Posts by Mike 16 1433 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
If the author's VCS had only four switches, it was probably not "original" (Heavy Sixer) which
had a sextet of switches. Perhaps an younger sibling had "salvaged" a few parts for a Science Fair project?
Meanhwile, I "got the message" about VCS popularity when my home was burgled. The thieves took the time to disconnect my VCS from the (17 inch diagonal CRT) television.
left the VCS, took the TV. (1984 or so). Great way to convey "OK, Boomer"
Long ago, I worked in the building housing my University's EE department. We were informed that ours was the second worst building on campus for Health and Safety
(not surprising when it housed lab equipment for folks whose future would include cutting edge distribution gear, as well as at least one generator that looked old enough for Tesla himself to have wound it)
Turns out that the _worst_ building housed the student health clinic, and the office of the campus fire marshal, who had conducted the evaluation.
IIRC (left UseNet in 2000), most substantial conversations (as opposed to quick shots of "first" or "plonk"),
were Interspersed. Not having to start a major research project to figure out the context of a "yes" is
one of my favorite memories of the days. Compare and contrast to the "modern" mailing list which
relies on "nesting" every email in a thread in a "reverse chronological" order. At least so far they
have kept the order of the letters of each quoted copy reading left to right.
BTW: Green Card Lottery was not the first SPAM I encountered on UseNet, but it was certainly the
first to (seemingly) _intend_ to annoy pretty much everybody on UseNet.
I'm torn about "re-upping". I got so much free time back in exchange for the groups I had read.
I certainly could not get my old "name" back, as it was a bang-path. A while back IIRC bang-paths
were still part of the email RFCs. They are/were not handled by the likes of Google and Comcast.
Good times. Now if only I could get things done _and_ graze my groups (mostly comp.*)
Been done:
https://undergroundgardens.com/about-us/
The Forestiere Underground Gardens, in Fresno California.
IIRC, the precipitating event was a would-be farmer finding out that his
newly purchased (sight unseen) land was not really so agricultural.
But of course the notice of selling land that doesn't quite match
the sales pitch is all in the past, right?
> "if they just got 4G working consistently..."
I, Personally, would _love_ to see the carriers (looking at _you_ Comcast)
provide voice via 4G LTE with fewer (preferably 0) cases of my own speech
from 1-10 or so seconds ago competing with the other person on a call.
Halfway decent echo suppression has been around for at least 50 years,
with far less hardware.
Yeah, I know, it's no longer a hardware problem, as pretty much everything
has been punted to software. We all know software is perfect, right?
One place I worked solved the password-inconvenience problem by having an application on all the Windows machine that would allow the user to log on as any (Unix) user they wanted to be.
Another had the "network neighborhood" password be COMPANY_NAME_MONTH_YEAR (got to obey the frequently change passwords" order).
Above brings to mind two memories from the early 1970s.
A minicomputer (vendor to remain anonymous) had the nifty feature of a "AC Power fail" interrupt, which could "freeze" the current state of the machine in core memory, such that it could resume where it had been when power came up. Sadly, the interrupt would not be invoked if the front panel power switch was used to turn it off. So the least-bad way to shut down the machine was to yank the power cord.
An example of a non-power-related "unscheduled shutdown (of a task, not the whole machine) was found by a friend (like me sort of a IT wannabe) when he heard some salty language from another user in the terminal room. We were evaluating a new great-leap-forward time-sharing OS in the most logical way: turning it over for "testing" by random undergrads who had managed to justify a login.
Seems that one such user was "testing" the chess-playing program, and had just gotten it in a fork when the operator killed ("dropped") his process. We were guessing that this was a "we don't play games with expensive research systems" situation, but my friend was suspicious _and_ knew how to read the logs, where the death of that process was immediately preceded by a request from the running process for the operator to kill it. Um... isn't there a way for a process to exit? Why yes, but that would not produce a message about the operator having dropped it. This was apparently a case where the computer player, seeing itself in a fork, "kicked over the table" to avoid taking the loss. 50 some years later I wonder if modern "AI" game players also include "not in the official rules" moves.
is in fact still being manufactured, but you can't (legally) get a 6501 (Because Motorola sued and won). So I'm glad I got my 6501 before the gavel fell.
That said, it took some years to get me to drop the practice of writing code that could run on the early 650[12] with no ROR instruction, and on the newfangled ones.
Resale Value? That must have been important to the folks who broke into my house. They took the time to disconnect my Atari VCS and leave it behind while taking the TV. "OK, Boomer" decades ahead of time. Also took some old silver coins, and probably used them in a vending machine.
As for VOIP landlines, unless you provide uninterruptible power, good luck.
My recollection was "Eve" as in eavesdropper.
OTHO, when using voice rather than data I suppose one could place Yyes Saint Laurent in the middle.
