readingnews

While I agree with:

>> Fools and their money, etc etc

And certainly Mc is not what it used to be (the MC-1700 receiver for example, was great)... you are slamming an "empty box" unfairly. It has:

  - A light, well, ok, pretty empty.
  - Removable back wall. Eh, ok.
  - A IR to turn on and off devices.  Hrmm. 
  - It can control other DinkyLink devices (I did not make that up)
  - Trigger control to control other audio devices. Hrmm. 
  - It is a sturdy metal box (go online and purchase a nice one, I bet they are hundreds of bucks)

Not that it is worth $1500, maybe $300, and at the same quality as that box looks with the glass front, probably $500, but again, saying $1500 for empty box is kind of unfair.

To be honest, I have paid $300 for nice rackmount enclosures with handles that were custom made.

How things change... I recall having a subscription (had one of those friends who always seemed to know what was coming out right before it came out) right when they started publishing, what was that, 1994? It was so cool.

I just viewed the front page, looks like the definition of "internet chum".

But seriously, to upend Google, you are going to need to be the default on what people use, which I think for now is phones.

Another barrier, maybe they need to get away from this: "will require succeeding at home and growing revenue, which largely comes from running ads." So what do you do when everyone runs some ublock-origin thing? We need to figure out a search monetization beyond "feed me weird things I do not want" on the sidebar. Should websites pay? No, wait, then only those with real money are on the web. Should we pay? Now, wait, we have had it for "free" for too long (could be wrong, I might at this stage in the game pay to have an actual search engine, like say google circa-internet 2004, of course the net was a different place, but still).

That is not as easy as it looks. My granparents had a number of tops like that (not German, but same style you threw it with a string)... none of the kids could get them to work, and (comically) none of the adults could get them to work either. Some child would find them during the holidays and some grandparent would say "oh yes I remember playing with those, you use a string" (goes and finds string, spends next 15 minutes proving they just can not do it). Then the kids would run off and spend an hour trying to get it to work, unsuccessfully.

I think when I see this video, we all were throwing it upside down.

I ran a company building electronic devices, so I had a lot of parts (LCR, transformers, chassis, screws, wires, connectors, misc)

    What types of storage do you use? 

I used to use those plastic bins that you see a lot of. I sorted by both resistor, and resistance series. So one bin would be bins of metal film, sorted by series with printable cards on the front drawers of each. Another bin would be carbon composition, another wire wound, etc. One bin had kind of misc (diodes, bridges, transistors), another small screws, another large screws, etc.

     Are you subscribed to an organizational philosophy?

The thing that lets me grab the part the fastest. I purchased my bins explicitly so I could get my round nose pliers into them easily and grab a resistor, as I always seemed to have round nose pliers in my right hand, and opened the drawers with my left.

    Do you sort your resistors by resistance?

See above comment. I will note that I had a short list of power resistors, and at first they were just bunched in with the regular resistors, but as they were larger (same with metal film and carbons, they are different sizes) it was slower to have them in one bin.

I will say this, however, after several moves an the economic crashes we went through, it became not my first source of income, and I slowed down a lot, to the point that it is more of a hobby. At this point, I had no room for the bins, and so now I have the following: I purchased a bazillion ziploc bags, perhaps 2"x3" with a white writable area on the outside. I put the resistors in them in the same way as I describe above (e.g. start at 47ohms and move up with metal film, then carbon comp, then power) and I put them standing up in cardboard boxes that allow two of the bags to sit side by side. This has saved a ton of room, although obviously it is slower.

On the "keep finding spare parts between my toes and under pillows", yeah, if you want to get rid of that, you need to have iron-clad will power to find that one you dropped just a moment ago.

Looks cool. if you are interested in analogue sounds and synths and like to make your own, this website is a good place to start. https://musicfromouterspace.com

You can buy kits there which are similar to OP. I have not purchased any, but many times have had them in my cart :)

I am no astrophysicist, but he notes:

    “Hi everyone, my name is Daniel, and I’m an astrophysics professor at UCLA. I’m only being paid $70,000 for this academic year,” McKeown says in the video.
 
    McKeown, listed as a lecturer on UCLA’s website, says he had to move out of his apartment because he could no longer afford the rent.

    McKeown says his rent was $2,500 a month. According to RentCafe, the average rent is $3,700 in Westwood.

Hrm, I have no idea what his actual situation or bills are. But 70k is not chump change, and 2.5k rent seems "manageable". Lets see, if his is single, that puts tax at 22%. It is probably 30% with state and local, minus SS tax. Lets kick it up to 36%.

