The single line method is evil. It removes choice
from the customer. I want to avoid the cashiers
that insist on putting canned soup on top of
bread and eggs. (and get upset if you start bagging your own)
I avoid stores that use the single line method.

> Everyone who tried to do something useful in APL, put up your hand.

APL is a wonderful language.

> Restricting digital storage to ones and zeros is needlessly polarizing
> and limiting. Why not allow a 0.5 bit value?

Word is the Russians tried to build trinary computers but the
magnetic cores wouldn't stay unmagnetized.

My stupid keyboard has redundant keys for the digits and a few others,
but no Umlaut, no Eszett and no Greek letters. Who designs this crap?

Some things can't even handle plain ASCII. Can anyone explain how
to google for "DVD-RW" or for "DVD+RW" without getting a gazillion
false hits? Google would be *so* much more useful it it handled
regular expressions.

> And FreeBSD has its own effort for that as well.

Could you point me toward this effort please?

Unix grew up on machines where CPU was nearly
always the bottleneck. But over the years CPUs
have increased in speed more than i/o has, so
now i/o is often the bottleneck.

I am convinced that a process that generates
data faster than a device can sink it will
fill up memory, starving other processes.

BTW, most web forums provide a way to send
someone a "private message", but I can't find
one on slashdot. Does /. have a similar facility,
or if not, why not?

I'm running 10 hard drives, most of them have been
upgraded to 2 GB. The expansion slots are all
full, so no more controller cards. I need a *lot*
more storage space. (SATA port multipliers look
promising, but can't find much in the way of
reviews, or actual user experience.) They are
just now coming out with 3 TB drives, hopefully
the prices will come down in a few months like
they usually do. But still way too small, I need
more like 100 TB per drive. Those itsy bitsy
SSDs might be okay for a laptop (that might get
dropped) with insignificant amounts of data,
but not for serious amounts of data that needs
cost effective storage.

>> Maybe even with the IBM logo added to make that clear
> Either that or they weren't immune to product placement in the 50's

Check out _Ozzie_and_Harriet_ pushing Coke, or
_I_Love_Lucy_ pushing cigarettes.

For most applications, wired mics are better than
wireless. Sometimes the wire is even a feature.
What would Roger Daltrey do with a wireless mic?

The real problem is overpopulation.

What is the FCC's excuse for censorship now that they have killed
off analog TV and thus all TVs have the V-chip?

Even medical education shows have everything blurred out.

Violence is offensive.

American football is violent and therefore offensive.

Janet Jackson is offensive with or without a "costume malfunction".

Nearly everything coming out of a politicion's mouth is offensive,
but they are constantly on the news.

Beam me up, Scotty, the USA has "jumped the shark".

Is anyone working on reverse engineering UVD?
AMD/ATI is really dragging their feet on documenting UVD. :-(

The problem with nukes is that people have this tendendacy to
make mistakes. Make a mistake with with a windmill or solar
and you might hurt yourself and a co-worker or two. Make a
mistake with a nuke and the entire world suffers. After
Chernobyl there was radioactive fallout in the continental
United States. Go look at a map and see how far away the US
is from Chernobyl. And the problem doesn't go away in a few
days, either. Germany still has problems from Chernobyl,
over 24 years later:
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100729-28819.html

Have we learned anything in the last 24 years? BP's
problems repairing a simple plumbing leak say no.

Paper tapes and classic yellow tty paper printouts from
the early 1970s, probably no timestamps though. PDP 8 FOCAL

Punch cards and printouts from mid 1970s, printouts would
have timestamps. CDC 6500, mostly FORTRAN, COMPASS (yeech)
Also some graphics printouts, one of which was published.

DEC tape from a famous PDP 11/70 running PWB Unix,
written 1979. Wish I had a DEC tape drive.

If I were sufficiently motivated I could
presumably look up the formats for paper tape
and punch cards and get the info. So of course
it is the DEC tape I'd like to be able to read.

> You can't get used to it because you are constantly changing between the two.

I wear glasses virtually all day every day.

Here is an example that is constant: Vision in the eye that had the retina
surgically reattached still looks distorted (like looking through textured
privacy glass) after a year. Theory is that the retina didn't get reattached
smoothly.

The upside-down lens experiment sounds interesting. Maybe my brain just
isn't plastic enough.

> Sure it might not be ideal but it's better than not being able to see at all.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be an improvement, I'm just doubting that it would
look normal.

> The visual field would soon 'look' fairly normal as neural plasticity
> made the peripheral visual system do the job of the central and integrate
> that into visual processing. There would be loss of visual and color
> acuity since the peripheral retina isn't as densely populated, and had
> very little chromatic visual receptors. Within weeks any differences
> noted would fade as what's being presented became to seem normal.

I sincerely doubt that. I can't even get used to the "wide angle lens"
effect of my eyeglasses. (Changing the focus to correct for myopia
changes the magnification.) I would *really* like lenses that correct
the focus without changing the magnification.

This "donut" thing sounds worse.