2A supporter and absolutist here. The problem with removing all of the guns is 1.) there's too damn many of them, and 2.) people intuitively understand that removing them is exactly the sort of tyranny the 2A was designed to prevent. I think the government will chip around the edges, but I'm not worried about losing my gun rights, including the ability to carry one concealed most everywhere. Canada, Australia and the UK have done us a favor by showing us the playbook ahead of time, and I think we'll be able to prevent it. In RE: reading books, being educated and unable to connect with other people. I think the problem might have something to do with the most studious among us being introverted by nature. There certainly are well educated communicators among us; they may be the exception rather than the rule, but they exist.

It is built in to Windows Explorer, but their implementation is clunky, and not suitable for everything I want to do with an unzipping tool. For example, with 7-Zip you can examine the contents of a single file without unzipping the entire archive. The 7-Zip compression format is more efficient (in terms of space, not CPU) than Zip, so you can pack more into an archive. Windows' implementation gives you only one zip format. Being that 7-Zip is free, there's no reason to not use it unless you feel it's just too complicated. Best, --Geoff

It could pretty easily happen here in Michigan too, but I think squirrel-based outages are more common.

I've been using SourceGear Diffmerge[^] for many years now. It's free and it works well on Windows, Linux and OSX. It will compare either files or folders of files.

I'm running a Pi-Hole here on a Pi Zero 2W, and another on my elderly dad's network on the same hardware. Although I use Brave and Ublock Origin, Pi-Hole makes a huge difference on mobile devices connected to my wireless LAN, and I would never go back to the Internet without ad-blocking. The ad-based revenue model for Internet content must change, and the only way to force that change is to employ technological countermeasures designed to thwart it. I'm cool with making micropayments to content providers for ad-free content as long as the costs are reasonable. No, I will not pay $9/month to your .com so I can have the privilege of viewing your ad-laced content. But I will pay a few Satoshis to read an article that piques my interest. I'm looking forward to a day where the advertising revenue model is dead; until then, I'll keep my Pi Hole, thanks.

I don't know your skill set at all, admittedly, but I personally am being inundated by recruiters after posting my resume to a couple of places. And the jobs look like they're quality jobs with decent pay and good benefits. I'm a .NET programmer with 30 years of industry experience, 7 in .NET specifically. The email is going crazy with interview requests. Give it a try, you've got nothing to lose.

The first computer I ever touched and "programmed" was a TRS-80, and I used it right in the Radio Shack store. The first real computer time I got was as a freshman in high school in 1981. They had five or six Commodore Pets; these were the generation with the full sized keyboard and the tape drive in a separate box. There were a couple of 8KB machines, a couple of 16K machines, and one "monster" with 32KB. They were in a room not much larger than an elongated walk-in closet. The print devices were converted teletype machines. Dad purchased a VIC-20 for us 3 kids (but it wound up being used mostly by me) at home; it must have been 1982. During the summer after my year in the 9th grade, my high school relocated from the city of Detroit to the suburbs. With the move came a new, greatly expanded computer lab. It still had the Commodore PETs, but it quickly started acquiring Commodore 64s. By this time I was starting to really ramp up my knowledge and understanding of programming, and it was pretty plain to see that the VIC-20s days were numbered. I did some odd jobs here and there and saved up the money to purchase a Commodore 64. The next two years multiplied my knowledge many times over; I got into assembly, Pascal, and decided to pursue a Computer Information Systems major when I graduated from high school. I went to my freshman year at college with a brand new Amiga 1000, and graduated after four years with my BA in CIS. It took awhile to get a job in the field, but I'm in year 28 or thereabouts of my software development career. So, I guess the machine that was "my C64" really was a C64. :)

What I use for this is Microsoft OneNote. Set up your categorization system in OneNote, then drag and drop the documents into new pages. You can drag the file right into the database, or "print" it into the database. I have been using OneNote to track important documents for years now, it works splendidly.

In 1979, at a Radio Shack store. It was 10 print "hello"; 20 goto 10 I was 11. My dad had been to a BASIC programming class for work, and he showed me what to do. --Geoff

CDP1802 wrote:

I would not hope to find 1000 of them in working condition on the entire planet. But are there really enough people around who are interested enough to pay such a price?

