Re:Professional racing *PREVENTS* bike-innovation!
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Sports Technology?
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-1 Flamebait. I ride both recumbent and upright. The upright is my commuting and errand-running bike. I can't ride the thing more than a few miles due to a back injury, so I use the recumbent for my long, fast weekend rides.
Going downhill is scary on a bent? You've never ridden one, obviously. If I ever go down a mountain highway at 60 mph on a bicycle, I want to be on a long-wheel-base recumbent or a modern stretched short-wheel-base like a Bacchetta or a Barcroft. It's like riding on rails.
As for uphills, the newer highracers like Bacchetta, Volae, and Vision Sabre can climb with the best of the uprights.
When I see cyclists flaming each other's choice of ride I just wish they would grow up. I love uprights, and I love recumbents. They both have their place.
I still have one of these in the closet - haven't fired it up in at least a decade. About once a year I think about digging it out and seeing if it still works, and never get around to it.
If I recall correctly, you needed a special OS to interface with external disk drives on the ATR8000. I don't think the standard Atari dos would work on non-standard size drives. Alas, I don't remember the name of the OS and I certainly have no idea where you would find it.
Encouraging truckers to shut down their engines during their downtime has to reduce air pollution considerably. I once drove a diesel van from DC to Iowa and back with a friend. We stopped to sleep at a truck stop in Ohio. After about 1/2 hour we had to leave the truck stop because we couldn't breathe. The fumes from all the idling trucks were beyond belief.
I don't know how the truckers can stand it. Maybe their insides are so well coated with truck-stop food grease that the fumes couldn't get through.
Last year I was biking on the Mall in front of the Air and Space museum and stumbled upon their model. It's stretched out along the road in front of Air and Space, the Hirshhorn, and the castle. Much smaller scale than Maine's model, of course, but still mind-blowing. Each planet was represented by a tiny round blip on a metal plaque. Comparing those blips to the dozens of yards of open space between them really brought the whole solar system into perspective.
I was going to suggest this but searched the comments first...
I'll second the motion on Gravity's Rainbow. This book is a total mind-fsck, a bit of science fiction, lots of geekiness (V2 rockets!), mixed with drugs, insanity, and more. It's a long read and will keep you off the streets for awhile. Not for the squeamish or the prude - some scenes made me gag.
Read the comment to which I was responding. He brought up the McDonalds coffee case as an example of a frivolous lawsuit. I responded to his use of an urban legend in making his point. I fail to see how my reference is irrelevant to that. If people are going to argue a point, they should argue from the facts, not from lies and distortions spread by corporate apologists (and I'm not calling the writer of that comment a corporate apologist - he is just another misinformed citizen).
I happen to agree that patents on business processes are a bad idea. But let's argue that point on its own merits.
Corporate American and its minions have been harping on this case for years as an example of lawsuits run amok. Poor Stella has been mercilessly vilified in this campaign to make it impossible for us to protect ourselves against the negligence and outright crimes of large corporations.
This was no frivolous lawsuit. For the facts, see this.
Unless I was hallucinating when I saw it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble two months ago, Calculus for Dummies is already available. It seems like such an absurd title that I actually thought I was hallucinating when I saw it, but I picked it up and determined it was real. I leafed through it a bit and it looked like a reasonable approach to the subject.
50-year-old programmers aren't interested in innovation? We just want to clock time and go home? What a total load of bigotted BS. Attitudes like this are the reason older programmers have such a hard time finding work. I will look forward with pleasure to the day you celebrate your 50th birthday in your shipping crate home because the next generation of ignorant, biased young whippersnapper managers won't hire you.
There are lots of posts joking about Vaidhyanathan's name, but has anybody read the interview? It's really quite brilliant. Our culture is being stolen from us, and he explains how it's happening and, more importantly, why it matters.
This interview should be required reading for all our congresscritters and judges.
During John Sculley's reign, Apple put together a video, "Knowledge Navigator", showing where personal computing might be going in the 21st century. Intelligent agents, full natural language understanding, full video instant messaging, etc.
One scene showed a guy with a portable machine who was using it to talk to a friend. He held his newspaper up to the flat screen so it could be scanned and sent to the person on the other end of the connection.
This article reminds me of a bit of graffiti I found in a men's room in the University of Maryland engineering building 20 years ago:
"A Fire Engineer is someone who, when someone at a party asks him what he does, says 'I'm an engineer', and hopes they don't ask what kind".
My job title is Senior Software Engineer. But I know engineers, some engineers are friends of mine, and I am no engineer. I'm a good programmer and systems designer, but there's really no engineering going on in my addled brain.
I think the term Software Engineer came into use to try to legitimize what we do. But, with few exceptions, software development does not make use of engineering disciplines and mathematical rigor.
The word "engineer" is so badly misused in the computer field (sales engineers, Microsoft systems engineers, etc.) that I think Texas is right to crack down.
