Perhaps not when you factor in the costs of administrator salaries and time, lifespan of equipment, and training costs.
A $400 Dell may be a bit cheaper than the $500 Mac Mini, but the mini might (it hasn't been out long enough to say 'will') need less administration time, last longer (especially with less fan action), be more intuitive for people to use, etc.
There's more to figuring costs than just the immediate price.
TV is the worst possible waste of time a person can have. [SNIP] It is designed to have somoene sit in front of a television while countless hours go away, never to come back. [SNIP] I wish I had back all the hours I had watching TV. It has harmed me.
And so says Slashdot user John Seminal, who has already posted 15 times to slashdot today within the past 8 hours, and at least 9 posts yesterday (there might be more posts prior to those 9, slashdot cuts off backposts after some number).
How do I get all those hours back? How do I go on living knowing my formative years were spent watching the Dukes of Hazzard?
Well, apparently your post-formative years were spent lapping up the postings and dupes of Taco and company, is that really much of an improvement?
This is where people start debating that internet is better than TV for whatever reasons - you can learn from it, you can choose your content, you can interact with people, etc.
I'll put in my two cents and say that all those things are true, but on the other hand surfing the web is an all-engaging experience. As opposed to the other things as you watch TV.
So I don't see why it is necessarily worse if I watch, in your words, third-grade jokes as I'm folding laundry, cleaning my room, eating dinner by myself, etc, as opposed to the incessant hours you apparently spend reading and posting to slashdot.
It had the best of all worlds. Real-time space-based melee fighting, trading and outfitting your ships and building fleets, exploring planets and finding minerals, alien life, new technology, interesting alien races to talk to with an involved plot, and a great sense of humor underlying the entire game.
When they asked the richest man in the world, who happened to have amassed his wealth in the PC business what he thought about the PC business, he had nothing but positive things to say.
Not just that, but most of Billy's wealth is still amassed as stock shares, which is potential wealth. Ie, that wealth isn't really his yet. So if he ever says anything disparaging against Microsoft he'll LOSE a truckload of money if the share price goes down.
That's why I really don't understand why investors take the word of company executives seriously, the executives are merely trying to keep their stock prices high.
It also seems somewhat wrong to let Gates write journalism columns anyway, because of the above conflict of interest. It's more-or-less giving Microsoft free advertising space (Or - can anyone point out any message where Gates actually said something worthwhile and also negative about Microsoft?). While I'm sure many journalists own certain stocks themselves, Billy is in a whole different class. He owns enough stock to buy several small nations, so giving him a platform in a supposedly neutral magazine to advertise just doesn't seem proper.
Hi, sorry this is so late a response, I hope you see it.
No, I'm certainly not trivializing studying Latin, that's why I said I'd only recommend it to someone if their interests were for classics, history, or linguistics. That certainly fits the bill for your mention of comparative Indo-European linguistics.
What I was referring to were people taking it in high school in order to boost their SAT verbal scores. But for that reason I think it's pretty lame, because studying Spanish or French would give a similar understanding of common word origins, yet also allow one to learn about and interact with another culture.
I can make anything connect to the PC, knock together a program and then interface it to anything in the outside world. Last time I tried it with a MAC, I got pissed off and threw it against a wall.
What external interfaces are you talking about that you want to use? You don't mean RS-232 and parallel port, do you? Mac's come standard with USB and Firewire, what kind of interfacing cannot you do with these ports that you could do w/ a PC? Even if you needed to use serial port you can get a USB to Serial converter for pretty cheap (must cheaper than the cost of fixing the Mac you threw against the wall). I haven't seen them specifically, but I'd imagine they'd have USB to parallel port converters too.
If you need to generate/read analog or digital waveforms, get a USB or Firewire data acquisition module, there's hundreds, maybe thousands, available. I know several research and engineering labs that use Macs exclusively for experimentation and processing (eg, the lab next to mine uses all Macs with LabVIEW for data acquisition coding).
