chiph

Especially since the systems of the time used wide ribbon cables to connect the hard drive & CD-ROM.

I was thinking that for this new generation, "Superscalar" doesn't cover it anymore, except as a generic term for the design technique. "Ultrascalar"? "Superscalar Pro"?

I had heard of MC Frontalot but never listened to any of his raps - But I should have:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVm8oZx9WSM

Also relevant to today's AI concerns:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWnV3HVro_0

It's still mostly a research tool. Don't be too harsh on an early system like this. One day it (may) become widely available and used by millions.

I regret not having the time to stop by the Connections Museum in Seattle when I was there. They're working on a new museum in Denver.

Their YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@ConnectionsMuseum

Depends on whether the devs included keyboard accelerator mappings. With the rise of "touch focused apps", it's becoming rare.

I saw the same thing at Best Buy. They switched from a traditional cash register to a web application on a PC. And all the clerks carefully (and slowly) navigated their mice to click on everything.

What was worse was their mouse platform wasn't level. So every time they let go, it would drift downwards and they'd have to go through the "where's my mouse pointer" wiggle again.

That's pretty shocking.

If you want to visit, here's the location.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/tvGDn6rruL5HKH5LA

You might also want to visit the Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel in SC (about 2 hours away because mountain roads are scenic but not fast). It was started being dug by hand before the Civil War as a railroad tunnel to connect Charleston SC to the Midwest but never completed.

https://visitoconeesc.com/stumphouse-park/

Clemson University used it for a while to age their blue cheese. They have more info about the history of the tunnel on their site:

https://www.clemson.edu/bluecheese/history.html

They sound that way to be unique and attention-getting. They have to cut through the background noise of 21st century life.

Here's a (totally unsafe!) demo from the 80's of why sirens sound the way they do. Do not attempt at home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsfczwy3KOE

I'm sort of OK with this use of plastic. Unlike all the single-use plastics we make (bottles, forks, food-wrap - the list is endless) this is going to be in use and providing value for decades. And can likely be made from recycled HDPE.

You can get IBM i (OS/400) running at home, but the hurdles are many. You need to have one of a specific set of PowerPC servers and need to "acquire" an operating system image. Which will be running in unlicensed demo mode. This YouTuber did it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUwJk81YatA

It's long been said that the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of the AS/400 is IBM itself. They offer classes, but don't make it easy - you have to join COMMON (their user group) and/or be enrolled in a university.

https://www.ibm.com/university/power/ibmi/

This is because of additional power & water costs? The landlord should install individual meters on the units. Or at least sub-meter, so they can be paid accurately by the residents. Offering unlimited utilities is a stupid mistake by a landlord.

I hired him last year to run Ethernet cable in my existing house and he did a great job (the original homebuilder did not make it easy on him!) At the time he was placing random icons so they'd protrude onto the next floor. I guess he got some development done to use color-coded bars instead, and it's much better looking/accurate.

He's in the Charlotte NC area.

Because if the business grows, then you will need to add servers, and reallocate each existing shard's min/max values. If you left room to grow (divide amongst 2^31 instead of 2^63) you can go a long way before you have to solve that problem. If the business turns out to be wildly successful, you'd probably set up a whole new pool anyway and migrate over (and get a new set of pre-allocated ID ranges).

This might be the perfect case to use an UUIDv7 as a key instead of a number.

Note that there are four different USAA insurance companies. Your military rank and how you got referred for membership will determine which one you join (listed highest/best to lowest):

United Services Automobile Association - Officers and senior NCOs

USAA Casualty Insurance Company - Enlisted (E-1 to E-7) and children of the above

USAA General Indemnity Company - National Guard, Reserve

Garrison Property and Casualty - Extended family of the above

I can't get past the article's paywall to view the 51% rate, but I expect your claim process experience will vary based on which company is insuring you.

I have noticed that the quality of service has declined over the past 5 years or so (which lines up with Peacock's being CEO). It sometimes takes 2 or 3 calls to answer a question with my policies these days, as they now have high turnover in the call center.

Story time: A relative of a former coworker had been laid-off from their bank job during the global financial crisis in 2008, but then picked up a position as a Colorado cannabis dispensary's CFO (their first).

When he arrived for his first day on the job, he discovered that employees were making cash pickups from the dispensaries using their personal automobiles. So they were having an hourly employee driving around in a Honda Civic with $50,000 or more in small unmarked bills the trunk. When they arrived back at the office, they would re-count the bills then store them in a plain steel filing cabinet. Like you'd buy at Office Depot.

The first thing he did was order some burglary-rated safes and got rid of the filing cabinets.