As I recall, it was the Executive that was pre-announced and that killed the O1's sales, but I could be wrong. Certainly the Executive was the O1's immediate successor. Similar hardware, even the case was almost identical, but it had a slightly larger (7") screen and a few other improvements.
I have one sitting in my office waiting for me to stop procrastinating and put it up on eBay.
My wife has an older Vaio desktop running Win98. I will probably inherit it when she upgrades (she uses it for telecommuting and it's getting a bit slow). I figured I'd install Linux on it. But a friend at work who owns the same model told me that he had tried to install Linux and Win2K on his with no joy. He says the bios doesn't support either (probably just no drivers available).
Also, I've noticed that every Viao model I've looked at has limited memory capacity. My wife's maxes out at 256mb, and I recently looked at a new Viao laptop that was limited to 512mb.
Get on your real bike, hit the road, and play dodge 'em with all the SUV-driving cell-phone-yakking homicidal maniacs. If you win, you are rewarded with more physical fitness, and if you lose you get a long period of rest and relaxation as you recover from your injuries. Such fun!
I used to play this game a lot until I had to take the R&R. Now I play a different game - playing dodge 'em with the headphone-listening unleashed-dog-walking oblivious folks on the multi-use trails.
Wrote much of the original Mac UI, wrote the revolutionary Quickdraw, wrote the first version of MacPaint, and invented HyperCard. If anyone belongs on this list, he does.
In my area, aluminum cans are recyclable. Plastic containers are only accepted if they have necks (don't ask me why). So these cottles or bans (to coin two words) are not recyclable here.
I wish I could remember the name of the story and the author - back in the '60s I read a short SF story about a scientist who developed a computer program that analyzed popular songs and advertizing jingles to determine what made a song stick in the brain. The computer used those elements to create the Perfect Song and play it back. The morning after the program is run, the scientist is found in a cataleptic state. I think they had to send in someone who was tone deaf to turn off the music (I don't remember why they didn't just pull the plug).
Don't lug around a laptop. When I was in London recently my travelling companion and I bought a one-week pass at an internet cafe (see http://www.easyinternetcafe.com for the one we used). It was cheap and reliable except for the often beat-up mouses and keyboards.
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-1 Flamebait. I ride both recumbent and upright. The upright is my commuting and errand-running bike. I can't ride the thing more than a few miles due to a back injury, so I use the recumbent for my long, fast weekend rides.
Going downhill is scary on a bent? You've never ridden one, obviously. If I ever go down a mountain highway at 60 mph on a bicycle, I want to be on a long-wheel-base recumbent or a modern stretched short-wheel-base like a Bacchetta or a Barcroft. It's like riding on rails.
As for uphills, the newer highracers like Bacchetta, Volae, and Vision Sabre can climb with the best of the uprights.
When I see cyclists flaming each other's choice of ride I just wish they would grow up. I love uprights, and I love recumbents. They both have their place.
I still have one of these in the closet - haven't fired it up in at least a decade. About once a year I think about digging it out and seeing if it still works, and never get around to it.
If I recall correctly, you needed a special OS to interface with external disk drives on the ATR8000. I don't think the standard Atari dos would work on non-standard size drives. Alas, I don't remember the name of the OS and I certainly have no idea where you would find it.
Encouraging truckers to shut down their engines during their downtime has to reduce air pollution considerably. I once drove a diesel van from DC to Iowa and back with a friend. We stopped to sleep at a truck stop in Ohio. After about 1/2 hour we had to leave the truck stop because we couldn't breathe. The fumes from all the idling trucks were beyond belief.
I don't know how the truckers can stand it. Maybe their insides are so well coated with truck-stop food grease that the fumes couldn't get through.
Last year I was biking on the Mall in front of the Air and Space museum and stumbled upon their model. It's stretched out along the road in front of Air and Space, the Hirshhorn, and the castle. Much smaller scale than Maine's model, of course, but still mind-blowing. Each planet was represented by a tiny round blip on a metal plaque. Comparing those blips to the dozens of yards of open space between them really brought the whole solar system into perspective.
I was going to suggest this but searched the comments first...
I'll second the motion on Gravity's Rainbow. This book is a total mind-fsck, a bit of science fiction, lots of geekiness (V2 rockets!), mixed with drugs, insanity, and more. It's a long read and will keep you off the streets for awhile. Not for the squeamish or the prude - some scenes made me gag.
Read the comment to which I was responding. He brought up the McDonalds coffee case as an example of a frivolous lawsuit. I responded to his use of an urban legend in making his point. I fail to see how my reference is irrelevant to that. If people are going to argue a point, they should argue from the facts, not from lies and distortions spread by corporate apologists (and I'm not calling the writer of that comment a corporate apologist - he is just another misinformed citizen).