What interfacing were you trying to do (and also how long ago was it) when you, which makes me doubt either your sincerity of your post or your abilities as an engineer.
OS X is basically UNIX with a very well-designed and maintained GUI on top of it. And it has drivers for the modern hardware so you don't have to spend all day hacking your XF86 Config files, etc.
What I've realized in the last year is that while I love using Linux (at home I've exclusively used linux for the past 6 years), I cannot stand administering it. It just takes too long to get the hardware working properly, keeping the software updated, etc. Even with Debian right now, where I'm stuck in limbo with a half-Stable and half-Testing distribution, some of my fonts are screwed up, I couldn't get CUPS to work with my printer, trying to use an external sound module involves re-loading it's firmware which I am reluctant to try, etc.
And on the other side of the coin, while Windows has a nice GUI and some hardware is easy to maintain and load drivers for, when things go wrong they go wrong BADLY. And dealing with the registry can really blow, not to mention the lack of security and stability.
I've had none of these problems on OS X. It gives me an easily-maintainable yet powerful and stable machine, and the choice to use a UNIX command line or a well-designed and attractive GUI. It's really the best of both worlds, and I really think Apple finally got it right, something no other commercial OS that I've encountered has done yet (I haven't used BeOS or Amiga, which some people seem to really love).
That's exactly what did it for me. I've always felt kind of 'Icky' using the older Mac OS's before, even back to the days of MS-DOS. However, when I first saw OS X, I became a huge fan. I've used Linux pretty exclusively at home for the past 6 years (Debian), but it starts to get annoying dealing with all the drivers/dependencies/up-to-date software, etc. Ie, setting up a printer or sound card can take hours, depending on the model. And if you want to install some other software only available as an RPM on your debian box, more headaches. Dealing with fonts and localities - more headaches. I'm sure some elitist will claim how I'm an idiot here and that it's as easy as going to/egg/foo/young and typing "obfuscate -ra -i16 --tag Suck Balls to get some random driver working, but even that elitist spent several hours going through the learning curve too. And so although I prefer using the command line and sometimes hacking things there, the administration side of Linux is just too rough and time-consuming for me.
That's why I love OS X - it's the best of both worlds. It's got the UNIX-like microkernel so you can do all the UNIX hacking you want. On top of that it runs an amazingly-designed GUI, much better than any window manager or desktop environment I've seen on Linux (in my opinion).
But the greatest part, for me anyway, is that "it just works", so I don't have to bang my head against a wall trying to deal with drivers,.configure files, etc. And in my experience so far it's much easier to administer and operate than Windows. If Sun or SGI had the foresight to create a great GUI on top of Solaris or Irix, they could have perhaps been in Apple's place long ago, but they ignored the UI entirely, which kept only Solaris within niche markets, and I have no idea where Irix is nowadays.
While Mac OS still has it's quirks (the whole ctrl vs command key thing), compared to the major flaws of Windows/Linux/etc it's the best option out there for me.
I've also realized something else - that I do not mind paying for decent closed-source software. I can't stand administrating Windows and really despise the Microsoft way. And I think this severe dislike for Microsoft led me to dislike other closed-source software the same way. But I've since changed views after seeing OS X.
I don't know if this is a controversial technique, but you can watch movies with German audio and English subtitles to work on your listening comprehension. Or the reverse to work on your reading comprehension.
For Spanish, it's quite useful that most DVD's (at least here in the US) have Spanish audio tracks.
In the beginning, the language as actually spoken by a native speaker will occur so fast it's hard to catch it. And especially so in a movie where you cannot see the speaker's mouth clearly. But with the English subtitles it is amazing how many words you already knew in the sentence but just didn't catch.
The cool part about this is that your brain sort of already understands what's being spoken, because your eyes see the words. So you don't have the tendency to translate word by word, which you otherwise would (and most people advocate against word by word translations once you move beyond the elementary level). So at first you can focus on catching the primary words in the sentence to match up w/ the translation. And later on you can catch finer details of seeing conjugations and other tenses, etc.
