I think someone complained to our manager and then had to explain why they were offended.

Well, I'm not a statistician either, I'm a mathematician. I got into a lot of trouble once for referring to the "human factors" department as "ship B". I've always been in ship C.

Ian Shlasko wrote:

Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?

Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's correct.

Super Lloyd wrote:

Though you are confusing layman's language with specialist language.

From today's Insider email: The Most Exclusive Website lets only one person view it at a time "Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that." This is only true for the median, not for the average. So there.

"Would you be interested in an online platform to support ideas generation and discussion and to put you in touch with financers for idea take-off? This sentence does not appear to be English, or maybe my vocabulary does not include some of these words used in this context, or maybe it's gibberish ... uh ... jargon.

Yes, there was. I think I've run into more than one that did that when doing searches.

I've used Acronis True Image for years. They used to be a lot better at fixing issues. I stopped using it at version 2013 but that version still works fine for me. I never had a need to upgrade and then I added a home server to my network and allowed it to handle backups. It's too bad to see a formerly successful product go down hill.

OriginalGriff wrote: What was your first "real" computer? (I'm not counting Spectrums and their ilk here: if it had a cassette tape it doesn't count ) Mine was a Xerox 820 with the dual-processor option plus an eight-inch floppy drive and an eight-inch, eight megabyte hard drive in a separate case. It was already eight years old when I got it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox\_820

I remember when I installed Turbo C for the first time and it took up half of my 40GB hard drive. I was pissed.

A computer used for things like this would not be able to connect to any networks - no hard-wired cable, wireless turned off, etc. Actually if they did not think about blocking a connection via a power cable network, it could work.

Well, I was rather a cynic once. But now I've combined all my beliefs into this phrase I've been circulating: "Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." It's adapted from a phrase by the British writer and scientist Richard Dawkins, who said that religion was a mind virus, an idea that infected the mind. He said that not all mind-viruses are malignant; some may even be beneficial. But many are harmful—racist theories, for instance.

From an Interview with Arthur C. Clark. February 18, 2004, The Onion, Volume 40, Issue 07.

The whole "nova" thing is an urban legend. It did not happen. http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp[^]

I've been coding for a living for 41 years this July. I loved it for about the first 30 but then the world changed somehow. Maybe I just got old. Anyway, I also arrived at the point where it just seemed pointless to keep learning new programming stuff. I have hobbies but I just don't have the time for them as long as I'm working. The gig I'm on now is the last one. When it's over, I'm retiring so I can do all the stuff I want to do without programming. Oh, it only took me ten years to discover that working more than 40 hours a week is a loser's game. There's no way you will get that time back and you miss out on a lot of more important stuff when you are working that much. In all those forty years, they kept trying to turn me into a manager but I refused. There's no way I would do that when I could stay coding.

I just went through a learning experience with a recruiter who I could not understand. He bungled the whole thing (including setting up an interview with the employer but not with me) to the point that I wrote him an email saying I was no longer interested. He sent me an email saying "thanks for the response, how about this other opportunity". I told him to never send me another email or call me ever again. I've not heard from him since (yet).

An advisor at the local unemployment office told me that most contacts you get from headhunters are not for a job they actually have. They are just looking to add you to their database so their searches can match you to a future job more efficiently (for them). I've found this to be mostly true.

I'm in the same position (except I starting programming for a living forty years ago). I just need a couple of contracts to make it to retirement. I get all the same lame calls and emails that you do. I keep getting an ad for occupation therapists in Texas somewhere. (I'll forward it if you are interested.) Half the cold calls I get are from people who I cannot understand. I've started just ignoring them.

Let's see ... I was a junior in college and decided to take a FORTRAN programming class because I had heard about computers from a friend who was taking a COBOL class. That would make me .. uh .. 20 at the time. It was the class that made me decide to program for a living. Now I can hardly wait to stop doing it.

English and FORTRAN. I still speak English but I haven't used FORTRAN since about 1985.

Same here. There is a 500GB external hard drive in my desk at work right now with all the important stuff I would prefer not to lose. It's only there for off-site storage. I use Acronis Trueimage Home. I've used it for years. They had some problems a couple of releases ago but the current 2013 version is great. You can do file backups, partition backups or disk backups. Everything is easy to set up. Just before a new version comes out, you can find people selling it with a rebate that results in an almost zero price.

That's "cow-orker".