Re: power failure, pain doctor, stuff like that

[Brian <http://www.cs..edu/~b>]

Oh yes, I know Ian.

The great thing about software is that you can be a kid and write software and 
you don't need any capital beyond the price of a personal computer.  Not like 
having to build a factory to make a physical product.  Lots of pre-OS X Mac 
software was written by teenagers.  Did you ever use a pre-X Mac?  Do you 
remember Boomerang?  That was a kid.  So was StuffIt, which was the zip-esque 
archiver for those old Macs.

What does it mean to "invent" a cryptocurrency?  Wasn't the inventing all done 
by Bitcoin?  You see how ignorant I am. :/

Outlook is well known to be horrible.  Astonishingly bad, even for Microsoft 
software.  But all the mail clients I know of can interface with your Outlook 
mailbox these days.

> On Feb 3, 2024, at 2:19 PM, Robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert> wrote:
> 
> To: Brian <http://www.cs..edu/~b>
> 
>> From: Brian <http://www.cs..edu/~b>
>> Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2024 02:12:08 -0800
>> 
>> Every organization has its own quaint traditions.  One of the
>>  EECS ones is that when we get an email announcement
>> because someone on the faculty gets an award (we have two or three
>> FRSes, the only one that really makes me envious) or dies (as this
>> morning, a long-retired one), everyone feels the need to Reply-All
>> with "Congratulations!" or "That's too bad!" as the case may be.
>> Really annoying.  Tempts me to organize email by threads, although
>> for all other cases that's not what I want at all.
> 
> I was very disappointed when I was forced (since Microsoft doesn't offer a
> mail client for Linux) to start using the web version of Outlook that,
> although it has threading, it is total crap.  I have learned to read email
> without threading, but I still miss it.
> 
>> And, I mean, lambda calculus kids are the ones I'm most
>> likely to discover, but for all topics there exists a kid who knows
>> all about it.  I have read about two different teenagers now who've
>> built working fusion reactors in their garages, which requires not
>> only knowing the physics, but knowing how to maneuver through the
>> bureaucracy to be able to get adequate quantities of radioactive
>> materials.
> 
> I remember hearing about the kid (I see here that he was 19) who
> invented the Ethereum cryptocurrency and being blown away that a kid
> could've come up with that.  (I also see here that, funnily, he worked
> with Ian Goldberg, who used to be at many of the  Linux Users
> Group meetings I went to in the 90s.  Perhaps you knew him.)
> 

>