Wow, I'd fail hard on trying to find what to include to get a sine function. Well, I'd probably grep *math* for sin. Other than that, that's a neat pactical coding test!
People usually got that (math.h), and if they didn't I gave it to them. It didn't usually help.
Offshoring software development has been one of the biggest economic mistakes that any civilized nation has ever made.
I disagree. It wasn't a mistake. It was a deliberate act by short-sighted executive management who profited obscenely from the "bold, visionary paradigm shift." The people who were responsible for the decision have all moved on with their millions in bonuses, stock options, etc. Their boards of directors are mostly made up of people who expect to be dead within 15 years or less.
I interviewed once as a "Systems Engineer," bridging the gap(s) between electrical, mechanical, optical and software. I interviewed with each department and each one grilled me in their own manner, the software guy had a little statistics riddle about black and white marbles in jars, but what they were really looking for was somebody who could understand every department and communicate effectively with all of them. I think I fit the bill, the top guy made noises like an offer would be coming shortly. But, we were waiting for the VP to get back from overseas and sign off on the position. And we waited, and the stock tumbled 20% over the next 2 weeks, and they never hired anyone....
I have usually hired "graphic programmers" people expected to turn data into pretty pictures. Most applicants have 5+ years of "graphic programming experience in C and C++" on their resumes. I give a simple test:
Here is some C code which draws an empty box on the screen.
Add code which draws 10 cycles of a sine wave, linearly decaying from 90% amplitude to 10% amplitude.
So, the environment is ready, there's the compile & run button to test your work, no time limits, I'll be in the next room working, just get me when you're ready.
I think I've given that test 40 times over the last 15 years, I think I've had a total of 6 people who actually produced a sine wave on the screen.
Nearly every applicant who has listed more than 10 years of "graphic programming experience in C and C++" got up and walked out within 15 minutes, none of them ever produced any C code of their own. A few guys would fight with it for hours and hours and still get nowhere. One of the marathoners was getting somewhere slowly, but he was drawing each half of a sine wave with its own for loop and calculating several parameters for each loop by hand on paper, and they weren't matching up very well on the screen. The bulk of them tend to realize they are getting nowhere within 30 to 45 minutes, the excuses they give tend to be very revealing about their personalities - some actually blame me saying the test is unfair, others want to work on it that night and get me an answer in the morning, the only one who ever came back with an answer was an attractive young woman who wore a low cut blouse on her return visit with the answer, she was shockingly unable to complete a similar test onsite that day. I wish I had been hiring for sales or marketing, sadly, I actually needed someone who could program for the programmer position.
Even among the people who could write the code, a couple of them insisted on calculating an exponential decay curve even though the instructions specified linear - one asked me for additional parameters to specify the exponential decay, I told him it was linear, he still left his answer as exponential. One fresh East German immigrant was a real wizard, he e-mailed in a perfect answer, when we interviewed him on-site I asked him to do it again, but with 5 cycles in polar coordinates, he finished in 15 minutes with great looking code - we made him an offer and he accepted, but 3 hours later phoned back and sheepishly declined, it seems he hadn't discussed the possibility of moving with his girlfriend.
Over the years, I hired in a couple of people who performed marginally on the test, couldn't do it themselves but managed eventually, with a lot of help, we needed people and they were the best who had interviewed. Those people never did stop needing a lot of help. The ones who did well on the test consistently turned out to be better employees.
Has anyone asked the poor if they want to be developed?
Seriously, I'd rather live any number of "poor" native lifestyles, with their lack of medical care, occasional famine, etc. instead of being in a welfare slum, with no health insurance or affordable medical care, crappy job market, pollution, stress, etc.
1M from the Gates Foundation could probably buy enough mosquito nets to cover the whole of Africa.
Mosquito nets are well known and have been widely available for 50+ years. If $1M in nets would wipe out malaria in Africa, it would have happened by now.
