NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is in Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside the Beltway. I was a contractor there, mostly as a Unix and Linux system administrator, for nearly 30 years. It's a great place to work, but the salaries won't be as high as you'd get in private industry. Commuting from Dupont Circle might be a pain, but it's a reverse commute, so that helps. (Most commuter come into the city in the morning, not out of it.)
When I was at the University of Maryland in the late 70s, we had a student chapter of the ACM that met regularly. Once a year (or semester, I forget) we had "Career Night" when local IT companies would do a presentation of what they had to offer to future comp. sci. grads. We always had a good turn out for Career Night since the vendors provided the refreshments, which were orders of magnitude better that what we had at a regular meeting. NSA was always one of the presenters, and it was an amusing talk because they couldn't really tell us anything about what we'd be doing. They just said they had interesting problems, pretty much any hardware you could name, and decent salaries and benefits. I don't think any of my friends ended up working for them, but I have known quite a few NSA employees over the years. A friend who worked as a Russian language specialist had little good to say about the IT system they had to use. I imagine the cryptanalysts were the ones with the really good systems.
Eric Allman talks about Sendmail, the early Internet, and coming out in the 70s in this interview from 2021 at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. Uploaded to YouTube by his husband Kirk McCusick. Some of the more interesting technical content is in the Q&A at the end.
I kept hoping I could trick NASA into sending me down there for a few weeks. Surely a senior Linux/Unix admin would be useful there? Ah, well, there's always the tourist option.
The impressive visual effects from the climax of Gold were used in the last part of the film The Magnetic Monster. When I saw that film, I thought it was bizarre how the effects suddenly got so much fancier. I eventually learned they had reused the Gold footage.
I think it's crazy that we limit programming languages to using ASCII in 2022. Yes, I understand the chicken-and-egg issues of input, but it still seems like we're limiting ourselves as developers if we don't make use of a richer symbology. I know Raku supports some Unicode operators and Guy Steele's Fortress language also supported non-ASCII symbols so it is possible. But I'm not holding my breath. This is just one old man's crazy opinion.
This posting brings back memories. I was a computer science major at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the late 70s. CMSC 330 was then taught by the late John Gannon, a demanding but excellent teacher. He tragically died in 1999 at only 51 years old. CMSC 430, subject of the OP, was also a fun course, but for the projects we had to use PL/UM, a local dialect of IBM's PL/I. The compiler (for our Univac 1108) was written by the professor teaching the class and it was buggy as hell. When we complained that our correctly written project code wouldn't compile or run correctly, the professor said that that was just training for the real world and we should find work-arounds!
The oldest functioning electronic computing device I have is a Nokia N800 Internet Table, ca. 2007. I never wrote anything for it beyond a shell script or two, but it was possible to write custom code for it. I never owned any of the classic 8-bit consoles. I do regret letting go of my first computer, a z-80 based Ampro Little Board that ran CP/M.
The oldest electronics I have are from the '60s and earlier, in various states of repair. I have a preamp and amplifier that I believe still work. I also have some of my dad's old equipment such as his Heathkit VTVM and audio signal generator. I have his ancient (1930s?) voltmeter that would probably work if I could get a 22.5V battery for it. And I have a non-functional '30s era Atwater Kent multi-band radio.
My pilot friend did this maneuver in a light plane (Cesena 172?) with me once or twice. It was cool to see my camera floating in front of my face for a few moments.
I don't think that was one of the talks that was live streamed, so there won't be a recording. I'm traveling today so I'll have to look for it when I get back. Henry may have a website, I'll look for that too.
I just sat through a talk at Worldcon by Henry Spencer that addressed some of these issues. He presented the case that to provide the energy we need to address future needs, including raising the standard of living in Third World countries, we’ll need space based solar power.
I was on X3J11, the ANSI committee that created the original C standard and my experience was similar. It was a great opportunity to learn C at depth and get an understanding of many of the subtle details. We rejected a great many suggestions because our mandate was to standardize existing practice, address some problem areas, and not get too creative. (We occasionally did get too creative. The less said about noalias the better.)
It was only when I saw the French spelling of Baritone is Baryton that I made the etymological connection between the "heavy" particle and the "heavy" male voice part.
I actually like the Elizabethan English in Shakespeare, but it's good to have a text with footnotes that explain some things. One thing we miss in modern times is a lot of Shakespeare's puns. The words he punned on have shifted in pronunciation such that the word play is no longer clear. For example, one play had a pun on raisin and reason, which were pronounced similarly in Shakespeare's day. Some are bawdy puns, such as hour vs. whore. Some groups are putting on productions of his plays in reconstructed "OP" (Original Pronunciation) and I hope to hear one some day.
The idea that HIV/AIDS is primarily of concern only to gay men is completely false. At the Whitman-Walker clinic in Washington, DC, which was for years primarily an HIV/AIDS clinic serving mostly gay men, the majority of new HIV/AIDS patients has for some time been straight African-American women. Every sexually active adult needs to be concerned about HIV and take appropriate precautions.
The agency tolerated CentOS but was never happy about it. The fact that it was directly derived from RHEL and could be expected to get timely security fixes probably helped make them comfortable with it. The agency is also concerned about Python2 remaining the default in both CentOS 7 and RHEL 7. Red Hat has committed to back porting security fixes for Python 2 proper, but that leaves a large universe of add on packages that might not get patched. Thus the move from both CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 to RHEL 8.
I'm a NASA contractor and until recently we used CentOS a lot. With the changes made to CentOS by Red Hat, we are now moving to RHEL or Ubuntu. The Agency prefers to have an OS with official, paid support. (I do not speak for NASA, my employer, or anyone else, and I'm retiring in two weeks, so there.)
Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" does a very good, completely non-technical, job of explaining the conflict between the two theories. It then goes on to explain why String Theory is one possible solution to the problem.
I was going to say this. The sdcard is the weak link in the Raspberry Pi system. Even a USB flash drive is better. I have a Pi 4 that I use as a secondary system and it boots from an external SSD. It makes a real difference in responsiveness.
I would like to have gone to the New York World's Fair, I was seven or eight, but the World's Fair I really regret missing is the 1939 New York World's Fair. As a fan of Art Deco, that place is amazing! And they had Elektro, the robot! It's high on my list of places to visit when I invent a time machine.