BBSes were the precursor to the Internet, for home users at least. Sure, universities could exchange among themselves, and CIS sucked our bank accounts down like a runaway pr0n habit, but BBSes allowed the everyman to connect to others online, chat, leave messages, learn, download, upload and all that good stuff (a decade or more before the Internet became popular) -- all without being charged for it.
RBBS was the king of BBSes for a long long time, with good reason. Widely distributed on floppies, impressively documented and configurable -- yet Basic-coded to fit in
Like Fortran, Basic had its time, place and purpose -- and still does. Only problem is that simple languages are hard for Microsoft to make money from. With ridiculously complicated languages they can crank out new, incompatible versions like clockwork and everyone must follow in goose^H^H^H^H^Hlock step.
Another also-ran is FoxPro, almost impossible to even get the darn thing, no printed docs, few third-party manuals -- yet SBT, among other things, depends on it. If only it paid to perfect things (and people)...
Mod parent up one more, he deserves a +5. As an engineering student in the later 70s/80s, Fortran was all I knew or cared to know. My one Comp Sci course was beginning Fortran programming -- the whole thing is probably learnable in a few hours today. My final year thesis was a 6000 line Fortran simulation used to determine the feasibility of building a "Two Stage Spouted Bed Coal Pyrolysis Plant" in China (it was).
95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.
It is easy to criticize, as many other posts have done, something invented half a century ago. Personally, I miss being able to use Fortran (or a procedural basic) to solve today's problems -- we've given ourselves over to the machine's favorite language (C) while we pat ourselves on the back for how smart we are now (as we create write-only code).
I wish this had become more popular. There's still time.
Math Maze was kind of like an RPG, but to beat the enemies you had to answer math questions correctly. Most students didn't enjoy this type of stuff.
In junior high my friend I volunteered to keep score during a game. Chalkboard and chalk situation. I started off conventionally but progressed to "23-14", "3 cubed", "17 +12" sorts of things. Most players didn't enjoy this type of stuff.
I want what I wanted 12 years ago -- my full sized desk is my display. Say, eight 24" displays, or six 30" ones -- all touch screen. Driven by six or eight computers. Bookshelfed by a couple of RAID racks of 750GB drives. CPUs and RAMS out the whazoo. Multiple operating systems as appropriate. Dash of Dolby 7.1. Pinch of Dragon Dictate. Dollop of liquid nitro.
The problem is that there is a group of developers and a few end users who are so out of touch with anyone outside the technology field that they are working under the assumption that everyone has the same basic skill that they do.
Microsoft formed their Usability Labs for exactly this reason. Perhaps these guys can work together on something like this?
is that (1) Google saw YouTube as a threat to itself -- a prime starting place for young people in the tens of millions, (2) so they bought it just as Microsoft and other giants have bought companies in the past -- to shut it down, so (3) Google will settle with Viacom for some seemingly convincing amount (let's say $10 million) and start using a content-filtering system that works, with the result that (4) YouTube is no longer a threat to Google.
since he discovered the fastest-known algorithm for calculating pi, the one still in used today. Perhaps also noteworthy for the 65,000+ digit reciters is that only 39 places of pi are sufficient to calculate the circumference of a circle around the known universe to within the radius of a hydrogen atom. "The Man Who Knew Infinity" has more.
In the November 25, 1986 issue of PC Magazine, Michael J. Mefford's SUGGEST.COM was published. In about an hour you could type in 1,256 characters into a Basic program and it would output the COM file. Does anyone else remember doing this? [BTW, search this page for "suggest.com" to get a brief description.]
But to make money on this, you would have to actually use McAfee. I used to, back in Windows 98 days, and it was fairly effective (and cheap -- I downloaded free DAT & DLL updates for years). Enter XP, and McAfee forgets how to write software. McAfee took way too much of my precious RAM (as did Symantec) and I stopped using it. I looked around a bit and settled on AVG Free -- about one third of the RAM usage (my first XP machine had 1GB of RAM but I don't want to waste 50+MB for a frickin AV). Today I consider getting AVG Pro, to compensate a company doing something right, but quite honestly I am concerned that AVG PRo will use more memory. Strange days indeed when the free one is the best one.
I find it interesting how big the biggest "failed" spikes are pretty much exactly at 36 and 48 months. To me this suggests a scheduled replacement cycle or a claim-before-the-warranty-runs-out move. The stats don't seem kosher to me.
Well, a virus in an email is a virus received. This discussion started with AVG's behavior. Someone said AVG never detected one that some other AV did -- but AVG detects and deals with them without a permanent dialog box -- it times out and man I wish other program dialogs would, for non essential messages.
