows XP system that I had MSE installed on.
So far as I could tell, something broke Windows updates, which in turn meant that MSE updates didn't flow, and the infestation ran wild... to the point that the computer was unusable.
In my work experience, it's easy for Windows updates to break or be broken. It was nonfunctional on my work computer for the better part of a year before I reloaded it.
This experience led me to believe that antivirus should have its own, hardened, secure, simple update path independent of Windows system management technologies.
In Illinois, a corporation can only be represented in small claims court by a lawyer. In general expect one if you're suing a corporation, small claims court or not.
My dad went into the local Apple retailer first when looking for a computer for his business. He was "in uniform" - dressed as an auto mechanic. He owned and operated a muffler shop and it was the appropriate attire for his job.
Honestly, he probably smelled like a mechanic too - sweat, grease and a little beer - and his hair was probably a little long and going in all directions.
Apparently they were rude and dismissive - after all, what does a dirty mechanic want with a computer? He probably couldn't afford it anyway.
So he drove across town to Radio Shack, where they treated him well, and over the years he and my uncle spent quite a lot on TRS-80 equipment.
Model I, Model III (several), 2 color computers, 3+ printers, modems, even an early semi-IBM-compatible Tandy 1000.
The Model 2 could have had 8" floppies, but I don't believe the Model III ever had 8" floppies. It had internal and/or external 5.25" floppies. Or just a cassette interface.
My dad owned several and my high school computer lab was made up of Model III and Model 4 computers. Not sure what technology but the lab was networked with 4 floppy drives on the "server" (just another Model III) along with the sole printer.
I don't think the Model 4's were part of the network.
I believe that printer contention was handled by standing up and saying loudly, "I'm printing."
Slashdot Mirror
I can't argue too much, but 100 years ago was 1912. Not exactly the dark ages. People were doing science as we would recognize it today, and they knew about stuff like germs, hand washing, and much more.
But your experience 10 years later might be much better. WW I led to quite a lot of medical advances. It would still seem primitive, but you would recognize it as "modern medicine."
Neither Hostess nor McDonald's forces you to eat their products.
Eat what you want. If you want free range apples, eat free range apples.
If you want Twinkies and Big Macs, eat Twinkies and Big Macs.
Personally, I eat a lot of produce AND the occasional Big Mac. Maybe once a year I buy a small package of Twinkies.
Or, maybe McDonald's will continue to evolve their menu (chicken, salads, and real fruit smoothies for example) to meet their customers' demands.
Ronald is no clown.
I'll take a pile of retirement money that my company can't pillage over one that they can any day.
Anyone working in the private sector today who thinks they've got a guaranteed pension is living in some sort of fantasy land.
I just don't agree with your argument, because splitting up funds among all employees isn't a rational use for funds.
There's only so much money in the pot. When executives in a failing company drain the pot into their own pockets, they accelerate the failure and make it harder to prevent it, because the company has fewer financial resources to do the things it needs to do in order to survive.
It doesn't matter if the pittance of a multi-million-dollar salary split up among all the employees wouldn't be noticeable. If the executives give up a million dollars a year of salary, that's a million dollars that can be put to productive use - whether research, finances, or keeping twenty people employed that your company needs but can't otherwise afford.
And yet, none of that is why most people are so outraged by exorbitant executive salaries at a failing company. They just think that if your bad judgement means people are losing their jobs and the company is failing, you shouldn't be living high. If the company is doing poorly, the people running the company should feel some pain. To do otherwise is bad for image, bad for morale, and immoral.
In a sufficiently under-served and rural area, they will. Small towns don't work like cities.
It's NCR, and the page calls it a POS system, so that was the "brains" for a point of sale system. I have no idea if it was an enterprise-wide system or for a single store. My guess is this consolidated sales information enterprise-wise, probably over dedicated lines to their stores, but that's strictly a guess.
It would be far from trivial to emulate this on a PC. If you look through the linked page, you find that the computer has a number of I/O boards, which probably have no comparable equivalent in the PC world. You have to be able to talk to the (equally elderly) systems in the stores for this to do the job that I'm speculating it did.
Ames Department Stores was a discount chain, but had smaller stores than a KMart or Walmart.
According to Wikipedia, Ames announced the closing of their remaining stores in August 2002, so I would guess that they used this to the end, then once they shut their doors, donated it since it had negligible value.
Point of sale systems are tremendously expensive, and Ames was under a lot of pressure from Walmart as they expanded into the northeast. It's possible that to replace this they would have had to upgrade the point of sale systems in all of their locations.
Maybe I'm a sucker but you're clearly an asshole.
It's easier to fix sucker.
The laptop is generally a piece of crap, so I'm not sinking any more money into it. I've obviously learned my lesson. I did look at the specs and it seemed like a decent price for what it was - i7, 8GB, discrete graphics, big hard drive. I just missed the screen resolution spec - which manufacturers tend to hide these days.