In short: no. $6000 can be translated as "I don't really want to sell it, but give me enough money to solve some of my financial problems and I'll part with it." Rare items have value when they're sought after by significant numbers of people. I wouldn't expect to find too many takers for such a device at the $100 price level, let alone $6000. Its day has passed, and unless you find someone who built his back in the 70s only to have it destroyed in a fire, you're very, very unlikely to find a market for one. I suspect most computers of that vintage follow the same trajectory my C-64 did: I couldn't part with it, so it spent the last 15 years I owned it in a box in my basement (stacked on top of the VIC-20). :laugh: Finally I needed to purge old crap (to make room for new crap! ;P) and they both went to a Freecycler. If you're attached to this thing and have the time and money to invest, by all means upgrade it. If money is not a problem, offer this guy $500 for his (he'll probably take it). If you can't see yourself doing either of the above, sell yours as spare parts to the guy who wants $6k for his, and move on with life. Personally, I'd find a different hobby. --Geoff

digital man wrote:

There are too many pointless pissing contests in the software world: ignore them and just try to be the most professional and pragmatic programmer you can be in whatever language/technology you choose to make a living from.

AMEN! I usually don't participate on programming forums because of the nonsense that goes on. Every time somebody says something, some pedantic fool takes him to task! You've said a mouthful. Thanks! --Geoff

Whoever told you that your wages are a form of "appreciation" needs to go back to Econ 101. A wage represents what you agree to sell your services for to your employer. It is a simple economic transaction. You give them something, and they pay you. The price is set by a couple of factors. One is the average market price for a person who performs this, or a similar job. The other is perceived value. An employer might offer more than the typical market rate to somebody that they think brings more to the table than just what is being asked for. Or they might offer less to somebody who doesn't quite fit the requirements, but shows some potential to grow into the job. Employers don't employ people to "appreciate" them with a paycheck. Employers employ people because they hope it furthers whatever business they are in, and they hope that they can make a profit on the investment they make in employing someone. It comes down to this: nobody owes you a job at any rate. $22/hour is all you could command under those particular circumstances, unless you successfully negotiate a higher rate. If you don't like the rate and consider it insulting, walk away politely. If you think there might be room for negotiation, then negotiate. But don't work under the misapprehension that your wages are anything other than what the employer judges your monetary worth is to their organization, because they're not. If you are ever fortunate enough to employ someone, you will realize just how foolish you are being, and you will eat the words you have written about how by an employer's standard people should be happy to work for $5/hour. Incidentally, young man, I *have* worked for $5 an hour, and at the time I was damn glad to get it. But I fearlessly predict that you will never employ anyone. Your attitude is completely wrong, and you would fail in any business venture unless you change it. And if you would work for free, congratulations. You've found a wonderful hobby. If you're lucky enough to turn it into compensation, you're ahead of the game. You don't know what the agency is selling to anyone, unless you work for the agency or have some type of connection to somebody there who does, so stop making that accusation. It's BS. --Geoff

I think your rate calculator is great! :-D

You won't get any abuse from me. I'm a software developer based in Detroit. I am acquainted with quite a few mechanical engineers and electrical engineers who work in the auto industry. The disciplines are not even remotely the same as software "engineering". A process engineer might be the closest analogue. Even then, I would hazard that the skill sets are still very different. A mechanical engineer has to know physics, the material he's working with (be it metal, plastic, wood, etc.), three-dimensional design, how to design a part to meet a cost target, assembly ease target, and serviceability target, among many other things. There is very little overlap with the sort of process "engineering" that a software developer does, and I think that the software design process tends to be less involved with so many different disciplines (such as metallurgy, etc.) as a mechanical engineer's process is. I do some pretty complex stuff, and the mechanical engineers are duly impressed when I can fix their computer issues in a matter of minutes. These are two highly technical fields, and people who are good in their field are deserving of the respect they tend to get. But "engineering" is a misnomer for what goes on in most software development shops; although I must admit I'm a bit hard pressed at the moment to coin a better term. As far as $22/hour is concerned, I would've jumped out of my socks for joy had someone offered me that in my first computer-related job. Even now, that's not a bad wage for a beginner. Can a good software developer make more as an employee? Sure, I make double that. But I wasn't worth that amount my first time out of academia. The OP ought to take a long, hard look at the career he's chosen if he thinks he somehow deserves an upper middle class lifestyle right out the gate. It's going to take hard work, my friend, and lots of it. You want quick money go sell meth. Anybody can do that. :omg: If you want to earn a comfortable living in a job that challenges you and helps keep your mind nimble, then work in the software industry, but don't expect to ever become wealthy.

Drool on myself. Wait for supper. Grab the nurse's breast.