I happen to agree that patents on business processes are a bad idea. But let's argue that point on its own merits.
Corporate American and its minions have been harping on this case for years as an example of lawsuits run amok. Poor Stella has been mercilessly vilified in this campaign to make it impossible for us to protect ourselves against the negligence and outright crimes of large corporations.
This was no frivolous lawsuit. For the facts, see this.
Unless I was hallucinating when I saw it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble two months ago, Calculus for Dummies is already available. It seems like such an absurd title that I actually thought I was hallucinating when I saw it, but I picked it up and determined it was real. I leafed through it a bit and it looked like a reasonable approach to the subject.
50-year-old programmers aren't interested in innovation? We just want to clock time and go home? What a total load of bigotted BS. Attitudes like this are the reason older programmers have such a hard time finding work. I will look forward with pleasure to the day you celebrate your 50th birthday in your shipping crate home because the next generation of ignorant, biased young whippersnapper managers won't hire you.
I have mod points and was going to mod this Funny, but got to thinking, I wonder how many Slashdotters got the reference.
That's amore!
There are lots of posts joking about Vaidhyanathan's name, but has anybody read the interview? It's really quite brilliant. Our culture is being stolen from us, and he explains how it's happening and, more importantly, why it matters.
This interview should be required reading for all our congresscritters and judges.
During John Sculley's reign, Apple put together a video, "Knowledge Navigator", showing where personal computing might be going in the 21st century. Intelligent agents, full natural language understanding, full video instant messaging, etc.
One scene showed a guy with a portable machine who was using it to talk to a friend. He held his newspaper up to the flat screen so it could be scanned and sent to the person on the other end of the connection.
So one piece of the puzzle may be on its way.
> don't these things [cybiko.com] do that sort of thing already?
Yes, and if you had read the article you would know that Peer-to-Peer is also suing Cybiko.
This article reminds me of a bit of graffiti I found in a men's room in the University of Maryland engineering building 20 years ago:
"A Fire Engineer is someone who, when someone at a party asks him what he does, says 'I'm an engineer', and hopes they don't ask what kind".
My job title is Senior Software Engineer. But I know engineers, some engineers are friends of mine, and I am no engineer. I'm a good programmer and systems designer, but there's really no engineering going on in my addled brain.
I think the term Software Engineer came into use to try to legitimize what we do. But, with few exceptions, software development does not make use of engineering disciplines and mathematical rigor.
The word "engineer" is so badly misused in the computer field (sales engineers, Microsoft systems engineers, etc.) that I think Texas is right to crack down.
The sexiest movie ever made.
Info here.
As I recall, it was the Executive that was pre-announced and that killed the O1's sales, but I could be wrong. Certainly the Executive was the O1's immediate successor. Similar hardware, even the case was almost identical, but it had a slightly larger (7") screen and a few other improvements.
I have one sitting in my office waiting for me to stop procrastinating and put it up on eBay.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
My wife has an older Vaio desktop running Win98. I will probably inherit it when she upgrades (she uses it for telecommuting and it's getting a bit slow). I figured I'd install Linux on it. But a friend at work who owns the same model told me that he had tried to install Linux and Win2K on his with no joy. He says the bios doesn't support either (probably just no drivers available).
Also, I've noticed that every Viao model I've looked at has limited memory capacity. My wife's maxes out at 256mb, and I recently looked at a new Viao laptop that was limited to 512mb.
I think I'll be avoiding Sony PCs in the future.
The eMacs have not been updated, only reduced in price. I'm not complaining - I may finally break down and order one at the new price
Get on your real bike, hit the road, and play dodge 'em with all the SUV-driving cell-phone-yakking homicidal maniacs. If you win, you are rewarded with more physical fitness, and if you lose you get a long period of rest and relaxation as you recover from your injuries. Such fun!
I used to play this game a lot until I had to take the R&R. Now I play a different game - playing dodge 'em with the headphone-listening unleashed-dog-walking oblivious folks on the multi-use trails.
Here's a brief profile on Apple.com: http://www.apple.com/creative/stories/atkinson/
In my area, aluminum cans are recyclable. Plastic containers are only accepted if they have necks (don't ask me why). So these cottles or bans (to coin two words) are not recyclable here.
I wish I could remember the name of the story and the author - back in the '60s I read a short SF story about a scientist who developed a computer program that analyzed popular songs and advertizing jingles to determine what made a song stick in the brain. The computer used those elements to create the Perfect Song and play it back. The morning after the program is run, the scientist is found in a cataleptic state. I think they had to send in someone who was tone deaf to turn off the music (I don't remember why they didn't just pull the plug).
Don't lug around a laptop. When I was in London recently my travelling companion and I bought a one-week pass at an internet cafe (see http://www.easyinternetcafe.com for the one we used). It was cheap and reliable except for the often beat-up mouses and keyboards.