I was the only girl in my high school physics class. At some point we had to make 1-tube radios (6J5). This was a way long time ago! Anyway, I was very nervous about cutting my wires too short so I had quite a bit of wire on there. I had an extra "tickler" coil which was patched with nail polish where I had to splice two wires together. The tuning knob was stuck through a piece of a refrigerator dish.
The day of the trial came. The teacher came in with a big battery and a pair of earphones. First they tested all the techie boys. They had nicely arranged boards. Many of them had actually done some electronics work at home. Some of their kit worked; some didn't. There were only about 7 of them. They drifted out of the room.
The teacher hooked me up -- and mine actually worked! A surprise to all of us. I had never soldered anything before, and had biked around town assembling the collection of parts that I had looked up in a book somewhere.
The point of this is that those of us with no engineering background whatever can be relied on to do something weird when first confronted with it. Not that those young women were really qualified; that is another issue. But big loops of wire? I can relate to that!

I found one (or two) of these once as part of a study. The old M-- H-- bank was going to replace some important system, and I was on the illustrious crew of analysts documenting all its interfaces. One of them was a deck of cards that was output at the end of the run. So very early one morning I followed it from the output room to the mail room, and then the wagon to an office, where the cards were placed on the desk of the person who ran that machine. She and her young assistant ran them through the machine, which duplicated them and added some columns, probably totals of some kind. Then they took the new deck and loaded it into another of the same sort of machine, programmed differently. It read the cards and printed a report. Then she put a rubber band around the report and cards, and it went back on the mail cart. I followed it down the hall and to another floor, where it arrived on someone's desk.
And...
He picked it up and threw it into the trash.
When I wrote it up, nobody wanted to believe me.

Jah, SAP. World's slowest suicide method.

I never actually programmed one, but when I worked at Siemens in Iselin, NJ we had some of these. For physical inventory, we needed it to print the name of the spare part on the card my program punched out of the Spectra 70. So a bunch of old guys from all over the company found themselves poking around on the board. And they were successful too. The inventory cards were beautiful! To take inventory, the warehouse people wrote the count on the card, we had it punched at the end, and fed back into the Spectra. (We ran COBOL on that, 64 K of memory allowed even the SORT to run.) Good old days!

Yeah, so did I. You were supposed to use the last 6 columns for a number that you could use in sorting the cards. We also used markers so you could line up the cards based on the position of a diagonal stripe on the edge. PL/1 - what a language! I had to write an assembler in PL/1. It was a great way to learn what we used to call "structured programming".

I took a look at their website and it was all white on black, which to me is barely legible. I am 71 and normally read black on white with no trouble, but have a lot of issues with the new fad for white on varied backgrounds, such as photographs.

Poor bankers! ROFLMAO!

Right you are -- people with stimulated brains make better thinkers, programmers, analysts, and even editors. It doesn't matter if the stimulation came from college or not. Intense use of the brain, enjoyment of challenge, and a certain ability to persist through obstacles, are key.

The Yahoo filter is very good. After a while you get one spam a month, maybe, and one or two items fall into spam that you might want.

Gentoo has no versions. Perhaps in the future it would be beneficial to actually do some research before placing your foot in your mouth. The gentoo INSTALL DISC has versions...however, that said, it's completely feasible to install gentoo with the 2007 disc and emerge your system to the current stable versions of everything. You will of course have a faster, easier time using a newer installation disc, but gentoo, once installed, has NO VERSION.

Alfresco takes what is essentially an unstable snapshot of the publicly available and GPL'd Community Edition, branches it into a private source repository, stabilizes that private codebase, and makes stable point releases of the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition from that. Sure, fixes from Enterprise Edition are eventually rolled back into the unstable Community Edition trunk, but there is never a stable point release made for the GPL licensed Community Edition. So, if our company wants open source (ie GPL) code for all the products we use in production, we can't get it from Alfresco!

Alfresco partner companies are banned from providing services to clients against the open source Community Edition.

If I fix a critical bug by patching the code for my licensed copy of Enterprise Edition, then I can no longer receive support from Alfresco for the product.

If I try to take part in the open source community and send patches for the product upstream to Alfresco, they either languish untouched:

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETWOTWO-1125
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-2810
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3301

Or are just flat out closed with no reason given (despite being obvious problems):

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3308

So, it seems to me Mr Asay, that although you really like to talk the talk, and although you might just meet the basic legal requirements to qualify as Open Source, when it comes to the spirit and community surrounding Free Software, I don't think you really understand how to walk the walk?

So why clutter the conceptual space (that is the harm right there)? It's just more you have to wade through when thinking of GUI's for smaller devices vs. larger ones.

So instead every iPhone OS book is going to be cluttered up with little side-boxes "[!] this widget only exists on iPad"?

Every iPhone programmer has to ignore about 95% of the iPhone APIs when writing any particular application because they just don't need it. Not using a couple more widgets isn't going to make any difference.

Continue to live your life in blissful ignorance while the world moves on past you

With what? A souped-up NeXTStep, a $1200 unlocked device, low res screen, and 1% market share. I'm shaking in my boots, I tell you.

usually to efficently leverage ethanol you have to have an engine designed for it. You can utilize VASTLY higher compression ratios with ethanol, because of it's massive antiknock rating. So you use a turbo, superhigh compression ratios, and boom, ethanol comes within 10-20% as efficent as gasoline. This allows you to use a smaller engine, and hence less pumping losses, opening the door for ethanol engines to surpass gasoline engines in MPG efficency. How about using ethanol in combination with gasoline to drastically boost normal fuel efficency by achieving higher compression ratios than normally possible? http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/engine.html This MIT engine uses ethanol injection to keep an engine from knocking, delivering significantly higher compression ratios. About 1 gallon of ethanol to 20 galons of gasoline used. And the result? Engine output per liter jumped nearly 2x. Thus, overall fuel efficency gains were in the neighborhood of 20-30%, and I doubt it'd be that much more expensive than a hybrid system. Combined with a hybrid system, this could allow stratospheric mileages easily toppling diesel in 1st place. I think so far this is only on simulations, but if it were to break into the market, Ethanol could find it's home not only as an alternative fuel, but more importantly boosting the efficency of all of the other straight gasoline engines out there. All it takes is customized design for the fuel application.