dustractor

(For those interested in the technical aspects of how to compare resampling algorithms, you take a sound, graph it, speed it up then slow it down, graph it again. Comparison of the two graphs would ideally be identical but in practice that's nearly impossible. Mainly you're looking for where frequencies got created that were not originally there.)

It made me very sad, that we as a species appeared to have forgotten how to build a simple apparatus consisting of a light-bulb, a switch, batteries and wires. So then I got a Fenix. It's machined out of a single block of aluminum and it takes 18650 cells instead of triple A's. I've used it on a regular basis for the last decade and it still works every time I need it, the whole time I need it. No more technical taps.

Sure, most programmers have at least heard of a stack, and some could tell you the name of an operation one might do to a stack, and quite a few could at least tell you the name of an algorithm that did said operation, but stack-based programming is kind of a niche domain so that sounds more like the thing a non-programmer would say to impress other non-programmers.

amazing.

Looking at a translation of the lords prayer, wondering where the word 'hallowed' came in, since it wouldn't have been part of the original language, I delved into why hallow was the substitute for sacred, and what the origins of 'sacred' were.

Sacere, a set-aside area, so so something set aside is 'sacred'. To hallow something is to hold it in high regard, to respect it, to put it in another category other than the normal one.

The hebrews had seven holy names and EL was one of them. Imagine if you time traveled back to that time and asked random people in the fertile crescent, who or what do you worship? They technically couldn't answer that because their beliefs told them not to say that word, but they COULD say the ____

the ____

el (blank)

the the

EL EL? I worship the ____ (cant say it, leave a blank)

A blank? Like a hollow? A word with a separate category? A set-aside-area? Sacere. Sacred. So, our father hallowed be thy name is like saying you have a separate category for that name. What is the normal category for all the normal words? You can say them and you can write them. What is special about the 'sacred' words? You don't say them.

So we went from paying 9.95/month for average 56k service, to 80/month for a service that was worse than that.

To add insult to injury, a local broadband provider kept sticking their signs at our driveway next to our mailbox, and we would call to try and get service, but we were apparently 200 feet past the limit of their service area. People who lived at the mouth of our driveway had service, our neighbors had service, but we were too far out they said.

I repeat: as late as 2016 I WOULD HAVE KILLED TO BE ABLE TO JUST USE FREAKING DIALUP!

There are apparently some DNA sequencer machines that only interface with older macs. The linked article is just as an 'exhibit A'... It doesn't go into the technical details as to why that is so. I can't find the article on why virtualization is difficult for this case but it was very interesting. Cooperative multitasking (mac system 5, system 6, system 7 ish era) meant that the running task had the responsibility to yield. If the task was something like 'sample the value of x instrument register every 10 ms' (or something like that) then it could do the quick maths based on the base system clock rate and know exactly how many cycles to sleep between each sampling. In other multitasking scenarios where the os has it's own things it wants to do, the program cannot deterministically know how many cycles to sleep. What if the process will be arbitrarily delayed or interrupted, so some samples are taken 17 clocks apart and some samples are 19? With the priority being JITTER FREE, it doesn't help if the os thinks, ahh i have a million clock cycles this second, and only 1000 things to do, I'll just do some housekeeping... so there are background processes using bus resources, network interrupts, etcetera, all batched up and dispatched because the os thinks it has time to procrastinate this one task that just wants to sleep and sample a register and sleep... but sleeping for EXACT duration.