Manchester Computer Center (MCC) Interim Linux zero-dot-something. A boot floppy and IIRC four more floppies for a system capable of compiling the kernel. I didn't have enough memory for X, but found and installed the MGR simple windowing system.
Yeah. There's an enormous (but largely unprofitable) market for a good-sized tablet that's rugged enough to give to kids, cheap enough to hand out replacements for the ones that don't survive. The first goal ought to be to get rid of most of the paper textbooks -- I cringe when I see the fourth graders hiking past my house on the way to school, bent over from the weight of the backpacks.
But then I'd have to live in upstate NY. After moving to the Denver area 30 years ago, I discovered that I was born to live in a high-altitude semi-arid climate. If you're going to live in a place that has all four seasons, Denver-Boulder has about as mild a version of them as is possible.
Most languages more or less work the same, the details and flaws are mostly in the libraries...
The libraries are always the time-consuming part to learn. Or perhaps more accurately, the interfaces to the libraries. Most experienced programmers will have encountered the situation where it's the same C/C++ library underneath, but the interfaces from Perl or Python or some other script-y language are all different in terms of details.
Maybe it's just the kind of jobs that I had, but over the course of 40+ years I don't ever recall being in a situation where I could honestly say, "I know everything about every topic relevant to this job; I've built all the job-related tools ever needed; there are no job-related skills left to acquire."
Certainly there were times when I could say, "None of this job-related stuff is as interesting as this widget I want to build for my own use," but that's something different.
1970, my high school had a Teletype model 33 connected to the timeshare mainframe at the local university. I was on my own with absolutely minimal documentation. Learned bad habits that took years to break.
My city does this every few years, and they still charge $20 for 28" and down, $35 for over. I got rid of the last one we had -- a color-corrected display my son had used for graphics design -- at one of their events maybe five years ago. It was an awesome sort of sight seeing all the pallets full of old TVs and monitors. If you had one of those 1960s fine-wood consoles they sent you to a special line -- there is apparently a market for those with the old electronics and display replaced with new.
I was a senior when the CS department at my undergrad school got a 16-bit mini. Key in the 10-word program that would read a bigger program from paper tape that would load the real OS from the hard disk...
Got a community college in your area? Almost all of them will have some sort of intro to programming class that deals with the hardest problem for newbies: finding bite-sized problems to start on. Also there's someone who can help you figure out your question as well as answer it.
With any luck they'll let you audit for almost nothing.
The hardest part for any software that converts from straight to curly to get right are contractions with a leading quote: 'twas, 'tis, '12, and so forth. Especially in fiction and attempts at vernacular.
It's a military device. The EMTs (combat medics in the US Army) are already deployed with the combat troops, so the planned use is probably evacuation of the wounded after the medics have done what they can.
Years back, a telephone switch company made a three-line change in some exception-handling code and pushed it without testing. Somewhat later the exception happened, was handled improperly, and the problem propagated from one switch to another, eventually taking down long-distance phone service for most of the East Coast. Ultimately put the company out of business.
Absolutely one of the hardest programming problems is in distributed real-time systems, making sure that errors are caught and damp out rather than propagating.
Texas and California are two of the four states with the most "action-level" lead test results. Some Oklahoma cities have among the highest lead levels in the country.
The map shows cities in all of EPA regions 1-5, and none in regions 6-10. It seems likely that the Guardian staff simply started working their way through audit results, and stopped when they had enough material for a story.
As I mentioned in another comment, out of date. 25 years ago the Brown Cloud was a real problem. Today, Denver doesn't even make the 25 worst cities in the country for overall air pollution. Having lived here while it happened, it's just absolutely amazing how much cleaner the air is now.
I moved to the Denver area 28+ years ago. Since I got here, the state's population has gone from 3.3M to 5.5M, almost all in the Front Range urban corridor. Much of that growth has been driven by tech, it's just been quiet. The state is consistently in the top several for VC money spent. There's also a long history of Colorado companies reaching a certain size and then being acquired by the giant coastal firms.
Boulder is terrific for little start-ups, and is full of them. When you get to the point where you want several acres to build a campus, no way. At some point, growing businesses have to move out of Boulder.
The article, like so many others, is blaming the wrong organization. (1) Agency budgets are micro-managed by Congress. There's no money to spend on system replacement unless Congress says so. (2) Congress, like legislatures in general, is extremely reluctant to appropriate money to replace something that works, even if it is just barely limping along. Shiny new toys for killing people a possible exception. (3) When procurement does finally happen, it's done under rules set by Congress that work reasonably well for paper clips and snowplows. Not so well for software.
I spent three years on staff trying to explain IT things to a state legislature. Educational. Frustrating as hell.
