stevetron

While amusing on the surface, let's substitute an ink-jet printer for the pen, and have a malicious party inject code as a print driver update, or maybe re-programs that chip in the ink cartridge, and the ink cartridge refuses to function on certain print jobs. Maybe it will only allow the words "WE SURRENDER" be printed as part of the message.

A Terminator walks into military headquarters, and asks the general who it needs to kill. The general says, sorry, can't use you. I have a stipulation that I can't use terminators because of the internal AI. You might turn on us and kill all the humans. The terminator says. Fine. I'll go get work for your enemy, and walks away.

I worked in a state gov't agency as a temp, twice, in the same department. Several of us had shared access to a PC that let us log-into a special terminal program and read records on some mainframe someplace. That PC had a 233-MHz cpu, I'll assume single-core. At that time, it ran Windows NT 4.0, and it had been patched to use a USB mouse. But we didn't rate an optical mouse, so someone would come in twice a day with a tote of cleaning supplies and clean the mouse ball.

After September 11, 2001, somebody came in from the federal government and ordered Windows XP to be the minimum OS for some security issue. The person who had to update that system said a 233 MHz machine was too-slow for XP, and she didn't have a replacement computer, she was already short on computers.

The next time I saw it, it was running XP.

Wouldn't an example of the given scenario be writing code 50 or more years ago in mainframe COBOL, and then still expecting to run it to this day?

I wouldn't call them business-critical computers, but I do have about 3-4 computers under one of my workbenches dedicated to certain work I did for a client. One of them has an EPROM programmer set-up, which includes a custom ISA-card, and a ribbon cable to an external box with a ZIF-socket. The software for that requires MS-DOS. To network that box, which is a 486SX, I run WFWG 3.11. Since these never go on the enternet or anything outside 'the lab', I don't worry about the old MS networking.

A second computer has an MS-DOS program that captures data input on a pair of RS-422 ports (two more special ISA cards) That let me look at packet data at a low level and watch which serial port received what data, and track character-level handshaking of a proprietary protocol.

A third computer under Windows 2000 ran a 68HC11 cross-compiler that didn't require a dongle. I also used this to run a remote debugger that allowed me to single-step through the 68HC11 code running on the target but moved to the target's RAM. To do this 'properly' I was constantly generating hard-copies from the compiler which would show me the C-code, and the resulting assembler code that I'd track through the debugger. I used a lot of paper on a project sometimes.

A fourth computer with MS-DOS, with WFWG3.11 also installed on it, had all my old CAD programs on it, from before they required dongles, so that I could pull-up drawings of some of the hardware I designed. Some of those were finicky about which mouse I use. I still have an old Logitech mouse C7 that two of my CAD programs required.

I was working on a replacement platform that put this into an Atmel-based controller, shipped a couple of samples, then went blind in one eye, while my client had a stroke and was out of action for a year. Between both of our health problems, that project kind of died.

How to turn a refrigerator into a brick.

I think we are confusing the line between the tool and the author. The AI is a tool, like a word processor, a typewritier, or a computer running MSWord or LibreOffice. Someone is going to say it isn't authentic if you used a spell-checker or a grammar-checker.

Is it disclosed on the box the TV comes in?

So, Rust.NET?

I was in a Costco one, and the men's room urinal was a trough, a strainless steel trough! I thought it was 'cool'.

What they need to do with urinal design is to make one that can catch the wide-spray of someone who sports a PA.

I worked as a temp once in a stae government building. It didn't have enough bathrooms. The toilets were of the type that drained/fastened to the wall instead of the floor. One day, someone big sat down and broke it. There was an angry announcement on the rarely-used building-wide speaker. Nobody owned-up to it.

If there's no reason for software to be slow anymore, then why, when I click on any item in my Windows 11 computer, does it take 30 secords for something to acknowledge I clicked? With a Ryzen 5 CPU boasting quite a few cores, an Nvidia gpu board, and 64GB of DRAM, why does it take so long?

Birds Nest soup with Chinese tomatoes?

Or Cinese noodles with Chinese tomatoes?

It sounds likw 2 domestic markets that China should use to rid themseves of their over-abundance of tomatoes.

The first thing I noticed: do people like wet books? The way a lot of those libraries are designed, all the books are going to be ruined at the first rainstorm.

The Library of Congress doesn't keep a copy of everything. It doesn't even try. I was shocked to learn this, as a child growing up I had been told the Library of Congress kept a copy of everything.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Where isn't there traffic congestion?

what money?

Uninterrupted time? Is there such a thing? Let me explain: Having retired from a tech world that didn't provide me with very many gigs, I have found myself being the roommate of my own mother. I am 69 and 1/2 years old. She is 93 and 1/2. She is in a wheelchair. And she has been widowed twice. I have never been married, and there are no prospects. I do all the cooking. That isn't easy as I am vegetarian, and have trouble cooking for her since she is not. But she can't live alone, and doesn't want to get married a third time.

Basically, I have windows of 5 minutes when I can do almost anything, then she calls me to do something for her that takes 15 minutes, then I have another 5 minutes of work. Instead of coding, my writing efforts have transitioned to writing fiction.

Simply change the pricing so that the datacenters pay a higher rate to subsidize everyone else.

The handwriting was on the wall with this issue since the O'Bama administration: he had been convinced that putting all health care records in one central repository i.e. server famrs, and then unleash AI-systems on all that data, would come up with a cure for cancer. And at that time, there was an electricity shortage problem.

Another server farm is the one that the NSA built in Utah where the local power grid has been unable to keep powered-up. That's the one purported to have the backdoor on everyone's internet traffic kept. But some people prefer I go away with my foil hat.

