For the few years after you couldn't smoke in your office but before it was banned outright, the various smoking places were a great place to get to know and interact with other people in the company on a more casual level. I finally gave it up about 6 years ago but I miss the social aspect of hanging out with a few people who all knew they were doing something wrong. I don't understand why some health nazi modded you down.

I bought my aluminum iMac back in 2007 and it works just fine, though I wouldn't mind an upgrade. What happened to that damn sequester?

On another note, can you really use a computer to accurately calculate how fast a nuclear arsenal will deteriorate? I didn't think so.

This may not be germaine, but it is well known that if you test a new antidepressant in the clinic, you get an average 30% positive response in the control group. It's also known that if Neil Young tells you that your music is crap, 30% will believe him. However, few will do anything about it.

CRT's have negative worth. We have a lot of CRT monitors sitting around gathering dust. I try to get people to just get rid of them the most benign way we can. They're worse than worthless. If you were standing on the street and someone handed you a CRT monitor, your net worth would drop.

Why you get modded up to "Interesting" for side tracking a post on Time Warner to whine about Apple is beyond me.

But there you go.

When I was in graduate school about 30+ years ago, I came home to my apartment only to find it ransacked, my stereo missing and my roommate's camera equipment gone. I called the cops. "I've been robbed", I said. "Were you there at the same time as the person taking your stuff?", they asked. "No", I replied. "Oh, you haven't been robbed, you've merely been burglarized. That's different. Not nearly as serious." Darn. The police came over and looked around for a few minutes and then left. I never heard from them or my stereo again.

Huh? I think I'm talking a few years earlier. FoxBase was originally a Mac only product. It was the only relational database that would allow storage and retrieval of graphic elements. It was pretty cool and very fast at the time. Microsoft bought it and lost the graphic storage capability on the Mac real fast. Then the Mac product disappeared. All of this happend around 1996 or so. Your memory has no bearing whatsoever on my original post.

The whole bunch of people who think about graphics on the web are always behind. The underlying framework for 2D (.svg etc.) is just now being developed and embraced. Back in the 90's when we really could have used such things due to such low bandwidth availability, we were bit mapping everything.

Apple understood this back in 1984 when they did all the primitive stuff in ROM. But as Apple faded and MS took over in the early 90's, intelligent graphics for the masses went missing. MS even killed a Mac graphics capable database (FoxBase) by buying it and taking out it's graphics capabilities. 3D? not likely anytime soon.

I wonder why on earth, when he finally ran out of gas, did he have to run into a ditch. I tend to agree with Gription. I'm gonna call BS on this story, too.

I don't miss any point. It would make about as much sense, maybe more, to draw molecules with postscript as it would be to use Chemfig. Similar learning curve. Learning to use Chemfig would require so much time that you wouldn't be able to learn enough chemistry to tell you that the structure was right or wrong. Chemfig might be appropriate for maybe 6 or 7 currently living people. No one I know. Maybe it would work for those guys at Chem Abstracts. But they already have a program like this. Maybe that's what chemfig is.

I just looked at the package called Chemfig, for drawing organic molecules in LateX. Wow, let's toss out 25 years of progress.

It came with word, excel, powerpoint and some other stuff that I don't remember.

Do you talk the same way you write? Just curious.

I bought an Office for Mac 3-pack for about $125. That's not exactly the same as $150 each. I'm not a Microsoft fan but I do try to stay credible when possible.

I don't know what this has to do with anything but I had to learn FORTRAN in a chemistry class about 36 years ago. This was before whiteboards.

I was one of the first Road Runner customers in the RTP, NC area. I've been a good customer. TW recently upped my rates and their remote is terrible. Unfortunately for TW, some real competition recently showed up for what once was a monopoly. I switched and just got off the phone to tell them that I am canceling. Amazingly, some promotions, that I was previously unaware of, became available to me. No way. A little competition can be a good thing.