His death over a decade ago might seem to present a problem, but with the sort of delays delays I have experienced with Volte, there might be traces bouncing around the telesphere.
Nice thought, but pretty much every communications device available to "common folk" is not all that trustworthy.
If the "client" lives in a smartphone, the already built-in capability to snoop the keyboard and display mean the "ends" are basically "Somebody Else's Computer"
True end to end would be my fingers to your eyes or my mouth to your ears (or vice versa) Not between two bits of software controlled by the developer, manufacturer, network provider, various government agencies, random criminals with "friends" in any of the above, etc. etc.
Of course, very few are likely to be willing to procure and manage a device less likely to be suborned. Available bandwidth for streaming is _far_ more important than staying solvent and out of the Gulag. :-)
Good chance that being found in possession of such a device is a quick ticket to that gulag.
IIRC, back quite a ways some researchers into HCF for latency pivoted to "energy delivery" in the form of laser surgery using HCF to minimize tissue damage from "waste energy". This was (according to the article I read at the time) in place of a previous system involving mirrors (but hopefully no smoke)
Perhaps MSFT is looking to make the Blue Screen of Death more literal?
Reminds me of a certain Pascal compiler that suffered (well, its users did) from a mismatch of expectations when run on RT-11 (PDP-11).
RT-11 has (had?) an odd convention that opening a file with only the disk name, not a filename, would return a file structure that referenced the physical disk (imagine any random program opening / on Unix and you get the idea)
the compiler, OTOH was a bit light on input validation, so when run without specifying any file, would open the system device Read/write,
and then abort when there was no source file named. But not before writing the boilerplate of an executable header over the boot block.
Maybe programmers should be exposed to "Trust, but verify" along with Hoare's advice on complexity.
I have been on (almost) two ends of this sort of thing.
First (Which I think I've mention before) was the time some bright spark removed my "Man On Line" tag and turned on the breaker for the roughly Austin-mini-sized Motor Generator that I was removing.
Second, while sidling down the inside of a wall (left when a rectangular space of the original building was "updated" to an irregular polygon).
I ran across a (turned on) switch on a piece of the old wall. The memory of my first experience aided the angel on one shoulder to override the devil on the other, who wanted to turn it off and see who hollered.
"Fools-proof, yes._IDIOTS_ proof no"
Boris Badenov
They made some interesting laser printers back in the day. Maybe that helped out on the "text to image" gig.
Is there a warehouse of old tech-company names somewhere, for cases like this? Or was that all handled by new tech companies buying older ones only for their horde of IPV4 addresses?
Back in the day, the 1401 jockeys on the business side of the "computer center" (A porta-shed) got a program to play music via RFI modulated by the length of data in "MOVE" instructions. Not to be outdone, the 1620 pilots on the "engineering" side reverse engineered the code, ported to the 1620, and added a percussion section, issuing appropriately timed "seek" commands.
It may help to know that these were all community-college students, with a certain amount of youthful enthusiasm. And spare time...
(The practical side I have mentioned before. Having a reliable "audio signature" to track the behavior of the code allowed us to leave the machine room for next door while a longish task was running, secure in the knowledge that the distinct whine of the "waiting for next console command" state would cue us to put our parkas on and go start the next job.)
For completeness (sound from unexpected computer systems) I must mention Ken Shirriff's blog entry about using a printer for music:
http://www.righto.com/search?q=printer+music
Was SYNC the infotainment option Ford offered some years back? The one deeply intertwingled with the whole car network? The one that could "brick" the car by "playing" an evil .mp3 file?
From the rush of "Vital Security updates" lately, it looks like bothering to check the validity (format wise) of media before attempting to "play" is still out of fashion.
That old thumb drive labeled 'Stones Royal Concert Bootleg' that you picked up in the parking lot may not be a gift from the gods (unless you count Loki).
I once read that the drafters of the U.S. Constitution were very aware of Cromwell, and what he wrought.
Some saying about it being "written by 39 men and a ghost" (Cromwell). Some other bits of wisdom on the web indicate 55 delegates, but the votes to adopt were only 39 of them. We still have the ghost, of course, for those paying attention. Most are too busy to care.
Good, but incomplete advice. Unless a fit of sanity has hit gcc developers since I stopped caring, to really
catch _ALL_ warning instances, you have (had?) do use
-Wall -ansi -pedantic
and of course -Werror
Apparently someone quite important considered standard compliance to be of lesser importance than continuing to "honor" a bug left over from some versions of the (pre-standard) Portable C Compiler.
In short (and invitation to the rabbit hole) the result of a pointer cast is not a valid modifiable lvalue
(I think I have that wording right)
Int myint;
char *myptr;
[...]
myint = *((int *)myptr)++; /* modulo some paren juggling */
[...]
