johnvanommen

10 ms·

91.
by johnvanommen 1y ago
> convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!" I had a traveling job for a while, I was away from home every single week.
92.
by johnvanommen 1y ago
LED light bulbs are a multi-billion dollar global industry The dude who invented LED light bulbs got a bonus of something like $50 for his invention He later left his employer to go work for Cree, who was making LED lightbulbs. His former e
93.
by johnvanommen 1y ago
> Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development. It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined
94.
by johnvanommen 1y ago
> Every story I hear about Atari is wild. Hard to believe they managed to have the success they did. It was a different era. I worked in a mall arcade in the early 90s, and because we purchased arcade games, I had access to the trade sho
95.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long? This is great advice. For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to d
96.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
> “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t. One time I was tasked with auditing what my
97.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
> Is there any historical reason why farming is a big industry in a state associated with deserts? California is a desert too.
98.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
Best episode of beavis and butthead
99.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
> Who on earth could've thought it was a good idea to get an AI to pretend to be a black queer mother of two? I would think that the obvious use of AI Facebook profiles would be to train them on someone who actually existed in the
100.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
That makes a lot of sense. My Facebook feed is almost 100% hobby stuff now. Sometimes my wife will say "hey did you see this thing that [family member] posted" and I haven't. And I assume the reason I haven't, is becau
101.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
> There's something essentially wrong with Meta and Google where they can do tech but not products anymore. I'm listening to "Masters of Doom" on Audible. It's about the creation of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. Gre
102.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
It's kinda surprising that nobody has made a product for that, because it COULD be done with a plain ol' loudspeaker playing out of phase. Basically: 1) put a mic above one person's head, in the headboard or somewhere near th
103.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
It's difficult if not impossible to do active noise cancellation for multiple people simultaneously.
104.
by johnvanommen 2y ago
The silk sheet from the article is a loudspeaker. The solution proposed in the article requires a microphone, and would have a tough time dealing with multiple sources. It basically records the room, then plays the room back via the silk sh
105.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> The kid they sent to us, at $250/hr (that’s $470 inflation adjusted) no less, had the manual open in his lap. I’m pretty sure they were taught never to get caught doing that. In my very first consulting gig, my employer intentiona
106.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> This really hits home. It was absurd. 12 people on a zoom call, 1-2, at most, speak beyond the introductions. For a while there, I had a weekly meeting at a former employer that had 63 people on it. The goal of the project was to chang
107.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> I've worked in places that refused to allow us (IT) to write programs to automate processes that would have saved enough money yearly to buy a house. They were "severely concerned" because "if you leave or get hit b
108.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
The only reason Amazon is profitable is because of AWS.
109.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> OVH uses OpenStack to power a large a amount of it's offering afaict, YMMV, but I think one of the main drivers of OpenStack is that it can be modified, because it's open source. IE, if you're Verizon / AT&T &#x
110.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> You never hear about it because it’s mostly dead. > Would love to hear a counter argument or evidence otherwise but my impression is there are very few successful openstack deployments out there I've been doing OpenStack contin
111.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> They even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall. I used to work for HPE on their OpenStack team, and getting support, even as an employee, basically required
112.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> I was working with web version of Outlook for a long time and loved it. As I understand it, web Outlook pioneered numerous browser innovations that we take for granted now.
113.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> I click on the file and "open with handbrake" and press "convert". I can't imagine how anything night be faster. I use both. One thing I prefer about ffmpeg is that I prefer it when I'm being a control fre
114.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
Laser Blast was also a great arcade in San Bernardino CA :)
115.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> Most these ads are for operators, not gamers, that's why they all talk about earnings. (I still don't know where you would have seen them though..) I used to hang out at my local arcade after elementary school. Your basic 198
116.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
The Thigpen Roatary sub used an entire hotel room as it's enclosure. I'm willing to bet you could outperform it using about $1000 worth of 18" subwoofers and 10,000 watts or so.
117.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> It's very interesting to use a fan to create such waves when an electromagnetic piston might fail. But I wonder how useful it is since making a piston vibrate at low frequencies isn't that hard, it's enclosing it that is
118.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
Random observations: * I heard the Thigpen Rotary Subwoofer when Thigpen premiered it at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in 2005. Something that's not obvious from most of the published pics is that the rotary subwoofer was using an enti
119.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
> (I’m rooting for SPARC) Gives a whole new meaning to "Sun Microsystems"
120.
by johnvanommen 3y ago
This might be the most succinct description of where we're at right now, that I've read all year.

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