I think you're glossing the inefficiencies involved in distributing anything to "the whole of Africa" - the administrative costs alone in distributing something as simple as a "LiveStrong" armband to every person in Africa (or even just those who are at risk of malaria from mosquito bites) would exceed $1M.
I was rooting for Nokia and Qt to take over the world, Apple style, starting the day after Steve Jobs died... guess that didn't happen.
On the other hand, a Windows 8 4G phone, with true (2005 era) desktop power in an always with me form factor with high quality GPS and camera and (LISTEN UP DESIGNERS) several days of battery life, while not exactly sexy and appealing as a open source Finnish superphone, would be a damn practical device - I'd actually like it better than an iPhone or Droid.
If you invest $100 in Nokia today, what will it be worth in 1 and 5 years?
Nobody can tell the future, but I'd guess $99.95 and $314.16
People hate surprises, stock valuations are driven mostly by people's emotional reactions. We can wish MS to fade into oblivion, but it's a little too big for that to happen very quickly, same for Nokia. Will they resurge like Apple did? Probably not, but I think they'll limp along and occasionally surprise the way IBM has for the last 20 years.
Sadly, they may have viewed this as a calculated risk, taken many times, and lost only once... I wonder if the actors behind Righthaven are really hurt by this loss at all?
Not too many programs bypassed the file system, I know my programs used a 3rd party library for screen and maybe mouse I/O, and I certainly "rolled my own" RS232 drivers for about a decade, but, to bypass the filesystem was to invite file incompatibility, we didn't get around to doing that until about 1995 when we were using a 6811 to drive an AT interface directly, and even then it was a major PITA just to implement basic FAT when everything had to be reverse engineered - we leveraged the Linux implementations of FAT, but it was still a stretch to get it in the 6811.
15 minute hole... top grossing apps in the store. When I sold my Palm OS game, most purchasers didn't realize it was shareware and paid the $9 by entering their credit card number into PalmGearHQ. I made it plain on my website that payment was at the discretion of the user and gave clear instructions on how to download, but PalmGear's marketing was less explicit about how shareware worked and lots of people paid for the app before they realized it was optional.
There is an option on my iPhone to restrict in-app purchases. You can password protect this option. I turned the option to make in app purchases off anyway and I have no children using it. If I want to pay for an app, I will buy one that is up front about the price. I never make in app purchases. Ever. But I have purchased many apps.
As the GP said, "in the default configuration of the OS". GM cars have an option to turn off their headlights. Doing so would save money on gasoline spent on turning the alternator load, small money sure, but this is America we're talking about, if you can save $2 per year "turning off lights" in your house... anyway, look around, how many GM car owners do you see utilizing this money saving configuration option?
Almost everybody runs default settings. Most people don't even know they can be changed.
Yeah, I've got a 4" well in a "flowing aquifer" - unfortunately, it only has about 3' of head most of the year, in days gone by it had over 15' of head. It will fill a nice sized pond in about a day. I ran the calculations on how much hydro-power I might extract from that 3' head-flow if I put a turbine on it. It came out to six watts, theoretical, if I could get an ideal turbine to extract that energy from the flow. I'm thinking solar is a better bet for me.
Oh yeah, I was "infringing" on the "use of XOR to display a graphic cursor" patent for years before I knew it existed... I'm pretty sure it's expired now.
It's a fascinating technology though. Anything we can do to speed up scan acquisition and post-processing is very welcome.
I suppose you have your own dedicated MRI... I did a bit of MRI safety testing and was always scrounging (typically for $500 per hour) time in various clinical systems when they weren't being used for patients.
Do you have to restrain your subject's skull in place for 19 minutes while taking your image?
To shorten the AC's reply: MRIs are developed like a long exposure on film. The energy that the images are created from accumulates over time, that is the time the patient must spend in the bore. There are some calculations that can be done after the raw data is acquired (and the patient technically does not have to be in the bore for this), but the newer machines can do those calculations quickly compared to the time required to "ping" the hydrogen atoms throughout the area of interest in your body and listen to them resonate.
