PorterDuff

I think mostly flavor. Canned soup is some nasty stuff.

Here's my entry into the efficiency menu:

Take a crockpot/slow cooker, throw in stew meat, frozen peas/corn/green beans, a lemon, an onion, garlic, sriracha, cut up a few potatoes and carrots, a can of chopped organic tomatoes. Cook for hours. Done. Probably 5 minutes of prep.

You could probably live exclusively on that. Low salt.

I got as far as this:

"1 (10½oz) can of cream of chicken soup"

and quit.

To me, a fascinating angle is when the electronics obsolescence curve runs into the mechanical one. Cars are filled with that kind of thing, but two more interesting ones are products like sewing machines and power tools. Both used to be overdesigned, now they have have additional features and underdesign enabled by built-in microcontrollers. In drills, for instance, it'll back off on the power where an earlier model needed to be able to handle an animal wielding it.

It seems like simplifications don't last long anyway as the real world impinges...plus, the rats always head right for the cheese.

To me, it's like the handwaving you hear about simply using a consumption tax. No doubt, people would find an infinite number of ways to game the system toot sweet.

Of course, implementing socially desirable behavior via tax law just throws even more complexity in the mix. Generally, I'd say that the larger the government share of GDP, the more opportunity for craziness. If your underlying culture doesn't reign anything in, mayhem results.

It's called tax code.

...and then all the corner cases go to tax court.

Thing is, life is more complicated than law.

It never was that easy (hang on, were there BIOS functions for that?). Anything that requires drilling down to draw a dot is too slow anyway. Obviously blitting an offscreen bitmap just leaves you the problem of dealing with pitch.

It was even more exciting dealing with rendering high resolution images with only a single line of bitmap. #thegoodolddays

The tax rates are probably the simplest part of a tax code.

Defining what 'income' really is or what an allowable 'expense' is, not so easy. Should two farmers helping each other out 1099 each other? Can a wealthy but chronically ill executive write off his RN wife's presence on a business trip?

To what extent is the video game industry crunch culture driven by non-negotiable deadlines? (trade shows, Christmas, movie releases)

A thing I don't get about eBook sites is why they aren't easier to browse. Simply being able to scroll through a screen equivalent of a library shelf (Dewey Decimal or LOC system) would be nice.

Obviously, using libgen tends to avoid this DRM problem.

No doubt as the surveillance economy ramps up, getting every last penny for copyright will ramp up also.

The latter. I'd have to sit and tally it up. It's possible that I'm slightly low in my estimate but not by a tremendous amount. I realize that that's only a couple of days a year. I'm not including getting sick in that swag.

Typically I'd work for somewhere for 5 years and then pocket the vacation when I left. There might be a single week (or two) off and a handful of Fridays off in that time.

I'll tell you when the non-vacation time comes up is when you become a FT contractor. If the money flows, you row.

I agree with you. If a privately owned company wants to pay over-market for certain jobs, that's their lookout.

As an old fart, and I've been in quite a different industry than the subject of the story, what has made a company successful is building a really desirable product in a growing market. People do a lot of handwaving about company cultures, quality of life, renumeration, but I think that building the right stuff will overwhelm practically any internal problems.

It's also probably a way that companies avoid carrying vacation on the books and then pay you when you leave.

I'd be surprised if I took 60 days of vacation in 30 years as an FTE.

"First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that shit and just play."

- Famous sax guy

Solo 401(k)

You could surely make a case for parking the local urgent care center (and make it 24/7) right next to the ER.

This is a bonafide question as I really don't know.

Could you train a surgeon without them ever being a doctor? Basically extract out the knowledge they need and train simply for that? It seems to me that the natural skills needed might be very different than those you need to make it through a typical medical school + a career as a family doctor.

I became one of those eBay Thinkpad + Linux guys purely to build bigger arms.

Hah. $2k. Cheap.

Me = goto ER for absurdly high BP and heart palpitations, which I've never had before. Quick hook up to ekg, watch BP, learn about PVCs, get kicked out after an hour or so as BP lowers somewhat. All in the hallway, no real admission. Admittedly not necessary looking back but you do what you have to.

Cost? $10k for the ER. $1500 for the doctor. Next cost? $4k for the ER if I'm poor Next cost? $350 of co-pay once I dug out my insurance card, God knows what Blue Cross pays. Broken system? I think so.

I've always wondered why you don't see self-funded startups that just hire old people. The customers don't care.

Hard to say.

Me = 35+ years in harness. Black coworkers in that time = 0 Female coworkers in that time = 3

I was wondering the opposite direction.

If there's an FPGA, why have a general purpose CPU?

I'd say that I know very well what they are doing, having to sit in the same meetings and all.

Broke organization? Probably. They all seem to be in some way or the other.

and I sort of miss ICE machines.

Oh well.

This kind of demo always makes me think of how long it used to take to render a single frame of anything non-trivial.

I'm not sure what a 'Distinguished Engineer' is, but in the places I've worked with 'Principal Engineers' (above the other 5 ranks or so) I've noticed that their main job is to go to meetings, be on standards committees, go to conferences, and give the folks who've been at the company a long time but don't want to work on a product team something to do.

"earlier ARMs didn't even have a divide instruction,"

Hah. That's interesting. I think that the cheaper variants of the AMD 29000 had the same feature.

A voice in my head tells me that divides for realtime video transforms used to really be a trip.

In addition to convenience, habit, and layout of cities and living areas, I'd say that a big push for cars is personal security.

I've always wondered if someone wrote a close-to-the-metal C compiler for the CDC 6400.

60 bit words, 18 and 60 bit registers, 6 bit characters.

In the case of the time wasting abilities of the internet, it's a rathole.