Thanks for sharing your story and good luck your father, you and your family.
My father suffered a severe stroke in 1994 (He was 46) which caused his heart to stop numerous times. He was comatose for 2 weeks and doctors told my mother there was too much brain damage from the lack of oxygen due to the multiple heart failures. My mother and grandparents could not bear the thought of pulling the plug. He came out with severe brain damage and was said not to be in a vegetative state but in an altered state. He was breathing on his own but of course needed a feeding tube. He moved around a bit, his eyes were open when he was "awake". Unfortunately he could not respond but we always maintained hope that he could recover. His mother was at his bed side nearly every day talking to him, reading to him, playing music, putting the TV on, playing home movies etc. We tried everything, asking him to try to move his eyes, squeeze his hand, anything really. Nothing got a response.
He passed away of natural causes in 2003, he was only 55 then. To this day I sometimes feel guilty that I didn't try harder to see if he was somehow trapped inside his own body. How horrible would it have been for him if that were true. But what was done was done and there really was nothing I nor anyone else could do for him, I accepted that a long time ago but there is always this lingering feeling of guilt. I used to have a lot of dreams that he was alive and well, living a secret life and the person wasting away in the nursing home was an impostor.
Its a shit position to be, having a loved one suffer like that. He was such a good man, intelligent, kind loving. For him to go at such a young age is about as sad as it gets.
The problem is they cant distribute the wad files. Other Doom engines such as prboom, zdoom, jdoom (my favorite), etc. have done just fine for over a decade as they only provide a "doom compatible" engine. The user must provide the wad files themselves even if they intend to play the shareware wad files that are freely available. They should have made or searched for a freely distributable total conversion wad to avoid any problems. I am sure there are plenty to be had off Doom fan sites.
There was a Doom game for the Android some years back but it too was pulled for the same reason, you cant distribute their wad files without permission. The game engine code is GPL so anyone can make a Doom engine on the mobile platform of choice be it Android, iOS, Browser, etc. You can even charge money for it. Just don't call it Doom and distribute a copyrighted wad file.
Lets not forget where most of the worlds helium comes from:
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Modern_extraction_and_distribution "In 2008, approximately 169 million standard cubic meters (SCM) of helium were extracted from natural gas or withdrawn from helium reserves with approximately 78% from the United States, 10% from Algeria, and most of the remainder from Russia, Poland and Qatar.[80] In the United States, most helium is extracted from natural gas of the Hugoton and nearby gas fields in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas"
I was under the impression Blue team was always trying to hack or destroy someone, usually Red team. Or is this supposed "Red" team really just Blue team with a red mask on? Someone needs to start spy checking.
You mean methamphetamine, not crack. Meth is cooked up using ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, components of over the counter nasal decongestants. Crack is pretty much cocaine that is mixed with baking soda and "cooked" until hard and broken up into little chunks otherwise knows as "rocks".
Friend of mine had a late model mercedes (2010 or 2011, I forget) which for some reason would not shut off the park lamps (lights along the side of vehicle). No matter which button he pressed or if the engine was running or not they just would not turn off. He took it to the dealership and after two hours of diagnostics and checking they simply removed the bulbs from the park lamps and sent him on his way. There was nothing they could do.
Before that car he had a VW Passat which intermittently went into limp home mode. He went to the dealership and it was the throttle position sensor. They replaced it multiple times until someone finally decided to check the wiring harness and bingo, it was a loose wire-to-pin junction on the connector. After it was replaced he was on his way. Goes to show you, no matter how advanced the electronics are, they can't tell you if its a bad connection. And those intermittent connection issues are the worst kind of electrical problem to trace.
Your reply has me a bit confused. Not a single one of your examples have any white supremacist ties and most of the perpetrators did not share any white supremacist beliefs. Did you reply to the wrong post? And to top it off your modded Informative when you only threw a bunch of domestic terrorist incidents into a string with no explanation of how they related to the grandparents statement.