Then he called some of the armored car companies (cash-in-transit firms), and was surprised to find they didn't want his business! It turns out their main customers (banks and credit unions) were VERY concerned over getting his drug cash mixed up with their customer's cash through a mix-up inside the truck. Marijuana sales were (and still are) illegal at the federal level. Even though the cannabis business was legal in Colorado, banks are regulated at the federal level via the Comptroller of the Currency and they couldn't take the chance of their cash being intermingled.

To solve this problem he started a subsidiary armored car business and ordered new vehicles for it (had them painted with green leafs on them..) They would only be used to transport dispensary cash. He even called his counterparts at other dispensaries and sold them on using his new firm for their cash transport woes. This was successful and he now has competition in the transport business.

To continue on his entrepreneurial arc, he set up another subsidiary to manage their real estate transactions. They were having problems acquiring new locations for their dispensaries as real estate sales are also subject to federal scrutiny via the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

That's because the bankers didn't realize they're not in the banking business anymore - they're in the IT business (which has a focus on tracking money).

Pascal did/does this, but eventually someone wants a string longer than the size portion can handle. Or wants the number of characters not the number of bytes.

They generally do stock parts. I was able to order a part when I was in the USAF for a near-obsolete machine (which still used core memory!) and it showed up within a week. Still in it's original EMP and environmental-proof packaging from the late 1960's.

Aircraft can get their service life extended a couple of times before they're parked for good (the B-52 is an extreme example). And the supply system eventually runs out. First of replaceable modules, then the boards, and now the chips.

My college job was at a record store that had a Ticketmaster machine. If you didn't want to pay the $2.50 fee[1] (we got only like 15 cents or something) you could go to the venue and buy tickets directly.

But since they became a monopoly that option is unavailable. Their contracts with the venues include that they get their full fee, even when bought in person.

[1] Which paid for the custom ticket printer, the ticket stock, the CRT terminal, and the central computer. We paid for the data line and donated the counter space.

> Exports are used for application code which is externally called.

This was the magic moment for me, learning Windows 3.0 programming. The idea that my program is no longer master of it's world, but instead is just something that gets loaded and called by Windows.

Gas heat uses two fans - one to blow air to the rooms (often shared with an A/C system), and another smaller one[1] to supply air to the gas burners and the heat exchanger. As part of the safety system, the computer won't open the gas valve and ignite the burners until it knows there is airflow from the small fan.

When GP spun the fan it fooled the computer into thinking it was running and continuing the ignition sequence. It may be that once the burners got everything hot there was enough airflow from the thermals so they didn't have a buildup of CO. Or were just lucky.

[1] The motor is usually generic but has a proprietary bracket, which was a $1500 lesson last year

Google has code written for their Tensor processors (TPU). Will it run on the NVidia GPUs that xAI has? Because I'm thinking they're "not part of their core architecture" and it will thus be money wasted.

(I thought for sure the title was backwards - it's a strange world)

I've been reading Bob's articles since he published in Infoworld. Could his next column be "Haha I fooled you - it was written by an AI"? I don't believe he would do that. Plus it'd be sophomoric - something that a man in his 70's wouldn't do.

> But the systemic risk is plain: when everyone is each other’s investor, supplier, and customer, one stumble can cascade through the whole ring.

We saw this in the early 2000's. AOL got most of it's online ads (revenue) from other dot-com companies. When the crash started, the first thing the dot-com companies did was cut back their ad spend. Which propagated through their ad agencies and into AOL. They were trading over $90 in 1999 and plummeted to $9 in 2002. Quite the fall.

When this bubble ends, someone is going to be holding the bag, and I suspect it'll be OpenAI (and similar firms). Datacenters can use their hardware for other customers (mostly). NVIDIA can go back to making consumer GPUs (which will be painful, but I believe they can weather that shift). But OpenAI is the middleman whose assets are software, employee skills, and now-worthless deals with other companies.

What helps for me was using cool/chilled water, and a swimmer's nose clip to help reduce the smell of the ingredients. If you are adding flavor drops - go with lemon and not anything blue or red in color.

One other piece of advice - stay off the internet afterwards until you're sure the anesthesia has worn off. My doctor related that a previous patient had gone on the Carvana website and bought a car while still under the effects. Oops.

That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.

I'm surprised that the font used for the "Rollerball" title wasn't mentioned at typesetinthefuture.com

I just installed it on a Raspberry Pi (with an otherwise too-small-for-any-other purpose SSD) for use at home. I wanted something with low power consumption, and I didn't want to have a single point of failure by running it in a container alongside everything else.

The only hiccup was forgetting that when pushing via the SSH connection, it will have paths relative to the home directory of my hg user.

> They understand the business processes they’re digitizing.

I feel this has more importance than they think. Outside consultants would not have had this domain knowledge and would have spent months learning it. And then would have had to fix their mistakes because they misunderstood something (billed to the province, naturally)