acomjean

5 ms·

31.
by acomjean 5mo ago
If you watch the documentary it’s an interview with the people who were there. There might be some discrepancy but I think the IBM guys were being honest about how it went down. The doc is on the Internet archive and worth a watch. You ge
32.
by acomjean 5mo ago
Interesting story of how MS got into the operating system business. IBM wanted the CPM operating system, but Digital Research wouldn’t sign ibms NDA… really a pivot point in computing history. From “Triumph of the Nerds” tv transcript: h
33.
by acomjean 5mo ago
They tried to neutralize but couldn’t apparently. “But when members of GKN Aerospace’s response team arrived to inject a neutralizing agent into the tank to reduce the liquid’s volatility, they learned that the tank’s valves were gummed up,
34.
by acomjean 5mo ago
They’re “triumph of the nerds”really good. Really gets to the pivotal points in business. The story of how MS got the operating system contract told by Gates/Balmer and the IBM executives. (MS at the time didn’t have an operating syst
35.
by acomjean 5mo ago
Modern PHP is pretty good. I’ve been using it for a while so it’s comfortable. I’ve been doing so Perl maintenance lately and I miss PHP. Perl is a lot weirder than PHP. If I didn’t know C or had dabbled in Perl before I would be complet
36.
by acomjean 5mo ago
I know areosmith, phish and the Dave Mathews band gave fan club members dibs on good tickets, though this was year ago. My friend was a huge phish fan and he’d always get a bunch of new years tickets in the 90s.
37.
by acomjean 5mo ago
“Data recovery”?
38.
by acomjean 5mo ago
Well Flea just released a jazz record where he plays trumpet. I admire him for it, but might need some financing now. https://youtu.be/1r0k2AW153g?si=-J6qNeyc3dHQJ6Gk
39.
by acomjean 5mo ago
I used canvas for some Harvard extension classes 10 to 5ish years ago. It worked Ok. Work distributed, grades posted. I didn't realized so many schools used it, or that it was all schools on one instance, which seems kind of nuts. I
40.
by acomjean 5mo ago
Wmbr is great. I always assumed it was “Walker Memorial Building Radio” based on the building it transmits from.
41.
by acomjean 6mo ago
We used to be amazed when I ran cross country in high school that these pro marathoners would best all of us in our approx 5K(3ish mile) races and then go on to repeat that distance multiple times. It’s totally remarkable.
42.
by acomjean 6mo ago
I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (s
43.
by acomjean 6mo ago
On the Apple 2 at least the paddles registered a number between 0-255. The joysticks were just “2 paddles” with an x and y between 0-255. I remember a little adjustment slider to help the joystick center near 0,0
44.
by acomjean 6mo ago
It’s hard. But do what you can, it’s all you can do. We got a solar array 10 years ago now. It’s small, but between 1000 to 3500 watts depending on the weather. It brings me some joy. “Ones and zeros” by Jack Johnson is brutal lyrically.
45.
by acomjean 6mo ago
There are a few of these floating around for older games, but the world needs more: Ara technica has a war stories feature on game development. https://arstechnica.com/video/series/war-stories For apple 2 games Jo
46.
by acomjean 6mo ago
A huge factor. I used ada for years and the fact everyone I worked with did hobby projects in other languages didn’t help it. And most of us liked Ada. It had other warts the string handling wasn’t great, which was a huge problem. It was
47.
by acomjean 6mo ago
As a student in the 90s I worked security for the student concert group on campus. We had to frisk people for Jello Briafa (Dead Kennedys) spoken word performance. I found a couple of tape decks, but those were allowed. They still put a l
48.
by acomjean 6mo ago
FNM’s cover of the Commodore’s Easy is both ridiculous and sublime. Man they can play. There was a good bbc show of theirs floating around on YouTube. The music is so intense that I feel these quieter pieces give one a chance to catch one
49.
by acomjean 6mo ago
The home page isn’t great. I think what he ment was use the subscription feature, which you seem to do. I sometime forget that feature exists, but I have channels I like that seem to only show up when I pull up subscriptions and never make
50.
by acomjean 6mo ago
This looks good. I’ve returned to Canon Desktop photo Pro for processing raw, but it’s clunky and Windows and only does canon raw (though I kind of get that). I’m trying DXO on windows some good gpu acceleration, but no Linux. I’ve moved m
51.
by acomjean 6mo ago
I thought of those. I remember drinking some. It tastes like cola but somehow different. But then again I liked new coke. And that wierd “ok soda” that doesn’t exist anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_Soda
52.
by acomjean 6mo ago
P5.js is pretty great. I used it create art, basically taking animal photos and using the dna sequence from that animal to recreate the photo using the 4 letters. (I did four passes using different size letters and layered in Gimp). Peop
53.
by acomjean 6mo ago
Many years ago I went to a photoshop conference to try and get better. There was a talk about converting color photos to black and white. As a former bw film photog this interested me. Black and white film is a little wierd (some people
54.
by acomjean 6mo ago
It always amazed me they made ships that just fit the Panama canal. I went though the locks years ago, it was quite a trip (and how a friend got met to go on a cruise) https://aramcomjean.smugmug.com/Panama-Canal/i-94P
55.
by acomjean 6mo ago
I worked for a time designing and building landfills. Nothing really rots in them typically as it’s really dry and don’t have good access to oxygen. Modern landfills are like giant plastic bags. This is to protect ground water. Decomposit
56.
by acomjean 7mo ago
I thought the timex Sinclair 1000 win 2 Kbytes of ram was bad. The membrane keyboard wasn’t great (the lack of a space bar was a wierd choice) but it did work. We had programs on casette and did get the 16Kbyte memory expansion. https:&#x
57.
by acomjean 7mo ago
As Comedy Central put it. “Sports, brought to you by gambling”. I don’t disagree on ad regulation but it’s enmeshed now and will be hard to control. Leagues kept their distance because it looked bad, but now seem to embrace it as it must
58.
by acomjean 7mo ago
what if the creator is a company? They are allowed to hold copyrights. Though one answers is: 95/120 years. "If the work is a joint work, the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made f
59.
by acomjean 7mo ago
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o... They all seem to be using pirated books. Probably slightly better than just web stuff as it is presumably edited. The authors case was thrown o
60.
by acomjean 7mo ago
can’t IP be sold to a company that is “alive” for as long as it’s financially viable. I always wonder when copyright runs out for artist who sold their collections to companies.

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