> If they didn't want it then they wouldn't have fought so long to keep it. Not a reasonable conclusion. On more than one occasion Microsoft has engaged in litigation to slow down the opposition, deplete their resources and demoralise them. Microsoft did this to Sybase while Microsoft Access was being prepared, and was caught very much on the back foot when it unexpectedly _won_ the rights to the source code for SQL Server. PeterW -------------------- If you can spell and use correct grammar for your compiler, what makes you think I will tolerate less?

100% reliant on shipments from Earth? That's not even close to true, for the moon at least. There are billions of tonnes of water ice as asteroids. A drone with some simple dirty reactors could use some of that water as reaction mass simply by heating it to steam in a hole - and the hole could be dug with the reactor on low. Once you have ample water ice orbiting the sun near the Earth the whole game changes. You can use it for reaction mass. You can crack it to oxygen and hydrogen with a platinum catalyst and UV radiation from the sun (pretty strong out there). That gives you ample thrust and reaction mass, plenty of air and water, ablative shielding, ice shielding for larger reactors and surplus hydrogen that's sure to be useful for something. Start mining metals on the moon instead of hauling them up out of the Earth's gravity well and it won't be long before you are in a position to build spaceships like battleships instead of soda cans. Not to mention a stronger military position since any missile would stagger slowly up out of the gravity well on an extremely predictable arc, unable to dodge if you throw rocks at it and with several days notice. By contrast, if you were really annoyed, a 50 tonne rock would be an extinction event for the groundhogs. Who knows, maybe that's what happened 65 million years ago. PeterW -------------------- If you can spell and use correct grammar for your compiler, why should I tolerate less?

New domains usually have immature configurations which means the chances of getting past defences are high. It's directly analogous to the immature immune system of a baby. Therefore spammers use watch for new domains and specifically target them. After they've been sharing ice-cream with the dog for a while it's much harder to invade. People crap on about the evil of spam but no-one will pay for the real solution, which is basically authenticated send combined with government issued e-stamps. The idea is that you accept unsolicited sources only when someone values your time, storage and bandwidth enough to pay for the privilege. An e-stamp is basically a digital certificate appertaining to the fully formed email. Since this includes your email address AND a send timestamp the e-stamp can only be used once, rather like a regular postage stamp. The point of this is not to provide govts with yet another tax scam, it's to screw up the economics of spam and drive the buggers out of business. That's why I also suggested accepting unstamped mail from known sources - it prevents govts from using this as a revenue gatherer.

PeterW -------------------- If you can spell and use correct grammar for your compiler, what makes you think I will tolerate less?

Crystal Reports is extremely well named - it's fragile and expensive, no sensible person would use it for anything but a very special occasion and it is typically bought by other people who don't have to look after it.

PeterW -------------------- If you can spell and use correct grammar for your compiler, what makes you think I will tolerate less?

Michael Martin wrote:

Is it just me? Or do any of you other wowsers out there think those are higher unacceptable lyrics to be broadcast to our kid sisters and children?

Even accepting your premise that semi refers to a partial erection, why should wise men not have erections? Why is it offensive to suggest that they might? If this is truly your opinion and you aren't just baiting people then you have correctly identified yourself as a wowser. Further, your interpretation is flawed. According to the lyrics, said wise men had a semi by the sea. Not three semis, just one. And they had it jointly. And it was significantly located by the sea. It's a semi-detached townhouse, which although still an erection, is more the bricks and mortar kind. Inside said domicile they got stoned all day, according to other lyrics. You can take offence at that, if you want to, although before you do it would be a good idea to find out how frankincense and myrrh were traditionally used.

PeterW -------------------- If you can spell and use correct grammar for your compiler, what makes you think I will tolerate less?

If I have two directional light sources A and B and I aim them diametrically opposed in a pure vacuum, and I observe in the direction of travel of the beam A, do photons of stream A travel at c or at 2c relative to photons of stream B? If I place the camera point C collinear but not between A and B, so that both streams are, for a short period, in a single observational frame of reference, are the photons constrained to travel at c/2 or does the fact that none of the photons from one of the beams will ever reach the observer provide them with a sort of quantum get-out-of-gaol-free-card, incidentally also releasing the other beam from the constraint? If we treat photons as field perturbation wavefronts in a fluid with a viscosity such that the wave travels at c, this certainly accounts for the constant velocity aspect, but it totally fails to explain the directionality. Imagining vacuum as a sea of contangent bubbles of potential kinda like valence shells, maybe photons don't travel but are absorbed and a new photon of the same energy emitted at the other side of each bubble.

PeterW -------------------- If you can spell and use correct grammar for your compiler, what makes you think I will tolerate less?