In other words, you can't rush the basic Physics of an MRI, but these guys have found a way to take the data in a smarter fashion so that less "pinging" is required.
This should actually be a win-win, in that the price of the MRI can stay the same, but now they can process more cattle through the gate per day, so income goes up. Since it's a software change, it will only cost a few million to roll it out through the regulatory system, no real additional cost in hardware or facilities. We can hope that the troll (if any exists, it sounds like this was published in a Journal) would be fed from a portion of the increased income.
Not to say the patent system isn't unfair/broken, but it's often been said that we shouldn't patent algorithms, and they should be OS etc. But how about if it's someone's livelihood, and years of research went into the algorithm, like I bet this did? Should programmers be given less due just because they're not working with real materials or making physical inventions?
I've worked as a "programmer" (at least, in part) for 19/22 years in my career, I have over a dozen patents issued - I got a thousand dollar bonus each for maybe three of them, any employment contract I have ever signed immediately transfers ownership of any of "my" inventions to the company, including future royalties, etc. etc. I think my working conditions, with respect to IP ownership, are representative of >90% of programmers out there.
Of those rare programmers who might invent something patentable while not under contract to their employer to transfer ownership of the IP, probably >90% of them can't afford the time and expense of prosecuting a patent application.
Of those especially rare programmers who might successfully get a patent or two of their own, most of them could not afford to do anything about it if a corporation of any size infringed their patent, at best they might hope to sell their IP to a megacorp, but they wouldn't be in much of a position to negotiate its value. An exception to this is when working for ultra-small startups, but 19/22 of my years have been at something like 6 different startups varying from 6-25 people in size, any smaller would be very hard from an income security standpoint - the thing I have never done is sign-on at the moment of inception when company shares are being handed out like toilet paper (hint: you'd usually get better value out of toilet paper than shares in startups that green.)
Of those exceedingly rare programmers who might have the means to negotiate fair value for their own issued patents, most of them probably don't need the money anyway and have better things to do with their time.
Physicians seem to have just enough personal financial juice to get something out of the patent system, but even they are kind of in a commodity market - I've heard it said among investors "these medical device startups, if they have all their IP in order and something worth something to someone somewhere, they pretty much have a standard value of about $3M if you can find an exit buyer." The physicians and their friends tend to sink $500K to $1M into the company "building it up" to a point where it is interesting to the bigger players, getting their FDA clearances, etc. Some get lucky and get bought, many just fizzle out after the early round investors get tired of pumping money in.
Oh, for what it's worth, 80%+ of my patents have nothing to do with software / algorithms, and none of the ones that got me the bonuses did. Sadly, several of them are crap, mostly the ones I got the bonus money for. In the non-bonus environment, if an idea was crap, I'd have little enthusiasm for it, which would tend to turn off everyone else and it would die in development. However, in the bonus driven environment, you'd tend to "read" the rest of the team (including upper management who were rarely present at meetings), and if they liked it, hell yeah, I like it too, let's get this application done and get that bonus!
They felt this way in 2003, they're confirming they still feel this way today, and those plants will probably be at the end of their design life by the time they are decommissioned anyway.
If they happen to change their minds anytime in the next 14 years, they can always start the construction of new plants then.
It's not as if they're so far from France that they're safe from nuclear power generation accidents or anything...
I got drunk with a Chinese national in college once, he started going on about how China will be great in the future the way the US is great now, maybe greater.... real national pride coming through in a way I have never seen in any American, even the NASA heads in Houston weren't that fervently patriotic.
They outnumber the US in population by more than 3-1, they have at least as many children educated to a level where they can didactically learn h4x0r 5x1llz like our kids do. And, if they give these kids enough free time, they'll be growing cyberwarriors the same way we do, but I think they'll have an easier time inducting them into the military and giving them direction.