He should have started his own pizza restaurants with his own ovens. Maybe then he'd learn more about baking. Especially pizza.

Restaurants wouldn't even need dish washers if they switched to paper plates. The pots and pans have to be washed by hand anyway. I was a dishwasher in a restaurant when I was only 14. I'd work a 12-hour shift on Saturdays because none of the 'real' dishwashers were available. The only perk I got was that I could have an occasional pipsi on-th-house. I also worked as a young adault in my father's restaurant. I'd come home from 'my' job every day, working on an electronics production line only to be shown the huge pile of dishes that had accumulated during the day. The production line paid me $2.50 per hour. My dad didn't pay me anything. But he let me park my 20-foot trailer in his back yard, which was adjacent to the restaurant property, and in the winter I had to refill my propane every 3 days.

RE: I promise I wrote this (and all the words in this post) with my meat fingers!

I'm a vegetarian, so I don't eat meat with my fingers, or anything else.

I'm waiting for that government subcommittee hearing where they are supposed to decide if my new cpu design is big endian or little endian. And they can't seem to decide if it should be coded in octal or hexadecimal. There's a separate committe deciding if the cpu clocke's phase 2 should be 90-degrees or 180 degrees different. There's a special group trying to decide how may accumulators the cpu should have. And there's a markdown already going on to decide if the flags register should have a separate flags for republicans and democrats.

> Put them in work programs. If they can’t be productive, put them in > mental institutions.

That was how NAZI-Germany and USSR (communist) governments 'solved' their problems.

In the USA, we had this president named Ronald Reagan who solved the mental institution problem: he closed all the mental institutions and expelled the patients so the patients live on the streets. That's really gave us a new influx of homeless people on a national scale, and it hasn't improved.

Show me a single law that was not given by a politician? I don't think there are any. Aside from maybe F = MA or Pie are squared LOL.

Aside from the disheartening forced-reading of this deeply-personal journal, I've gleaned from it that Musk wanted to bring OpenAI into Tesla, and OpenAI leaders did not. My thought is "OF COURSE" Musk would want to bring it in under his corporate control. I'm glad it didn't.

There is at least on class of voice modems the article didn't mention: The type 407 modem. In the 1980-1984 time period, I was part of a project to build a system for approving-disproving checks at some point of sale. The customer came to us, and wanted a way for a retailer to use a touch-tone phone to input a check routing code, have their database provide a determination of the check being good or bad, and returning a message via voice sysnthesizer to the customer on the telephone. In a nutshell, anyway. Their competitors kept requiring the retailers to purchase phones with integral card readers (for reading mag stripe credit cards).

I designed and built the box with the speech synthesizer, and it sat between the customer's computer, and a type-407 modem.

The Bell 407 modem was a large rack of many modems. Too pricey. Too big a hardware investment if you just wanted one incoming line. But we found something called a Tuck 407. The Tuck 407 utilized a 300-baud modem chip, and the one we had only could transmit in this mode. We didn't use this mode. We used the mode that utilized a touch-tone decoder and fed the digits out the modem's serial port. The modem also featured an input for audio, which it fed back into the phone lines. Thus, a voice modem. But the price of teh Tuck 407 was still somewhat pricey at $400 each. I only ever saw two of them cross my workbench, and they were resold to the customer.

My company built their own type 407 modem. They wanted basically a pc board level product that had the same footprint as the voice synthesizer board, so they could both be placed in the same enclosure (card rack). Eventually, that was done. It also chewed up about $30K in R&D costs. But it worked very well. It would have implemented the AT-style instruction set, but nobody was sure how to shoe-horn that on top of the hardware we'd built, that relied on extra control pins of the RS-232 connector into the modem. Several sample units were built, the product passed it's FCC part 15 and part 68 requirements, and only 2 initial sample modem boards ever made it to the customer that had also bought the two Tuck 407 modems.

The plans for the 407 modem got burned up in a fire. Almost like in a novel, it was so classic.

There's also Clue, Combat, stratego, Life, Parcheesi

How? I had a set of letterhead/envelopes/business cards printed up. I had already been "hanging-out" in the local electronics surplus stores, where they also sold used computer parts and the like. Stacked around the cash registers in these stores at that time were business cards. Various specialists. So I kept my own maintained stack of cards in my two main goto-stores, and I was friends with the register clerks, and had them handing out my cards on occasions when somebody came in the store and wanted help with "something". After 8 months of doing this, and being flat-broke, the day before Christmas, somebody telephoned off of my business card, and asked if I could do something. He brought some sample stuff, and I accepted a $200-per week retainer from him (I was really good at budgeting and that was what I had been getting for UEI until it ended). He had brought his checkbook with him, and wrote me a check. That started my personal word-of-mouth network and kept me going for a few decades.

I'm certain that if LinkedIn were confronted, that they could produce a response that says they are covered by the TOS you had to agree to in order to use the site. I don't have time to spend scanning legalease. Or make use of LinkedIn. If my system is being scanned, they'll see that I'm using a legitimate licensed copy of Windows 7 on a MODERN computer. If anything is at fault, it includes web browsers that Identify themselves to web sites.

I am having trouble understaning. First, which routers are actually made in the USA? ASAIK, none of them are.

I don't know anything about React. I used to do everything in C++, and I was really happy when I could do embedded projects in C instead of assembler.

With that said, I really like C#, even if I can't stand some of the directions it's grown into, and I think that the start menu could have been written in C#, WinForms, and have been far less troublesome.