The industry STANDARD is Solidworks, with SOME form of CAM, but it is expensive, and the CAM side of the house can get crazy, depending on what features you want/need to support. High speed machining? 3+ axis profiling? etc. The HUGE advantage, if you are a student, you can get it CHEAP, and even better, if your school picks it up/you have access to their validation server it can be free. Going into the pro world, this is the one they will probably expect you to know
Best for money/easiest? I went Alibre enterprise, but the CAM it ships with is somewhat limited, but it may be enough for what you want to do. Bobcad/cam is another product where I own a seat, but it didn't work the way I thought. Rhino gets good reviews, and is supposedly fairly easy

IF you have the funds, and are starting from scratch, and want you knowledge to be industry applicable, get Solidworks (for the amount I spend on a full up Bobcad, Alibre, and CAM, I probably could have done this, and even if it was extra, I wish I did). There is a real cheap version of Alibre, see if you like it (I also think there is a 30 day trial of the full up version)

Oh, one huge advantage/disadvantage of Alibre - they use the directX libraries vs (gad, can't remember what the high end cads - had 3 teeth pulled today, and drugged off my mind). The GOOD thing is that you don't need to run a workstation level graphics card - just a good 'regular' card, like you would do for a business or gaming PC.

Too true. 6500K CFLs are so "cold" looking that they make me shiver.

The problem I have with Crees is th form factor. We have recessed lighting in our kitchen, mostly R30, and the fixtures are 40 years old, certainly superseded by newer standards. Regular R-30 bulbs fit perfectly. The Cree equivalents take some work to fit right, especially the ones with the built-in bezels.

That said, I love the light they produce. It's a bit brighter, and only slightly whiter than the light the 65W incandescents put out, at a fifth the power consumption.

I have one question for the pick-your-color manufacturers: Have you ever consulted an interior designer? The colors of paint, fabric, etc. in a room are all picked with specific lighting in mind, both natural and from lamps. Start futzing with it, and things will start looking crappy. Ever wonder why a hotel room looks fine under CFLs but the same CFLs in your bedroom make everything an ashy grey? It's because the colors in the hotel room were picked specifically because they complement the color spectrum put out by the CFLs.

I'm looking forward to the day not far off when I can have all LED lighting in the house, but I have no desire to make radical color changes (except for special applications people have mentioned ike aids for the deaf).

IBM support still sucks. You spend more time proving to them that you're entitled to support than you spend getting support. Customer number? Site code? How about I give you the number of dollars we've sent you, and then we can talk about how you can't find those other numbers in your system.

I went through this yet again earlier this week. At one point I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Four months ago, my company wrote you an eight-figure check for worldwide licensing and support. If that's not in your database, maybe you should switch to Oracle."

I see dead OSes. They're everywhere. They don't know they're dead.

Too bad they didn't go the other way too: us.konicaminolta.com, uk.konicaminolta.com, etc. Were I registering domains for a big company selling to consumers, I'd register anything they might reasonably guess. (Plus use geolocation to guess for them.)

OTOH, people use Google (etc.) so much that the actual domain names almost don't matter--just click on what Google found. (I still can't remember our public library's convoluted domain name even though I go to the site a couple times a week.)

And it persists. My kid's teacher's email address is @brrsd.k12.nj.us.

I've had the same experience with disks. I've had brand-new drives fail in under 200 hours of use, and I have 20-year-old 1GB drives that are built like tanks and still work fine, even though they make that irritating buzzy bearing noise.

RAM disks are cool and all, but except on live CDs they're usually unnecessary. The kernel's buffer cache and directory-name-lookup cache (in RAM) can often outperform RAM disks on second reads and writes.

(Claimer: I worked on file systems for HP-UX, and we measured this when we considered adding our internal experimental RAM FS to the production OS.)

At least #4 is a legacy from the ARPAnet and USENET from the same time period.

Nobody comes here any more. It's too crowded.

Remember, though, NYC is much more than Manhattan. In Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, you can be miles from the nearest subway station, and Staten Island isn't connected to the NYC subway system at all.

(Wow, I wonder how many hours have been lost finding bugs resulting from syntactically-correct typos like the one I just made...)

Column-independent syntax and free-form comments are a good start. (You can't enforce good commenting, but you can at least enable it.) And to be fair, COBOL's long variable names were a huge improvement over old versions of FORTRAN and BASIC.

COBOL initially claimed to be self-documenting because of its English-heavy syntax. Indeed,

    PERFORM DO-SOMETHING VARYING X FROM 0 TO 10 BY 5.

is much more readable at first glance than

    for (i=0; i=10; i+=5) { do_something(); }

but this let programmers think they didn't have to add many of their own comments. Thus, it was more likely that a typical ugly hack would not have been commented.

Teletype ribbons are pretty easy to replace, because plain typewriter ribbon can be loaded onto its pair of generic spools (no, I'm not showing my age here, nope). Try finding the ribbon *cartridges* for 70's/80's vintage dot-matrix printers. They were as device-specific as toner cartridges are today.