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Comment Re:Spellink chekers. Duh! (Score 2) 285

Spelling checkers don't help with grammatical context. I see that few people don't know when to use "fewer than" vs "less than", or the difference between "insure" and "ensure". They are indeed different.
If Joe SixPack (or for UK, "Joe Pint" (or equivalent slang)) doesn't know the difference, well, so what. When I see professional authors not knowing the difference, I am... disappointed, I guess.
And crap, I'm an engineer, I'm not even supposed to know how to spell.

/F

Comment Re:Sounds cool (Score 3, Insightful) 156

"what's to say that they don't have a homegrown version of software that does the exact same thing" Based on their website, if they did I would feel secure that it didn't work properly.

Based on having worked for Verizon in software development, I can assure you that it's a miracle when almost anything works properly.
The really sleazy types were the marketing and management types. The stories I could tell... I feel unclean just thinking about it.

Comment Re:The thing with ASCII (Score 1) 728

What could "mostly invisible" mean?... (especially considering the sky)

It means I can't see it, as in the apparent intensity as I see it is roughly about 1/4 to 1/3 what others see. Hard to measure things like that.
It also means that I wear a narrow palette of colors to stay out of trouble.

Transportation

Denver Airport Overrun by Car-Eating Rabbits 278

It turns out the soy-based wire covering on cars built after 2002 is irresistible to rodents. Nobody knows this better than those unlucky enough to park at DIA's Pikes Peak lot. The rabbits surrounding the area have been using the lot as an all-you-can-eat wiring buffet. Looks like it's time to break out The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

Comment Re:Lesson #8 (Score 1) 590

Ya know, I actually DID walk to classes, barefoot, in the snow. Yes, I was weird. (I growed up as a hillbilly. My mamma never could learn me to wear shoes much.) Now there were was only a very minor hill on the way, but the dorm was not 100 meters from the classroom building.

True, we only learned FORTRAN, using punch cards... then again I was a physics major, not a CS weenie. Those guys were too damned weird... imagine a physicist thinking another group was too weird to associate with.

We did have paper tape available on our KSR33s but it wasn't used all that much. We even had like 3 'glass teletypes' out of about 150 total terminals.

I don't even have a lawn any more.

/F

Comment Re:Not a bad idea, but ... (Score 4, Informative) 520

However that is not universally true (though I think it was more true a while back).

In the Denver area hospitals are frequently understaffed, but the hospitals refuse to hire many of the available nurses.

In particular the problem is that a significant percentage of new nurses can't get hired because there are policy (and regulatory? dunno) reasons that you can't have too high a percentage of staff being new graduates, due to their lack of experience. So new nursing school grads have a tough time getting hired around here.

My wife (a nurse) is involved in the training and orientation of new hires at her hospital, so she's relatively up on the issues. Also related is that there are some hospitals which are hurting financially due to the current general economic issues - a lot of that depends on the mix of patients and how they pay (insurance, if any, Medicare etc.)

There is also age discrimination for nurses in the opposite direction - my wife has been refused jobs because she's 'too old' or 'overqualified' etc. Not as bad as in the software world but it does exist.

Comment Re:GOOD RIDDENCE OL TEDDY BOY (Score 5, Interesting) 512

Aside from a few universally hated people like Hitler, we have a tendency to focus on the good in people when they die. ...

Actually one of the biggest eye-opening shocks of my life was in the 70's when I was an American student in Germany living with a German family. They were quite adamant that Hitler had done Germany a lot of good throughout much of of his tenure as their leader.
Remember these were people who had lived through the economic nightmare there after WW-I, then the 30's and 40's. They said Hitler had brought them out of the economic mess, put food on their table, made jobs available etc. etc. And all that is true for the most part.
We tend to focus on the seriously bad things he did... like I said it was a massive shock to me at that time, having been taught only a subset of the entire set of historical events.
Do NOT view this as me agreeing with their viewpoint, merely pointing out that it existed, and in some sad forms still exists.

/F

Comment Re:Sense of Recent History (Score 0, Redundant) 283

Not wrong in my neck of the woods. I'll admit that it was a period of transition, so perhaps drugstore chain X kept them around longer, while drugstore chain Y disposed of them sooner. There could well have been regional components as well, local economics, etc.

I didn't attempt to correlate when they disappeared from where with any other factors etc.

Comment Re:Just incredible! (Score 5, Informative) 283

1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.

Tube testers were pretty darned hard to find almost anywhere in 1977 (you could find them in old-used-electronics stores). I do recall testing tubes in drugstores in the early 70's.

Solid state, and even (*gasp*) integrated circuits were in widespread use. Why, by gosh by golly, we even had *8080*'s then.

I was a senior in college in physics+EE; I and a handful of my fellow students managed to coerce one of the EE profs to take a few hours and teach us about tubes (they had been removed from the curriculum). For the most part the interest was for us audio-nerds... tubes had that nice desirable sweet sound... (but I digress)

/F

Comment Re:How about being yourself? (Score 1) 842

Sounds great, but...
Cologne? You may want to reconsider that one. How much? If the cologne bottle will last you a period of years with daily application, maybe OK. If it only lasts weeks, or days, that's at least as bad as never showering.
Then there are people with varying degrees of sensitivity or allergy to scents. Some are obvious about their displeasure, others will just think you're a dick.

Comment Re:Average 60 (Score 1) 547

Nah, I'm as healthy as an ox. I feel just grea...&*)( ^ wgha'ts thayt opain in my armm ow...

60 hours is no big deal, when you love what you're doing. I have had a few times when it was real torture to try and appear to be busy for 40 hours though.

Comment Re:age matters (Score 1) 547

Mistakes, as in hitting 'Submit' before you're finished...

The other point worth making is code quality. My code tends to have less than 10% the average error rate (big company, we track such things). Again, it's all that experience.

Enough yapping, back to slaving (and loving it).

Comment Re:age matters (Score 2, Insightful) 547

Yes, thinking matters big time. Other elderly colleagues of mine can generally code circles around the young whippersnappers, as we've been there, made the mistakes, and know not to make most of them. (Sadly we do repeat them sometimes). Too bad so many young'uns already know everything and don't want to learn from others, and prefer to learn by making the same mistakes others have made a zillion times before.

/F

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