Because of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_blur
First a VIC20, where coding a loop to print "Asshole" was the pinnacle of achievement
As I look back, I now notice that almost every system I was ever drawn to was programmer-centric. I never realized it back then, and even into post-secondary education it took a while to realize that CS was my destiny.
But it sort of does make sense. You spend your whole life worrying about the unknown. Saving for retirement, dreading what may potentially happen wrt your health. Will I still have a job next year, will I be healthy enough to provide for myself in old age, etc?
In some ways, you're living in a constant state of 'fight or flight', with adrenaline levels at maximum all the time. IOW, you're always stressing about something. When you eventually hear that you're dying, you can basically stop worrying about the future. You only have to think about things from day to day, and hence you can enjoy those days.
I've had that happen with relatives, where in one case they were extremely frugal their whole lives, and never spent money on themselves. When they found out they had a year to live, they went out a spent $20000 on credit cards, and died in debt. But they died (relatively) happy.
And another relative, who was exactly like your anecdote, that became happy once they knew they were dying. It makes sense if you consider that some peoples lives are a constant source of stress, and you can never relax for any reason. In some sense (and this will seem extremely ironic), being told you're going to die is a huge weight off your shoulders. I have to admit that I sometimes feel the same way at only 40 years of age. Perhaps that's not a good sign
Not sure if this is supposed to be serious or a joke, but the 68K refers to a Motorola 68000 CPU, and it could address up to 9 *MB* of RAM. It was in an absolutely different class compared to an 8-bit Apple ][.
Don't give them any ideas. Then again, with the amount of anti-intellectualism in the US lately, it seems they already have the idea.
The sarcasm is strong with this one
Success (!) on getting Kmail 1.x working again in KDE 4.9.4. I simply recompiled the kdepimlibs package, and forced the kmail1 binary to use the new ones. This fixes the profile issues. I suspect once KDE 5 hits, though, Kmail 1.x is dead for good.
For my part, I suffered through the nasty port of Kmail to Akonadi, which was a truly awful experience, but I got through it with my folders intact and it's finally back to a state resembling usability, though not nearly as fast or solid as the original. The Kmail user interface is still the best going, and one day I might actually see some benefit from the new database backend, instead of just pain, races and nonsensical warnings.
Personally, I never did get the newer Kmail working adequately, and am compiling the last 1.x version (from KDE 4.4 or so) and using that. That worked perfectly well up to KDE 4.8. Once KDE 4.9 was released, the profiles stopped working. Previously, you could have separate inbox, sent-mail, servers, etc for different email addresses, and when you sent from each email address, it used the correct sent-folder, etc. Now, it all defaults to local folders. So I don't know what to do next. Dig into the code, I guess, and try to hack it again. Why can't they just leave working programs alone???
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood