wildgift

The 386 has an MMU, making it feasible to do preemptive multitasking and virtual memory.

The 286 and 8086 had multitasking based on allowing small programs to run concurrently, but nothing that used a lot of memory.

The competing 68000 also lacked an MMU. The later 68010, I think, had the MMU.

The GNU utilties, clib, gcc, all that stuff was just spinning out into the PC world. The software was being ported to everything from Amigas and Ataris with no MMU, and sometimes no hard drive, to Sun workstations. I thought it was pretty amazing - that a lot of hobbyists like me were turning our personal computers into little unix-like machines.

GNU was like this sun, and we were starting to move toward it. It was like we were sunflowers looking for sun... and then meteors being pulled by gravity.

For some people, the FSF and GNU project were more important than DOS or the Mac.

GNOME = GNU Object Model Environment

Also, Linux isn't GNU, but it is GPL.

People get annoyed at the RMS self-promotion, or GNU promotion, but that stuff is important.

I was a student at the time, but it seemed like GCC was like the Linux of its day, causing a lot of upheavals in the compiler market. GCC code was so fast compared to what was out there.

What you just did was "blame the victim" and basically green-light the asshole company's behavior.

You're shifting the blame away from the scammers.

Desperation?

Most of the commenters are wannabe school cops or something. I think it's fantastic that they figured out how to make it into something useful.

Same here. These thin-lined icons also slow me down.

The BPP starting at Laney is one of the cool things about Oakland. There's history around the corner when you're roaming the city. That and the Oakland Museum and Chinatown. And Flints BBQ, and E&J, and Doug's. And the markets in Fruitvale. And the anarchist and communist stuff in Berkeley. I'm getting all misty-eyed.

That has to be BS. I used to walk around Oakland at night in the 90s during the crack days. Whatever. It was unsafe, but there's unsafe... and unsafe. Put on the city face. Besides, if you're not Black, the cops won't mess with you. People think anyone walking at night is crazy. And don't go to the really dangerous spots where gangs run the street, unless they know you. You can see it by the drug dealing. That's just common sense.

OK yeah I got mugged once. But nonviolently, LOL. Only cost me $20. This was near Downtown.

LOL, yeah, move to Fresno or Kern County.

There's a thing called a bus. Who the hell wants to bike across the Bay Bridge?

I don't know what SF is like now, but CNet, Wired, Craigslist, and a few other companies started out there. There was also Hyperreal and SF.NET, the ravers, and Mondo 2000 up in Berkeley too. Maybe it wasn't the same kind of startup or the same people, but there it was.

Anyway, I was almost instantly burned out on that hype almost before it happened. It wasn't the tech but the whole utopianism that was tiresome. Technoids in fantasy land. Ugh.

I couldn't afford SF and liked Oakland a lot more, especially Chinatown and the area around the lake, and the swap meets, and the tiny computer stores. The Black culture, southern culture, Black Muslims, all that was new to me. The crime, not so cool, but whatever. SF had hella crime too.

I guess my old San Francisco and old Oakland are no more.

screw civilization.

To really get an idea of how H1B screws the working class and poor, look at the lower-paid jobs. It seems like many of them don't require a bachelors degree, or just require some kind of vocational education.

These are the 30k to 45k jobs that make up the lower half of the "middle class."

That's just unfair. Local workers need to get a first chance at these jobs.

The SICP videos are available somewhere and are pretty intense.

I think the line spacing and line length matter more than the font size. With these high-resolution displays, the fonts can be pretty small, and they're still readable, but you then need to make the column narrower and add a couple pixels to the line height.

Can you go on strike with your coworkers?

How can you compare corporate greed to union greed? The best paid union workers were autoworkers and longshore workers, and the companies they worked for were still huge and profitable. So as "greedy" as these well paid workers were (and I mean "were," because autoworkers make a lot less today) they weren't greedy enough to destroy the company.

If it weren't for this so-called "greed" there wouldn't have been a middle class at all. And now that unions are shrinking to almost irrelevance, the middle class is vanishing.

The old attitude of companies holding onto workers was created by unions making demands. Now that unions are few, and in many sectors, were never present, the "fend for yourself" at-will contract is the standard.

The unions made those "good old days". The labor strife of the 20s and 30s set the conditions for the middle class of the 50s and 60s.

Aren't programmers more like the engineers who made the cars? Their work product is not just the design but the assembly line and the process, and those things help produce parts and cars. The autoworkers are more analogous to the people who work within software-controlled workplaces. That would be the people who pack boxes at Amazon.com, or do data entry, or customer support.

What if the problems to solve are becoming easier to solve, because we're more plugged-in into an infrastructure of information? That eliminates work.

Standards are a good example. We love them, but, in a way, they eliminate the creation of middleware jobs that transform the data from one format to another.

Autowork in the 1930s and beyond may have been semi-skilled, but before widespread automation, it was a craft, and cars were expensive. This de-skilling has always been happening in software. Back in the 80s, word processors were written in assembly. Today, they can be written in JavaScript.

Sometimes, it takes a while.

I grew up in a part of California where many Chinese businesspersons entered and started businesses. Many of these businesses would hire a white man to do some sales. This was generally within communities where white people rarely exceeded 30% of the population. In many, whites made up less than 10%. It was mostly a Mexican American and Asian area.

The reason why was obvious. The local business operators, who were mostly older white people, didn't want to buy from a Chinese person.

Asian guys I knew were resentful. Not only was it racist to do that, but the whole situation was racist. It was a racist response to a racist situation, and it made racism seem hopeless.

As far as accents went, we didn't have them, by and large, unless one was an immigrant. The most common accent was a Chicano English accent.

The Mexican Spanish "r" is close to the Japanese r/l. You don't say "bulito" or "burr-ito" like a burr of metal. You say "burrito", and know that people who can speak it add a tiny bit of a roll to the "r". The Japanese R is not rolled, but it's like just starting the roll.

What about NewEgg? You also have to look and see if there's a brain drain going to Taiwan and China, because Taiwan decided, years ago, to focus on making PCs.

There's something very corporate about how they go about this, though. It's not uncommon either.

Retail stores are a kind of small scale capitalism, with lots of merchandising. It's all about shelf space. The Korean shopowners don't know what to stock, so they leave it up to Goya.

That's not that different from having Frito Lay stock your snack rack, or having Bimbo USA control a few meters of baked goods, or having Coca Cola dominate your soda fountain. Why does Grumma dominate tortillas when there are dozens of tortilla factories in my city?

It's just a different brand. I see "Fud" brand deli products (it's pronounced "food", and it's kind of a joke), and they do the same thing. The get lots of space to do demos. They're competing with Oscar Mayer and Farmer John. The product is not that different - it's middle-range premium product.

Goya appeals to immigrants for the same reason Fud, Kraft, McDonalds, and Farmer John appeal. They're okay. Not awesome. Not crappy. Just a tad above average. Nobody is fooled.

Definitely, but the paper it was in was the Washington Post. If they printed that in the Chron or LA Times, people would take it for a joke.

The cold war ended, and there was no longer a need to prove that we could send something up into space and rain down fiery death upon anyone on the planet. Hence, no more space program.

That seems very different. That's more like exciting, risky behavior mixed in with a deathwish.