One problem that would seem to be a hindrance is that very often the subtitles don't match exactly the audio, even for the same language. But sometimes this works to your benefit because even as a beginner you can often hear deviations that occur. But since you have the basic idea of the translation it makes it easier for your brain to pick out the deviations.
For example, while learning Spanish, I was watching some dumb movie with Spanish subtitles and English audio, and after a question with an obvious YES answer the guy replied "Is a frog's ass watertight?". But the translation was "Is the sky blue?". And you'll be amazed, even at an elementary level, when you can find even less subtle discrepencies between the translations.
My girlfriend's native language is Spanish, but she's been fluent in English since I met her. But she was the motivation I learned Spanish. When she was back home in Central America, and I called there but she wasn't home and I couldn't communicate at all with her family, I realized it would be quite useful if I learned the language.
So I studied a bit on my own (and with her), took one semester at university while I had spare time, etc. The best part about learning with her is that she helped me to perfect my pronunciation (well, not perfect, but definitely way better than most Americans). We speak 99% in English, because it gets too frustrating for us if I cannot understand what she's saying. But with her family I speak Spanish. I've also made friends with a whole group of Spanish speakers (from Spain and Latin America) which gives me extra practice too. I've found that most Spanish speakers usually encourage you to speak the language, even if you're bloody awful at it.
But I'm really glad I did this, because Spanish is becoming ever more prominent in the states, and I highly recommend Spanish to any American. I wanted to learn Spanish for some time, and she was the push to get me off my ass to learn it.
I was a bit jealous of the latin students in my high school because of the reasons you mention (I studied French, and couldn't take Latin because of time conflicts). I also remember my high school biology teacher claiming how 100-200 years ago Latin was considered the language of learned people.
But I've since come to realize that now I'm really glad I studied a living language, because I can actually use it.
Additionally, if one learns a living Romance language, they will also be able to identify most of the same common Latin roots. Is there really much of a benefit, if this is your goal, to study Latin over French/Spanish/Portugese/etc? The other languages give you an appreciation into another existing culture. And it is really cool to be able to talk to people in a new language that a mere few months ago you'd be entirely unable to talk to.
So after living in the real word for awhile, I'd only recommend Latin to people interested in studying the classics, history, or linguistics.
I've used Pauker, and I give it a thumbs up. I used it to pass my Spanish class, although I feasibly could have used flashcards but they get too annoying.
Pauker tries to match to memory models, so you first 'learn' cards for the short term memory cycle (i forget how long that is, no stupid pun meant here). And then you get quized on those words. Pauker follows some kind of exponential memory model, so as you successively get words right, the time before they expire again increases exponentially. For quizing, you can set it so you either type the back of the flashcard, or you acknowledge that you got the card right. You can decide which side of the card to test.
The good : Pauker can use Unicode, which is a must for basically any language besides English. I was one of the few in my spanish class that consistently got accents right (for some reason my teacher didn't count accents too much, go figure).
Using the exponential memory curve, you don't have to waste your time consistently quizing words you know well.
The bad : sometimes it's annoying to deal with the preset 'learning time' cycles for new cards. Pauker has a certain 'memory philosophy' built into it, so if you don't want to deal with that philosophy it can be a pain.
While I agree that analog processors probably hold some promise, there is one large issue with them: heat.
Yes and no, depends how your operating the transistors. For example, ECL (Emitter-Coupled Logic) runs quite fast and doesn't saturate the transistors, contrasted to what TTL does. By not saturating they're able to switch states quite quickly, but they dissipate power like crazy. As of 7 years ago you could easily find ECL lines (For example this AND/NAND chip can work at least to 3 GHz. This is a discrete component, so you can do logic this fast onto the pins.
But the trick is to exploit Shannon's theorem, and possibly work in base 4, base 16, or similar. You obviously need a higher SNR, but you won't need to clock as fast. Of course designing for base 2 is hard enough, base-4 components would be really difficult, and you'd have to come up with quite clever designs.
