HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

stevetron

67 karmajoined قبل 4 سنوات

comments

stevetron
·قبل 8 أيام·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل 8 أيام·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل 9 أيام·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل 15 يومًا·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل شهرين·discuss
> 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.
stevetron
·قبل شهرين·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل شهرين·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل شهرين·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل 3 أشهر·discuss
There's also Clue, Combat, stratego, Life, Parcheesi
stevetron
·قبل 3 أشهر·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل 3 أشهر·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
I am having trouble understaning. First, which routers are actually made in the USA? ASAIK, none of them are.
stevetron
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
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.
stevetron
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
So now there's a few additional steps when I install a new distribution to make certain that classic sudo is the one installed, rather than sudo-rs

I'm sure someone things this is a good idea, but I do not, and nobody cares what I think. But I come from being a long-time coder who's always been a terrible typist and can't depend on "touch typing" and have to actually look at things, like the keys, and the screen. And handicapped by going blind in one eye, and having arguments with eye doctors who say "get used to it and switch to audio books" and needing 14-point boldface fonts for everything.
stevetron
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
If I understand this, the owner of the text is the tool? If I used a pencil, the writing was authored by the pencil. If I used a typewriter, the writing was authored by the typewriter.
stevetron
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
Perrhaps they can add ID-checking to the gnu compilers, too? lol
stevetron
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
Here's a memory: My old Fido-net system, running on a 386, with a single phone line. Connected to a Microcom 34Kbaud modem.

Everything is chugging on, and connects to another system further up the chain at 2 am for network traffic. Except he's on a new phone number, on a new exchange in the state. A 914 exchange. Only the phone company's updates haven't reached all of the telephone switching centers in the sate. Somehow, it was re-routed to 911 services, and I had the police and fire department at the front door responding to a 'silent call'. They went away unhappy. I wasn't very happy either.
stevetron
·قبل 4 أشهر·discuss
This is like a previous administration trying you re-unite children with their families.
stevetron
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
How about including a course in touch-typing that emphasizes the computer keyboard rather than the typewrite keyboard?
stevetron
·قبل 5 أشهر·discuss
I'd say it lost it's coolness when it started public flogging.