Example: Hyatt Regency walkway collapse

The contractor made changes to save money. Only in this case they got the PE to sign off on their changes without evaluating them.

Where did this "floating barge" thing come from? They're landing it on the water right now so that it doesn't cause property damage if it fucks up. When they feel confident that it can stay under control and on target, they'll have touch down on land. A floating barge is a hell of a lot more difficult than dry land, with no advantages.

The aluminum-era Powerbooks/MacBook Pros were awful for that. I had three of them, 1 PPC and 2 Intel. The DVD drive would become misaligned with the slot and you had to take it apart to get the disc to eject. Also, the latch to keep it closed wouldn't work, and the skin oils from my palms would etch pits in the top of it. The "unibody" case design was a major and overdue fix for all those problems. The only thing I miss is a matte screen option.

I regularly use one with a keypad and digital timer, so no knobs to wear out, but still a genuine Amana RadarRange. Got it for $25 at Goodwill back in 2000 or so.

The other day I needed to open a Visio document. I had created it a few months ago, before my old XP PC got refreshed with a Win 7 box. For some reason, while it still had Office 2007, it was missing Visio. Even worse, it wanted to open IE, which wanted to use an ActiveX viewer plugin... which proceeded to turn the line art into a bitmap when printing to PDF.

So I downloaded OO. No Visio for you! (This was actually the point at which I tried the ActiveX viewer.) Then I decided to check if Libre Office could handle it. Holy crap, yes, it opened it like a native document.

Then I made sure to save a PDF version of my document just in case someone else wanted to see it later.

The link to medium.com is for editing an article.

I never said anything about "our" sports teams and colleges. You can get them on a Texas license plate for almost any major university or NFL team, regardless of what state they're in. I'm sure that's all made easier by group-licensing agreements. Well, that and being able to put any 4-color process art on a plate in low quantity.

They terrorized Boston.

I've been using the H&R block off-line software for the past few years, OS X version. The main reason is because they are NOT the #1 in that market, so they won't get cocky like Turbo Tax. And I'm in Texas, so the basic basic version. You also get 5 e-files included for the price, so I got my mom to use it a couple of times.

I get it for $15 at Fry's in January because even though they mail me a new disc every year, the amount they want to activate that online costs more than buying it at Fry's (like ten bucks or so more). At least they sent a cardboard sleeve mailer this time instead of a full snap case, to save postage on something I won't be using anyhow.

http://www.popsci.com/article/...

Byte was dead by 1993. There was some kind of Computer Shopper clone magazine that took its place (and name) for quite a few years thereafter, but it wasn't Byte. They even managed to get Pournelle's column into this doppelganger of Byte.

Calculator Watch

GIS for calculator watch

I particularly like the one built around a generic 2x20 text LCD.

Life is also simpler in the Mac world because there isn't a triple .NET update every couple of weeks. And the .NET updaters seem to take a lot more time than regular patches. How badly do you have to fuck up a language runtime library to make it need monthly updates? And I'm not talking about just adding new features to the latest one, like with Java. This is .NET 1.x 2.x and 4.x all getting constantly patched.

Because if the main computer goes out after the launch and before the docking, with the backup already broken, things could get a bit... intense... up there. Since it controls external stuff like the rail car, they really just need to get everything moved where it needs to be ahead of time.