More interestingly it might be possible to have each
'bit' ride on a Microwave or higher carrier frequency, with the digital information modulating it. This way you could employ dense wave-division multiplexing, like in communications, to have multiple bits riding on each carrier line. Of course you'd need to design microscopic receivers/transmitters/processors to work on these signals, but it might be possible. The trick would be keeping the CPU size small, such that the registers/ALU/cache can all communicate with each other at a decently fast clocking rate (obviously limited by speed of light).
I find the latter to be more informative and useful than meaningless mnemonics.
Found it on the web (at least some of them) here .
I think Henshall's method is much better,
especially since the kanji were originally developed in ways that have innate mnemonics in them. Eg. sun and moon together are bright, woman and child together mean 'like', as a women likes a child, prostitute is woman and dazzling, etc.
For anybody that doesn't know Japanese (or Chinese), you might want to check out this elementary kanji page and see some of the basic Kanji. They're actually pretty interesting to learn about, and you can easily learn the first twenty or so pretty quickly. You will probably even recognize some of these characters next time you happen across a Chinese or Japanese newspaper or website.
But seriously, you can still find some basic parts in most radio shacks : resistors, caps, pots, transistors, standard op-amps, basic TTL, etc. Unfortunately most of rat shack's sales are consumer products of shoddy quality and/or ripoff prices. But most other stores do have components hiding away in some corner.
Wasn't that the difference between the 486 SX and 486 DX, regarding the math coprocessor?
Actually, I've heard two versions of the story. One is that the SX had the math coprocessor intentionally crippled by Intel, but sold for a cheaper price for larger volume sales.
The other version was that the coprocessor had the highest failure rating for the chip fabrication. So on these chips with a failed copressor, the coprocessor was turned off, but the rest of the chip was still usable.
I vaguely remember this whole practice was described in a computer book my friend was reading, because I remember a joke the author told about computer salesmen. Unfortunately I only remember the joke, not the useful info from that book. (This joke comes from the days of small computer shops)
Q : What's the difference between a computer salesman and a car salesman?
A : The car salesman knows when he's ripping you off.
Reminds of of the old joke about electronic compoment manufacturing fabs. They'll sort the parts coming off the assembly line into three bins, depending on how the testing of each part went :
My brother works for a financial firm in Wall Street, and uses Excel all the time. So hes a "power user" w/ Excel, and often makes complicated spreadsheets.
While we were at my other brother's house, he wanted to create a mortgage spreadsheet to show my father various options to buy a house. The computer there only had Linux and Open Office, but my brother was able to whip up the spreadsheet in no time on his first try using OpenOffice. He only ran into a few small bumps where certain items were located in different menues, etc.
So this was a real kind of spreadsheet application that he'd use at his work all the time, and he was able to integrate into OpenOffice just fine within a few minutes. He was amazed at how smoothly it was, and even more amazed that it was available for free (as in beer, not speech).
On top of that, he occasionally sends me various complicated spreadsheets that he's made up for personal finance things on Excel, and all of them have opened just fine in OpenOffice. In fact, they work better there than in Apple's Appleworks!
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not when you factor in the costs of administrator salaries and time, lifespan of equipment, and training costs.
A $400 Dell may be a bit cheaper than the $500 Mac Mini, but the mini might (it hasn't been out long enough to say 'will') need less administration time, last longer (especially with less fan action), be more intuitive for people to use, etc.
There's more to figuring costs than just the immediate price.
[SNIP]
It is designed to have somoene sit in front of a television while countless hours go away, never to come back.
[SNIP]
I wish I had back all the hours I had watching TV. It has harmed me.
And so says Slashdot user John Seminal, who has already posted 15 times to slashdot today within the past 8 hours, and at least 9 posts yesterday (there might be more posts prior to those 9, slashdot cuts off backposts after some number).
How do I get all those hours back? How do I go on living knowing my formative years were spent watching the Dukes of Hazzard?