Terrorists won't but unfriendly foreigners will. The value of north american real estate would be so much higher were it fully furnished and untenanted. Dams, roads, electricity and water distribution systems, factories (presumably there are some left in the US) and all that sort of thing, but free of inconvenient americans. Just a little judicious bioengineering and all you have to do is go there on holidays and sniffle at them! You can even rationalise that if God objects he will send a sign in the form of a Great White Hanky. PeterW -------------------- If you can spell and use correct grammar for your compiler, what makes you think I will tolerate less?

Infrared is a lower energy color than red. But he asked about fire. Fire is an exothermic oxidation reaction that autothermocatalyses (is sped up by the heat it produces). In the absence of autothermocatalysis it isn't burning, it's rusting. Before this argument can be settled there must be agreement on the meaning of temperature with a strict, unambiguous definition of temperature. You will find this harder than it looks.

Your COBOL so fat, she got her own zipcode

The word for a programmer who doesn't understand threads is incompetent. The only difference in this regard between a win32 programmer and a VB programmer is that the former surprises me. -- modified at 6:49 Friday 23rd June, 2006 If you think this is harsh this is probably because you haven't just spent six months cleaning up a set of services written by people who used timer callbacks to achieve what might generously be called concurrency. In the end my boss caved in and said ok you can rewrite it from scratch. This took...a week including thorough unit testing with a variety of GSM devices (it's a comms protocol over SMS). It was out of QA and in production in a fortnight. There is half the code (500 lines down from 1100), it works properly under load instead of losing messages, it recovers from modem glitches properly and it's roughly 20 times faster. I am not a coding genius. I'm just competent.

Implants. How tacky, no, wait - How cool! I'll be able to slay seven with one blow or similar. I've been a bit lazy of late on account of it's too cold out in my gymnasium but as soon as it warms up you better believe I'll be back out there. I sleep better, I don't snore (snore? me? if it ever happened I was asleep at the time) and I have more energy. And then there are the conjugal perquisites. The only thing better than being wanted is being lusted after...

The angle between no points is NULL.

So exactly how much are you paying us for for coaching you through semester 3 of your IT degree? OK now that 've been nasty, congratulations on knowing you don't know and bothering to find out. Presentation is not without value but content is far more important. Here are some tips from an old hand (and you are paying me, by not producing crap design documents). These documents tell you

1. What you are building.
2. What you are not building (define the limits)
3. How it works.
4. Other systems (including people and their manual systems) with which it interacts what services and information all these systems provide to each other.

What you are building may break down into several end products. You describe these in terms of how the end-user will see them, eg

A system that allows up to three operators to go to the moon, stroll around in hard vacuum taking holiday snaps and then make it all the way back to Earth without dying.

That's the space race in a nutshell. It's easy to see whether the requirements have been fulfilled. Spacesuits, rockets, booster stage detachment explosive timers, none of these are objectives except insofar as they contribute to fulfilling the requirements. It's easy to get carried away especially when things are galloping along as they often do in the early stages of a project. How it works is a WIP (work in progress). It starts of as a thumbnail sketch of how you think you're going to put the system together, and is then revised in accordance with bright ideas and harsh realities. Another WIP document you should maintain is a Risk Assessment. Any unknown - all bright ideas, untried 3rd party components and external systems that may not conform to their documented capabilities - should be noted along with all of the things you don't know for certain and which have the potential to (technical term) bite you on the ass. Under no circumstances show the RA to your boss, s/he will panic. When you need to kill a poisonous bright idea from someone powerful, do an RA for it and show that to everyone. Unless you are on an as-long-as-it-takes timeline you will need to estimate. You can do this once you have a fairly detailed how-it-works (properly known as a Functional Specification). Get Microsoft Project or equivalent and learn how to use it. So good so far. The problem is that your estimate tells you the shortest time in which the project will complete if absolutely nothing

Take the case off the router and set a 20" room fan blowing directly on it. This will give you serious airflow. Ten years ago I cooked a HDD in a server due to too many drives and not enough airflow, and this solution dropped the temperature from literally blistering to merely bloodwarm.

Reflection.

Because nature and nurture conspire against them. Just this week I read a med sci piece on some bit of the brain that lights up like a christmas tree in autistic idiots savant and not at all in women, with blokes in the middle and nerdy engineers lighting up more than usual. That said, of the two (count them, two of forty) women in my computing course fifteen years ago, one was an oxygen thief and the other was so good it was scary. And she was a natural blonde with a radiant smile and a body to die for, with nice perky, oh wait wrong type of website. But you get the gist. I feel that we let down engineers everywhere when we failed to capture and clone her. Imagine, if you will, a world of hot chicks who like pizza, video games, programming computers and building gadgets, rode around on a trailbike... man, she even brewed her own beer! -- modified at 2:04 Thursday 22nd June, 2006