PorterDuff

I was just musing about what makes a tech company more likeable.

Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.

Exactly. I like the idea of "traditional American supermarket" for the irony content.

When I was a youngin', our town didn't have any chain stores, just a dozen or so family markets.

I miss the culture and environment, not so much the lack of selection. Since then, it's hard to take sides in a Safeway vs Walmart vs Amazon brawl.

The first chain fast food (aside from the ubiquitous Dairy Queen) came somewhat later. That's a thing I think we could do without.

It would be interesting to take that C version and hammer on it a bit for speed.

...and then add SIMD.

Exactly. There's GUIs and there's GUIs.

When I've looked at libraries, I always consider how you'd implement the Visual Studio interface with them.

How about academic research into the value of academic research in programmer job success?

I figure that eventually it'll be similar to the Voight-Kampff test and kept on file forever while being shared with all potential employers.

But first, a smartphone app to manage the water consumption and walking times.

You can certainly see why they bailed from their existing car lines.

I can understand where all the car manufacturers have the same problem. They're afraid of building one too many generations of IC-powered designs (which are also following a Moore's Lawish rule of increasingly complex design) but aren't really sure what's next.

Only the finest handmade paper will be used.

I think if I were wanting to bang out a simple embedded design with a GUI, this is exactly the direction I'd go. It isn't like you usually need super complex behaviors and I'd hate to add in extra toolkits or a big framework just to get a few buttons on a screen.

I've never dealt with Raspberry Pi world, but I can see the value of stripping the software world on one to the bare minimum. I wonder if someone has put together a FreeRTOS tool chain for it.

I like the idea of podcasts because of the amateur angle, not so much since it's basically just another version of talk radio. I don't doubt there is some loss in social contact if you use a recording to fill-in for conversation, but there's something a little off-putting about music too.

It worries me sometimes that (given my age) 'More Than a Feeling' or 'Hold On Loosely' are so etched into my brain...and I'm a jazz listener/musician. Why is that? They live next to old commercial jingles and show the amount of programming that can go on in the 'independent' mind.

To finish up my old man rant, it's funny how modern people need constant noise and a steady supply of sweet beverages to avoid unease. Maybe there's a book here on the curative value of quiet walks and drinking plain water, it wouldn't be very long though.

After a long and storied career I mostly just get a kind of vicarious doom-thrill from reading about interviews I couldn't possibly pass.

Does antitrust law apply to a monopsony?

A friend of mine who is about 6'6"- 350, just loves that place.

I'll pass thanks.

That's a good question. I've worked on a couple of products with those and never thought about it.

It seems to me that the interesting angle to this would be to avoid manufacture and instead spend your time on radical CPU designs on FPGA to be made from scratch later. No doubt that doesn't meet the needs of the folks in India.

I wonder if lifeboats couldn't carry a little device that sounds (or smells) like a killer whale. Maybe sharks are never really that much of a problem.

It seems to me that it's more expensive to go to an Ivy League school than to simply hire faculty as personal tutors.

Looking back, I can see where working with your hands would have been a lot of fun. No doubt you hit the ennui inherent in any profession. Maybe the right answer is to start over every ten years.

Weakening core culture.

or Presidential brothers.

I think that food supplements/vitamins are the worst. My one and only email to jeff@amazon.com was on that. It probably didn't do any good, but I felt better.

Luckily, they don't appear to be of any value anyway.

The biggest change in my memory was the evolution from family-run business to chain store. Growing up, there were probably a dozen small markets in my home town. The next level of de-skilling was offsite butchers and scanning registers (our best local store also doesn't have scales, everything is by quantity or is pre-weighed). The next big change might well be no checkout at all.

No doubt, Safeway is going to complain about Amazon drone-delivered groceries like poor Borders bitching about Amazon (after killing off thousands of small bookstores).

Generally, I'd say that the biggest change in grocery stories happened in the 1960's, not now.

I've tried it before, but ended up with MuseScore for everything.

What I'm thinking about is more like this: http://www.arkkra.com/

A problem I see in music scoring software is that they are waay to complicated. You end up with all the possibilities in that world even when you just need a few features in your own corner.

What I'd like would be a way to really efficiently do a jazz leadsheet like you'd see in a fakebook. That cuts the notation down quite a lot. The idea is that you could type in something from an existing sheet really quickly in order to do things like edit it or change the key...or you could bang out something from transcribing.

Spend some time getting it to have a good handwritten look on output.

After that, add just enough stuff to do big band (or small group) charts. But no more.

Since I've mostly lost interest in computer science, my goals are much more modest.

I think I'd like to pound out a language that succinctly describes sheet music. I've seen at least one, but I think I could do a better job. The toolkit would probably include a realtime display showing the results of the interpreter in order to avoid a PITA save_file/convert_file/look_at_output cycle.

This would be especially useful on smaller projects like leadsheets.

I think I agree with you.

They're starting to put cars on the same obsolescence train as consumer electronics. This is on a device that costs a helluva lot more. I suppose that EVs have the same issue.

The parts situation is going to be interesting. Lacking standardized design and only a limited number of years of guaranteed (and high cost) replacements, it should be interesting in a decade. Cars a tough environment and I'm afraid that wrecking yards will see a lot of usage in terms of both cars become obsolete/unfixable and as sources of spare parts.

It's interesting that the original sin of pushing towards this situation is the mandatory backup camera. Once the screen and a tolerably fast embedded system get installed, cost reduction leads you to a monolithic place for car controls. The modern fascination with cell phones probably helps the population go along.

Not a bad point. It's like how talk show callers often ask how the host is doing instead of cranking right up. It hurts the flow.

It seems to me that there's less of that than there used to be.

In days of yore, I shipped quite a few ROM-based products. Bugs were frowned upon.

It seems to me that self-driving cars can't be just as safe as the status quo, but have to be far far better. It's an unreasonable need, but human nature.

I'll bet that to really make it work well, you also need to redesign roads to suit the new cars.

In any case, I'll believe it when I see widespread/universal adoption of self-driving in constrained environments (mining vehicles, warehouses, storage yards). Step two will be things like garbage trucks (slow, expensive, otherwise automated, phone home when it gets in trouble).

One problem I can see with a standardized computer filing system is that there is unlimited ability to build complex tax law.

That's an interesting point and I'll mull over it.

It isn't like the big software houses would fight against the idea.

It'll be interesting to see what a 12 year old Tesla is worth.

Electronic control boards on ovens is a terrible idea. Guess what usually breaks on one (like mine, we don't use it so it's been broken for 4 years).