Well, apparently your post-formative years were spent lapping up the postings and dupes of Taco and company, is that really much of an improvement?
This is where people start debating that internet is better than TV for whatever reasons - you can learn from it, you can choose your content, you can interact with people, etc. I'll put in my two cents and say that all those things are true, but on the other hand surfing the web is an all-engaging experience. As opposed to the other things as you watch TV.
So I don't see why it is necessarily worse if I watch, in your words, third-grade jokes as I'm folding laundry, cleaning my room, eating dinner by myself, etc, as opposed to the incessant hours you apparently spend reading and posting to slashdot.
In space, no one can smell you farting! That's why you should avoid tandem spacewalks.
It had the best of all worlds. Real-time space-based melee fighting, trading and outfitting your ships and building fleets, exploring planets and finding minerals, alien life, new technology, interesting alien races to talk to with an involved plot, and a great sense of humor underlying the entire game.
Anybody up for a game of Frungy?
Not just that, but most of Billy's wealth is still amassed as stock shares, which is potential wealth. Ie, that wealth isn't really his yet. So if he ever says anything disparaging against Microsoft he'll LOSE a truckload of money if the share price goes down.
That's why I really don't understand why investors take the word of company executives seriously, the executives are merely trying to keep their stock prices high.
It also seems somewhat wrong to let Gates write journalism columns anyway, because of the above conflict of interest. It's more-or-less giving Microsoft free advertising space (Or - can anyone point out any message where Gates actually said something worthwhile and also negative about Microsoft?). While I'm sure many journalists own certain stocks themselves, Billy is in a whole different class. He owns enough stock to buy several small nations, so giving him a platform in a supposedly neutral magazine to advertise just doesn't seem proper.
No, I'm certainly not trivializing studying Latin, that's why I said I'd only recommend it to someone if their interests were for classics, history, or linguistics. That certainly fits the bill for your mention of comparative Indo-European linguistics.
What I was referring to were people taking it in high school in order to boost their SAT verbal scores. But for that reason I think it's pretty lame, because studying Spanish or French would give a similar understanding of common word origins, yet also allow one to learn about and interact with another culture.
What external interfaces are you talking about that you want to use? You don't mean RS-232 and parallel port, do you? Mac's come standard with USB and Firewire, what kind of interfacing cannot you do with these ports that you could do w/ a PC? Even if you needed to use serial port you can get a USB to Serial converter for pretty cheap (must cheaper than the cost of fixing the Mac you threw against the wall). I haven't seen them specifically, but I'd imagine they'd have USB to parallel port converters too.
If you need to generate/read analog or digital waveforms, get a USB or Firewire data acquisition module, there's hundreds, maybe thousands, available. I know several research and engineering labs that use Macs exclusively for experimentation and processing (eg, the lab next to mine uses all Macs with LabVIEW for data acquisition coding).
What interfacing were you trying to do (and also how long ago was it) when you, which makes me doubt either your sincerity of your post or your abilities as an engineer.
That's exactly what did it for me too.
OS X is basically UNIX with a very well-designed and maintained GUI on top of it. And it has drivers for the modern hardware so you don't have to spend all day hacking your XF86 Config files, etc.
What I've realized in the last year is that while I love using Linux (at home I've exclusively used linux for the past 6 years), I cannot stand administering it. It just takes too long to get the hardware working properly, keeping the software updated, etc. Even with Debian right now, where I'm stuck in limbo with a half-Stable and half-Testing distribution, some of my fonts are screwed up, I couldn't get CUPS to work with my printer, trying to use an external sound module involves re-loading it's firmware which I am reluctant to try, etc.
And on the other side of the coin, while Windows has a nice GUI and some hardware is easy to maintain and load drivers for, when things go wrong they go wrong BADLY. And dealing with the registry can really blow, not to mention the lack of security and stability.