But don't tell me to buy a desktop. I don't want a desktop. If I own a desktop I have to sit at a desk to use it, that's why it's called that. And I don't have a good place for a computer desk, except upstairs in a spare bedroom or somewhere in the basement.
I don't want to sit at a desk, I want to sit on the sofa and fool around online, check work email, check personal email, and look things up in the course of living my life. I want to carry it to the printer (in the basement) when I'm printing shipping labels. I want to take it to the kitchen if I'm cooking a recipe I found online. I want to watch the latest Dr. Who via streaming video (legally) while I clean up the kitchen and make lunch for tomorrow. I want to let my nephew use it sitting on the floor in our living room at the coffee table where I can see everything he's doing.
Sure, if I'm spending my day coding, I want a desktop-like environment. Multiple screens, proper keyboard and mouse. I do that at work. I don't do it at home.
MY advice to YOU? Ditch the fancy desktop and get a decent laptop to use at home instead of sitting at some fixed position in your home to Use The Computer.
Yes! This!
I bought a laptop a couple years ago (2010) and didn't even think to look at screen resolution. It's a fairly high-spec Dell otherwise - i7 (when i7 was brand new), 8G, etc etc, so I assumed it would be comparable to my old one at least, maybe better. Spent $1200.
It's this shit 1366x768. I've been mad since I got it and realized how low res it is.
My prior laptop, also a Dell, had a "WUXGA" resolution. 1920 x 1200. I bought it in 2005. Spent $2200.
I don't have the money to blow on another laptop. I have, however, done some window-shopping, and it's darn frustrating. It's not even a search option on most sites, and there don't seem to be many laptops that have higher than 1366x768 anyhow. It was expensive in 2005, but it was an option at least. You can barely even buy it today, because of the commoditization of these screens.
So don't say "buy it if you want it" because you almost can't.
I"m sorry you never learned basic facts that most people learn at a fairly early age.
I'm not going to apologize for thinking that everyone should have single digit multiplication and addition committed to memory.
I'm not saying memorize 17 x 17 - or 1024 x 1024. that's pointless. (Although I bet there are a lot of people here who just know 1024 x 1024. 2^20.)
Even without a calculator or tricks, there are easy to understand ways to do those calculation that have been taught for decades (or much longer.) But they depend on knowing 7 x 7 and 7 x 1 and 1 x 7.
And as a practical matter, when math is hard for you, you can't afford to lose points because, when the teacher says "no calculators" you can't solve for "x" in "42 = 6x".
Your argument is absurd.
Is basic calculation skills needed for further math education? How about in algebra when they aren't using calculators and are expected to be able to solve for x in something as simple as "4x -5 = 15" ? Teachers expect you to get the basic math right on that sort of thing. They pick the numbers so they're easy but you still have to get the arithmetic right.
But forget future math education. She probably isn't going to do one bit more of it than someone makes her do.
And the truth is, most people don't need to understand more math than basic arithmetic, geometry and algebra anyway.
When they essentially fail at arithmetic it affects the rest of their life. They can't make change. They can't check that they got the right change. They can't estimate tax or calculate a tip. They can't build a bookcase except with the flat-pack from Ikea.
For a current middle-school student, not knowing "5+9" or "6 x 8" makes them feel stupid, because most of the rest of the class does know it. She needs to not feel stupid at math to do well in future math classes. When you're in 5th grade, that means circling back and learning basic sums and times tables.
She should have learned the sums by 2nd grade and multiplications by 3rd, 4th at the latest. She didn't, and now someone needs to help her fix that, not tell her she doesn't need it.
Only if you're in a state whose outcome isn't essentially decided.
I have usually voted Republican. I live in Illinois. This year I'm voting Libertarian, because I actually like and respect Gov. Johnson.
It doesn't matter. No matter how I vote, Obama is going to win Illinois.
By voting for Johnson, he and/or the Libertarian party may get more federal funding next time around, it sends a nice "neither one" message, and Johnson may get more respect when he runs again in 4 years, which he has pretty much said he intends to do. Doesn't sound like a wasted vote to me.
Now a vote for Romney in Illinois. There's a wasted vote!
I graduated in 1986 from a high school in a small town.
Closed campus. They didn't want the students wandering all over town when there was basically nothing to do.
I have to disagree.
A 5th or 6th grader should be able to do mental calculations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication of single digit numbers virtually instantaneously.
She may not enjoy achieving that, but once she does she will be happier in math class, not less happy. Right now she's the dumb girl who doesn't know that 7 + 5 = 12. Fix that and she'll do better in math going forward.
I was speaking merely of the greater impermanence of software compared to things in the more physical world, and the emotional ties that would make its end harder.
If the OP doesn't think that will bother him, put a little thing about her in HTML comments, and a dedication in the About.
