pontifk8r

I got MP/M working on the softcard back in the day. Never really had an application for it though.

I really enjoyed S.L. Sanger’s book “Hanford and the Bomb: An oral history of World War II” - but it’s out of print now and used ones? Sheesh!

Make your own with padding cement. Put the stack of bills in a vice and coat one edge a few times with the cement. I did this for a nephew as a unique gift. Some people being paid with these are suspicious.

Not in the last four. Switzerland & UK, two years ago.

As a US person who has, You need to experience euro train travel. The whole experience, from booking using an app to waiting for a train. You’ll find the apps are good, the schedule information accurate and up to date. The apps don’t do stupid things mostly. When you arrive at the station, you’ll find it generally clean and well maintained. Signage is clear and tied into the train information system. Arrival times accurate. You can get a nice sandwich if the shop is open. Intercity Trains are modern and fast. Lots of power ports to plug in your phone. Nice seats. Also great electronic signage in the train. You might even have good wifi. You would not be afraid to use a bathroom in a station or on a train. Best part is that you CAN rely on the trains. Nothing like Amtrak where if it’s on time it’s remarkable.

After my daughter went through two laptops in high school (1st: "I closed a pen in it and broke the hinge" 2nd: "Dad! Someone ELSE knocked it off my desk") I found an ex-state-police toughbook, it even had a carrying handle. Plasma monochrome screen. Slow. But it ran all of the applications necessary for school.

Turns out it had a cool factor all it's own, and she really liked that laptop. She figured out she could neglect and abuse it. I even left the "property of " stickers from the state police on the thing, which gave it extra... something. It was still working when she gave it back to me before she went to college. I think I sold it for $100.

anyone implement the game of life on this yet, for a particular line length?

How many kids do you have, dad engineer?

Seems like they could use something like GammaPix from https://www.imageinsightinc.com/ with their existing drone's CCD camera to estimate radiation levels.

I think I recall Alice and Bob also being mentioned along side Louis Reasoner in SICP problem sets in ‘81 or ‘82… (Edit) well, according to Wikipedia, the cast of characters for SICP doesn’t include Alice and Bob. In those years the book didn’t exist yet.

Deleo's Autobody was down there near the Good News Garage, that guy was ALSO a character, and Mr. Deleo had a very distinctive voice. I was hoping that one day they'd have him on to answer autobody questions.

Had my '72 Plymouth Fury ("The Boat") fixed at the GNG once or twice. And post-graduation '85 Toyota fixed at Deleo's after a fender bender on the SE expressway.

Cover letters. “Respond to requirements with qualifications and specific examples”

Our expectations have also changed over the years. Despite the perception of a downward spiral in quality, cars have, in general, become much better. Remember when fuel injection was exotic (well, you probably don't). My first car, a 1971 Plymouth fury, required a special little ritual just to get it started, involving pumping the accelerator a precise number of times, then turning the key. When I started driving it in only it's 7th year of life, nothing smaller than a softball could be put in the trunk, because the thing was seemingly designed to soak up road salt and rot the rear quarter panels, and there were holes that large on both sides of the body work. Have to say that after that, driving a Toyota for the first time in 1985 was... a revelation. Today, cars last longer, have more features. Most econoboxes will make it past 100K miles no problem.

But when today's cars break, there's generally no high school shop class knowledge to fall back on to fix the every-day small things, and anything major requires information, tools, and parts that are beyond most consumers. Remember that the people that work for the car repair places probably didn't have vocational courses in high school, either.

Modern society's items have been value engineered, and it seems like the operating tolerances are narrower as well. Unless there's aggressive maintenance, today's stuff just breaks vs. limping along at some reduced performance level. And some items that previously were built to allow for maintenance are built for wholesale replacement now instead.

It's rare for today's consumers to fix anything, let alone their electronics, but it used to be common for people to try to repair their own TVs by testing and swapping tubes until the 1980s. Of course, before digital TV and cable EVERYONE fiddled with their "sets" to get a good picture. "Snow" and "Rabbit Ears" are not terms associated with TV watching today. I couldn't buy a 40" color TV that spied on my viewing habits in the 90's for the equivalent of today's $299 either.

