A modern high-school math calculator that is solar-powered and can run rings around the previous generations costs around $15 in any fall back-to-school sale, and even less when they're clearing out their school supplies for the Halloween stuff. Both my high-school kids have several old ones (borrowed from teachers when their was forgotten, or lost and then refound after purchasing a replacement) knocking around in their drawers. I've offered them to their friends and friend's parents, but every one just offers me back their old stuff.

Perfectly functional but unwanted electronics crap is everywhere these days: cell phones, DVD players, digital cameras, laptops, and high-school calculators will survive with the rats and cockroaches after we are long gone.

Nepotism

Link is to a June 15th article.

Turbovision (and all the Borland GUIs -- don't forget TurboProlog!) gets my vote.

All based on IBM's Systems Application Architecture / Common User Access (SAA/CUA) standard from the late '80s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Systems_Application_Architecture#Common_user_access_.28CUA.29 . I still have a virgin copy of the SAA/CUA Manual in my amateur computer museum.

I don't actually know -- I haven't used it since the mid-seventies. But back in the day, it used to be pretty geekish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Control_Language

'nuff said...

Poppycock!

If race isn't a biological manifestation, then what could it possibly be? Environmental? Chance? Of course there's a genetic difference between various groups of people who share certain distinctive features (e.g. skin colour, nose shapes, eye shapes, lactose intolerance). That doesn't mean that any of the groups are any better than another, that particular individuals always conform to their parent's genotype, or that these genes don't get endlessly mixed and remixed as time goes on.

It seems to me that "race" is just the informal word* we use to talk about these different groups. It's certainly a concept that has started a lot of wars throughout history, and perhaps for that reason it's becoming increasingly politically incorrect to use. But the word does mean something, and that meaning is inextricably entwined with biology.

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* Perhaps we use "race" for human beings because we would be offended if we used the same term that we use for other animals: breed. But that would definitely be politically incorrect!

Are you implying that some of us are descended from some other species of Homo Sapiens (if that's not an oxymoron) that didn't evolve in Africa?

Just lost about 140K bots on my net...

Not even three months ago...

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/03/16/0240232/why-new-programming-languages-succeed-or-fail

Granted, the previous one is about new languages. But can't we assume every significant old language succeeded for at least some period of time (even if all some of them succeeded in is failing spectacularly -- remember Japan's push for "fifth generation languages" in the '90s)?

raw C??? Talk about having it easy!

Back the good ol' days we programmed these things in hex machine code. Eventually -- after a decade or two of indentured servitude -- we were allowed to use the assembler.

To paraphrase your point 4, your redundant DNS servers should ideally not have anything in common at all. Except (duh) the same zone tables.

Actually we had this sorted 39 years ago:

Basic: 10 print "Hello World"

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_2200 from 1973. It even had a hotkey for typing p-r-i-n-t- in a single keystroke.

La plus ca change, la plus c'est le meme chose. (The more things change, the more they're the same thing).

That article is really an eye-opener -- it makes complete sense though, once when you understand the rationale. I'll switch to putting new ones on the back from now on. Thank you for the safety tip.

I have:
- 4 kids
- 4 cats
- 0.5 dogs
- 3 houses
- been continuously professionally employed for 37 years, and
- not a single pair of dress shoes.
It took me 40 years to be able to toss the last ones, but I am very proud of finally managing to do so.

I may have to give in and get some if any of the kids decide to marry someone from a conventional family -- a possibility I am already apprehensive about, largely because of the need to obtain things like dress shoes.