EvanAnderson

It's crazy they didn't have a centralized clock system in a facility like that. What a thing to scrimp on.

I worry about dismantling working, productive smaller businesses (and they employment they provide) in service of preventing wealth concentration. In the US, at least, Big Wealth is really unaffected by estate taxes. Smaller businesses with less sophisticated ownership structure end up with a tax burden or being forced to liquidate.

I'm talking more like the late 80s when I was giving my address info to clerks at Rat Shack who were typing it into some kind of green-screen app on what, if memory serves, kinda looked like a Wyse terminal.

> I think their cash registers ran SCO Xenix.

Tandy had a Xenix license from Microsoft and shipped a version on their TRS-80 Model 16 and Tandy 6000 machines (both of which were Motorola 68000-based). It would be interesting to know how much of their own stuff they used internally. I have a recollection of a (potentially apocryphal) story the TRS-80 Model 1 had a "fallback" use as an in-store management computer if they failed to sell.

Absolutely! There would inevitably be a CoCo on display and that's the machine I'd play with.

A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.

I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).

> ...but more importantly available a few miles away within practically any city.

We're around the same age and likely have similar memories. I poured over Radio Shack catalogs and weekly ads when I was a kid. When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.

When I started doing PC tech work (in rural Western Ohio in the late 90s) it was always an option, no matter how far out in "the sticks" you were working, to drive to a Radio Shack for emergency parts. They might not have exactly what you needed, and you'd probably pay a hefty price, but you could get the job done.

That ubiquity definitely left an impression on IT technicians of my generation. I was recently doing some work w/ a legacy system that called for some serial gender-bender/null modem cables. Not having any handy I had to improvise with some DE-9 to RJ-45 hoods and creative crimping to get what I needed. A cow-orker commented "We used to be able to just go to Radio Shack when we needed stuff like that in a hurry."

Absolutely. I've seen two examples of electricians using wire nuts to splice two runs if UTP wire together. There's also a general disregard for keeping the pairs twisted as close to the termination as possible.

"At best, an air gap is a high-latency connection." - Ed Skoudis (of SANS fame).

Beware that some providers are in contracts prohibiting them from taking cash payments if they know a patient is covered by the contracting insurance carrier. I don't know the specifics of the business justification for these terms but they do exist.

I've had providers tell me they'd have been happy to charge me less, making less than their insurance reimbursement, but not have to mess w/ billing my insurance, but they were unable because their contract with my insurer did not allow it.

I think the "you can fill up in 5 mins" analogy is apt and reasonable, actually.

For the average person it's much harder to exercise out of a bad diet than just change the diet. I think it's an easier "sell" for most people to start off trying to eat less than to keep eating the same way and jump right into "kick your ass"-level exercise.

According to the nasty, nasty fights I've had with people about this topic there are, apparently, some people whose bodies are actually perpetual motion machines and I'm various kinds of insensitive for even bringing-up physics as it relates to weight. >sigh<

There was a nice HN discussion about an M.D.'s blog re: Vitamin D that includes some notes about toxicity. The doctor showed-up on HN and interacted in the comments, too. I found what she wrote to be valuable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24138590

Blast from the past here-- it's ewwhite! I hope life has been treating you well, sir. It's hard for me to believe it's been so long.

We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.

I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.

I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)

When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.

I suppose I was never their target market anyway.

On the more-and-more rare occasion that I end up on Stack Overflow as a result of a search I find myself losing excessive time to following the random links to other communities. The other communities really are good stuff.

I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.

I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.

When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)

Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.

Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.

Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.

The acquisition of OpenNT / Interix / Services for Unix (SFU) gave MSFT a really solid POSIX compatibility offering but it was too late-- Linux was already ascendant by that time. The no cost nature of Linux, as compared to the per-client client licensing for server versions of NT, can't be understated, though.

> Well, yes, it was designed and it also was a reimplementation of an existing thing, this being VMS.

My nitpick with the "reimplementation of VMS" statement would be that it didn't target source portability of VMS applications like Linux (and the GNU C library running on top of it) does with Unix/POSIX applications. I see it as Cutler and his team taking lessons learned from VMS and building something new incorporating those lessons in a different requirements framework.

Server Core is sort of that. The GUI is still there. You can run full Win32 GUI programs if you bring over the dependencies. There's less bots there but it's not analogous to a lightweight Linux distro that has no windowing environment.

A fever dream of mine is a "distribution" of NT that ships with the Interix subsystem and boots to text mode (or serial console) by default.

> Also, the NT kernel is criminally underrated, and pretty much unknown to hobbyists. It had features that Linux took years and years to come up with its own design for...

A person after my own heart. NT was actually designed, versus being a reimplementation of an existing thing.

Good catch. I wouldn't want people to get that impression. My reference to being a current Motorola Customer was a statement about liking their build quality (and their not being Google).

It's not a banking app, but there are definitely apps that don't work on GrapheneOS that can't be made to work. A friend of mine is "required" to use Microsoft Authenticator for his work MFA, which won't run. He's looking at having to carry another phone.

I have to use the awful thing, too, so if I go to GrapheneOS next year when, hopefully, a non-Google phone supports it, I'll have to carry two phones. Ugh.

I'm already a Moto phone user so assuming GrapheneOS becomes available on a Motorola phone next year I probably will switch.

Edit: I have at least one app that won't run under GrapheneOS (Microsoft Authenticator) so I'll be stuck with a two-phone carry, too. >sigh<

There have been a ton of scams my Customers have reported over the years that I've traced back to users clicking bad ads.

Google may care a lot, but if my experience is any indicator they don't care enough.

I moved to Android in 2022 from the iPhone ecosystem. I've been thru one phone replacement cycle and it was glorious. I got by without ever using Google Play and never had to tie my phone to any "ecosystem".

I had "sideloaded" all the APKs for the software I used on the old phone and saved the APKs. Moving to a new phone was just a matter of loading all the software and copying my rsync'd backups onto the new phone. It was wonderful. Just like moving to a new PC.

I guess I'm happy I got to have this experience for a little while.

Edit: I've found a few apps I can't used because they require Play attestation. Eventually I'll hit one of those that I need and I'll be at an impasse irrespective of this particular power grab.

> We have come a long way.

Except for all the legacy systems and embedded devices I have to deal with that have no certificate automation functionality and are still within their budgeted lifetimes. Those dumb things still require manual enrollment (or, at the very least, ugly one-off scripting to hand-puppet their stupidity) and the decreasing certificate lifetimes makes the problem that much more excruciating.

When I heard "carbon-fiber" and "pressure vessel" in the same sentence I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion

This would be the opposite of that, though.