This year for the holidays I bought myself an HDHomeRun Prime by SiliconDust. Comcast gave me an M-card with no questions, and the tech support number in the documents (a call center that does only Cablecard activations) handled the activation fine. It would have been somewhat easier if there were a decent online description of exactly what numbers the call center needed. Three independent tuners, DLNA compliant, and delivers the HD streams over our household LAN (some wired, some wireless). Works fine to my Mac and my Android phone. There are issues with my old Android tablet, but those involve the limited hardware there, not the delivery.
I'm perfectly happy to pay writers for well-researched well-written content. I'm not happy paying an aggregator for access to what they think is good writing. Good writers are rare; the internet has made aggregation cheap and easy, with the expected outcome that there are lots of terrible aggregation sites out there.
I'm not sure what their reasons are. Mine used to be that I had to deal with various non-trivial levels of background noise -- turn the volume up loud enough to hear the quiet parts over that noise and the loud parts were enough to knock you over. These days, it's more that aging ears have greatly narrowed the spread between loud enough to understand and loud enough to hurt.
I wonder what's wrong/right with my setup? Opening this link in a new private window gets me the stock Forbes opening page, which includes a "proceed to site" link (sometimes after a few second countdown). Some dumb quote but no ads. My blocker stops 10-15 elements on each Forbes page, but I get the article. No mention that I'm running an ad blocker.
Mac OSX 10.11.2, Firefox 43.0.3, uBlock Origin 1.5.1.
In the western US, the anti-nuclear sentiment has more to do with historically bad experiences with non-commercial activities. Open-air nuclear tests. A few years ago the DOE declared the Rocky Flats site in Colorado to be clean; there's a growing body of evidence that they did the job on the cheap and the remaining plutonium will get loose. Last year the WIPP in New Mexico had a leak, and DOE agreed to pay a $74M fine. This month, DOE asked the court for a further 17 year delay to 2039 to finish the vitrification plant that is key to cleaning up the disaster that is the Hanford Site in Washington. Given Republican attacks on the DOE budget, Washington has asked the reasonable question, "What are the chances Congress will continue to fund construction for another 24 years?" On the commercial side, Yucca Flats will probably open eventually, and be substantially expanded, against the wishes of the people of Nevada.
It's not all that hard to understand why western politicians are not given to believing the nuclear scientists and engineers who say, "Yes, but this time will be different."
Slashdot Mirror
...amazing what can be done if a bunch of smart people are willing to donate time worth enormous amounts of money. See, for example, GNU/Linux...
Manchester Computer Center (MCC) Interim Linux zero-dot-something. A boot floppy and IIRC four more floppies for a system capable of compiling the kernel. I didn't have enough memory for X, but found and installed the MGR simple windowing system.
Yeah. There's an enormous (but largely unprofitable) market for a good-sized tablet that's rugged enough to give to kids, cheap enough to hand out replacements for the ones that don't survive. The first goal ought to be to get rid of most of the paper textbooks -- I cringe when I see the fourth graders hiking past my house on the way to school, bent over from the weight of the backpacks.
But then I'd have to live in upstate NY. After moving to the Denver area 30 years ago, I discovered that I was born to live in a high-altitude semi-arid climate. If you're going to live in a place that has all four seasons, Denver-Boulder has about as mild a version of them as is possible.
Most languages more or less work the same, the details and flaws are mostly in the libraries...
The libraries are always the time-consuming part to learn. Or perhaps more accurately, the interfaces to the libraries. Most experienced programmers will have encountered the situation where it's the same C/C++ library underneath, but the interfaces from Perl or Python or some other script-y language are all different in terms of details.
Maybe it's just the kind of jobs that I had, but over the course of 40+ years I don't ever recall being in a situation where I could honestly say, "I know everything about every topic relevant to this job; I've built all the job-related tools ever needed; there are no job-related skills left to acquire."
Certainly there were times when I could say, "None of this job-related stuff is as interesting as this widget I want to build for my own use," but that's something different.
1970, my high school had a Teletype model 33 connected to the timeshare mainframe at the local university. I was on my own with absolutely minimal documentation. Learned bad habits that took years to break.
My city does this every few years, and they still charge $20 for 28" and down, $35 for over. I got rid of the last one we had -- a color-corrected display my son had used for graphics design -- at one of their events maybe five years ago. It was an awesome sort of sight seeing all the pallets full of old TVs and monitors. If you had one of those 1960s fine-wood consoles they sent you to a special line -- there is apparently a market for those with the old electronics and display replaced with new.
I was a senior when the CS department at my undergrad school got a 16-bit mini. Key in the 10-word program that would read a bigger program from paper tape that would load the real OS from the hard disk...
Got a community college in your area? Almost all of them will have some sort of intro to programming class that deals with the hardest problem for newbies: finding bite-sized problems to start on. Also there's someone who can help you figure out your question as well as answer it.
With any luck they'll let you audit for almost nothing.