Books are different than software. If 5,000 copies were sold, it's likely that the book will exist for a very long time somewhere - but, more importantly, the not sold copies can persist on the author's bookshelf, and the author's family's bookshelf, for generations.
My great-grandfather wrote a book in 1932 about Herbert Hoover. Since Hoover was then the current president, I suppose it might be considered part of his re-election campaign. To the best of my knowledge, all of his living descendants have a copy, and those copies will no doubt be passed on to our children, and persist in the family until the paper crumbles to dust. In fact, thanks to the questionable tactics of someone called "Kessinger Publishing", it's once again available new in print.
A song or poem about his grandmother? That will likely persist in some form until the OP dies, whether in his papers, or his memory, or those of his friends and family. Since I was only talking about emotional ties and the OP, that's plenty.
Whatever it is, it probably has an expected life span of a few years.
If you tie a tribute to your departed grandmother up in it, you're going to be even more bummed when your project's life ends.
My grandfather died slightly over a decade ago. Nothing I was working on then is still in use in any meaningful way. Both facts make me sad, but having them tied together would be worse.
Find the local park district and buy a little plaque on a park bench if you want something. Or a brick in the humane society sidewalk, or whatever people do wherever it is you are.
Or better yet, honor her memory by doing something with your life that would make her proud of you. You probably had a hard time explaining to her what you even do, why would you memorialize her with it?
My high school had a room full of TRS-80 Model III and a few Model IV. They used them to teach BASIC programming, two different one-semester classes. I was a pretty good TRS-80 BASIC programmer already so I didn't intend to take them.
I remember them being networked somehow, with four floppy drives and a printer attached to the Model III that was the "server." The other Model III computers had no drives. Printer contention was handled by announcing that you were going to print, then nobody else would print until you were done.
Then my senior year they got a lab full of Apple II and were doing Pascal on them. But I couldn't get in the Pascal class because I didn't have the BASIC prereq. They at least let me skip the first BASIC class and take the second one, as a sort of consolation prize.
A month or two ago, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I took my nephew to a very nice public park in a very expensive suburb two towns over. (For those in the Chicago area, Harvester Park in Burr Ridge.)
It was like there had been a bomb scare or something. There were two guys using one of the baseball diamonds and one kid on a bike moping around. That was it.
I had been worried about the place being mobbed. But instead I got to go on the swings, the cable ride and go down the slides, then we walked the mile long trail. (The slides hurt, I didn't really fit.) We had a blast, but I really wondered where everyone was and what was wrong with people for being home and indoors on that beautiful day.
I gave my mother-in-law a non-admin account on her computer and didn't give her the administrator password.
I'm over there at least twice a week, and also have LogMeIn (free) installed.
I'm not sure we told her she wasn't an admin user, but I honestly don't think she'd understand if we tried.
My only qualm with MSE: My mother-in-law (and my wife's sister, who lived with the m-i-l) managed to impressively infect a Windows XP system that I had MSE installed on.
So far as I could tell, something broke Windows updates, which in turn meant that MSE updates didn't flow, and the infestation ran wild... to the point that the computer was unusable.
In my work experience, it's easy for Windows updates to break or be broken. It was nonfunctional on my work computer for the better part of a year before I reloaded it.
This experience led me to believe that antivirus should have its own, hardened, secure, simple update path independent of Windows system management technologies.
Most people want a Toyota, not a BMW.
Well, that's what they buy, anyhow. Because the Toyota meets the base requirements and it leaves them money for the mortgage.
Personally I don't are about metal case, etc. my laptop leaves the house about three times a year. I'll be careful.
In Illinois, a corporation can only be represented in small claims court by a lawyer. In general expect one if you're suing a corporation, small claims court or not.
My dad went into the local Apple retailer first when looking for a computer for his business. He was "in uniform" - dressed as an auto mechanic. He owned and operated a muffler shop and it was the appropriate attire for his job.
Honestly, he probably smelled like a mechanic too - sweat, grease and a little beer - and his hair was probably a little long and going in all directions.
Apparently they were rude and dismissive - after all, what does a dirty mechanic want with a computer? He probably couldn't afford it anyway.
So he drove across town to Radio Shack, where they treated him well, and over the years he and my uncle spent quite a lot on TRS-80 equipment.
Model I, Model III (several), 2 color computers, 3+ printers, modems, even an early semi-IBM-compatible Tandy 1000.
The Model 2 could have had 8" floppies, but I don't believe the Model III ever had 8" floppies. It had internal and/or external 5.25" floppies. Or just a cassette interface.
My dad owned several and my high school computer lab was made up of Model III and Model 4 computers. Not sure what technology but the lab was networked with 4 floppy drives on the "server" (just another Model III) along with the sole printer.
I don't think the Model 4's were part of the network.
I believe that printer contention was handled by standing up and saying loudly, "I'm printing."