Yeah, I was the 1-2-3 "expert" in the summer of '87, I coded a spreadsheet so large it had to be broken into multiple files and transfer data between them with macros on loading... nasty stuff. I also showed them how to run wide format paper in their wide format OkiData DMP, with compressed text you could get about 4x as much on a sheet as they had been previously... had the interesting side effect of melting the print heads after about 3 weeks of use... fun times.
I suppose one snide observation about TP3 is, cool as it was to the engineers, it didn't really do anything useful by itself, 39K of code running on 8 or however many K of OS, and it still needs source code to do anything useful.
Asynchronous hardware-generated interrupts were not really necessary if the hardware could provide buffering for input devices, the application had to poll or block for input anyway, so if the hardware was buffering you didn't need any interrupts to do buffering in software. This held true for both CP/M and DOS, in fact.
Lack of async I/O was what made DOS applications block on I/O. If you had a "DOS" application that appeared not to block on I/O, then said application had its own filesystem and disk drivers.
I remember coding UART drivers in assembly and C, I also remember reading about UART drivers and finding it amusing that every book on the market (and, at one time, I made a point of going to the "computer" section of every bookstore I passed and looking it up in all the books they had on the subject) would provide an example of an interrupt driven RS-232 receiver, and then bow out with some excuse like "an interrupt driven transmitter would be coded on similar principles and is left as an exercise for the reader..." It wasn't, the 16550 and 8259? before it had some kind of quirk in the transmitter interrupt logic that required about 4x the mental gymnastics to make something that really worked properly as an interrupt driven transmitter. After 2 or 3 years of limping along with polling transmitters (and, since we received data like a firehose and sent it out like a sniper, polling wasn't unbearable), I finally got around to making an interrupt driven transmitter that worked like you would want it to.
I met an engineer some years later who said it was a silicon bug in the chips, and since everyone coded to the bug in the original chip, they carried the bug forward in later generations....
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Wow, I'd fail hard on trying to find what to include to get a sine function. Well, I'd probably grep *math* for sin. Other than that, that's a neat pactical coding test!
People usually got that (math.h), and if they didn't I gave it to them. It didn't usually help.
Offshoring software development has been one of the biggest economic mistakes that any civilized nation has ever made.
I disagree. It wasn't a mistake. It was a deliberate act by short-sighted executive management who profited obscenely from the "bold, visionary paradigm shift." The people who were responsible for the decision have all moved on with their millions in bonuses, stock options, etc. Their boards of directors are mostly made up of people who expect to be dead within 15 years or less.
It was no mistake.
I interviewed once as a "Systems Engineer," bridging the gap(s) between electrical, mechanical, optical and software. I interviewed with each department and each one grilled me in their own manner, the software guy had a little statistics riddle about black and white marbles in jars, but what they were really looking for was somebody who could understand every department and communicate effectively with all of them. I think I fit the bill, the top guy made noises like an offer would be coming shortly. But, we were waiting for the VP to get back from overseas and sign off on the position. And we waited, and the stock tumbled 20% over the next 2 weeks, and they never hired anyone....
I have usually hired "graphic programmers" people expected to turn data into pretty pictures. Most applicants have 5+ years of "graphic programming experience in C and C++" on their resumes. I give a simple test:
Here is some C code which draws an empty box on the screen.
Add code which draws 10 cycles of a sine wave, linearly decaying from 90% amplitude to 10% amplitude.
So, the environment is ready, there's the compile & run button to test your work, no time limits, I'll be in the next room working, just get me when you're ready.
I think I've given that test 40 times over the last 15 years, I think I've had a total of 6 people who actually produced a sine wave on the screen.