Shop wisely for your kitchen appliances (mixers, toaster, blenders), high-end cutlery, and tools at thrift shops in neighborhoods transitioning from older demographics. Learn how to sharpen knives and maintain stuff.

Use all your senses: learn what your major appliances and vehicles sound like when they're operating correctly, and listen to them periodically. Extra squeaks or rumbles when the furnace runs? Maybe a new blower motor is in your future. Notice the refrigerator cycling more frequently? You ARE vacuuming the cooling coils periodically, right? Dishwasher door seem easier to operate? Bet one of your balancing springs has failed.

Troubleshooting and maintenance is a life skill.

We were fortunate to be able to buy our first "new" house with new everything 8 years ago. Having all-new stuff was great for a while. The gas water heater lasted 5 years. A nephew plumber replaced it for the cost of the new unit (~1K) vs quoted $5K job by plumbing outfit. Took him 4 hours. The expansion tank started to fail two years later; $69 plus a few minutes of labor. The forced-air ducting between 1st and 2nd floor is undersized, so the single-glower furnace is inadequate to keep the house at a consistent temperature. Finally put in a heat pump this year to partially remedy that situation. Original wall timers for various fans failed about every 2-3 years. Choice is replacing the $20 wall timer with now $25 wall timer, or fixing the original electronics ($1 with a replacement part from Digikey). Original washer, a front loader that came with the new home, failed 1 month (yes, 1 month) out of warranty, with a bad trunion. To fix this required a literal complete tear-down and rebuild with the new tub. GE would do nothing other than send free parts. Our trusted appliance guy said he wouldn't do it, because it took too long (8 hours) and was uneconomic. I did it in about seven, but replaced the washer a few years later, since front loaders just don't get clothes as clean.

I believe Patrick Winston used to say this... (actually, "It's only AI until we know how to do it.")

Thirty+ years ago was a time of big changes. There were a bunch of companies competing for the "supermicro" and workstation business, both in hardware, and software. If you wrote that kind of software, you might have done it in C. If you were on the business side, you were working w/mainframes, or "Basic 4" type business computers, or maybe CP/M or MP/M computers. IBM PCs were mostly still using DOS, and programming on those was often in DBase, FoxPro, Turbo-C, BASIC... etc.

In 1988 I was a 25 yo working on for a 10ish person KP funded start-up that wrote a Mechanical CAD package that ran on Microsoft Windows 3.0. The premise was that PCs would take over, that mini and micro segment would disappear, that VARs would no longer be necessary to sell hw/sw and train people to use apps.

The application was written in C (not C++) for Windows. It took significant parts of an hour to compile (see the XKCD comic on sword fighting during compiles). Some of the demos we'd do would be on the COMPAQ luggable machines. We'd find bugs in the Windows API. We'd write our own object-oriented DB that lived in memory and disk. The "Algorithms" book was 18 years away. Most of the team had been through 6.001 (THE 6.001) and had that as a basis. We had to solve pretty much everything -- no real libraries to drop in. Our initial network had a single 68000 based Sun machine with SCSI hard drives (10MB then 100MB as I recall) running NFS, with PC-NFS on all of the PCs, connected via coax cable ethernet. We used CVS as our source control. We later got a SPARCstation to do ports to Unix, and it was very much a thing to port separately to Sun, Intergraph, and SGI workstations since the OSs were different enough.

The first version took about 2 years (hazy...).

And after you'd written the product on Windows, to get it to RUN well we would write programs to do runtime analysis of typical app usage (watching swaps in and out of memory) to build custom linker scripts to pack code in a way that minimized the amount of program paging in and out of memory, since PCs didn't have much memory in those days. I'd find out a couple of years later this is how MSFT did it for their applications; they didn't tell us, we had to figure this out. Developers were Developers. Testers were Testers. Testing was done primarily with running through scenarios and scripts. We were date driven, the dates primarily driven by industry events, our VC funding, and business plan.