Austin airplane attack on IRS - An engineer who was angry at the government, no white supremacist beliefs. Kansas City bombing - Although Timothy McVeigh was partly inspired by "The Turner Diaries", there is no mention of white supremacist views given as his reason for the bombings. Abortion doctor assassinations - of the killers mentioned, one had previous ties to the KKK but renounced their beliefs and one is suspected of ties to Christian Identity but only speculation. Anthrax - The only suspect, Bruce Edwards Ivins, was never linked to any white supremacist beliefs. Olympics bomb - Same nut job who killed one of the abortion doctors who was believed to be linked to Christan Identity, but again, no real proof. Ted Kaczynski - Leftist luddite with no white supremacist beliefs. Chinese embassy in Iraq - What incident are you talking about here? I cant really find an article that explains how white supremacists bombed a Chinese embassy in Iraq.
I have to admit I like to play phone games simply because many are free or really cheap and I can play anytime, anywhere.
I started playing videogames in 1982/3 when my father bought a Franklin Ace 1200 (think it was a 1200), an Apple II clone. The first game I remember playing was one called Short Circuit, in fact I played it recently on an emulator. From there I played various games on a Canon 8086, ATT PC6300 (8088), then in 1987 we got an NES. Amazing! From there my brother and I pretty much played PC and console games in parallel, maybe a bit more NES. in the 1990's we played a lot of SNES. Then the internet rolled around, FPS and online multiplayer started becoming big and we went mostly PC (some Playstation thrown in along with N64 and GC and finally the 360).
Today I have a demanding job and side business and I simply don't have the time for video games like I used to. I used to put in many hours of TF2 per week (at least 10), and play on the 360 from time to time but now I just break out the phone while relaxing in bed watching TV after a long day. I still play PC games, spent an entire sunday a few weeks ago playing TF2 MvM and a bit of Crysis warhead. The Xbox360 has mostly just collected dust and probably be put to use an a netflix player in the future. My console buying days are over. I also don't own a tablet but I may buy an android tablet if I can find a good use for one. To me a tablet is an oversized smartphone without the cellular radio. I find its only useful for games and internet which my phone does just fine. It can't run EDA tools, CAD, compilers or FPS games which my PC and laptop do just fine.
My brother is a much different person, he is a video games junkie, and that led to him to going to college to become a developer. He went in not knowing C code from a screw driver and came out with a ton of programming knowledge (his final group project was a simple networked multiplayer RTS which worked) . He recently worked for a web developer doing back end code and is now trying to get into Blizzard where his girlfriend currently works. He mainly plays PC games and has an extensive Steam library.
Right now Bad Piggies from Rovio has me hooked. Simple physics based game that can have hilarious results. The kind of games where you can pop on and play for a few minutes, close it and come back are becoming more popular, the so-called casual gamer market. And casual games are simple enough to work on phones and tablets as they require minimal interaction (world of Goo and plants vs zombies are good examples that started out on the PC). You mostly tapping or swiping a finger around vs juggling multiple keys on a KB, a mouse while yelling into a mic and getting yelled at.
If the people who are watching the scanner monitors are located in a private viewing room, the people on the security line should have a monitor so they can see the person watching the screening process. This way both parties watch each other and deters things like groups of gawkers crowding a monitor to watch the hot chick get scanned or attempting to snap pictures with a cell phone. Of course the camera would be positioned so that the passengers can't see the X-ray screens, a side view of the TSA agent would be more than enough. It might help the passengers feel a bit more secure but there is still the issue of strangers peering through your clothes.
It reminds me of one of the latest South Park episodes poking fun at the TSA, who installed cameras in everyones bathrooms. The person watching the screens was jerking off the whole time.
"So, is Cook just pulling a page from Steve Jobs' people-don't-read-anymore playbook, or is he unaware that children happily used vertical touch screens forty years ago on UIUC's PLATO System (more PLATO History)?"
This sentence should have been left at the bottom of the barrel where it was scraped from. And please for-the-love-of-god how the fuck does an article from 40 years ago about a bunch of kids playing on an early touchscreen evidence in favor of vertical touch screens? They're kids! They will pay with anything shiny and interesting, especially if its some newfangled technology that looks like a television.
The real answer is no one wants to work with vertical touch screens unless its minimal interaction like kiosks, HMI's, POS systems, etc. To sit in front of a monitor, have to reach out and diddle it all day is not at all ergonomic or healthy. Not to mention maddening.
