No, boss, I'm not playing Minecraft. Minecraft is where I run VMs on the desktop now A developer who goes by "Delta2Force" has created a Minecraft mod that runs virtual machines on virtual computers built inside Minecraft. The mod is called "MCVmComputers" and is yours for the downloading on GitHub. The odd twist on virtualization relies on Oracle's free VirtualBox desktop hypervisor and the Fabric Minecraft …
Well, yes... this project actually started as a minimum chip 6502 design, but that led to wondering whether a serial flash chip could emulate parallel rom at a (much) lower speed - around 1MHz, and that led to just putting the memory on a Nucleo Arm, and that led to putting the processor on the Arm as well...
What the hell, I'm an engineer. I can stop any time I like... can't I?
Quote:
What the hell, I'm an engineer. I can stop any time I like... can't I?
The short answer is no... 40 odd years of experience have taught me that... ever more fiendish devices for killing luckless managers/operato ... oops.... for producing widgets ever faster have proved that to me
The long answer is you can stop any time you like, but you really have to tell yourself you want to stop
E e e engineering... I can hhhandle it.. cant I?
" I'll obviously need something to fill my time..."
Friends, neighbours, acquaintances will find plenty of needs for your knowledge, skills, and problem solving. As a colleague said shortly after retiring - "I don't know how I ever found time to do a day-job".
What has become obvious is that apparently the majority of people in the UK have no technical expertise. The "throw-away" culture means they never even look at the simplest of problems. On the other hand - much is not made to be repaired. Home car maintenance seems to be - at most - topping up the windscreen washers.
A neighbour illustrated that yesterday. He needed a longer screw than had been supplied with some new drawer knobs. He was showing me a No 10 countersunk woodscrew - and wanted "one like this with a flat tip".
He eventually fetched the screws that had come with the knobs. How could anyone think a No 10 countersunk wood screw was the same as an M4 flanged button head machine screw (bolt)?
This morning he was thinking of buying inappropriate M4 countersunk Pozi screws (bolts. He didn't think the ideal ebay M4 flanged button head ones suitable - because they were Allen key rather than Pozi drives.
As an almost retired engineer, he probably owns his own property ... so one correct answer could be "more than I could ever count in my lifetime" ...
If you want to know how many shed you own, 1 hectare = 1.0e+55 shed (or 1 acre = ~4.047e+54 shed, for the enlightened few who still farm in the English speaking world).
"I made my peace with simulation hypothesis a long time ago [...]"
Any hypothesis that requires a superior being (or similar) to have created our universe - is basically "turtles all the way up". It invites infinite layers of nested creators above our universe.
At some point the "creator" recursion argument is usually sidestepped by saying some self-verifying ideological layer above our universe "just is, always has been, ineffable". For which Occam's Razor says that our universe - and its possible alternative energy phases - "just is, always has been, ineffable" - with no creator fashioned to suit human hubris, insecurity, and ignorance.
I wonder what else what might come out of this period?
I've started working on some "projects" since the pandemic kicked in too.
Reminds me of that famous quote "in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced..."
Well, at least the cuckoo clock actually works and does something useful.
Leonardo was a sci-fi author totally lacking the mathematical and engineering skills to make his machines working. Michelangelo reached the same skills of the Greek and Roman masters of 1500 years before - so actually nothing really new.
The whole Renaissance is over-hyped. It's people more or less understand paintings and sculptures, or Leonardo sci-fi drawings - but most of them don't understand mathematics and real science, although its true that during Renaissance ancient books with forgotten knowledge were sought and techniques re-discovered or re-imported from Arab sources.
The real innovations came with Galileo - who built the real scientific approach and changed the world much more than Leonardo, Raffaello, and Michelangelo put together. And without Galileo understanding of the pendulum, there would have not been any cuckoo clock...
They are apparently not all that rare. My PCB-based one came from a yard-sale, where a friend ran across it in a box of "Free items". He remembered that I had been asking for one to serve as a "second witness" while reviving my wire-wrap one and grabbed it for me.
My Jolt, OTOH, was not so lucky. Stored in a shed, it succumbed to some chickens that had flown the coop and decided that shed was a great new clubhouse, and the Jolt an acceptable "litter-box" or whatever euphemism chickens use.
I have a double-handful of unassembled KIM-1 kits. Used to find 'em for 50 cents or a buck at garage/yard sales here in SillyConValley, back in the '90s ... at the time I was looking for old amplifier kits[0], but I usually bought early computer kits anyway.
[0] '50s & '60s, Eico, Dynaco, Scott, Heath, McIntosh ...
This post has been deleted by its author
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