I've had none of these problems on OS X. It gives me an easily-maintainable yet powerful and stable machine, and the choice to use a UNIX command line or a well-designed and attractive GUI. It's really the best of both worlds, and I really think Apple finally got it right, something no other commercial OS that I've encountered has done yet (I haven't used BeOS or Amiga, which some people seem to really love).
That's why I love OS X - it's the best of both worlds. It's got the UNIX-like microkernel so you can do all the UNIX hacking you want. On top of that it runs an amazingly-designed GUI, much better than any window manager or desktop environment I've seen on Linux (in my opinion).
But the greatest part, for me anyway, is that "it just works", so I don't have to bang my head against a wall trying to deal with drivers, .configure files, etc. And in my experience so far it's much easier to administer and operate than Windows. If Sun or SGI had the foresight to create a great GUI on top of Solaris or Irix, they could have perhaps been in Apple's place long ago, but they ignored the UI entirely, which kept only Solaris within niche markets, and I have no idea where Irix is nowadays.
While Mac OS still has it's quirks (the whole ctrl vs command key thing), compared to the major flaws of Windows/Linux/etc it's the best option out there for me.
I've also realized something else - that I do not mind paying for decent closed-source software. I can't stand administrating Windows and really despise the Microsoft way. And I think this severe dislike for Microsoft led me to dislike other closed-source software the same way. But I've since changed views after seeing OS X.
Just my 2 cents, YMMV.
In the beginning, the language as actually spoken by a native speaker will occur so fast it's hard to catch it. And especially so in a movie where you cannot see the speaker's mouth clearly. But with the English subtitles it is amazing how many words you already knew in the sentence but just didn't catch.
The cool part about this is that your brain sort of already understands what's being spoken, because your eyes see the words. So you don't have the tendency to translate word by word, which you otherwise would (and most people advocate against word by word translations once you move beyond the elementary level). So at first you can focus on catching the primary words in the sentence to match up w/ the translation. And later on you can catch finer details of seeing conjugations and other tenses, etc.
One problem that would seem to be a hindrance is that very often the subtitles don't match exactly the audio, even for the same language. But sometimes this works to your benefit because even as a beginner you can often hear deviations that occur. But since you have the basic idea of the translation it makes it easier for your brain to pick out the deviations.
For example, while learning Spanish, I was watching some dumb movie with Spanish subtitles and English audio, and after a question with an obvious YES answer the guy replied "Is a frog's ass watertight?". But the translation was "Is the sky blue?". And you'll be amazed, even at an elementary level, when you can find even less subtle discrepencies between the translations.
So I studied a bit on my own (and with her), took one semester at university while I had spare time, etc. The best part about learning with her is that she helped me to perfect my pronunciation (well, not perfect, but definitely way better than most Americans). We speak 99% in English, because it gets too frustrating for us if I cannot understand what she's saying. But with her family I speak Spanish. I've also made friends with a whole group of Spanish speakers (from Spain and Latin America) which gives me extra practice too. I've found that most Spanish speakers usually encourage you to speak the language, even if you're bloody awful at it.
But I'm really glad I did this, because Spanish is becoming ever more prominent in the states, and I highly recommend Spanish to any American. I wanted to learn Spanish for some time, and she was the push to get me off my ass to learn it.
But I've since come to realize that now I'm really glad I studied a living language, because I can actually use it.
Additionally, if one learns a living Romance language, they will also be able to identify most of the same common Latin roots. Is there really much of a benefit, if this is your goal, to study Latin over French/Spanish/Portugese/etc? The other languages give you an appreciation into another existing culture. And it is really cool to be able to talk to people in a new language that a mere few months ago you'd be entirely unable to talk to.
So after living in the real word for awhile, I'd only recommend Latin to people interested in studying the classics, history, or linguistics.
Pauker tries to match to memory models, so you first 'learn' cards for the short term memory cycle (i forget how long that is, no stupid pun meant here). And then you get quized on those words. Pauker follows some kind of exponential memory model, so as you successively get words right, the time before they expire again increases exponentially. For quizing, you can set it so you either type the back of the flashcard, or you acknowledge that you got the card right. You can decide which side of the card to test.