Not that the gcc folks are alone in this. A very respected programming columnist lost some of my respect for flaming a compiler for having the audacity to issue a warning for this construct.
You have lived a charmed life.
Synchronized audio came to film in the 1920s, and lasted (for TV) until the early 21st century. It was there that I first noticed significant lack of sync, but not via a Digital TV. It was apparent;y a case of the networks using DTV to distribute programming, but still transmitting in traditional (NTSC in my case) analog form. I knew something was up when my old CRT-containing TV "got the bug", a year of more before DTV transmission (other than tests) for over-the-air. Synchronized audio/video is pretty rare these days.
I'm still not sure how the arcane art of audio/video sync as lost. Did the last person who had read a spec die?
If any of them get thawed and re-animated, I'd also love to have a phone conversation devoid of long-delayed (sometimes 10 seconds or more) echoes and twilight-zone worthy audio artifacts.
IIRC, some years back a court in the U.S. ruled that candidates (for a job on the police force) who scored too high on "intelligence" (yeah, I know) could be rejected on that basis. In effect "Not that one. They're too smart of be a cop".
I assume that a plausibly accurate test of ethics could be used to disqualify political candidates. As if this hasn't already been implemented.
What makes you think you will get a truthful answer?
I have witnessed serious issues with 3rd-party IP from generally reputable sources. I have also seen product-killers (and it turned out a company killer) designed in house, and things in between like "jellybean" IP like I2C blocks that could cause some pretty hard to diagnose problems.
I'd love to have an answer, but doing business with only those you trust (for a good reason, not just because their CEO golfs with yours). is Table Stakes. Yes, I know, companies can change. I remember when e.g. Intel and NatSemi were the sort you expected to screw you on purpose, while e.g. Motorola and Signetics generally screwed you by accident.
Times change, companies change with them.
BTW: Sounds like this revisits what SRI (Englebart?) called "Augmented Intelligence" as an alternate meaning for "AI"
Meanwhile, that portrait?
It is there to cover the safe in which Chekhov's gun is kept when not on the table.
I wonder if the games so designed (by either AI or AI) can be readily solved by the likes of Tom7's (the one who "publishes" at SigBovic) game-playing bot.
Of course the technique (either meaning of AI) will appeal to the fearless leaders whose mantra is "Innovate me some more, like you did last year" (or month, or week). Game designers are well known as High Strung Prima Donnas
It has ben clear for decades that the descriptions and figures in patents are _NOT_ designed to be understandable to one reasonably skilled in the art. They are designed to be foggy enough to allow wide ranging calls of infringement, and to be so obfuscated as to drive the would-be implementer mad. I'd be hard pressed to implement one of my own patents from _only_ the description. This obfuscation is what wer pay lawyers for.
As for what the "originals" knew, well Boole's writings were originally about a multi-value logic (hand-waving, "A bit like Fuzzy Logic"). Only later did the bit-heads decide that "well, only zero and one really count". Much like those who think a "baud" is a "bit per second". Your gig-ethernet begs to disagree.
(BTW: Boole also wrote on theology and related subjects. Much like others of his era.)
Or so I have heard. I celebrated when I turned 100 (octal) and regularly include job experience that would indicate my age to a recruiter with a few miles on the clock themselves. Saves hopeless interviews.
OTOH, I once got a job offer by noticing that the questions on the civil-service exam were clearly "correct in 1962, not so much by 1972", and answering as if it was actually 1962.
Decided not to take them up on that offer, unlike a friend who unfortunately mentioned System/360 assembly language, and got saddled with maintaining some COBOL support libraries whose mention might provoke a quick Sign of The Cross.
A friend (no really. Only he had actually been in the navy) saw a dummy torpedo at a surplus store, and just had to have it. So he bought it and took it home (no idea how, I would expect his truck to be too small). A day or so later got a call from the store saying he must return it. "No way!" he replied and hung up. Day after that a couple serious looking "men in black" showed up for a conversation. Turns out that it was "dummy" in the sense of "no warhead", but not so "dummy" as to lack the latest, classified, navigation system.
He didn't mention them paying any attention to the hemp forest...
One job, those of us in Engineering (tee shirts and the occasionally shorts on hot days with the usual insane climate control) sometimes referred to the ties worn by the DP/MIS folks as their "EBCDIC Flags".
There, I've lost some generations of people who used a few (later) generations of the IBM S/360.
I got that job partially due to advice from a friend's girlfriend who was "skilled in the art" of the interview.
She had recommended a "casual" look that included jeans, but also a long-sleeve shirt with pockets
(signalling practicality), topped with a sport-coat. The idea was to appear "typically into comfort and utility, but threw on the coat at the last minute to signal 'but you are special enough to make the effort to dress up'"
It worked. Or was it my ability to avoid being sucked into a dispute between my two interviewers (heads of the Hardware and Software departments)?
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