jnord

I am listening to an old Philips valve radio from 1952 which has FM and a wonderful rich sound. I am still using an HP-25 LED calculator I bought back in 1977. My oldest piece of software is Microsoft Money from 2002 which now has transaction and investment histories dating back nearly 20 years.

Americium-241 can be found in smoke detectors which came into the headlines when a kid tried to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard back in 1996:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2506549/Uh-oh-Radio...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

> This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was)...

The article appeared in the monthly magazine of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, so the audience is not completely non-technical.

However, having seen IEEE's decline first-hand over the past 25 years, they are clearly dumbing things down a bit to cater for all types of audiences, including non-EEs. Even their website now just uses the slogan "The world's largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology", and many of its articles now fall into the styles of those of retail science magazines.

As a former DXer, I used the Satellit at a time when the shortwave tropical bands were filled with exotic stations. Nowadays, I have my SDR with technical specs we could only dream about back then but on the same bands I struggle to find any stations at all. Blame the migration of shortwave stations to FM and the Internet over the past 30 years where they enjoy far better fidelity.

Seems like a crowd favorite, previous discussions here:

2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4062981 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4544318 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8094186 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064657 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631513 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571055

I did Coursera's "Introduction to Machine Learning" by Andrew Ng back in 2013 and loved it. Great tutor, good course material - and it looks like Coursera is still offering this course though I am not sure if it is still free. The course is language-agnostic and uses Octave (an open-source Mathlab clone) for assignments and examples.

Jerry's pages were always the first pages I read when he was a columnist for the Byte magazine in the 80's. He was a true pioneer in those early days of computing who wrote non-stop about new products and the computer exhibitions he attended. RIP.

"Confucious says man who puts chicken and peas in soup very unhygienic".

"It is easy to make a mistake but if you really want to stuff it up you need a PLC". :)

In the early days of my career I had to modify some code for a PLC that operated on a car production line. The modified code took too long to run so a watchdog process assumed the code had frozen and performed an emergency shutdown of the hydraulics of the line's welding robots. Six cars were damaged when the heavy robot arms crashed and buckled car roofs, and the one-car-every-45-seconds production line ground to a halt for 15 minutes.

My memories of Popular Electronics is around seeing the diagrams for a simple microcomputer, the Cosmac Elf which was based on RCA's 1802 CPU. I begged my mother for an advance on my pocket money, sourced the parts and wire-wrapped it all together over a Christmas break. Best money she ever spent, software and computers turned into my career and still is today.

I have 15 years of transactions in Microsoft Money, a Windows application. I choose it at a time when the only other alternative was Quicken, and I hanged on to it ever since for its clean and simple UI, ease of use, and its reporting and forecasting features.

Unfortunately, Microsoft retired this product about five years ago but still makes it available as Money Plus Sunset Deluxe edition, available as a free download.

There is also the 8086 verson of CP/M, CP/M-86, which runs well within VirtualBox.

Tragically, this practice is not limited to Commonwealth Bank. I have had similar cold calls from Citibank and various telecom companies who all start out with wanting to verify my account details.

Funny enough, these companies' email policies also state that they will never request account or security details via email but obviously this has not carried over to how they interact with customers over the phone.

A few more can be found here with black-and-white overlays:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2219584/Ghosts-war-A...

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/the-ghosts-of-worl...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/images-world-war-devasta...

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/europe-overlay-photos-2014...

http://petapixel.com/2013/04/02/photos-of-modern-day-locatio...

http://www.pinterest.com/tlwillen/ghost-photos-world-war-2/

http://www.pinterest.com/jarm69/now-and-then/

When I read this story the first thing that sprung to mind was Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, described by Wired magazine as "the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry".

As any entrepreneur will tell you, it is never a good idea to have long-running projects with few public deliverables. Projects like this need new blood, new ideas and continuous user validation in order to remain relevant.

While perhaps not a Java webapp, Stormpath offers a User Management API that may fit your need:

https://stormpath.com/

This seems to be the modus operandi of both government and corporations nowadays. First a short-sighted idea is implemented then if an uproar ensues, apologize and reverse. Thus it is important to ensure a shit-storm of public opinions in response to crappy policies or bit by bit ones personal (and financial) liberties are eroded.

George Orwell's book "1984" (written 1948 and prior to the formation of North Korea) outlines a state eerily similar to North Korea with its erasure of people's past, punishment for not clapping enthusiastically and generally for "dreaming different dreams", as this article puts it. It's disturbing to see these kind of states still managing to transfer their totalitarian systems from generation to generation with no foreseeable hope of a positive change.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Welcome to 24/7 customer service - a sales rep handling multiple chat sessions and failing to context switch between them.

Looks like that number is in base-36 instead of base-10 (decimal). Using http://www.unitconversion.org/numbers/base-10-to-base-36-con... yields number 80113871 as the last 8 digits of the phone number.

What a wonderful story and presentation - thanks for telling it.

When checking out the site that was mentioned in the article, I mispelled the URL slightly and ended up at mikerowsoft.com which the AVG virus scanner reported as an "attack" page. Now there is something for the Microsoft legal team to sink there teeth in.

Having done three courses with both Coursera and Udacity, I can honestly say that my biggest gripe with MOOCs is their emphasis on transmitting information sequentially, that is, via video lectures.

Seriously, what is wrong with putting up some nice readable-at-own-pace lecture material that is hyperlinked and indexed correctly so that I don't have to rewind videos if I missed something?

Unfortunately, Zeo closed down last month: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/lights-out-for-zeo/

Aitutaki, Cook Islands, South Pacific. Expensive ASDL but beautiful location, pop. 1500, all English-speaking.