Six Flags and Cedar Fair Merger

Jeff said:

People who refer to Microsoft as "M$" are douchebag anti-fanbois.

So says the company man. ;) What happened to the Jeff who used to be proud not to own a suit? Now he's been replaced by this corporate, white-picket-fence having, married, breeder. Shame, shame! (just kidding of course)

RideMan said:
Nobody *admits to* eating at White Castle. Lots of people eat there, but nobody admits to it.
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Not true, Harold and Kumar made it cool to get White Castle....if you're high that is. ;)

And on the subject of Five Guys and In-N-Out, I find both of them vastly overrated, especially in the case of In-N-Out. I dont know if it was just a case of anticipointment or what, but when we were in NoCal several years ago, we ate there a couple of times and I dont see what the big deal is. The burgers are okay but not great and the fries were just not my type.

My wife does like Five Guys though. I'm in the "meh" catagory

The chain that is rapidly expanding and will be national in a few years is Culvers. Ummmm, frozen custard and butterburgers...

Oh, I had a butterburger at Culvers when I visited my brother in Michigan. Yum-my!

^^^ I was also 'anticipointed' with In-N-Out. I didn't think it was that much better than Steak & Shake. I realize that's blasphemy to anyone from CA or NV, but if S&S had a secret menu and funny/vague names for topping combinations, it really wouldn't be much different.(Don't get me wrong, I like S&S, and therefore also like INO, but I didn't have an orgasm while eating my Double Double.)

^^ I hope that's true. Culvers is awesome!

Someone earlier mentioned Meijer. They seem reluctant to move into northeast Ohio, perhaps because Giant Eagle is pretty much everywhere for groceries, and Walmart for hypermarkets. Years ago I emailed Meijer corporate, and I got a response saying they weren't yet interested in moving this far east.

2Hostyl said:
So says the company man. ;) What happened to the Jeff who used to be proud not to own a suit? Now he's been replaced by this corporate, white-picket-fence having, married, breeder. Shame, shame! (just kidding of course)

Still don't own a suit. :) I hear if you show up to an interview in a suit, they'll laugh at you as an obviously poor fit to work there. I've seen SteveB a couple of times, and he wasn't wearing a suit either. Or throwing chairs. ;)

Carrie M. said: Oh, I had a butterburger at Culvers when I visited my brother in Michigan. Yum-my!

Who ordered the well-done coronary with cheese?

The only thing KMart did by buying Sears is put Kenmore and Craftsman tools in KMart stores. There is a KMart in my neighborhood that is an absolute DIVE. They have NOTHING there-the cashiers (all 2 of them) are at least 70, half their stuff is out of stock and the store looks dirty. As for Sears idk how the heck they even stay in business, I never see anyone in the stores ever.

I liked In and Out but have to agree that I think Steak and Shake is much better. Culvers ROCKS! :)
I dont know if I'm more excited about going back to San Diego in May for Knotts & Disney again or for Carl Jrs, Claim Jumper and Jack in the Box! :)

Jo
Lifetime Raptor flights: 2175 :)

Once there was a software company whose business was that of creating add-on software to be used in conjunction with major products of another software company.

The problem with that kind of business is that when you advertise your product, you have to acknowledge the intellectual property of the other business if you use their names or trademarks in your advertising materials.

Their solution was to include a disclaimer at the bottom of their ad stating, "Apple is a registered trade mark of You Know Who."

One of the utilities sold by this company was a BASIC compiler which was a direct (and somewhat superior) competitor to a compiler provided by yet another software company. It was only necessary to refer to this company indirectly, therefore to avoid impinging on the company's trademark, this company was sometimes referred to as, "TinySquishy".

That said, both "TinySquishy" and "You Know Who" are now major players in the world of computer hardware and software. Meanwhile, the "Siblings of Snoopy" are all but forgotten, along with their cool set of floppy disk care warning icons

A cautionary tale, perhaps? :)

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The Beagle Bros rocked. I still have a Peek/Poke chart around here somewhere.

I miss BASIC. I wish Windows still had real DOS -- or even the fake DOS of a few versions back -- so I could play around with QBASIC. Of course, I'm a troglodyte that technology left behind a long, long time ago.