The good : Pauker can use Unicode, which is a must for basically any language besides English. I was one of the few in my spanish class that consistently got accents right (for some reason my teacher didn't count accents too much, go figure).
Using the exponential memory curve, you don't have to waste your time consistently quizing words you know well.
The bad : sometimes it's annoying to deal with the preset 'learning time' cycles for new cards. Pauker has a certain 'memory philosophy' built into it, so if you don't want to deal with that philosophy it can be a pain.
Yes and no, depends how your operating the transistors. For example, ECL (Emitter-Coupled Logic) runs quite fast and doesn't saturate the transistors, contrasted to what TTL does. By not saturating they're able to switch states quite quickly, but they dissipate power like crazy. As of 7 years ago you could easily find ECL lines (For example this AND/NAND chip can work at least to 3 GHz. This is a discrete component, so you can do logic this fast onto the pins.
But the trick is to exploit Shannon's theorem, and possibly work in base 4, base 16, or similar. You obviously need a higher SNR, but you won't need to clock as fast. Of course designing for base 2 is hard enough, base-4 components would be really difficult, and you'd have to come up with quite clever designs.
More interestingly it might be possible to have each 'bit' ride on a Microwave or higher carrier frequency, with the digital information modulating it. This way you could employ dense wave-division multiplexing, like in communications, to have multiple bits riding on each carrier line. Of course you'd need to design microscopic receivers/transmitters/processors to work on these signals, but it might be possible. The trick would be keeping the CPU size small, such that the registers/ALU/cache can all communicate with each other at a decently fast clocking rate (obviously limited by speed of light).
Found it on the web (at least some of them) here .
I think Henshall's method is much better, especially since the kanji were originally developed in ways that have innate mnemonics in them. Eg. sun and moon together are bright, woman and child together mean 'like', as a women likes a child, prostitute is woman and dazzling, etc.
For anybody that doesn't know Japanese (or Chinese), you might want to check out this elementary kanji page and see some of the basic Kanji. They're actually pretty interesting to learn about, and you can easily learn the first twenty or so pretty quickly. You will probably even recognize some of these characters next time you happen across a Chinese or Japanese newspaper or website.
Haha, I wish ;-)
But seriously, you can still find some basic parts in most radio shacks : resistors, caps, pots, transistors, standard op-amps, basic TTL, etc. Unfortunately most of rat shack's sales are consumer products of shoddy quality and/or ripoff prices. But most other stores do have components hiding away in some corner.
The other version was that the coprocessor had the highest failure rating for the chip fabrication. So on these chips with a failed copressor, the coprocessor was turned off, but the rest of the chip was still usable.
I vaguely remember this whole practice was described in a computer book my friend was reading, because I remember a joke the author told about computer salesmen. Unfortunately I only remember the joke, not the useful info from that book. (This joke comes from the days of small computer shops)
Q : What's the difference between a computer salesman and a car salesman?
A : The car salesman knows when he's ripping you off.
Military Grade
Consumer Grade
Radio Shack
With the way my brain works, the one thing that stands out most in that code segment is that you wrote 1 instead of 2 in your list of primes.
While we were at my other brother's house, he wanted to create a mortgage spreadsheet to show my father various options to buy a house. The computer there only had Linux and Open Office, but my brother was able to whip up the spreadsheet in no time on his first try using OpenOffice. He only ran into a few small bumps where certain items were located in different menues, etc.
So this was a real kind of spreadsheet application that he'd use at his work all the time, and he was able to integrate into OpenOffice just fine within a few minutes. He was amazed at how smoothly it was, and even more amazed that it was available for free (as in beer, not speech).
On top of that, he occasionally sends me various complicated spreadsheets that he's made up for personal finance things on Excel, and all of them have opened just fine in OpenOffice. In fact, they work better there than in Apple's Appleworks!