Honestly, why do people task these stupid questions? Any article that asks a question is mostly bullshit, full of nonsense and speculation. It feels as if they are just try to throw up any shit they can think of to gain page hits and stir the pot when nothing needs to be stirred.
Linux has Linus Torvolds because Torvolds wrote the damn thing. Its like asking if "Project/Business X" needs a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. They started their respective businesses/projects from the very beginning and thus have a vested interest and say in the direction the project or company is headed.
How would they even go about finding and selecting people to be their Torvolds?
Why is he worried about thermal distortion? I work for a laser welding shop and believe me, thermal distortion is not a concern when it comes to the machine frame. We built two of our workstations, the first was built using 80/20 and the second machine has a welded frame that was designed in house and built by a 3rd party. Thermal distortion was a non issue and we work with tolerances down to the nearest 1/10000 inch (2.54 um).
To me this "article" is more about promoting his kickstarter than anything else. He is splitting hairs when it comes to using wood vs metal to justify using a cheap and simple to work material. If he used metal frames his machines for would cost as much as the competition. I have seen laser engraving and cutting systems for under 10 grand, some as low as 4-7 grand.
RF and signals are not the same thing. Any signal transmitted by radio must have a carrier frequency to carry the data. Without the carrier frequency you would just be blasitng out noise in multiple bands or frequencies. Plus you also need to understand the physics of radio and antenna design to realize that an antenna for a 10MHz signal needs to be pretty big. Plus you would be stomping all over the short wave band which will piss a lot of people off inclusing various government branches including the FCC. You need to contain your signal in a bandwidth, or channel.
Little example of FM radio: When you tune 100.0 on the FM radio dial you are tuning in a 100MHz carrier signal, not a 20-15kHz audio signal. The 100MHz signal is FM modulated by using the amplitude of the audio signal to control the frequency of the carrier wave. The louder the signal, the higher the carrier frequency. To demodulate the signal a few methods exist but the best and most popular is using a super hetrodyne receiver to mix the tuned carrier with a closely matched signal from an oscillator in lock step (using a phase locked loop) you then get what is called the beat frequency or intermittent frequenct (IF) which is sent to another mixer to decode the audio data out.
What i described above is just the jist of FM modulation, probably not accurate either as I am not an RF expert myself (just someone with an interest and has done some reading). So in summary, its not as easy as putting an antenna on the wire.
Windows 3.11 was Windows for Workgroups, essentially windows 3.1 + networking. I don't now why you would call it a flop. Its more akin to Windows 95 vs 95 SE. SE got USB support, win 3.11 got networking support.
Windows NT 3.5 had the win 3.1 GUI and was still very new at the time. It was also competing with Netware and OS/2 so it was still trying to carve out its place in the PC world. Once NT4 came out with the windows 95 GUI things started to fall together and NT started picking up steam. By the time NT4 was at SP6 it was winning the server OS wars and by then OS/2 was just about dead and Novell was still fighting. Novell lost because the windows domain (aka Active Directory) was a huge success in the IT world where the server OS and desktop OS were essentially the same.
Also win2k was far from being a flop. It was a major leap forward for MS where the consumer oriented features (direct-x, usb) of windows 95/98/me were finally merged with windows NT. The DOS era cruft was finally shed and we moved to a real multitasking OS with multi-cpu support which paved the way for multi-core CPU's. We still have 4 machines running 2k on a 2k8 domain (they run motion control software which is incompatible with vista/7 and there was no reason to move them to XP).
Vista was a flop because of early driver incompatibilities. Everyone was running XP and many XP drivers would not work in Vista plus some people would try to force drivers to work or used early beta drivers and experienced all sorts of crashes. Vista wasn't a big deal for me, I only used polished drivers for Vista and never had a single problem. I also disabled super fetch, UAC and some other service that hogged resources and it ran smoothly. Windows 7 is pretty much Vista SE with all the resourcing hogging services turned off or tweaked.
Usually taking a dump for 20 minutes means taking a personal call in the stall for 20 min. We had a kid at work who would disappear for 15-20 minutes a time to the bathroom to talk to his girlfriend. Needless to say he wasn't employed very long.