Nearly every applicant who has listed more than 10 years of "graphic programming experience in C and C++" got up and walked out within 15 minutes, none of them ever produced any C code of their own. A few guys would fight with it for hours and hours and still get nowhere. One of the marathoners was getting somewhere slowly, but he was drawing each half of a sine wave with its own for loop and calculating several parameters for each loop by hand on paper, and they weren't matching up very well on the screen. The bulk of them tend to realize they are getting nowhere within 30 to 45 minutes, the excuses they give tend to be very revealing about their personalities - some actually blame me saying the test is unfair, others want to work on it that night and get me an answer in the morning, the only one who ever came back with an answer was an attractive young woman who wore a low cut blouse on her return visit with the answer, she was shockingly unable to complete a similar test onsite that day. I wish I had been hiring for sales or marketing, sadly, I actually needed someone who could program for the programmer position.
Even among the people who could write the code, a couple of them insisted on calculating an exponential decay curve even though the instructions specified linear - one asked me for additional parameters to specify the exponential decay, I told him it was linear, he still left his answer as exponential. One fresh East German immigrant was a real wizard, he e-mailed in a perfect answer, when we interviewed him on-site I asked him to do it again, but with 5 cycles in polar coordinates, he finished in 15 minutes with great looking code - we made him an offer and he accepted, but 3 hours later phoned back and sheepishly declined, it seems he hadn't discussed the possibility of moving with his girlfriend.
Over the years, I hired in a couple of people who performed marginally on the test, couldn't do it themselves but managed eventually, with a lot of help, we needed people and they were the best who had interviewed. Those people never did stop needing a lot of help. The ones who did well on the test consistently turned out to be better employees.
Has anyone asked the poor if they want to be developed?
Seriously, I'd rather live any number of "poor" native lifestyles, with their lack of medical care, occasional famine, etc. instead of being in a welfare slum, with no health insurance or affordable medical care, crappy job market, pollution, stress, etc.
1M from the Gates Foundation could probably buy enough mosquito nets to cover the whole of Africa.
Mosquito nets are well known and have been widely available for 50+ years. If $1M in nets would wipe out malaria in Africa, it would have happened by now.
I think you're glossing the inefficiencies involved in distributing anything to "the whole of Africa" - the administrative costs alone in distributing something as simple as a "LiveStrong" armband to every person in Africa (or even just those who are at risk of malaria from mosquito bites) would exceed $1M.
So, why don't sharks get mosquito bites?
I was rooting for Nokia and Qt to take over the world, Apple style, starting the day after Steve Jobs died... guess that didn't happen.
On the other hand, a Windows 8 4G phone, with true (2005 era) desktop power in an always with me form factor with high quality GPS and camera and (LISTEN UP DESIGNERS) several days of battery life, while not exactly sexy and appealing as a open source Finnish superphone, would be a damn practical device - I'd actually like it better than an iPhone or Droid.
If you invest $100 in Nokia today, what will it be worth in 1 and 5 years?
Nobody can tell the future, but I'd guess $99.95 and $314.16
People hate surprises, stock valuations are driven mostly by people's emotional reactions. We can wish MS to fade into oblivion, but it's a little too big for that to happen very quickly, same for Nokia. Will they resurge like Apple did? Probably not, but I think they'll limp along and occasionally surprise the way IBM has for the last 20 years.
Sadly, they may have viewed this as a calculated risk, taken many times, and lost only once... I wonder if the actors behind Righthaven are really hurt by this loss at all?
Not too many programs bypassed the file system, I know my programs used a 3rd party library for screen and maybe mouse I/O, and I certainly "rolled my own" RS232 drivers for about a decade, but, to bypass the filesystem was to invite file incompatibility, we didn't get around to doing that until about 1995 when we were using a 6811 to drive an AT interface directly, and even then it was a major PITA just to implement basic FAT when everything had to be reverse engineered - we leveraged the Linux implementations of FAT, but it was still a stretch to get it in the 6811.
15 minute hole... top grossing apps in the store. When I sold my Palm OS game, most purchasers didn't realize it was shareware and paid the $9 by entering their credit card number into PalmGearHQ. I made it plain on my website that payment was at the discretion of the user and gave clear instructions on how to download, but PalmGear's marketing was less explicit about how shareware worked and lots of people paid for the app before they realized it was optional.
