kindall

If you don't already know what CORS is, you're probably not a Web developer and don't need to know.

Me too. Imaginos is a brilliant album

the tape relay was one of the TRS-80s IIRC. You could toggle it back and forth fast enough to overheat it and get it stuck.

Imagine how much a really big cube of tungsten would weigh. Installing it at MOMA would itself be the art.

I started writing my own WinCompose-like utility in AutoHotkey, before I learned about WinCompose. Gave up on that immediately, obviously.

AutoHotkey is really an amazing tool. The actual programming language is awkward, but it has capabilities no other tool offers without writing a bunch of tricky low-level C code yourself.

Proprietary, not PCI, but expansion slots, yes. On HPs it was called the MIO slot and later the EIO slot. If your printer came with a MIO card that only did serial and parallel, you could swap it for one that added networking.

Gil was brought in to swing the axe, and he did exactly what he was brought in to do. He cancelled a bunch of stuff that was draining Apple's resources. He was never going to be popular but the point was that the next guy could come in with clean hands.

If your manager is telling you that your performance is lacking and that you need to improve in specific areas, how is that really any different from being told you are on a PIP, and the rest of that? That is, what would you, as an employee, do differently if you were told specifically that you had been placed on a formal PIP, rather than just being told how you needed to improve?

The leadership principles are an important part of Amazon's solution to the problem of getting hundreds of thousands of employees pulling in the same general direction. They are easy to get people to sign on to because they are, for the most part, obviously good ideas succinctly stated. People at Amazon actually use them to make decisions daily.

Other companies don't propagate their corporate culture so explicitly, so it seems a little weird and cultish. But if you're a big company doing things the same way other big companies do them, you're going to get the same results that other big companies get. Amazon wants to get better results than other big companies.

When I started at Amazon, I felt like 14 was simply too many. I tried to do a Carlin-style winnowing, but darned if I could get the number below twelve without starting to lose things that the company obviously thinks are important. (They recently added two more, by the way.)

As a bonus, after a stint at Amazon, your familiarity with their leadership principles can make you very desirable to other companies. I know a number of people who were individual contributors at Amazon and were snagged by Microsoft for leadership positions, either team leads or product managers.

And the Internet is only one particular internet, and the World Wide Web is a specific web

"Loud pipes save lives," they say, while putting their own lives in danger from ordinary motorists who must constantly repress the urge to destroy the insufferable noise machine.

I think McD's uses liquid oil, so not hydrogenated (trans fat). You hydrogenate oil to make it solid at room temperature, as a substitute for animal fats. If you're going to fry in it there's no point in not starting with an oil that is liquid at room temperature.

People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking. In one other situation I was the guy who got several former co-workers hired, all at once, a frankly freak occurrence I still don't quite believe actually happened. My current job, I was contacted out of the blue by the team's manager on LinkedIn. Most of my jobs have come from being active on the Internet, or else from applying cold.

The purpose of the patent system is to incentivize people to publish the details of their inventions instead of keeping them secret, thereby advancing the state of the art. The limited-time monopoly is the incentive.

I think that's what the "optimize for Web" checkbox does

They really missed an opportunity by not calling it the Great Vowel Movement

PHI means protected health information. Protected means protected by HIPAA. By definition, there is no PHI not protected by HIPAA. HIPAA is concerned with what health information must be protected and defining that defines PHI.

Shades of the 6502, where 0 was BRK

resizable arrays of pointers to objects stored elsewhere, which is going to blow through your cache anyway, especially when you start accessing those objects' attributes. so it's more a memory management strategy than a performance optimization.

Or you just hit Ctrl-Enter

Subaru CVTs already have essentially this feature. The transmission doesn't have gears (duh, it's continuously variable) but it still has the ability to manually shift to predefined ratios.

Acura RL was one of the first to have active nose cancellation, in 2005.

I saw that too if it's the one that was at the Ohio State University in 1986 or 1987. I was just a kid who had never heard of either of those guys, but I still remember it thirty-some years later.

Expected Snoot Booper; found it

I think you're underestimating just how dominant the Apple II was in the late seventies to mid eighties, at least in the US.. Apple made the machine until 1993 (and the model I'm talking about isn't even the 16-bit IIgs, but the 8-bit IIe) because they were still selling profitably up until then. Every school had them and every parent who could afford one got one for their kids. Commodore 64s were cheaper, sure, but had a reputation as a game machine and couldn't run Apple software or even exchange files with Apples. Better to buy an Apple II clone if you couldn't afford a real one.

Not that there weren't games for the Apple II... there were plenty. Most of the biggest game publishers of the early micro era, including one or two that still exist today, developed for the Apple II first. Sierra On-Line, Broderbund, Electronic Arts. Programming an arcade game on the Apple II was so challenging, what with its bizarre screen memory layout, weird color scheme, and lack of hardware sprites, that many Apple II game programmers viewed programming for the C64 or Atari 400/800 (which used the same CPU but had actual graphics and sound hardware) as akin to cheating. Some of the most creative games of the era arose from these technical limitations. And hordes of young programmers cut their teeth learning how to remove the copy protection from these games so they could trade them for free games others had cracked. The guys who started id Software met at an Apple II publisher.

It was as dominant in business right up until the IBM PC took off and even for some time after, thanks to VisiCalc, the first killer app. When Apple released the integrated software package AppleWorks in 1984 it shot to the top of the sales charts. Not merely the Apple II charts, but the industry charts for all computers including the PC. It stayed there for months and served as a foundation of a healthy third-party development ecosystem for years.

The profits from the Apple II line paid for the development of the Lisa and then the Macintosh, and kept the company afloat until the Mac was profitable.

Yeah, the Apple II was a big deal. I got in a bit late myself (I stared my first job in the industry in 1990) but it was still the foundation of my technology career.

The book The Goal is a fun read if you're interested in constraints.

Hinting is what that's called.

US patent laws sensibly state that only individuals, not corporations, may be awarded patents.

Unfortunately, most companies require that any patent awarded to an engineer in their employ is automatically assigned to the company.

Get rid of that loophole and employees will be able to license their patents as they see fit. Of course this is fraught with practical difficulties, but some kind of compromise could be reached.

Never happen, obviously.

A good man, if he does bad things when he's drunk, makes sure he's never drunk again. That's how you can tell he's a good man. Being drunk is an excuse for bad behavior exactly once.