I agree about not MS tools. I think I first thought of it when MS tried to include Central Point's anti virus in DOS 6. Everyone proceeded to target CPAV, that we had been using for years prior to that.
Personally, I use Eudora (that happens to have auto dismissing dialogs as an option) rather than Outlook (has MS ever made a good email program?). I switched to Opera for browsing about a year back (thanks to osnews discussions) and quite like it. My address book is a flat text file -- why would I want more than that (I don't need it on the street, on the road I take a laptop with that file).
6 to 8 years ago I gave out code to people that allowed them to query my site's data. The code (with a bit of javascript) needed to be embedded on their existing (poorly coded) pages so I knew it would stop working at times -- so I put an "if this is not working" link with my email address and exposed it...on about 750 pages at last count. I used to average about 100 viruses per day. Oh well, no big deal and I've never been infected.
I've never seen AVG prevent, or detect an actual virus.
This is a completely ridiculous statement. Maybe you just haven't checked C:\$VAULT$.AVG, a normally hidden directory. Mine currently has 121 xxxxxxxx.FILs, going back to Feb 4, 2007. AVG is alive and well, TYVM.
Pandora lets you set up virtual and customized radio stations. Basically you type in a band you like and they start playing music, some of which is from that band and the rest of which has been human-judged using numerous metrics to be similar to what you like. One of my core bands is Boston so that was my seed band -- I was very impressed with the bands they suggested and I've only stopped listening because it involves constant downloading and I don't want to annoy my ISP.
Parent post is so ridiculous I feel I, as a dedicated Fry's man must stand up and do what needs to be said.
I've never seen "low end junk" -- but I have seen a massive selection of brands, prices and quality levels. Maybe you are incapable of seeing beyond the first item placed in front of your eyes?
I've never bought something that had been repackaged at Fry's. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, rather that I doubt it happens all that often, percentage wise, for the simple reason that these guys are the Wal-Mart of tech stores. They have dozens and dozens of cashiers -- heck, one person is paid just to direct people to the next available cashier. The phrase "they must be doing something right" comes to mind.
Every Fry's person I have talked to spoke easily understandable English. Maybe you are used to a West Virginia drawl?
Register counter space is fine, and receipt checkers are in most stores I go to, including Best Buy and Toys R Us (we have 3 younguns).
NewEgg is fine for that one item you want at a good price. Fry's is usually a bit more expensive than the best online deals but it is hecka fun to lose an hour or two in there.
Professors were notorious for not preparing lectures, and working out examples as they were going along, often failing to prove what they wanted to prove.
And combining that with the parent's point about using Math as a cutter subject, we arrive at what it was like when I took engineering at the U. of B.C. One first year engineering calculus course was specifically used to weed out students and took out one-third of the class each year. By the luck of the draw my class got an old fart on sabbatical from New Zealand -- this guy had no clue about the course, rambled on incessantly, trying to prove stuff and failing on a regular basis, etc.
I got so pissed off I started dropping in on another prof's class. He was the polar opposite and everyone in that class was fine. But to take it one stage further I still went to the old fart's class and started correcting him (by shouting out from the back...one of the few wonderful university traditions) whenever he messed up.
At final exam time, as I walked to the old armories to take the test, the university clock tower (pumping out CITR through its speakers) played The Who's "Don't Get Fooled Again".
All in all an unforgettable period of my life that I am still worked up about 30 years later.
He was indeed. My favorite (ok, only) story about him is:
I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number
expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
- Godfrey H. Hardy (1877-1947)
They are subliminally flashing "jackpot" so you get used to seeing it, ignoring it, and pushing the buttons for the next bet. Then, when you do win something that requires someone to come over and pay you off, you just push those bet buttons and carry on with the smaller machine-provided payout only.
The other way this scam happens is to display the jackpot in very small letters -- friends of mine put me on to this a decade ago with the early (fugly) poker slots.
Maybe we need class action lawsuits against trade publications that give favorable ratings to obviously defective products. Let's start with PCMagazine that used to be the gold standard for thorough testing of products.
It turns out I needed to right-click on a slashdot.org page, edit the site preferences, specify a new css file that I created just for slashdot and voila all the code shown worked as advertised.
Slashdot Mirror
BBSes were the precursor to the Internet, for home users at least. Sure, universities could exchange among themselves, and CIS sucked our bank accounts down like a runaway pr0n habit, but BBSes allowed the everyman to connect to others online, chat, leave messages, learn, download, upload and all that good stuff (a decade or more before the Internet became popular) -- all without being charged for it.