Still, that window of opportunity spawned a whole load of exploitative software. Glad it's closed now.
There is an option on my iPhone to restrict in-app purchases. You can password protect this option. I turned the option to make in app purchases off anyway and I have no children using it. If I want to pay for an app, I will buy one that is up front about the price. I never make in app purchases. Ever. But I have purchased many apps.
As the GP said, "in the default configuration of the OS". GM cars have an option to turn off their headlights. Doing so would save money on gasoline spent on turning the alternator load, small money sure, but this is America we're talking about, if you can save $2 per year "turning off lights" in your house... anyway, look around, how many GM car owners do you see utilizing this money saving configuration option?
Almost everybody runs default settings. Most people don't even know they can be changed.
Has anybody seen the Googleplex "server" spec? from what little I've read, I'd assume they're on SATA.
Yeah, I've got a 4" well in a "flowing aquifer" - unfortunately, it only has about 3' of head most of the year, in days gone by it had over 15' of head. It will fill a nice sized pond in about a day. I ran the calculations on how much hydro-power I might extract from that 3' head-flow if I put a turbine on it. It came out to six watts, theoretical, if I could get an ideal turbine to extract that energy from the flow. I'm thinking solar is a better bet for me.
Oh yeah, I was "infringing" on the "use of XOR to display a graphic cursor" patent for years before I knew it existed... I'm pretty sure it's expired now.
It's a fascinating technology though. Anything we can do to speed up scan acquisition and post-processing is very welcome.
I suppose you have your own dedicated MRI... I did a bit of MRI safety testing and was always scrounging (typically for $500 per hour) time in various clinical systems when they weren't being used for patients.
Do you have to restrain your subject's skull in place for 19 minutes while taking your image?
To shorten the AC's reply: MRIs are developed like a long exposure on film. The energy that the images are created from accumulates over time, that is the time the patient must spend in the bore. There are some calculations that can be done after the raw data is acquired (and the patient technically does not have to be in the bore for this), but the newer machines can do those calculations quickly compared to the time required to "ping" the hydrogen atoms throughout the area of interest in your body and listen to them resonate.
In other words, you can't rush the basic Physics of an MRI, but these guys have found a way to take the data in a smarter fashion so that less "pinging" is required.
This should actually be a win-win, in that the price of the MRI can stay the same, but now they can process more cattle through the gate per day, so income goes up. Since it's a software change, it will only cost a few million to roll it out through the regulatory system, no real additional cost in hardware or facilities. We can hope that the troll (if any exists, it sounds like this was published in a Journal) would be fed from a portion of the increased income.
Not to say the patent system isn't unfair/broken, but it's often been said that we shouldn't patent algorithms, and they should be OS etc. But how about if it's someone's livelihood, and years of research went into the algorithm, like I bet this did? Should programmers be given less due just because they're not working with real materials or making physical inventions?
I've worked as a "programmer" (at least, in part) for 19/22 years in my career, I have over a dozen patents issued - I got a thousand dollar bonus each for maybe three of them, any employment contract I have ever signed immediately transfers ownership of any of "my" inventions to the company, including future royalties, etc. etc. I think my working conditions, with respect to IP ownership, are representative of >90% of programmers out there.
Of those rare programmers who might invent something patentable while not under contract to their employer to transfer ownership of the IP, probably >90% of them can't afford the time and expense of prosecuting a patent application.
Of those especially rare programmers who might successfully get a patent or two of their own, most of them could not afford to do anything about it if a corporation of any size infringed their patent, at best they might hope to sell their IP to a megacorp, but they wouldn't be in much of a position to negotiate its value. An exception to this is when working for ultra-small startups, but 19/22 of my years have been at something like 6 different startups varying from 6-25 people in size, any smaller would be very hard from an income security standpoint - the thing I have never done is sign-on at the moment of inception when company shares are being handed out like toilet paper (hint: you'd usually get better value out of toilet paper than shares in startups that green.)