If the performance is that much better, it doesn't show up in casual use. I've been using Chrome since they made it available last week. I'm a Gmail user, and I do my fair share of surfing. It isn't much faster, if at all. The feature set is nice, but I'm already hankering for a couple of Firefox extensions that aren't here for Chrome yet. Foxmarks chief among them. I have had significant trouble viewing Flash video. Sometimes it just hangs the browser and doesn't work. I've seen numerous error messages about the Flash plugin having crashed. BTW, I'm using a cable modem that peaks at about 4MBit/sec (on a good day!) and have been running Chrome on both a Vista as well as an XP laptop. The Vista machine is a Compaq 8510W with the Intel Centrino and 4GB of Ram. So I'm fairly well equipped as far as hardware and connectivity go.

I've been doing it exclusively for HP since 2004. Wouldn't trade it for a desk anywhere! :)

It's an exceedingly *bad* idea. If you're handy enough to clean and gap the plug, then you're handy enough to fix the rope start, it is not a complex mechanism. I recently learned through experience that it is worth the $7 or so to get proper recoil cord instead of substituting whatever you may have on hand; the stuff is readily available from the big box home improvement stores in the U.S. (Lowes, etc.) The engine will probably fire and quite possibly run, if everything is set up properly. That puts you in a position with your hands near the turning blade with potentially as much as ~6hp driving it. It is not a safe idea. Don't try running it without the blade, either. The blade provides the mass the engine uses as a flywheel, and all sorts of unpredictable stuff will happen if the engine starts to run without it. Chances are very good that if the engine has compression and the crankshaft is not bent then you will be able to make a working proposition out of it with minimal expense. Do things safely and correctly and you'll have your health so you can enjoy mowing the lawn! :-) --Geoff

John, My four-person shop uses CVS. CVS is a predecessor to Subversion and is available on Windows and Un*x platforms. There is a TortoiseCVS plugin available that makes using CVS a pretty easy proposition from the Windows Explorer. Icons with a green highlight are checked in -- or at least, are the same as they were when checked out; icons with an orange hue have been modified. You use CVS as follows: check out a module, which makes a copy in your local CVS 'sandbox'. Edit it. Check it back in. If all goes well, nobody else has changed the same module, and you're done. If somebody else was working on that module and checked their changes in first, the client alerts you, and makes a local copy of the checked in version in your CVS sandbox with a slightly different file name. You can then use your favorite diff tool to figure out what needs to be altered to make the two versions one again, and then after you're done editing, you check it in. (My current favorite diff tool is DiffMerge.) If you want to make sure your copy of the module is current, say before you make changes, you perform a CVS update on it, and the tool will automatically rev the copy in your sandbox. Using the TortoiseCVS tool, you can get a chart of all the versions of the code, and perform diffs between them to see what changed where. We primarily develop in both Perl as well as C#. We're also using CVS to store our documentation, our Makefile, some small GIFs used in the web pages, etc. We have also used it in the past to store a 30+MB MSI installation file, so it can handle big stuff if need be. The big thing with this tool, and I'm sure with others like it, is the preparation you have to do before you implement it. I personally am on my second implementation of the CVS repository, because I didn't want to live with all of the mistakes I made during the first implementation. These mistakes were really ideas that seemed good at the time, but later proved to be a hassle. For example, before we went to automated builds of all our code using make and msbuild, I was manually building each program, and storing it in a separate subdirectory in the CVS repository, and then copying it to a \binaries subdirectory under the MSI CVS module. That was more work than the small benefit of having the built binaries in the repository was worth! Our current repository structure looks a little like this: \ --Server modules -----Module S-A -----Module S-B -----Module S-C.... --Client Modules -----Module C-A -----Module C-B

First saw a personal computer in a Radio Shack store somewhere around 1978-79. First got to use a computer when I started high school in 1981 -- Commodore PET. I was 13 that year. :laugh: First owned a VIC-20 around 1982. 3KB of RAM, cassette tape mass storage, and I was really living! I learned BASIC on this machine and the PETs at school. We had old teletype machines at school we used for printers. Noisy! First owned a Commodore 64 in ~1984. I remember paying $200 for it, using money I earned painting a basement. My parents gave me the 1541 Floppy drive for Christmas. (The VIC and the C-64 are still boxed up in the original boxes in my basement!) Learned Pascal (KMMM) and 650x assembly on this machine. Believe it or not, I didn't actually get a PC-compatible machine (a used 386) until 1994 or so. I had been working as a sysadmin for several years at that point and couldn't afford a new machine. In between the C-64 and my 386, I had an Amiga 1000, which I used all through college. What a ride it's been! :)