RBBS was the king of BBSes for a long long time, with good reason. Widely distributed on floppies, impressively documented and configurable -- yet Basic-coded to fit in
Like Fortran, Basic had its time, place and purpose -- and still does. Only problem is that simple languages are hard for Microsoft to make money from. With ridiculously complicated languages they can crank out new, incompatible versions like clockwork and everyone must follow in goose^H^H^H^H^Hlock step.
Another also-ran is FoxPro, almost impossible to even get the darn thing, no printed docs, few third-party manuals -- yet SBT, among other things, depends on it. If only it paid to perfect things (and people)...
Mod parent up one more, he deserves a +5. As an engineering student in the later 70s/80s, Fortran was all I knew or cared to know. My one Comp Sci course was beginning Fortran programming -- the whole thing is probably learnable in a few hours today. My final year thesis was a 6000 line Fortran simulation used to determine the feasibility of building a "Two Stage Spouted Bed Coal Pyrolysis Plant" in China (it was).
95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.
It is easy to criticize, as many other posts have done, something invented half a century ago. Personally, I miss being able to use Fortran (or a procedural basic) to solve today's problems -- we've given ourselves over to the machine's favorite language (C) while we pat ourselves on the back for how smart we are now (as we create write-only code).
I wish this had become more popular. There's still time.
Math Maze was kind of like an RPG, but to beat the enemies you had to answer math questions correctly. Most students didn't enjoy this type of stuff.
In junior high my friend I volunteered to keep score during a game. Chalkboard and chalk situation. I started off conventionally but progressed to "23-14", "3 cubed", "17 +12" sorts of things. Most players didn't enjoy this type of stuff.
...4 20" LCD monitors, minimum 1600x1200 resolution...
Yes, acres and acres of LCD!
I want what I wanted 12 years ago -- my full sized desk is my display. Say, eight 24" displays, or six 30" ones -- all touch screen. Driven by six or eight computers. Bookshelfed by a couple of RAID racks of 750GB drives. CPUs and RAMS out the whazoo. Multiple operating systems as appropriate. Dash of Dolby 7.1. Pinch of Dragon Dictate. Dollop of liquid nitro.
The problem is that there is a group of developers and a few end users who are so out of touch with anyone outside the technology field that they are working under the assumption that everyone has the same basic skill that they do.
Microsoft formed their Usability Labs for exactly this reason. Perhaps these guys can work together on something like this?
things in space don't change direction unless something else hits them
By hit you also mean the hit of gravity from a close encounter, right?
is that (1) Google saw YouTube as a threat to itself -- a prime starting place for young people in the tens of millions, (2) so they bought it just as Microsoft and other giants have bought companies in the past -- to shut it down, so (3) Google will settle with Viacom for some seemingly convincing amount (let's say $10 million) and start using a content-filtering system that works, with the result that (4) YouTube is no longer a threat to Google.
since he discovered the fastest-known algorithm for calculating pi, the one still in used today. Perhaps also noteworthy for the 65,000+ digit reciters is that only 39 places of pi are sufficient to calculate the circumference of a circle around the known universe to within the radius of a hydrogen atom. "The Man Who Knew Infinity" has more.
In the November 25, 1986 issue of PC Magazine, Michael J. Mefford's SUGGEST.COM was published. In about an hour you could type in 1,256 characters into a Basic program and it would output the COM file. Does anyone else remember doing this? [BTW, search this page for "suggest.com" to get a brief description.]
Who would be reassured by the following:
The average human is good for 10,000 to 1,000,000 hours.
I successfully repartitioned and formatted a FAT32 drive to a size greater than 32GB with QTParted. That's not even possible in Windows.
Fat32Format
But to make money on this, you would have to actually use McAfee. I used to, back in Windows 98 days, and it was fairly effective (and cheap -- I downloaded free DAT & DLL updates for years). Enter XP, and McAfee forgets how to write software. McAfee took way too much of my precious RAM (as did Symantec) and I stopped using it. I looked around a bit and settled on AVG Free -- about one third of the RAM usage (my first XP machine had 1GB of RAM but I don't want to waste 50+MB for a frickin AV). Today I consider getting AVG Pro, to compensate a company doing something right, but quite honestly I am concerned that AVG PRo will use more memory. Strange days indeed when the free one is the best one.
I find it interesting how big the biggest "failed" spikes are pretty much exactly at 36 and 48 months. To me this suggests a scheduled replacement cycle or a claim-before-the-warranty-runs-out move. The stats don't seem kosher to me.
Well, a virus in an email is a virus received. This discussion started with AVG's behavior. Someone said AVG never detected one that some other AV did -- but AVG detects and deals with them without a permanent dialog box -- it times out and man I wish other program dialogs would, for non essential messages.
