dbcurtis

77 ms·

811.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning ..." (emphasis in the original) I find that s
812.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
it comes in two pieces. just go to Ikea and only buy the legs. It might not be possible to order it online that way, but in a physical store it should be no problem.
813.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Well, I'm getting a lot of comments from the motorized desk lovers here. I'll hang my reply onto yours... I think we have discovered how to sort sailors from power boaters :) For that matter, I use a French press instead of a Ke
814.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Well, on the one hand, it is great to have a replacement for the original controller. At a previous employer I had a Bekant with the stock controller, and those darn things are dreadfully unreliable. We had enough of those desks to get go
815.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
?? linker scripts are about the layout of the executable. The OS (if there is one) is the driver of that. ISA spec is an orthogonal concept.
816.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Agree completely that it is a deal breaker. But don’t be too hard on the hardware engineers, sometimes the BOM can not afford the extra 17 cents.
817.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
> I'm sure you can setup GCC to work with this, but it would be a project. FWIW AVR is not only Harvard, but code memory addresses point to 16-bit words, and data pointers to bytes. Yet, gcc works great (mostly). It is mainly a matt
818.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Those of us that were around in the days of mainframes and line printers remember that actually you sent 133 columns of characters to the printer, column 0 being the "carriage control" character. The most popular being blank, to
819.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
> Workers provide fake social security numbers that the CAFO is under no obligation to thoroughly vet. AFAIK unless something has changed in the past few years, it is worse than that. It is illegal for employers to challenge documention
820.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
It absolutely was a thing in the 1970’s. I saw neighbor’s farms destroyed by the inheritance tax. The law was changed, so now the inheritance tax kicks in at a much higher level. Most farmers set up trusts now anyway. It wasn’t only farmers
821.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Traditionally, airships have required large ground crews to managing mooring/unmooring operations. Have they solved that problem? Delivery to low infrastructure areas by definition means it would be hard to assemble a trained ground c
822.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
I remember seeing them go overhead once in a while. I hadn’t realized they ceased operations. Just a couple of days ago I saw a blimp overhead, I thought it was them, but it must have been the Goodyear blimp moving between football games.
823.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
There is a kind of middle ground. A few years ago I had a conversation with a friend that completely redefined investment versus speculation for me. This friend's grandfather had been a lettuce farmer in Monterey the 1930's. The
824.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
This may well be. But at least in the case of the diary farmers that surrounded my home town, all the water used to grow the cattle feed fell from the sky.
825.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Kind of. Remember that the valves are providing a linear approximation of a logarithmic relationship. So the third valve is usually tuned to a flat 1.5 steps to be used primarily in combination with valves 1 and 2 to ease intonation problem
826.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Radio direction finding is reasonably straight-forward in theory, but practice is a challenging art. First, what frequency is the control transmitter on? (or frequency-band/freq-hopping in). If it is one of the usual R/C bands, th
827.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Yes, certainly. No argument. But when the stakes are high, a little back up doesn't hurt. It is just as much an excuse for some last minute good wishes anyway. In any case, everybody has different circumstances. Parenting is an imp
828.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Wait till they hit college. then you become the alarm clock. (Today, got up at 0500 Pacific to provide back-up alarm for kid on east coast with final).
829.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
What I describe is duck typing, with eager authentication of duck specie. Exceptions raised at point where the greatest clarity of error message is possible. Aspirationally, anyway.
830.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
> I wish python had some equivalent to the switch statement that didn't involve workarounds with dictionaries, because sometimes you just want a clean way to deal with a value that can take 7 different forms. I am with you there. I
831.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
> The RISC-V instruction set family does benefit from the decades of research since MIPS was first created. Agree. Also, RISC-V has a business model built around open source, it isn't a desperation move, which is what the MIPS move
832.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Sorry, that makes little sense to me. The extra calories burnt in conversion to glucose is not going to be enough to cause weight loss. Any glucose that your body does not immediately consume gets converted to lipids and stored. Show me th
833.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
It all ends up as glucose. If you eat glucose, it goes straight into your blood stream as glucose. If you eat fructose, it gets converted into glucose. If you eat starches, the polymers are chopped into simple sugars of glucose and fruct
834.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Mythbusters did an episode about those masks. They only fooled humans at a distance, and then not well. Grant does a heck of a double-take, though, at one point. It is a fun episode so I won’t spoil it.
835.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Great point about Smalltalk. It had been around a long time by the time of UCSD Pascal, and had a byte code engine from the start. Along similar lines, Burroughs had a line of machines that swapped in language-specific microcode on a task-s
836.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
UCSD Pascal has a byte code interpreter, sure. And I will grant that it may have been the first or at least among the first popular ones. But the idea of a byte code interpreter was already old by then. I worked on a byte code interprete
837.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
Nah, SUN was buried under Intel's fab capacity. A big tsunami of cheap silicon rolled in -- Linux surfed it, SUN wiped out under it.
838.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
I suspect not legally possible. There is a lot of code in the NT kernel from various other companies that at least at one point was under NDA, and a lot probably still is.
839.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
How would you expect moving everyone to cities to solve our political problems? When you say that, this is what I hear: "People who have different economic interests from me are not worth an ounce of my empathy, and this would finally
840.
by dbcurtis 8y ago
The ability to get over obstacles is very impressive. If you have ever watched a RoboMagellan http://robogames.net/rules/magellan.php competition, you will have seen many robots fail to do what MiniRHex can do. The

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