(70000-(70000*0.36))/12.0=3733.33

Ok he is left with 3733.33-2500=1233.33 a month, that is BRUTAL, but I know people that live on less than that after a home mortgage and car note.

Again, I have no idea of his situation. Maybe student loans, maybe a car note, medical expenses, etc, but to state out loud that you have probably 1.2k a month after rent and can not possibly live without _a hundred grand_ extra (what he is trying to raise... which is EIGHT THOUSAND A MONTH EXTRA) seems a bit, I am not sure, overreacting? I am just conflicted about this story. I have really good friends that would do a hulluva lot for a 70k job with a 2.5k rent, but at the same time, it is true we are paying professors (and educators in general) far too little.

Is this just to make a statement maybe?

ACM, come on, stop spreading disinformation. You know well and good nothing travels at the speed of light down the wire or fiber. We have converters on the end, and in fact in glass it is the speed of light divided by the refractive index of the glass. Even in the best of times, not c. I just hate that, when a customer is yelling at me telling me that the latency should be absolute 0, they start pointing at articles like this, "see, even the mighty ACM says it should be c".

Ugh.

Honestly, not making this up, I have no idea how any of you have time to read.

Last few books I read (non-{technical,programming,electronics}) were in college. Perhaps a few for fun, mostly for class.

I work all day, when I am done with work, I have house work to get done. Every single time I grab a book and think "I will read this book", heck even technical,programming,electronics books I _want_ to re-read, time vanishes, I put it up and get too busy.

Reading these comments, seems like a lot of people read books. I have no idea how you all find the time.

Actual research into this area is needed for us, but I am always left wondering, why are we not doing research into what packaging is better for us?

Are glass bottles OK, or does the coloring leech out? I am guessing clay pots were fine for thousands of years, should I be using them? What about brown paper wrap? I know the butcher paper has a coating on it... Every time I read something like this two thoughts come into my mind:

  - I will never get "mega corp" to stop using them. 
  - I do not know what the alternatives are.

≥≥ Unlike other countries in the US you can call yourself an engineer as a job description without any restrictions, so far too many people have taken on that job description, even if it does not make any sense.

This is one of my pet peeves... in Engineering school it is beaten into you that what you build has to be correct. Correct as in, did you check the poles and zeros? Is this thing going to oscillate out of control and kill people in any breeze? Is this circuit ever going to go into a region where it will fail, probably killing people, and did you ensure you have circuitry that will prevent that? Is every floor of this building rated for the loads, winds, seismic activity, etc.

I feel like in software, there used to be a lot of focus on correctness of algorithms. In undergrad computer engineering we had to take algorithms and again in grad school. That class seemed like the one to teach you to be correct, but it was just in your algorithm design. So much of software today controls hardware that may end up controlling (insert your deadly item here: life support, airplanes, cars, trains, critical infrastructure, deadly infrastructure, etc) that it makes me wonder just how much holistic testing of the "in which ways can this software fail and kill people" has taken place.

All of your examples could be negated, I will just do one as an example:

Apple did not spend 20+ years developing the smart phone thinking "I hope this research pays off". The same for the rest of your examples.

Bell Labs, OTOH, was literally like "go do fundamental telecom and computer research, and we will see if we can use it to get ahead".

Those are two different mindsets. Amazon had one goal so did Nvidia, Google, etc, with each venture you cited. Bell Labs was a _research park_ of exploration that we do not recreate today.

You will not "recreate" it, as everything now is short term shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article notes, they held the long view on innovation.

We could really use a large number of bell labs today. It will not happen.

Wow, how much fun times my friends and I had with Glider. We probably could not possibly thank you enough for making something that caused us to spend so much time together. If only I had more rubber bands...

So many dead links... so many links going to AOL or CNN or domain-squatters. Heck a lot of links on the first page are empty.

On the flip side, like so many others here, I had a friend who went overboard with his. Automatic reloading systems, piezo trigger so you did not need lighters and such, scopes, automatic cutting devices for the spuds. He tore it apart after a spud went through both sides of a car (it was a junk car he was intending to shoot) and ended up "who knows where" on the other side.

I still have a roll of punch tape, I think for a PDP11, that says "Lunar Lander" on it, and I have no idea who to give it to.

IMHO, the real problem is that there is zero value to go to bby. The sales teams are either not to be found, or know nothing. Checking out is a nightmare of "where is anyone to check me out?" and the place looks like a dump (the three I have gone into recently for an emergency part, which I could not find).

It is nice, but it looks like it was filmed with a flip phone camera. Try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rryu85BtALM

Right? Is that a thing?