Brian: Who said anything about Beagle Bros? :)

Mike: At least you're not the one with four lines of ASCII artwork in his signature... :)
Actually, I've kind of kept up, but it doesn't even feel like programming anymore, and besides I don't have time for it. Too busy riding roller coasters.

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At least you're not the one with four lines of ASCII artwork in his signature...

I teach the intro programming course for majors. My lecture notes on linked lists? ASCII art. I have a board of core memory around here somewhere with magnets you can still see with the naked eye, too. You have to look close (and I'm getting to the point that I have to put on my reading glasses) but they're there.

BASIC sucked for anything non-trivial. It was too hard to manage code, with those silly line numbers and what not.

Wisdom from someone who apparently never did anything non-trivial in BASIC.

The only real problem with trying to do stuff that pushes the limits of the hardware in BASIC is that because it is interpreted, it is SLOW, and because of the way memory is mismanaged, in Applesoft you had to frequently force garbage collections if you did a lot of string manipulation (I always did...) to keep the machine from simply freezing up once in a while to rebuild the string database.

It just takes some coordination and discipline on the part of the programmer(s). You modularize the code, define inputs and outputs, leave yourself room (and keep a copy of GPLE handy) and the only real limitation was 324 tokens on each of 64,000 lines. Given that you only had about 30k of code space to work with (including variable storage and graphic display pages), you could not run out of useful line numbers before running out of memory. But almost anything you do can be handled by smaller modules, which can be easily swapped in and out; the trick is that you have to know the tricks for passing variables between independent program segments. Heck, I was to the point where I had a library of short routines, mostly for interface I/O, that I could import into whatever I was writing. I knew what the inputs were, I knew what the outputs were going to be, and I knew what block of variable names I had reserved for libraries.

Q1$="{default response}:R$(0)="smart":R$(1)="stupid":PRINT "Answer this question: ";:GOSUB 60010:PRINT:PRINT Q1$;" is a pretty ";R$(Q1$="{default response}");" answer!"

Of course the absence of ELSE makes for some interesting workarounds, like the one above... :)

And for real trivial stuff? There is some one-off data manipulation where I can upload the source text file to a server, boot the old machine, download the source text file, write the manipulation code, run it, upload the output file, and download the output to the modern machine in less time than it takes to declare base classes and type variables. Well, okay, maybe not THAT fast. But still, when you're that close to coding "on the metal" you get pretty good at it.

I'm not going to say it was better than what we've got today, because it wasn't. But it wasn't as bad as the computer science geeks would have you believe. They're just jealous because they were all brought up on PASCAL.

]N$="--Dave Althoff, ][":PRINT N$:PRINT S$

--Dave Althoff, ][

RideMan said:
Wisdom from someone who apparently never did anything non-trivial in BASIC.

Come on, Dave, seriously? That's a b.s. accusation and you know it. I hit those memory ceilings more times than I could count.

The only reason basement TRS-80/Apple II/Atari 8-bit/Commodore nerds (and I was all of the above) ever used some flavor of BASIC was because it came with the machine, and free was as much as we could afford. There was no tooling to speak of and every variation of the language was verbose and ugly.

I can remember writing in BASIC almost 30 years ago with a friend on an original IBM PC that my dad wasn't using. It was all we had. Had a PASCAL class in college but don't remember much of it now.

My son started in a computer camp a few years ago and they started kids on BASIC. All of the stuff I learned in high school came back as I talked with him about what he was doing.

No more of a B.S. accusation than accusing someone of being a d-bag just because they type M$. I use that all the time, and I'm anything but an anti-fanboy, typing as we speak on a Windows PC. I like Microsoft, and I also like saving time by only typing 2 characters :).

Just Sayin... :)

Yeah, because being a douchebag is just like having a qualified opinion. And no, making a smiley face doesn't make it better.

Darnit.. Im pissed I came in late on this thread now. Especially with the mention of the Commie 64. I ignored this thread because I thought it was still silly CF/SF merger speculation. You think i would learn that we dont always stick on topic..

Oh well next time..

Way to go from CF/SF to machine language/basic though.

This has to be the most off topic forum in a while. How is it that a news article comes out speculating that two major players in the industry may be merged, and it turns into a discussion about burger joints. Futhermore how does an off topic discussion about burger joints become a discussion about computer programming?

At any rate, here is a news article explaining why cedar fair is 95% likely to be sold to Apollo.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idAFN1712716620100217?rpc=44