joblessjunkie

Really enjoyed this.

But I believe the goal isn’t a place - some absolute location to the right. The goal is an action: to always be in the state of holding the right d-pad button down, or taking some intermediate action so we can go back to holding the right d-pad down again.

BASIC had been aggressively trimmed down to fit into an 8K ROM on the first machines, and there just wasn’t room for much more than crude SAVE and LOAD commands unless we gave up something else. Expanded “disk basic” variants came later, but these were all non-standard.

CP/M and DOS were indeed pretty weak, but this was a time where being first to market with a minimum viable app was everything, and then compatibility with what had already shipped first stalled progress.

We are in an era of extreme demand for GPU and limited supply. Every inference we push to the edge frees cloud resources for other tasks. Every efficiency gain increases what we can achieve with existing resources. If images can be rendered with half as much compute, we need half as many GPUs.

Laughing agreement. I’m very sentimental for BASIC.

By the standard of getting kids started it’s an amazing and wildly successful language.

By any other standard, it is absolutely terrible! It commits every famous programming sin! Stay away! Do not learn from this language! LOL

I’m a greybeard, I played Oregon trail on the II and remember the first Mac.

IMO Apple (well, Jobs) was always trying to create a sealed, perfect appliance for regular people, even in the very early days. Apple worked very hard to hide all implementation details. Hackers, on the contrary, want to see and tweak all those hidden details. The complaints today were the same in the 80s.

To his credit, Jobs finally got there. My mother is in her 70s and the iPad is the only computer she’s ever used.

Reminds me quite a bit of Asimov’s “The Last Question”, which mines the same “computer-as-God” vein, is also very short, and has a suspiciously related title. Asimov’s story appeared in 1956, just two years later.

GDPR states that consent must be freely given. If there are financial incentives, the consent may be invalid.

Bandcamp workers voted to unionize five months ago. Is this a bust?

As an old fart who actually used a typewriter, I must point out that the bell does not ring when you press the carriage return. The bell rings when you are nearing the end of the line to warn you that you are bout to run out of paper.

On carriage return, the sound should be a slow swing of the heavy carriage physically returning.

I agree, "legitimate" companies usually want to comply and to do right by their users. That's why I get hired.

But currently the entire online analytics and advertising industries are hanging by this thread.

I am not a lawyer, but my full-time work involves reviewing codebases for GDPR and CCPA compliance.

I do not believe this strategy will achieve what OP is hoping.

In response to a deletion request, Reddit instead seeks to anonymize the data. Anonymous data is not personal data, so anonymous data is not covered by GDPR.

If you submit a GDPR deletion request, they will in this way wriggle into a position where they claim GDPR does not apply.

When Reddit (or most any other website) soft-deletes an account, they simply obfuscate the user's identifiers such as username and IP address. They argue that this is sufficient to make the mass of remaining data anonymous, and therefore not covered by any privacy law.

This is an extremely common position for websites. However, it requires that the remaining data truly be anonymous. For Reddit, this is absurd, as the free-form content of the website allows any amount of identifying information to be uploaded. Reddit simply cannot guarantee that identities cannot be deduced from what remains.

I believe this is fundamentally in violation of GDPR, but I am not a GDPR regulator with the power of enforcement.

This requires a legal appeal to the regulatory bodies.

There are many correct answers here, but I recommend the Pentax K1000. It is possibly the world's #1 most-manufactured camera, and was the standard camera for beginner photography classes throughout the 80s and 90s.

There are vendors on eBay that specialize in this camera and have literally 100s of cameras in stock.

Early models are all-metal, while later ones incorporate some plastic, but are consequently lighter. At this age, I wouldn't worry about the reliability difference of the two, and simply plan to replace the body if it fails.

The Pentax K-mount has a lot of cheap, good glass. The 50/1.8 is standard and fabulous, the 28/2.8 and 135/4 are also amazing and can be had for under $50.

The camera is entirely manual, with no autofocus or autoexposure available. Optionally, you can put a button cell battery in it to power a simple exposure meter, visible as a needle indicator in the viewfinder.

