Download the free stellurium application, actually, you're on slashdot so you probably already have it. Start playing with the date tab and watch the north sky. It's pretty cool. I did this a few years back, I think Polaris was about 3 degrees off of true north back when Columbus was sailing. Neat!

I remember, way back in the day, putting together a mac for a broke friend of mine. Another friend knew one of the owners of Bare Bones, made a phone call, and they donated a color monitor to the project. Class act all around. (And yeah, to this day I'm still a customer!)

A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion says, "Because if I do, I will die too."

The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp "Why?"

Replies the scorpion: "Its my nature..."

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fit.slashdot.org%2Fcommen... - posted that 10 years ago...

Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use of the word "spam" to describe unwanted electronic correspondence.

Please, lets ignore the accent issue. It doesn't prove bad teaching, just that the teacher learned English in a different place than you did.

I attended and graduated from MIT. One of my professors had a thick accent and it was distracting. He also had a Nobel prize.

Ours cost about $80 a year and is open on Saturdays. We rotate our backup drives into it monthly. Yeah, weekly would be better...

If you're just starting out you're going to be learning a lot, reading blogs, reading stackoverflow, and there is far more Obj-C out there than Swift now. So you since you want fast, not best, Obj-C is the correct choice for you. Not necessarily for everybody, but for you.

I have a box in the attic. I occasionally use them as postcards.

I write software for a living. And yes, we all test our code, unit tests, regression test, automated testing, QA departments. And we still have bugs in our code. And you want to shine a computer controlled laser into my eye? PS: a friend of mine had it done about a decade ago. We've lost touch so I can't say how it worked out for him, but I do recall him sketching out on a bar napkin the areas that needed improvement. He was going in for a touch up since the doctor's office called and said the new software was in. No thanks...

My ex-brother-in-law is a wildlife biologist. He's done a lot of field work. He told a story at Christmas a few decades back. He took his 7 year old son out hiking is some deep woods. Being concerned if something went wrong he put a radio tracking collar on him, just part of the stuff in his lab. I asked him how it worked. He deadpanned, "I hated shooting him with the tranquilizer dart from the helicopter." I almost lost my egg-nog.

kids? I still have a box of Hollerinth cards somewhere.

I have no annoying co-worker's voices to annoy me. I put the music loudly, very, when I want it, I had dead silence when I want it.

Headphones? Give me a 10" sub-woofer instead.

ooooo, 16 bits, how fancy! :- ) But seriously, fire up the old beast now and then....,

Thank you!

I was out on the road and couldn't respond. Glad you did for me.

Yes, I did OS X before then. And before then it was MacOS 9 and then 8. And before that was System 7. And before that was System Software 6. Before that was SunOS (not Solaris, and MassComp, remember them?). Before that was VMS and before that was RXS-11M. Before that I was at MIT, best one I remembered was called Q on Perkin-Elmer hardware. You had to call out "Ok to to compile" before compiling. Of course some ITS and a smidge of Lisp machines. Then it was PDP-8 assembly language. Oh wait, one more. A Frieden Flexo-writer. Yes, that means I have cut and pasted with scissors and glue.

Now get offa my lawn.