Of those exceedingly rare programmers who might have the means to negotiate fair value for their own issued patents, most of them probably don't need the money anyway and have better things to do with their time.
Physicians seem to have just enough personal financial juice to get something out of the patent system, but even they are kind of in a commodity market - I've heard it said among investors "these medical device startups, if they have all their IP in order and something worth something to someone somewhere, they pretty much have a standard value of about $3M if you can find an exit buyer." The physicians and their friends tend to sink $500K to $1M into the company "building it up" to a point where it is interesting to the bigger players, getting their FDA clearances, etc. Some get lucky and get bought, many just fizzle out after the early round investors get tired of pumping money in.
Oh, for what it's worth, 80%+ of my patents have nothing to do with software / algorithms, and none of the ones that got me the bonuses did. Sadly, several of them are crap, mostly the ones I got the bonus money for. In the non-bonus environment, if an idea was crap, I'd have little enthusiasm for it, which would tend to turn off everyone else and it would die in development. However, in the bonus driven environment, you'd tend to "read" the rest of the team (including upper management who were rarely present at meetings), and if they liked it, hell yeah, I like it too, let's get this application done and get that bonus!
They felt this way in 2003, they're confirming they still feel this way today, and those plants will probably be at the end of their design life by the time they are decommissioned anyway.
If they happen to change their minds anytime in the next 14 years, they can always start the construction of new plants then.
It's not as if they're so far from France that they're safe from nuclear power generation accidents or anything...
I got drunk with a Chinese national in college once, he started going on about how China will be great in the future the way the US is great now, maybe greater.... real national pride coming through in a way I have never seen in any American, even the NASA heads in Houston weren't that fervently patriotic.
They outnumber the US in population by more than 3-1, they have at least as many children educated to a level where they can didactically learn h4x0r 5x1llz like our kids do. And, if they give these kids enough free time, they'll be growing cyberwarriors the same way we do, but I think they'll have an easier time inducting them into the military and giving them direction.
Yeah, I was the 1-2-3 "expert" in the summer of '87, I coded a spreadsheet so large it had to be broken into multiple files and transfer data between them with macros on loading... nasty stuff. I also showed them how to run wide format paper in their wide format OkiData DMP, with compressed text you could get about 4x as much on a sheet as they had been previously... had the interesting side effect of melting the print heads after about 3 weeks of use... fun times.
I suppose one snide observation about TP3 is, cool as it was to the engineers, it didn't really do anything useful by itself, 39K of code running on 8 or however many K of OS, and it still needs source code to do anything useful.
Asynchronous hardware-generated interrupts were not really necessary if the hardware could provide buffering for input devices, the application had to poll or block for input anyway, so if the hardware was buffering you didn't need any interrupts to do buffering in software. This held true for both CP/M and DOS, in fact.
Lack of async I/O was what made DOS applications block on I/O. If you had a "DOS" application that appeared not to block on I/O, then said application had its own filesystem and disk drivers.
I remember coding UART drivers in assembly and C, I also remember reading about UART drivers and finding it amusing that every book on the market (and, at one time, I made a point of going to the "computer" section of every bookstore I passed and looking it up in all the books they had on the subject) would provide an example of an interrupt driven RS-232 receiver, and then bow out with some excuse like "an interrupt driven transmitter would be coded on similar principles and is left as an exercise for the reader..." It wasn't, the 16550 and 8259? before it had some kind of quirk in the transmitter interrupt logic that required about 4x the mental gymnastics to make something that really worked properly as an interrupt driven transmitter. After 2 or 3 years of limping along with polling transmitters (and, since we received data like a firehose and sent it out like a sniper, polling wasn't unbearable), I finally got around to making an interrupt driven transmitter that worked like you would want it to.
I met an engineer some years later who said it was a silicon bug in the chips, and since everyone coded to the bug in the original chip, they carried the bug forward in later generations....