I've been shooting these for 40 years, so I'm a bit biased, but I do recommend them just for their ubiquity and cheap replaceability.

Under CCPA, businesses do not "demand" data because there is no restriction on its collection. Businesses simply need to provide notice of what they collect.

Consumers cannot opt out of this collection.

Consumers do have the option to opt out of having their personal information resold to third parties. The CCPA then specifically restricts businesses from withholding services or providing you with reduced services as penalty for this opt-out.

CCPA may not be perfect or even well-explained, but it's a first step in a positive direction within the United States. I think it's unfair to call it "useless".

I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history."

Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying to sell CD-ROM drives.

The upcoming Windows 93 (whoops, we slipped a little, make that 95) was going to require a billion floppy disks for distribution. Retail products were shipping in large boxes with comically tall stacks of expensive floppy disks.

CD-ROMs, on the other hand, are so cheap to distribute that AOL mailed them out as unsolicited junk mail.

It was worth sinking some money into a bunch of high-quality CD-ROM titles to get those drives standard on all PCs. Once that task was accomplished....

You are of course correct; mea culpa.

We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.

One product design goal was to run on the mass market 386 PCs of the time.

It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at some point, or flaky CD-ROM drives that just never seemed to read the same data twice the same way.

It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).

Encarta was part of my first job out of university. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. IIRC the BMP, WAV, and AVI file formats all came from this team at about this time.

In the summer of '91, I was tasked with assembling a 386 PC with an early CD-ROM drive to demo an early build of Encarta at a trade show. It was a lot of effort to find a combination of hardware and drivers that would work reliably together.

Encarta itself (at least at that time) was written as a Word document. Hyperlinks were defined using footnotes, and animation and audio placeholders were defined with custom OLE objects. The whole thing got exported as RTF and fed to a compiler, which created the runtime data structures optimized for CD-ROM access and that also built a full-text search index. The compilation was very slow and required huge amounts of RAM.

Around this time, the team had some awareness of HTML as one of many emerging hypertext markup languages, but the internet was still a few years away and no one knew what format would "win" for hypertext. In any case, there were no tools or browsers at all, so we had to build everything -- including our own search engine for the CD-ROM.

My reading is that levels were once randomly generated, but the updates ends this.

The update provides a fixed series of 10k hand-checked levels for everyone to play, regardless of their existing game state, so your game will end after hole 38,890.

GeekWire recently ran a profile with some more background:

http://www.geekwire.com/2017/feedme-food-delivery-aggregator...

I do not believe it was a mockumentary or wheels-within-wheels meta-commentary.

I was just struck by the irony that all the accusations leveled by the filmmaker at the media and our government also apply to this film itself.

I also spent a lot of my time watching the film trying to sort out how much is truth, and how much is propaganda or deliberate misinformation.

However, I think this also exactly the point this film is making about our modern media and political environment, which makes the film all the more effective and terrifying.

I found a plausible explanation here:

http://www.network54.com/Forum/27140/message/1296951241/More....

tl;dr: The BBC reference pitch was generated by dividing and multiplying a 1MHz crystal oscillator. A440 was achievable by this means; A439 was not.

It makes it seem like the "journalist" doesn't believe his own "reporting".

It sounds like you actually worry about his kind of thing a great deal, considering the amount of effort you put in.

Why not simply treat every search that returns zero results as a request, and dump the UI entirely?

Did the f.lux team just seriously imply that dimming your monitor at night can prevent cancer?

It would be nice if this link also appeared when you are not logged in.

> You have to teach the user what the icon means

Who's in charge here? The software works for me, not the other way around.

I don't want to be learning your glorious new UI, I want to be using its essential feature and getting out ASAP.

I understand that for progress to be made, ideas must be explored and risks must be taken.

But leaving out a label is not progress, it's just someone trying to save screen space on a cluttered design, and it doesn't help me.

f.lux wants to modify how the screen appears when other apps are running.

In general, this is not the sort of thing you want sandboxed applications to be doing. You can imagine the problems that a bad actor could create with this capability.