Probably more importantly, IE was free while Navigator 4.0 was $49. While there were free licenses available for personal and educational use, corporations and institutions adopted IE en masse as the cheap âoegood enoughâ solution especially since Windows 95 had an extremely rapid corporate migration due to much improved networking and hardware support.

I bought a Vizio E-series 2016 for my father. Perfect dumb tv and was on the shelf at his local Walmart. (previous E series were smart). Probably $100 less than a smart TV. These TVs were unique in that the only smart features were provided via built-in Google Cast. So pretty much beam apps from your ipad, including a custom vizio app. Otherwise nothing smart -- no netflix, amazon, nothing. Using Google Cast worked great for me visiting, but was beyond his capability. He just wanted a dumb TV to watch cable TV on.

In 2017, Vizio changed strategy and announced a free upgrade for all 2016 E Series owners. To the "full" Smart TV package on almost every Vizio. And now his "dumb" TV is getting Airplay 2. I didn't realize until this article that this "free" upgrade was just another shot at monetization -- artificial price differentiation to make the sale (since obviously the smarts were in the original TV), then give the smarts free to those who didn't pay for it to unlock the third party revenue stream. Impressive.

The problem with N2 is that some prisoners are going to hold their breath for 3-4 minutes, then start breathing the N2. While the comments are accurate about people who want to die, or accidentally die via N2 being quick and painless, its going to be pretty ghastly to watch some guy hold his breath until blue, then start gasping for air, then go unconscious and die. Some guy will train himself for a 7+ minute breath hold. Other forms of execution aren't affected by prisoner choice -- seems an obviously cruel method to let people live as long as they can hold their breath.

In August 1992 I purchased a 486-66 machine with 4MB of RAM for $3000. It was pretty top of the line for consumer use. In May 1993 I purchased 4MB of RAM for $400. In spring 1995 I purchased 8MB of RAM for $300 for the machine. Ran Linux in each configuration (first install SLS in April 1993 -- May purchase was to get X somewhat functional). Each sum was a lot of money at the time for me as a college student.

In 1987, the company I worked for spent $2000 for 4MB RAM for a 386 Novell server. In 1982, the company I worked for spent $2000 for a 512K RAM disk for CP/M (trade name of "Semidisk" -- it had an external power supply and would maintain state across the reboots and power cycles of the host machine)

Computer programming is a little different....

CS50 has always been fast and loose. I can remember showing weaker students my code and letting them copy a few lines or the answers to early problems. And vice versa. Many times TAs were in the labs shoulder to shoulder with us helping us with problem sets. Collaboration was always encouraged as long as you came up with some original ideas for harder problems and you weren't blatantly ripping off other people. Intro to CS is designed to get to pretty challenging material quick. You can't get to the fun stuff if everyone has to solve every easy and medium problem from scratch. Back in the dot-com days, passing CS50/51 with a good grade was sufficient to get a professional programming job, regardless of major. Those who didn't go to Harvard may not realize that getting easy problems 100% right is not culturally respected in the sciences there -- most exams are solely problems that range from hard to extremely hard and a 50 or 60 is an A-.

Plagiarism is a tough standard to apply to computer science at the intro level, similar to plagiarism in algebra. I completely understand and respect the Be Reasonable concept -- that's how we rolled (I took CS50 at roughly the same time as the current professor). I saw stuff that went over the line as well (printouts fished out of bins or stolen from printers, cut and paste specials) I like the Be Reasonable concept, but it has clearly reached its limit if this many students are getting dragged into investigations.