My manager would toss his Android phone if he knew MS was offering windows on a phone. Mind you he isn't a technical wiz, quite the opposite in fact. All he knows is Windows + office + share point + outlook = best software ever made. He has even stated that he wishes all business software needs were developed by MS. He doesn't give a shit if the underpinnings are Windows, Linux or Plan 9. He just wants applications that seamlessly integrate with each other. And Microsoft has done that very well with their products.
If windows 8 phones and tablets come with an office like app suite that can view/edit/create excel, word and power point files and then add in native outlook mail clients to sync task lists calenders tied together with share point MS will win over a large number of Businesses.
I had a friend who had a job working for a speed camera company that was contracted by Howard County (just west of Baltimore). He was paid to drive a speed trap van to a site (often near on and off ramps of Rt 70 outside of Baltimore), setup the laser radar equipment and then monitor the computers. It was a boring job which had him sitting in a van with little to no climate controls for up to 6 hours a day. He would call me every now and then to stave off boredom and all you could hear in the background was the windows ding every fraction of a second. That ding was played every time a car was going 10-12 MPH over the limit. Each ticket was something like $150 and from what he guessed he would catch anywhere from 200 to 500+ speeders a day. That coupled with the fact that the county had ten such vans deployed at any given time. Each van grossed upward of 100,000 a day. I bet the contractor made a pretty penny (and paid their workers shit) but the county made out like bandits. They easily pulled in a million a week. So they can cry me a fucking river.
Now it looks like they cut out the middle man and bought the actual equipment. I bet it paid for itself within a week.
I think the real important fact is that you demonstrate that coding is your passion and hobby. If you walk into a job interview and instead of padding your resume with buzz words and bullshit, pad it with your own projects. That is worth more than anything.
I'm all for an interactive museum and maker center. How awesome would it be if they had a build your own Tesla coil workshop. Plus they could also offer 3d printing, small laser cutting, machine shop and various electronics and computing workshops. And Brookhaven lab is a few minutes drive south.
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Thanks for sharing your story and good luck your father, you and your family.
My father suffered a severe stroke in 1994 (He was 46) which caused his heart to stop numerous times. He was comatose for 2 weeks and doctors told my mother there was too much brain damage from the lack of oxygen due to the multiple heart failures. My mother and grandparents could not bear the thought of pulling the plug. He came out with severe brain damage and was said not to be in a vegetative state but in an altered state. He was breathing on his own but of course needed a feeding tube. He moved around a bit, his eyes were open when he was "awake". Unfortunately he could not respond but we always maintained hope that he could recover. His mother was at his bed side nearly every day talking to him, reading to him, playing music, putting the TV on, playing home movies etc. We tried everything, asking him to try to move his eyes, squeeze his hand, anything really. Nothing got a response.
He passed away of natural causes in 2003, he was only 55 then. To this day I sometimes feel guilty that I didn't try harder to see if he was somehow trapped inside his own body. How horrible would it have been for him if that were true. But what was done was done and there really was nothing I nor anyone else could do for him, I accepted that a long time ago but there is always this lingering feeling of guilt. I used to have a lot of dreams that he was alive and well, living a secret life and the person wasting away in the nursing home was an impostor.
Its a shit position to be, having a loved one suffer like that. He was such a good man, intelligent, kind loving. For him to go at such a young age is about as sad as it gets.
The problem is they cant distribute the wad files. Other Doom engines such as prboom, zdoom, jdoom (my favorite), etc. have done just fine for over a decade as they only provide a "doom compatible" engine. The user must provide the wad files themselves even if they intend to play the shareware wad files that are freely available. They should have made or searched for a freely distributable total conversion wad to avoid any problems. I am sure there are plenty to be had off Doom fan sites.
There was a Doom game for the Android some years back but it too was pulled for the same reason, you cant distribute their wad files without permission. The game engine code is GPL so anyone can make a Doom engine on the mobile platform of choice be it Android, iOS, Browser, etc. You can even charge money for it. Just don't call it Doom and distribute a copyrighted wad file.
Lets not forget where most of the worlds helium comes from:
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Modern_extraction_and_distribution
"In 2008, approximately 169 million standard cubic meters (SCM) of helium were extracted from natural gas or withdrawn from helium reserves with approximately 78% from the United States, 10% from Algeria, and most of the remainder from Russia, Poland and Qatar.[80] In the United States, most helium is extracted from natural gas of the Hugoton and nearby gas fields in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas"
Science depends on it!