I agree about not MS tools. I think I first thought of it when MS tried to include Central Point's anti virus in DOS 6. Everyone proceeded to target CPAV, that we had been using for years prior to that.
Personally, I use Eudora (that happens to have auto dismissing dialogs as an option) rather than Outlook (has MS ever made a good email program?). I switched to Opera for browsing about a year back (thanks to osnews discussions) and quite like it. My address book is a flat text file -- why would I want more than that (I don't need it on the street, on the road I take a laptop with that file).
6 to 8 years ago I gave out code to people that allowed them to query my site's data. The code (with a bit of javascript) needed to be embedded on their existing (poorly coded) pages so I knew it would stop working at times -- so I put an "if this is not working" link with my email address and exposed it...on about 750 pages at last count. I used to average about 100 viruses per day. Oh well, no big deal and I've never been infected.
I've never seen AVG prevent, or detect an actual virus.
This is a completely ridiculous statement. Maybe you just haven't checked C:\$VAULT$.AVG, a normally hidden directory. Mine currently has 121 xxxxxxxx.FILs, going back to Feb 4, 2007. AVG is alive and well, TYVM.
Free AVG does signature updates daily. It also, as needed, updates components -- it did this 3 or 4 days ago, labelling update Recommended.
You can force an AVG update to happen "now" by a right-click and select -- beating the pants off the NAV piece-of-crapola web-like interface.
Pandora lets you set up virtual and customized radio stations. Basically you type in a band you like and they start playing music, some of which is from that band and the rest of which has been human-judged using numerous metrics to be similar to what you like. One of my core bands is Boston so that was my seed band -- I was very impressed with the bands they suggested and I've only stopped listening because it involves constant downloading and I don't want to annoy my ISP.
There are probably other services like this...
Parent post is so ridiculous I feel I, as a dedicated Fry's man must stand up and do what needs to be said.
I've never seen "low end junk" -- but I have seen a massive selection of brands, prices and quality levels. Maybe you are incapable of seeing beyond the first item placed in front of your eyes?
I've never bought something that had been repackaged at Fry's. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, rather that I doubt it happens all that often, percentage wise, for the simple reason that these guys are the Wal-Mart of tech stores. They have dozens and dozens of cashiers -- heck, one person is paid just to direct people to the next available cashier. The phrase "they must be doing something right" comes to mind.
Every Fry's person I have talked to spoke easily understandable English. Maybe you are used to a West Virginia drawl?
Register counter space is fine, and receipt checkers are in most stores I go to, including Best Buy and Toys R Us (we have 3 younguns).
NewEgg is fine for that one item you want at a good price. Fry's is usually a bit more expensive than the best online deals but it is hecka fun to lose an hour or two in there.
How deep under Asia is this water? We've only been able to drill to 12,262m so far.
Professors were notorious for not preparing lectures, and working out examples as they were going along, often failing to prove what they wanted to prove.
And combining that with the parent's point about using Math as a cutter subject, we arrive at what it was like when I took engineering at the U. of B.C. One first year engineering calculus course was specifically used to weed out students and took out one-third of the class each year. By the luck of the draw my class got an old fart on sabbatical from New Zealand -- this guy had no clue about the course, rambled on incessantly, trying to prove stuff and failing on a regular basis, etc.
I got so pissed off I started dropping in on another prof's class. He was the polar opposite and everyone in that class was fine. But to take it one stage further I still went to the old fart's class and started correcting him (by shouting out from the back...one of the few wonderful university traditions) whenever he messed up.
At final exam time, as I walked to the old armories to take the test, the university clock tower (pumping out CITR through its speakers) played The Who's "Don't Get Fooled Again".
All in all an unforgettable period of my life that I am still worked up about 30 years later.
He was indeed. My favorite (ok, only) story about him is:
I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
- Godfrey H. Hardy (1877-1947)
They are subliminally flashing "jackpot" so you get used to seeing it, ignoring it, and pushing the buttons for the next bet. Then, when you do win something that requires someone to come over and pay you off, you just push those bet buttons and carry on with the smaller machine-provided payout only.
The other way this scam happens is to display the jackpot in very small letters -- friends of mine put me on to this a decade ago with the early (fugly) poker slots.
Maybe we need class action lawsuits against trade publications that give favorable ratings to obviously defective products. Let's start with PCMagazine that used to be the gold standard for thorough testing of products.
It turns out I needed to right-click on a slashdot.org page, edit the site preferences, specify a new css file that I created just for slashdot and voila all the code shown worked as advertised.
Thanks for replying...