The hardest part for any software that converts from straight to curly to get right are contractions with a leading quote: 'twas, 'tis, '12, and so forth. Especially in fiction and attempts at vernacular.
It's a military device. The EMTs (combat medics in the US Army) are already deployed with the combat troops, so the planned use is probably evacuation of the wounded after the medics have done what they can.
Years back, a telephone switch company made a three-line change in some exception-handling code and pushed it without testing. Somewhat later the exception happened, was handled improperly, and the problem propagated from one switch to another, eventually taking down long-distance phone service for most of the East Coast. Ultimately put the company out of business.
Absolutely one of the hardest programming problems is in distributed real-time systems, making sure that errors are caught and damp out rather than propagating.
Texas and California are two of the four states with the most "action-level" lead test results. Some Oklahoma cities have among the highest lead levels in the country.
The map shows cities in all of EPA regions 1-5, and none in regions 6-10. It seems likely that the Guardian staff simply started working their way through audit results, and stopped when they had enough material for a story.
There's a reason that HP, Intel, AMD and Broadcom/Avago all have sizeable operations in Fort Collins: Colorado State University.
As I mentioned in another comment, out of date. 25 years ago the Brown Cloud was a real problem. Today, Denver doesn't even make the 25 worst cities in the country for overall air pollution. Having lived here while it happened, it's just absolutely amazing how much cleaner the air is now.
The OP's observation is really behind the times.
I moved to the Denver area 28+ years ago. Since I got here, the state's population has gone from 3.3M to 5.5M, almost all in the Front Range urban corridor. Much of that growth has been driven by tech, it's just been quiet. The state is consistently in the top several for VC money spent. There's also a long history of Colorado companies reaching a certain size and then being acquired by the giant coastal firms.
Boulder is terrific for little start-ups, and is full of them. When you get to the point where you want several acres to build a campus, no way. At some point, growing businesses have to move out of Boulder.
The article, like so many others, is blaming the wrong organization. (1) Agency budgets are micro-managed by Congress. There's no money to spend on system replacement unless Congress says so. (2) Congress, like legislatures in general, is extremely reluctant to appropriate money to replace something that works, even if it is just barely limping along. Shiny new toys for killing people a possible exception. (3) When procurement does finally happen, it's done under rules set by Congress that work reasonably well for paper clips and snowplows. Not so well for software.
I spent three years on staff trying to explain IT things to a state legislature. Educational. Frustrating as hell.
This year for the holidays I bought myself an HDHomeRun Prime by SiliconDust. Comcast gave me an M-card with no questions, and the tech support number in the documents (a call center that does only Cablecard activations) handled the activation fine. It would have been somewhat easier if there were a decent online description of exactly what numbers the call center needed. Three independent tuners, DLNA compliant, and delivers the HD streams over our household LAN (some wired, some wireless). Works fine to my Mac and my Android phone. There are issues with my old Android tablet, but those involve the limited hardware there, not the delivery.
I'm perfectly happy to pay writers for well-researched well-written content. I'm not happy paying an aggregator for access to what they think is good writing. Good writers are rare; the internet has made aggregation cheap and easy, with the expected outcome that there are lots of terrible aggregation sites out there.
I'm not sure what their reasons are. Mine used to be that I had to deal with various non-trivial levels of background noise -- turn the volume up loud enough to hear the quiet parts over that noise and the loud parts were enough to knock you over. These days, it's more that aging ears have greatly narrowed the spread between loud enough to understand and loud enough to hurt.
Dynamic range compression is one of the audio effects I use most often.
I wonder what's wrong/right with my setup? Opening this link in a new private window gets me the stock Forbes opening page, which includes a "proceed to site" link (sometimes after a few second countdown). Some dumb quote but no ads. My blocker stops 10-15 elements on each Forbes page, but I get the article. No mention that I'm running an ad blocker.
Mac OSX 10.11.2, Firefox 43.0.3, uBlock Origin 1.5.1.
In the western US, the anti-nuclear sentiment has more to do with historically bad experiences with non-commercial activities. Open-air nuclear tests. A few years ago the DOE declared the Rocky Flats site in Colorado to be clean; there's a growing body of evidence that they did the job on the cheap and the remaining plutonium will get loose. Last year the WIPP in New Mexico had a leak, and DOE agreed to pay a $74M fine. This month, DOE asked the court for a further 17 year delay to 2039 to finish the vitrification plant that is key to cleaning up the disaster that is the Hanford Site in Washington. Given Republican attacks on the DOE budget, Washington has asked the reasonable question, "What are the chances Congress will continue to fund construction for another 24 years?" On the commercial side, Yucca Flats will probably open eventually, and be substantially expanded, against the wishes of the people of Nevada.
It's not all that hard to understand why western politicians are not given to believing the nuclear scientists and engineers who say, "Yes, but this time will be different."