Posts by Gene Cash 3858 posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
Exactly.
The "flying taxi" is already here, and it's called a "helicopter" and Uber already sell rides... at least in San Francisco and London.
However, they're really maintenance intensive and hard to fly, so if someone can come up with a better alternative, I'm all for it.
> At a company I used to work for
This sounds like exactly the plot of the 3 or 4 books I have discussing the downfall of the British motorcycle industry. I believe at one point, one of the engine manufacturers had a guy with a special stick pushing on the lathe so it would machine proper crankshafts.
Along came the Japanese who ate their lunch.
I got a TRS-80 Model I Level I for Christmas in 1979. I remember upgrading it to Level II BASIC and 16K was something on the order of $250. My mother was an IBM 370 coder and she was not convinced I needed that huge amount of memory!!
I went to Atari computer camp in Asheville, NC, where I met Dr. Alan Kay, and since I knew how to code 6502 with the Assembly Cartridge, he offered me an internship when I graduated from high school. I graduated in late '83. Oops. Oh well. I went on to wrangle dual-CPU CompuPro S-100 boxes running networked with Arcnet for my 1st job.
I just Googled it and apparently my parents somehow paid an ungodly sum for me to attend that. This was held at the Asheville School. Asheville is a beautiful place, and I went back for several of the Honda Hoots held there.
One of the guys at camp with me was Italian and came over on the Concorde. One night the school cafeteria offered spaghetti and he was really looking forward to it. I warned him that 1) it was American "Italian" food and 2) it was school cafeteria food. I still remember the look on his face at first forkful... which he immediately spit out.
> editing xorg.conf
Before EDID and all that auto-configure magic, you had to calculate the dot clock line for your particular monitor and graphics card. This was a line that described the timings and resolution for the display.
And yes, if you screwed it up, it would kill the monitor. Since a nice Sony Multisync was a big wodge of change, you checked the calculation about a dozen times before actually trying it.
Nowadays, you just cable shit up and turn it on, and it just works.
We all know you can't dictate a schedule. It will take as long as it needs to take, and it take as much money as it takes to buy all the things and pay all the people.
The reason the schedule is a row of dominoes is that each one builds on the other. If a test fire goes titsup, then you need to stop and investigate why. If an engine produces less thrust than expected or part A does not talk to part B, ditto.
This is why Musk is not afraid to break things. He does it "mostly right" and learns to do it differently as necessary.
NASA expects perfection the first time, because Congress expects perfection the first time, and that costs time and money.
Google shat on a bunch of my friends, insisting they weren't using their real names, suspending/deleting their accounts and wanting driver's licenses, birth certificates and crap like that to reinstate them.
With an unusual name like mine, I can see Google doing the same to me, so I moved to Fastmail. I sure as hell am not sending them personal documentation. They're not the bank or a government agency. Fuck 'em.
Yes, from personal experience, i have to tell you most people are not aware of what Facebook is. They have no idea their personal life is under a microscope.
I have had to sit down personally and individually with all my relatives to explain this in detail, using small words. Sure, most of my friends understand, because they're computer savvy. The normal man in the street is not, and is not aware of Faecesbook's slurping.
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This is the meat of the issue. Is this going to be another Google playtoy to be abandoned when it grows bored? Their track record certainly discourages me from contributing or buying their products.
I only have an Android because Apple is worse and Microsoft is gone.
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