I was under the impression Blue team was always trying to hack or destroy someone, usually Red team. Or is this supposed "Red" team really just Blue team with a red mask on? Someone needs to start spy checking.
You mean methamphetamine, not crack. Meth is cooked up using ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, components of over the counter nasal decongestants. Crack is pretty much cocaine that is mixed with baking soda and "cooked" until hard and broken up into little chunks otherwise knows as "rocks".
Friend of mine had a late model mercedes (2010 or 2011, I forget) which for some reason would not shut off the park lamps (lights along the side of vehicle). No matter which button he pressed or if the engine was running or not they just would not turn off. He took it to the dealership and after two hours of diagnostics and checking they simply removed the bulbs from the park lamps and sent him on his way. There was nothing they could do.
Before that car he had a VW Passat which intermittently went into limp home mode. He went to the dealership and it was the throttle position sensor. They replaced it multiple times until someone finally decided to check the wiring harness and bingo, it was a loose wire-to-pin junction on the connector. After it was replaced he was on his way. Goes to show you, no matter how advanced the electronics are, they can't tell you if its a bad connection. And those intermittent connection issues are the worst kind of electrical problem to trace.
Oops, the anthrax link didnt work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks#Investigation
Your reply has me a bit confused. Not a single one of your examples have any white supremacist ties and most of the perpetrators did not share any white supremacist beliefs. Did you reply to the wrong post? And to top it off your modded Informative when you only threw a bunch of domestic terrorist incidents into a string with no explanation of how they related to the grandparents statement.
Austin airplane attack on IRS - An engineer who was angry at the government, no white supremacist beliefs.
Kansas City bombing - Although Timothy McVeigh was partly inspired by "The Turner Diaries", there is no mention of white supremacist views given as his reason for the bombings.
Abortion doctor assassinations - of the killers mentioned, one had previous ties to the KKK but renounced their beliefs and one is suspected of ties to Christian Identity but only speculation.
Anthrax - The only suspect, Bruce Edwards Ivins, was never linked to any white supremacist beliefs.
Olympics bomb - Same nut job who killed one of the abortion doctors who was believed to be linked to Christan Identity, but again, no real proof.
Ted Kaczynski - Leftist luddite with no white supremacist beliefs.
Chinese embassy in Iraq - What incident are you talking about here? I cant really find an article that explains how white supremacists bombed a Chinese embassy in Iraq.
I have to admit I like to play phone games simply because many are free or really cheap and I can play anytime, anywhere.
I started playing videogames in 1982/3 when my father bought a Franklin Ace 1200 (think it was a 1200), an Apple II clone. The first game I remember playing was one called Short Circuit, in fact I played it recently on an emulator. From there I played various games on a Canon 8086, ATT PC6300 (8088), then in 1987 we got an NES. Amazing! From there my brother and I pretty much played PC and console games in parallel, maybe a bit more NES. in the 1990's we played a lot of SNES. Then the internet rolled around, FPS and online multiplayer started becoming big and we went mostly PC (some Playstation thrown in along with N64 and GC and finally the 360).
Today I have a demanding job and side business and I simply don't have the time for video games like I used to. I used to put in many hours of TF2 per week (at least 10), and play on the 360 from time to time but now I just break out the phone while relaxing in bed watching TV after a long day. I still play PC games, spent an entire sunday a few weeks ago playing TF2 MvM and a bit of Crysis warhead. The Xbox360 has mostly just collected dust and probably be put to use an a netflix player in the future. My console buying days are over. I also don't own a tablet but I may buy an android tablet if I can find a good use for one. To me a tablet is an oversized smartphone without the cellular radio. I find its only useful for games and internet which my phone does just fine. It can't run EDA tools, CAD, compilers or FPS games which my PC and laptop do just fine.
My brother is a much different person, he is a video games junkie, and that led to him to going to college to become a developer. He went in not knowing C code from a screw driver and came out with a ton of programming knowledge (his final group project was a simple networked multiplayer RTS which worked) . He recently worked for a web developer doing back end code and is now trying to get into Blizzard where his girlfriend currently works. He mainly plays PC games and has an extensive Steam library.