Was the price of Blu-ray 3D films and Blu-ray 3D players set too high?
- didn't even hit the radar by this point


One issue not discussed yet is that content was very expensive. At one point there was a limited amount of 3D VOD at about twice normal VOD prices ($9 or so). But Netflix never supported 3D for DVD rentals. Nor redbox. Some of the "trashy" 3D wasn't bad but were you really going to spend $30 to watch The Green Lantern? So most people had a very limited amount of 3D content. Both of the cable companies around me had no 3D content other than pay VOD and that is long gone. The only movie I wanted to see in the past few years that was available to me in 3D was Harry Potter 7 Part 2 which was pretty decent.
There are still millions of 3D TVs out there (and most can find a 3D BluRay player). Make a good 3D movie, people will buy it if they were going to buy the BluRay anyway. Passive 3D is available cheap on many mid-range or better TVs these days, though its becoming rarer. If there was cheap content, people would still be watching 3D.

Actually there's another location in an office park in Warwick, Rhode Island (RI DHS office). I only had a 4.5 month wait for my GE interview (a year ago, its not getting any better). They clearly haven't done the math -- if the wait was shorter, I'd suggest my wife and friends do it. As it is, I'd only suggest it for true road warriors.

If they want people to do it, make it so you can arrive an hour early for your next flight and sign up at the airport -- not wait 5 months.

If you're going to do it, might as well do GE. I don't know that many road warriors who don't do at least an occasional international flight. And you can easily wait 75 minutes at Logan for customs/immigration if you're sitting in the back of the 2nd 747 to land in a row.

So I have 7 ipads. All of them were purchased used except one from work.

My family uses 4 (1 each), my parents have 2, and an ipad 1 sits around unused as it has minimal value at this point due to app compatibility. Most wealthy families I know have multiple ones (one or more for kids, one or more for parents). All lower middle class families I know of have one or more for the family. With cheap apps, its a good value especially used.

I'm considering buying a eighth to run navigation and fish finder for my boat. An used ipad plus the sensor is far cheaper and more powerful than a dedicated boat unit. I also have 3 more specialty tablets that are hardly used as ipad is more powerful. And two Sony Dashs.

Apple hit a great price/value point for these units. And badly misjudged obsolescence -- the batteries last many years, unlike iphones. There aren't any killer apps driving upgrades Consumers don't want bigger screens (though there's some good professional use cases). Or pencils. The tablet category may be the most rapidly matured piece of electronics in history. 5 years from brand new and hot to a completely mature market.

Many people have used an emergency brake to effectively stop a car at speed. Just because you (and my mother) can't, don't knock the concept. For slowing to a stop it works ok -- panic stops good luck.

I have this car. It's not how it works. It's not three presses. The shove to park normally works. There's an "easy" press up and a "hard" press up. The problem is if you do it a little softly you go into neutral instead. Since its not mechanical you tend to do it with a lighter touch than most cars. I had it happen to me once when I went to open the door and the car started rolling. I shifted into park. People need to pay attention when they drive. It is very easy to drive this car if you pay attention and it took no special instruction during the test drive or for relatives. I drive rental cars for work all the time and its no different than the standard "this brand does things a bit different" feel. This transmission shifter design supports the "Sport" mode in the transmission which optionally allows gear selection of the transmission . It lets you get out of sport both up and down with a hard press and is a more natural feel than the "separate gate" design. You do a hard press down to get into sport, soft presses up and down if you want to pick the gear, hard press up or down to get out. You can also paddle shift up and down. Its a pretty cool and effective design -- unfortunately sport mode itself isn't particularly fun. There have been several firmware upgrades to this transmission which I highly recommend (for shift quality and RPM gates). I also think it improved this problem.

Good call.
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When it blows up, it will be your problem. I've had signed blood oaths from business executives that they fully understand the risks of legacy unsupported equipment running business processes. When it blows up, IT folk are still the ones on nights and weekends trying to patch it together. Even if you pull off a miracle and quickly resolve 80% of failures, your professionalism (and future raises) will be shattered over the other 20%.

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There's a certain amount of legacy gear you can never avoid (we have a VAX plugged in if we need an update and recompile for a piece of hardware delivered about 40 years ago to a key customer and still in active use). And we have a lot of very expensive industrial equipment that relies on legacy OSs. There's no excuse for not keeping basic equipment up to date. That CEO has no understanding of risk management. I know small businesses that just closed up shop and went out of business after a major IT failure. He's playing Russian roulette with his company. For people who have options, you should never work somewhere that disrespects your profession.