As we got ready for releases, I recall sleeping under my desk, and would get woken up when bugs were found related to "my area." That company was pretty much everyone's life -- we mostly worked, ate, exercised, hung out together, and we were always thinking and talking about "the product." There was this thing called COMDEX that would take over Las Vegas each November, as the SECOND biggest show for that town. The first was still the Rodeo :-). If you were in PC hardware or software, you HAD to be there. Since some of the team members comprised core members of the MIT blackjack team, when we went to COMDEX there was some crossing of the streams.

Design principles? Talk it over with the team. Try some things. I can't recall compensation levels at all.

That company got purchased by a larger, traditional mainframe/mini CAD/CAM vendor, about the time that I was recruited to the PNW.

Things better, or worse than today? That REALLY depended on your situation. As a single young person, it was great experience working at that start-up. It was a springboard to working at a mid-size software company that became a really large software company.

Today, it CAN be more of a meritocracy, since there are ways to signal competence and enthusiasm by working on open source projects, and communicating with other developers. It's easier to network now. It's HARDER from the perspective of there are larger numbers of developers in nearly any area now than ever, and geography just isn't as important. But I also perceive that most people are less willing to make trade-offs like spending extra time today finishing something while it's still top of mind, vs. "knocking off" and doing it tomorrow. That could just be my perception, however.

I still like working hard.

This commercial product uses the CBRS frequency allocations, which they (and others) point out is already built into commercially available devices, like iPhones. Is there not an OpenBTRS or Open Air Interface way of utilizing CBRS?

child: "When will Daddy be home?" parent: "Any minute now..." child: "I choose THIS minute!!!!"

Pretty sure that's not what happened. Gabe had a different view of how PCs would become a bigger part of entertainment (this is in the 90's, when watching video on PCs was heresy!), starting with PCs in the living room. He tried to sell management on his vision, but this being the old Microsoft, he lost an internal battle. He proved his entertainment vision in the best way possible -- Building Valve Software by telling great stories, making great games, building an ecosystem, and now branching into hardware.

Try this modern take: https://youtu.be/-F-IHvF5OCA

BTW The series is totally worth watching.

Seems like you should have been fully vested from any original grants by now. So, 8 year vesting, plus the low salary? Hope you are learning things that will position you for success in your next role.

We all need a special version of this document we can bring to health care provider visits, something to the effect that they agree to inform of and get consent for any products or services that are Not covered by insurance BEFORE they are provided, since of course they are experts in medical issues and billing.

Here's the SC126 single board computer with CP/M in ROM (flash). https://www.tindie.com/products/tindiescx/sc126-z180-sbc-mot... with a Z180 running at over 18 MHz. Much faster than any Dynabyte, Northstar, Cromemco, and so on that were available back in the day.

Computed GOTOs in C are just pointer arithmetic and casts.

I'm correcting you: Unless he makes less than $40,000 in salary, the capital gains tax rates are going to be lower than the tax rate for ordinary income. The chart in this article reveals more: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10151...

When tearing down some of this technology, there's almost an undercurrent "how this works is a mystery today" -- but the humans that still worked on some of these micro-marvels are probably still alive. Have you had success in finding people that did work on these designs, for example in the case of the "universal controller (UC) architecture" which might merit an article all its own?

TruCentive | https://trucentive.com/jobs-trucentive/ | Senior/Lead Full-stack Engineer| REMOTE (only) | Full-time

TruCentive is a fully-remote VC funded start up in the incentive automation and non-cash compensation accounting space.

TruCentive is hiring for a fully remote senior/lead full-stack developer. Our stack is Ruby on Rails, JS, some React.

Listing for this position, and others we may have open: https://trucentive.com/jobs-trucentive/

Complete sets of reasonable fancy china can be cheaper at a thrift shop than buying a few every day place settings at crate & barrel. Eat on fancy china every day, put it in the dish washer. When you tire of it, dispose of it (thrift shop again, or throw away).

Is this similar to “work to rule?”

It seems like a (cynical?) way to turn today's overpriced real estate assets into a stream of payments. Someone purchasing a home for DKK 300K with no interest may think they're getting a deal, until they try to resell that home and find out they cannot sell it for more than DKK 240K.

The article estimates certain costs (e.g. $5 paperwork/overhead) without much factual evidence. Relatively small reductions in those costs could make all the difference in profit or loss on any particular order.