Right now Bad Piggies from Rovio has me hooked. Simple physics based game that can have hilarious results. The kind of games where you can pop on and play for a few minutes, close it and come back are becoming more popular, the so-called casual gamer market. And casual games are simple enough to work on phones and tablets as they require minimal interaction (world of Goo and plants vs zombies are good examples that started out on the PC). You mostly tapping or swiping a finger around vs juggling multiple keys on a KB, a mouse while yelling into a mic and getting yelled at.
If the people who are watching the scanner monitors are located in a private viewing room, the people on the security line should have a monitor so they can see the person watching the screening process. This way both parties watch each other and deters things like groups of gawkers crowding a monitor to watch the hot chick get scanned or attempting to snap pictures with a cell phone. Of course the camera would be positioned so that the passengers can't see the X-ray screens, a side view of the TSA agent would be more than enough. It might help the passengers feel a bit more secure but there is still the issue of strangers peering through your clothes.
It reminds me of one of the latest South Park episodes poking fun at the TSA, who installed cameras in everyones bathrooms. The person watching the screens was jerking off the whole time.
"So, is Cook just pulling a page from Steve Jobs' people-don't-read-anymore playbook, or is he unaware that children happily used vertical touch screens forty years ago on UIUC's PLATO System (more PLATO History)?"
This sentence should have been left at the bottom of the barrel where it was scraped from. And please for-the-love-of-god how the fuck does an article from 40 years ago about a bunch of kids playing on an early touchscreen evidence in favor of vertical touch screens? They're kids! They will pay with anything shiny and interesting, especially if its some newfangled technology that looks like a television.
The real answer is no one wants to work with vertical touch screens unless its minimal interaction like kiosks, HMI's, POS systems, etc. To sit in front of a monitor, have to reach out and diddle it all day is not at all ergonomic or healthy. Not to mention maddening.
Depending on the "load" of shit they spew you can expect ripple.
And just to clarify, when I said Linus wrote the damn thing, I should have said Linus founded the project.
Honestly, why do people task these stupid questions? Any article that asks a question is mostly bullshit, full of nonsense and speculation. It feels as if they are just try to throw up any shit they can think of to gain page hits and stir the pot when nothing needs to be stirred.
Linux has Linus Torvolds because Torvolds wrote the damn thing. Its like asking if "Project/Business X" needs a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. They started their respective businesses/projects from the very beginning and thus have a vested interest and say in the direction the project or company is headed.
How would they even go about finding and selecting people to be their Torvolds?
Why is he worried about thermal distortion? I work for a laser welding shop and believe me, thermal distortion is not a concern when it comes to the machine frame. We built two of our workstations, the first was built using 80/20 and the second machine has a welded frame that was designed in house and built by a 3rd party. Thermal distortion was a non issue and we work with tolerances down to the nearest 1/10000 inch (2.54 um).
To me this "article" is more about promoting his kickstarter than anything else. He is splitting hairs when it comes to using wood vs metal to justify using a cheap and simple to work material. If he used metal frames his machines for would cost as much as the competition. I have seen laser engraving and cutting systems for under 10 grand, some as low as 4-7 grand.
Tag this article shameless self promotion.
I wish Microsoft realized that as well.
You forgot Blow.
RF and signals are not the same thing. Any signal transmitted by radio must have a carrier frequency to carry the data. Without the carrier frequency you would just be blasitng out noise in multiple bands or frequencies. Plus you also need to understand the physics of radio and antenna design to realize that an antenna for a 10MHz signal needs to be pretty big. Plus you would be stomping all over the short wave band which will piss a lot of people off inclusing various government branches including the FCC. You need to contain your signal in a bandwidth, or channel.
Little example of FM radio: When you tune 100.0 on the FM radio dial you are tuning in a 100MHz carrier signal, not a 20-15kHz audio signal. The 100MHz signal is FM modulated by using the amplitude of the audio signal to control the frequency of the carrier wave. The louder the signal, the higher the carrier frequency. To demodulate the signal a few methods exist but the best and most popular is using a super hetrodyne receiver to mix the tuned carrier with a closely matched signal from an oscillator in lock step (using a phase locked loop) you then get what is called the beat frequency or intermittent frequenct (IF) which is sent to another mixer to decode the audio data out.