I see a fair number of articles like this. "Check out this awesome piece of history. I took a picture with my Motorola V300 with 0.3MP camera circa 2004, reduced it using shareware of questionable quality from VGA to CGA to save space and uploaded it to my website"

Perhaps we can just:

ln -s .plan ~/public_html/now/index.html

Sure, we can run it through some template or use awk, but what the heck.

I am still baffled at how I can not use a VOIP number to register, even if it accepts TXT/SMS. If I have a snappy new startup and we go all in VOIP, I guess we can not use (or pay to use) OpenAI?

He was also a regular guest on the Woodwrights Shop with Roy Underhill, and both of their hand plane collections are quite nice.

>> and you have to deal with medical doctors, who assume that a terminal professional degree conferring upon them a title they appropriated from academia means they are experts in all fields.

Dang, I do not like Doctors as much as the next person (ok, Medical doctors, I am a doctor of engineering, I suppose, according to some piece of paper)... but you are just _jaded_.

I have met Doctors who understand full well that they do not know it all. Sure I have met conceited, full of themselves doctors who think they play god too. For the most part, people are people, and IMHO, on average, someone who went to get a terminal degree and did so with good teachers was taught good and well that they surely did not and do not know it all. I sure as hell know that I know nothing about life, the universe and everything, even though I have three letters after my name.

I agree with this statement, however:

>> Medical software often sits at a sad intersection.

Not sure what a good solution is.

Does the Verge even proofread? In a linked article (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/9/24152987/apple-crush-ad-pi...) they claim:

>> Watching a piano, which if maintained can last for something like 50 years

Something like 50? I know people who own pianos which are "something like" 150 years old, and I do not know many people with a piano.

Some are _centuries_ old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortepiano

Replace woodworking with "any hobby you want to pursue".

I find that a lot of people go to work thinking they enjoy it, and wake up later and realize it is just "work". This leads them to go off and figure out what they really enjoy, and they start doing that (they call it a hobby). Some of them ruin their hobby, by turning it into a full time job, where once again, it just becomes "work".

I admire your bravery of posting to something like HN for people to pick at it (there are always positives and negatives)...

Personally, I think there are a number of hard questions to answer surrounding fact checking, it might be wise to get advice from experienced people in fact checking (I have no idea what it is called, but I think that is an entire field).

No big deal, but it raises my curiosity, why are you located in Canada and incorporated in the U.K.? I see you already have a LTD, and TOS (so you _did_ speak to legal advice already, I guess?) It seems like you have gone pretty far with this already. It seems I can get a quote as a business... do you charge by the query?

Every time I see these I always think of my roll of punch tape that has "Lunar Lander" written on it that I can not possibly use as I have no access to a DEC.

Should the title read "earliest known Digital video game"? I keep reading it "the very first computer game ever", instead of "from DEC". Maybe I am wrong, is it the very first video game (before tennis for two, etc)?

I find this very interesting, as my path is nearly identical, with the added note (like some other replies) that I just can not stand 60s-70s rock any longer... but I find my musical interests are much wider, and I am listening to more new music than ever before (trance, IDM, experimental, jazz, classical).

I do know people who turn on some streaming service and basically listen to the same genre all day long. I am not sure how they do it. Maybe we are in some small demographic that goes nuts if we do not discover new music?

I am having a tough time... I am a systems administrator who also has experience teaching and coding, but I am looking at systems admins / engineering positions only. I consider myself highly experienced in Linux / Unix. A few years back, I could just word of mouth say I was looking and have offers. Now, nothing.

Lots of ghosting after the 2nd or 3rd interview. Very few positions for Sr. Systems admin / Engineer that I see as of late, much more "full stack or devops", but they really want a full time developer with a lot of front end experience. I do not really create web-applications, though. So it is tough.

Of all the things on the list, the third item

    RJ45 Join Adapters

Is one that has saved me (and others I work for) so many times. How many times have I been in some building/area without my network tool bag with two male RJ45s looking at one another and I am going, "hrmm I have to connect these".

I _literally_ just used one this morning... cable too short, no network bag in sight, but my laptop bag always has an RJ45 join adapter (not sure if that is the real name).

I love these arguments: To help with inflation:

>> Have a higher savings rate

Uh, right. So for someone who is just getting by, does not "overspend" and does not have luxury items, how do they do this? I hear over and over the argument is: if you can not save money, you are overspending... well, if you are in the cheapest housing you can get, have no car, no hobbies, no expenses outside of food/shelter/water/electric bills, and you are not saving, what do you do? Too often I hear the well off say "just spend less".

I think the author is trying to get around the idea that people should actually get raises.