So as a certified Naval Nuclear engineer (though a decade stale...) These nuclear plants are designed for significant manning for routine operations. One of the key systems controls distribution of electrical power and continuous control of voltage through the various electrical "grids" in the ship. This system is highly manual because its the type of thing that a trained person does really well and there are all kinds of niche conditions that rely on a lot of judgment. As the voltage is manually tweaked multiple times/hour, it is pretty certain that the voltage would go out of spec in a matter of days or weeks, eventually triggering cascading failure as one redundant system after another falls offline due to electrical transients. Highly unlikely it would make it a year. With one really trained person you could probably make it 5-10 years until equipment failure due to a lack of maintenance (either skills or parts) caused shutdown.

So I've hired a lot of older programmers, and a lot of older programmers are my best ones.

1) You can't fake management. I've fired far more managers than top technical guys. If you're not really into management, you're not going to make it. It's starting over in an entirely new skillset. Be a team lead for a few people if necessary or expected for your company.

2) Find a really tough area. It's probably not going to be the new cool language of the week. My top older programmers have been mainframe specialists, database architects, systems architects, data warehousing specialists. Whatever was really tough at the time. By focusing on really hard, complex problems you scare off the younger competition. It's ok, they want to work on the new shiny stuff anyway.

3) Learn to communicate. Those new young guys do, but they have their own style. Take advantage of your background and create your own style. You need to build partnerships with managers and customers so they have confidence in you. Make your experience valuable to the team doing peer reviews, designs, etc. Spend time mentoring new guys in the "right way" to build and maintain systems. Not being an old fogey/jerk -- just sharing the wealth with everyone new and old. My best old guys can reach across the org and get me access to data sources unreachable through the front door. Access to their "old guys network" and institutional knowledge is something they bring to the table. The young guys bring something else. I assign each to the jobs that are right for them.

4) Push the future from your perspective. The young guys are from an edgy and somewhat naïve perspective. You need to push the future from your perspective. If you keep your head down and keep programming, the young guys will win, one will get lucky and end up in management and potentially all hell will break loose. Even if you don't win, being part of the strategic planning process makes sure you stay in the game and the voice of experience and discipline is heard (and keeps middle aged guys like me in charge).

Some of my saddest days was guys retiring at 60+ or dying on the job. I can always hire new young guys -- it takes decades to get more experienced guys.

There's a real art. Used to be, if you ordered a triple play from the cable company, they'd send out a top guy since they were the only ones qualified for all 3. Some of those guys really went above and beyond for a pro installation.

Go either to the attic, basement, or crawlspace. Run from there to the closest point. Hug the walls even if its the long way, cable is cheap. Then do a short outdoor hop if necessary.

If you've got some money, go ahead and hire a pro. For $200-300 you'll be done. Or cut the walls and repaint. Your wife will like a custom color anyway.

If you're patient, chop the cable, blame it on the previous resident, other construction, etc., and pay the service fee for the reinstallation at a better location. I ripped out both a cable company box and all the phone wire as an eyesore and left the wires dangling from the pole. (We have two cable companies in town).

One way not mentioned that they save money is efficient repair.

When you get a warranty payment from Squaretrade they make you send back the broken device. Which they can turn around at leisure, without the difficulties of getting it back to you, and fix it and sell it on ebay. And get most of their money back.

It is much more costly (and time consuming) as an individual consumer to get your computer fixed. So the actuarial calculation is more complicated than you describe -- if their repair and resale costs are low enough compared to mine, both of us can make money under this model.

Since I have little kids who I let use a few computers, I buy the warranty on their primary devices. It has more than paid off (though that was the dog's fault). I ordered an identical device from Amazon, swapped the hard drives, and sent them the broken computer with the new hard drive. Money very well spent.

The big problem with warranties is most companies are sleazy and do everything possible to avoid paying out. Luckily there are now a few that actually focus on good customer service.