What i described above is just the jist of FM modulation, probably not accurate either as I am not an RF expert myself (just someone with an interest and has done some reading). So in summary, its not as easy as putting an antenna on the wire.
Windows 3.11 was Windows for Workgroups, essentially windows 3.1 + networking. I don't now why you would call it a flop. Its more akin to Windows 95 vs 95 SE. SE got USB support, win 3.11 got networking support.
Windows NT 3.5 had the win 3.1 GUI and was still very new at the time. It was also competing with Netware and OS/2 so it was still trying to carve out its place in the PC world. Once NT4 came out with the windows 95 GUI things started to fall together and NT started picking up steam. By the time NT4 was at SP6 it was winning the server OS wars and by then OS/2 was just about dead and Novell was still fighting. Novell lost because the windows domain (aka Active Directory) was a huge success in the IT world where the server OS and desktop OS were essentially the same.
Also win2k was far from being a flop. It was a major leap forward for MS where the consumer oriented features (direct-x, usb) of windows 95/98/me were finally merged with windows NT. The DOS era cruft was finally shed and we moved to a real multitasking OS with multi-cpu support which paved the way for multi-core CPU's. We still have 4 machines running 2k on a 2k8 domain (they run motion control software which is incompatible with vista/7 and there was no reason to move them to XP).
Vista was a flop because of early driver incompatibilities. Everyone was running XP and many XP drivers would not work in Vista plus some people would try to force drivers to work or used early beta drivers and experienced all sorts of crashes. Vista wasn't a big deal for me, I only used polished drivers for Vista and never had a single problem. I also disabled super fetch, UAC and some other service that hogged resources and it ran smoothly. Windows 7 is pretty much Vista SE with all the resourcing hogging services turned off or tweaked.
Usually taking a dump for 20 minutes means taking a personal call in the stall for 20 min. We had a kid at work who would disappear for 15-20 minutes a time to the bathroom to talk to his girlfriend. Needless to say he wasn't employed very long.
My manager would toss his Android phone if he knew MS was offering windows on a phone. Mind you he isn't a technical wiz, quite the opposite in fact. All he knows is Windows + office + share point + outlook = best software ever made. He has even stated that he wishes all business software needs were developed by MS. He doesn't give a shit if the underpinnings are Windows, Linux or Plan 9. He just wants applications that seamlessly integrate with each other. And Microsoft has done that very well with their products.
If windows 8 phones and tablets come with an office like app suite that can view/edit/create excel, word and power point files and then add in native outlook mail clients to sync task lists calenders tied together with share point MS will win over a large number of Businesses.
I had a friend who had a job working for a speed camera company that was contracted by Howard County (just west of Baltimore). He was paid to drive a speed trap van to a site (often near on and off ramps of Rt 70 outside of Baltimore), setup the laser radar equipment and then monitor the computers. It was a boring job which had him sitting in a van with little to no climate controls for up to 6 hours a day. He would call me every now and then to stave off boredom and all you could hear in the background was the windows ding every fraction of a second. That ding was played every time a car was going 10-12 MPH over the limit. Each ticket was something like $150 and from what he guessed he would catch anywhere from 200 to 500+ speeders a day. That coupled with the fact that the county had ten such vans deployed at any given time. Each van grossed upward of 100,000 a day. I bet the contractor made a pretty penny (and paid their workers shit) but the county made out like bandits. They easily pulled in a million a week. So they can cry me a fucking river.
Now it looks like they cut out the middle man and bought the actual equipment. I bet it paid for itself within a week.
Dont waste your time feeding the trolls.
I think the real important fact is that you demonstrate that coding is your passion and hobby. If you walk into a job interview and instead of padding your resume with buzz words and bullshit, pad it with your own projects. That is worth more than anything.
I'm all for an interactive museum and maker center. How awesome would it be if they had a build your own Tesla coil workshop. Plus they could also offer 3d printing, small laser cutting, machine shop and various electronics and computing workshops. And Brookhaven lab is a few minutes drive south.