analog31

19 ms·

421.
by analog31 9mo ago
When I was in high school, calculators had just hit the scene. Some teachers allowed them, others didn't. One of our teachers allowed us to bring a single page of notes to the exam. I wrote my notes on a photocopy of a slide rule. At e
422.
by analog31 9mo ago
I use one engineering app that has a "soft" license. It has a lot of failure modes, all of which are essentially administrative not technological. A fair number of departments have to work together: IT, purchasing, and accounts pa
423.
by analog31 9mo ago
The irony is that on-time completion of is probably the #1 source of project failure in the real world.
424.
by analog31 9mo ago
I only remember the II+, but both were dense with chips. The IIe had fewer chips as I recall. That level of complexity wasn't unheard of at the time. When the IBM PC came out, only a few of the chips were in sockets (the CPU and RAM&#x
425.
by analog31 9mo ago
I only saw the emdash in the thread link, but I do know that an iPad "wants" to turn a double dash into an emdash automatically. I have no idea how to disable that default.
426.
by analog31 9mo ago
High capacitance, low voltage. Computers were somewhat unusual at the time in terms of requiring a lot of current at 5 Volts. The line frequency power supplies were inefficient enough even under optimal circumstances. I've seen some gi
427.
by analog31 9mo ago
Universities don’t make money. Granted, I’m 62, so I’m from the old world. I attended college, and taught a couple of college classes, before the AI revolution. There was definitely a connection between learning and evaluation for most stud
428.
by analog31 9mo ago
That’s fair, but at the same time, expecting any learning to occur in remote classes, when fair evaluation is impossible, may also be outdated.
429.
by analog31 9mo ago
It’s a benchmark that people can understand. And of course humans evolved along with our environments. There are many places where a wheeled contraption can’t go without clearing a path for itself. Likewise for intelligence. Is human-style
430.
by analog31 9mo ago
Indeed, my professor mentioned that we used 741's so we would learn all of its deviations from the idealized op amp model. Plus, we had a huge pile of them.
431.
by analog31 9mo ago
Coincidentally, there were vacuum tubes with dual grids for mixer and AGC applications.
432.
by analog31 9mo ago
A palpable fear in Wisconsin is access to water. Another is the potential abuse of eminent domain. When Foxconn made a deal with the state to build a factory for large screen TVs, water was a major part of the deal. They were given an exem
433.
by analog31 9mo ago
Probably a vanishingly small number of people who drive stick, actually understand how and why it works. My kids do, of course, because I explained it to them. Most drivers just go through the motions. A growing number of cars have CVTs.
434.
by analog31 9mo ago
The reasons I can think of for learning to drive stick shift are subtle. Renting a stick shift car in Europe is cheaper. You might have to drive a friend's car. My kids both learned to drive our last stick shift car, which is now close
435.
by analog31 9mo ago
Yeah, I remember trying to delete a fully loaded Python installation that had found its way onto a OneDrive-managed folder. After a chat with IT, I learned that OneDrive can only delete X number of files at once. We agreed that the most pra
436.
by analog31 9mo ago
>>> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all. >>> Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear
437.
by analog31 9mo ago
Xenon is quite expensive.
438.
by analog31 9mo ago
I think that outside of narrow engineering circles, most use of lubrication is based on a mixture of trial-and-error, folklore, and marketing. One reason is that most lubrication needs are actually quite low performance, and you could proba
439.
by analog31 9mo ago
>>>AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. Why will they want to?
440.
by analog31 9mo ago
Including the US. I don't want to be dependent on this stuff any more than anybody else does.
441.
by analog31 9mo ago
>>>> In a functioning org, there are lot of professionals depending on correct estimation to do their job. A side effect is, no there aren't. Allow me to explain that catty remark. The experienced pro's have figured ou
442.
by analog31 9mo ago
A middle ground is "just write a plug-in." What I mean is, I like programs that provide a mechanism for scripting, adding a plug-in, whatever. This allows you to add a feature and perhaps even maintain it in your own repo, without
443.
by analog31 9mo ago
Well, I don't know if people ever look at old threads, but I had an inspiration, and decided to unlock my old phone before switching to the new one. Tracfone made it utterly painless. Now I have an unlocked phone should I ever travel t
444.
by analog31 9mo ago
>>>> The first step is to acknowledge that voters dislike Democrats so much that not only did a guy like Trump have a chance of winning, but he won. Twice. I think this is too extreme. Trump lost the popular vote, twice, then wo
445.
by analog31 9mo ago
>>> When BIOS interfaces weren’t sufficient they hit the hardware directly - and even if they weren’t doing that, they’d end up depending on behavioural quirks of IBM’s BIOS implementation. This happened with the Apple II as well,
446.
by analog31 9mo ago
That's fair, but I'm open to change. In fact, coincidentally, my wife and I were talking about it tonight. We feel frustrated that we might not have done enough.
447.
by analog31 9mo ago
What was my type of American supposed to have done? This is a sincere question, since I'm racking my brain over it. People debate this with one another constantly. We may have more common cause with you than it might seem on the surfac
448.
by analog31 9mo ago
Interesting coincidence. I just ordered a new Tracfone for 50 bucks. I had assumed the unlock policy was 1 year. The same phone, unlocked, was much more expensive. Strategically, I figured that after being a Tracfone customer for well over
449.
by analog31 9mo ago
A loss of the popular vote, followed by a near toss-up, was hardly a clear message. Roughly half of us didn't intend to send that message, and if polls are an indicator, even fewer now. I'm mad about the election and what it seems
450.
by analog31 9mo ago
>>>> For law firms that built their entire client acquisition strategy on Google, this is an existential shift. Oops. I guess it's back to billboards along the freeways.

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