Does anyone remember that type of early web form multiplayer games where you'd allocate resources by percentages and then fight against other 'countries' in turn based games? Do those still exist?
US has a curling team too. I wish the US had better olympics television coverage, but it's become mini athlete docs, a little of US performances and it robs us.
There's this too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMLU6-NHINQ
Microcontrollers and PLC are historically different fields that have some overlap as the fields converge somewhat. PLC come from relay logic and so learning Ladder Logic and playing with a cheaper Automation Direct PLC might be good if you're looking to do control systems like industrial machines and those robotics. RPi series micros are good to learn embedded electronics, servo controls and Realtime OS. Computer Engineering and Control System Engineering are treated differently even in the California State Engineering License Exams, so they tend to be different paths but the skills have some overlap. My degree was in computer engineering and didn't cover any PLC, but I contract and PLC comes up a lot in one-off things that need to be reliable.
I live in America so 'moral rights' aren't a thing, but in europe it appears to give artist/creators rights over how their work is portrayed. How our legacy is carried forward of our own likeness or our work is a moral question, and cultural, and defines our values.
We used to install the server-side exchange connector on windows small business server. It was an involved process to get working, but pretty reliable.
in the 80s AVG built a robotic Andy Warhol but he was enthused about it. Abraham lincoln is an American icon. Not sure someone who still has family in living memory is the same category despite being a sort of icon for a big corporation and a big emerging ethical concern of the 21st century seems to be bodily autonomy and consent. I see a lot of AI generated 'animated' photos, of the living and the dead. I tend to see a lot of people ignore someone's consent like they ignore media piracy, with a disinterested immoral hand-wave.
I know most productions now run so tight they rent their stuff, so once the edit is done and shipped most of the raw footage is all purged. No outtakes or extra footage exist. Actors prefer this for their image, studios will not pay to store any of it, but what a loss.
I really enjoyed the original Valve's Portal BBS you could dial into Aperture Science and read on the history. The writers at Valve really wrote some great silly backstory about a shower curtain company developing quantum portals, as some sort of tool to get in and out of showers. I'm not sure that's cannon anymore though.
Unless you're very wealthy, chasing the AAA game peak performance on PC is becoming unattainable. You can easily get an Intel Arc B580 card for ~300 to play at 1440p regular settings, but to take advantage of the highest quality at NVIDIA 4090 or 5090 you're looking at $4000 just for the GPU. AAA games just broke their price ceiling too with Nintendo going for $80/90 regular game prices for their headliners, and Microsoft following.
There are so many wonderful independent games studios that aren't competing for the top performance, or twitchy shooters that require such high hardware that it becomes serious competition for AAA.
A few recent favorites that don't require anything top end hardware wise are Psychonauts 2, Balatro, Wanderstop, Kitsune Tails, Shovel Knight, Cuisineer.
Since Doom: The Dark Ages requires a raytracing card, it's out of reach for me.
There was a time that printed checks had to use special laser toner called MICR Toner that was magnetic so the magneto readers could machine read the check bottoms routing and account numbers, but that went away when the Fed just ran it all as ACH/ electronically and optically scanned checks around the time mobile deposit and well after OCR became a thing. Last I checked the rule was still present in the statues.
CGP Grey, a youtube channel, has a video on some of the problems of the postal codes and addresses from earlier this year that I learned about alternates to my familiar US based system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K5oDtVAYzk
That's a crime the Valley Relics Museum couldn't get the Spaceship. It has done a really great job saving what can be saved of Los Angeles San Fernando Valley history. If you're ever near the Van Nuys airport check it out.
Fry's was a happy place for me. Memories of their old Terminal based stockkeeping system (AS400? AIX? I heard rumors the owner wrote it themselves). The Burbank Scifi theme, the Manhattan Beach polynesian theme, the Woodland Hills Alice in Wonderland Theme. Even the old sacramento unthemed version and the newer train themed one. The memories of building my own computers for several iterations and almost always getting my parts there, shopping first with my Dad then later a relaxing walk on my own. The haunted look of female partners dragged there. The ecclectic selection. It was a okay substitute for an old style electronics store like Electronic City, but had so much other interesting things. So many interesting things lost in LA. DAK2000, TRI-ESS Sciences, OPAMP Books. ALL Electronics surplus.
"he’d forgotten to write the bootstrap loader"
He didn't load the whole program from the switches on the face, just the bootstrap that would let them feed the paper tape through the teletype/paper tape reader that was common at the time. It would take a very very long time to load the whole program by hand. See this video of a demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxU_3dEJ2nM
I met Billy Mitchell briefly in 2015 at the now defunct Museum of Pinball in Banning, CA. He was promoting the world record for most people playing pinball simultaneously we participated in. I asked him about his depiction in the documentary and he replied something like "it's all true" with a lot of smirk and theatrical swagger. I got the impression he was a ruthless self promoter in all things he does, with his sauce business and his public ego and all the theater around the videogame records and most of what he was doing was all kayfabe as a heel, to use a wrestling term.
Later he handed off a high level game of Ms. Pacman he was playing to me in good fun. He really is very good at the games. (I didn't last long). People are complicated.
Pretty sure that is misleading, i'm no tax lawyer but gift rules only apply to friends and family. Buskers have to report income from performing, waitstaff have to report voluntary tips given to them and while there's probably no caselaw yet, I would suspect the IRS would fight you on income you receive entertaining other people not being 'gifts'.
If you want to go the other way and bring your old Mac to the internet, there is FujiNet. Also if you do have an old Mac, remove those old batteries, they leak destroying the motherboard.
I was at the SCaLE22x linux expo in Pasadena last week and there was a company Replit that has a tool where you type the website you like and it was pretty decent. They said someone came by and in a prompt alone created a GPDR compliant cookie popup. It's another tool, it wasn't perfect, but okay for some one-off sites. It will require skills to direct and know what you want, just like always. Embrace the power, know the limits. Let the new skills enabled by the new tools empower you, reject vendor lock-in to keep yourself free to ply your trade. Just like last time around.
Yeah, I leaned from an old "Bruno Furst" memory course, but it's fairly widespread to use the same system, because you can create visual mental pictures from combinations of the sounds into a word dictionary that links to numbers. The phonetics are fairly loose and designed to be adapted as you need it. You just insert vowels as you need to make words mental pictures vivid. Once you have a 'library' it becomes a hook system.