What was the name of that slide rule manufacturer that made SRs with emphasis on the requirements of electrical engineers? They also made a smaller amount (about one-tenth the amount they did for electrical engineers) for *electronic* engineers but I can no longer recall their name. Very - *very* - rarely one comes up for sale on Ebay for
*astronomical* money. Anyone know?+1. Go to distrowatch.com and choose a flavour to suit you. It's free. "Once you Slack you'll never go back" as they say. And it's true! :)
Windows is fine if you don't mind the world and his wife knowing all your private business.
Yeah, I see some of that in larger companies. IT doesn't have much of a clue or time to deal with individual problems, so they do mass upgrades in order to hide their lack of expertise. The logic is that actually fixing a machine is risky, while replacing it is guaranteed to work. That leaves the learning curve in the hands of their users, not IT. Good system.
At the same time, some companies have an equipment pool. That's collection of machines to swap out with broken machines when someone complains. I did that for a while, with predictable results. Users did not like the replacement machines even if they were better or faster because they had setup everything the way they wanted it and had to do some learning. Of course, the spare machine pool tended to become the worst machines in the company. Budgeting for replacement spare machines was way down the priority list.
Oh, and you're right about "waiting for them in the morning". Computers are best done under cover of darkness. I'm glad that I'm not doing that any more.
However, this rant did not come from a luser with all the alleged benefits of having a IT department and help desk. It's from a lone user who has to fend for himself as best he can. There's no budget or time for upgrades. Learning something new can be an expensive proposition.
Most help desks are outsourced to countries where English is a 2nd language and technical expertise is taught to the support techs by the users. I talk to a tech support person perhaps twice per year. However, last Friday, I was forced to do so because I was fumbling over bugs while installing a Xerox Workcenter 6605dn MultiMalFunction color laser printer. Nice machine but I ran into 2 bugs in the firmware and 3 bugs in the supplied software. After 45 minutes on the phone, all of the bugs had been verified but not fixed. The tech was from China and seemed highly competent. It was difficult to tell because I could barely decode his version of English. He used Logmein to take over the desktop and try to find a solution. I was furiously taking notes on what he was doing, but it still took me another 30 minutes to undo the damage. It took me another 2 hours to contrive workarounds and make the printer mostly usable. As far as I'm concerned, the 45 mins of support and the 30 minutes of damage control were total wastes of my time. So much for help desk, tech support, and such.
Have you tried using a Chromebook? That's the way they work. Many of the really cool programs was web apps, stored on a remote server. When there's an update, it's on the server and the user is never bothered. Everything is synced to the cloud, so if there's data that must be restored after a crash, it's ready to go. I now have 3 Chromebooks that are essentially interchangeable and as far as software is concerned, identical. If I were to "powerwash" (clear out everything) a Chromebook, or buy a new one, I need only login with my Gmail account, which starts an automagic sync from the cloud. My new Chromebook is ready to use in a few minutes (depending on internet speeds). Of course, there are some security implications and potential problems. I managed to infect my machine with some malware (browser hijack via a Chrome extension) from Facebook. I was busy and didn't want to clean it out manually. So, I just "powerwashed" the machine and restoring from the cloud. Nothing was lost and I was back in business in about 10 mins.
I have two monitors, two keyboard, and two mice on both my home and office machines. The office has a KVM switch, but it only handles the PS/2 type devices. I managed to get two identical keyboards for the home, but the office keyboard are sufficiently different to drive me insane.
Out of curiosity, I sometimes ask customer if they know how to juggle. I've noticed that those who can juggle, can also handle keyboard changes much better than those who cannot.
There was once a trend to have the selection of menu choices limited by a user configured basic, normal, and advanced. It didn't work very well because there was always some obscure setting that need to be changed, but was only available on the advanced menu system. I would be elated if some industry representatives would gather in the proverbial smoke filled room, and settle on a limited vocabulary of perhaps 100 words to describe actions and features found in most software. I'm getting rather irritated with Preferences, Settings, Options, and Features used on menus, all of which mean the same thing. Maybe some day I'll decode the difference between Extensions and Plug-ins. The graphics and video editing software is the worst, where menu terms are a mix of jargon from the movie industry, art, computer, legal, and contrived terms. Etc...
However, menu design is just a small part of the problem. The real difficulty is that learning computers is really about adding a few hundred words to one's vocabulary. For tech types such as most of us, that's easy. For the GUM (great unwashed masses), it's nearly impossible. Worse, the jargon expands exponentially as every company tries to obtain a marketing edge with proprietary enhancements, proprietary buzz words, and of course, proprietary user interfaces. I can go on vacation for a few weeks and return to face a boat load of new acronyms, terms, jargon, and buzzwords that need to be digested. It never ends, or maybe it will end when computahs become an extension of ourselves (cyborg) where they can be just as stupid, erratic, and irrational as we are.
Maybe if I go to sleep now, it will all be better when I wake up.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
One problem with Distrowatch is that if you pick an obscure distribution, it just might disappear. At the moment, there are 826 distributions listed: My guess(tm) is about 250 are considered active.
Never mind the OS. Just sniff your outgoing router traffic and see how many programs and applications "phone home" and collect information on what you're doing. Most just send your serial number or unique ID on startup. Others collect usage info and DRM data. For example:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Pickett made a series of aluminum-body slide rules for both electrical and electronic engineers. The "electronics" versions I know of were the N16 and N535, both with scale sets designed by Chan Street. The N16 tends to be somewhat pricey on eBay.
The simpler (and more cheaply made) N515 was sold en masse with the CIE electronics correspondence-learning course. The scales on this one are simply screen-printed, not "machine-ruled" into the metal as they are on the better rules, and I learned to my dismay that they can come off if you try to clean the rule body with Simple Green and Water. Fortunately this one is as common as dirt and isn't expensive.
Hemmi, in Japan, made bamboo-body sliderules with scale sets for both electrical and electronic engineers. The 156 was targeted towards electrical engineers (it has the vector/hyperbolic scales). The 255 and was for "expert electrical engineers" and the 256 was "for electric communications". The 255, and the "chemical engineers" 257, seem to be rare and expensive.
Yep. A reader of this newsgroup sent me a clue that CIE sold those: Lots of different models, but mostly Hemmi sold under the Pickett name.
Close look at the 515-T electronics slide rule: More like an electronics cheat sheet printed on a slide rule.
Not worth too much these days:
More electronic slide rules (with calculation examples):
I must lead a sheltered life because I have never seen any of those. It took me about 5 years to fight my way through college. The first 4 were all slide rules. The last year was slide rule plus a TI SR10 with the then amazing square root button. Only much later did I get a real scientific calculator.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I've this Forth (ciforth) that runs on Linux and Windows.
To my surprise, I only needed to switch the assembler code of the Linux code that does a system call and the numbers of the system calls to get a working system on OSX. 1] My thorough testing reveals a couple of details, nothing much. (If you open a non-existing file, is it automatically created?) This testing took a day on my brothers Apple. The feeling was just familiar Unix. At no point I couldn't do what I needed to do around the test. Programs like vi are just there.
This is a compiler kernel, so all libraries just work from there.
(Interested? See
-- Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters. albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
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