peckrob

17 ms·

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by peckrob 8y ago
We were doing speech recognition 20 years ago without any kind of networking. I dictated part of a term paper in 1995. Dragon Dictate I think is what it was called. You could even navigate the word processor menus and UI with it, or say thi
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by peckrob 8y ago
> The blue line is slow, crowded, loud, frequently requires delay-inducing maintenance, and is often very dirty and smelly. The times I've traveled to Chicago, I don't mind taking the train. Most of these things either don&#x27
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by peckrob 8y ago
I live in one of these areas (Huntsville, Ala., the red blob at the top of Alabama). Here, it's tornadoes. But the thing about tornadoes is that they are incredibly localized. While the big mile-wide wedge tornadoes are can destroy a
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by peckrob 8y ago
Agreed. I agree with most of the points in this post, but I can’t get behind this one. I read 1-2 books a week because I prioritize reading time. Usually an hour or two before going to sleep. I find quiet reading time really helps me wind
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by peckrob 9y ago
Overall this is a great compare and constrast article, but I do have one quibble with it. > In the US, I've always been able to see a specialist within a few days. Score one for America. This is really, really heavily dependent
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by peckrob 9y ago
> I was surprised by one or two details, including the fact that some of these quintessential American airliners were actually manufactured in China, as long as 25 years ago. It's rumored in aviation circles that COMAC secretly reus
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by peckrob 9y ago
They fly them in, where they are officially handed over to a third party for possibly resale, but more than likely cannibalization and the scrapping. American Airlines retired 20 MD-80s at once last year and documented the whole thing. [0]
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by peckrob 9y ago
After a few weeks without checking your notifications, they start emailing you things like this.
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by peckrob 9y ago
For those who don't know, this is basically the plot of a classic science fiction novel, Rendezvous with Rama . ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama )
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by peckrob 9y ago
> We need an engineering code of conduct. Most engineering disciplines have this, and they take it very, very seriously. That's part of being a PE. The problem is enforcing breaches of the code. In engineering disciplines that r
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by peckrob 9y ago
I don't disagree that some of the executives should be face similar, perhaps even harsher, sentences, but just "following orders," even under "duress" does not relieve a person of responsibility for their actions. S
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by peckrob 9y ago
Same. Running Gentoo you learn a lot about how Linux works at a deep level. I'm glad I have that knowledge I gained running Gentoo and it's saved my bacon a few times over the years. But after about the third time that upgrading m
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by peckrob 9y ago
Asterisk [0] and a combination of SIP soft phones and Polycom physical hardware. [0] https://www.asterisk.org
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by peckrob 9y ago
Somewhat related, Miss Baker [0] was one of the first two animals launched by the United States into space and recovered alive. After her flight and some time in Florida, she lived at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama
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by peckrob 9y ago
A few months back I was wiping some old drives using a USB->SATA adapter plugged into an old Linux machine I keep around for experimenting on random things. Mostly because I could just leave it to run for however long it took. There were
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by peckrob 9y ago
Boeing isn’t fighting the CSeries for what it currently is. The CS100 and 300 in themselves don’t directly complete against any Boeing planes. Their worry is that a successful CSeries could spawn a stretch CS500 that would be begin moving i
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by peckrob 9y ago
I've had a few jobs that I was really happy at. In fact, most of my jobs have been on the happy end and the ones that weren't, I've moved on quickly. I generally like smaller companies where there's a "family"
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by peckrob 9y ago
This is actually one of the reasons I do a lot of non-tech hobbies like woodworking and making wine. So much of what I do is ephemeral. It exists as bits stored in a computer, it not something I can physically touch. Literally everything I
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by peckrob 9y ago
What you're describing is called the Wait Calculation [0]. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_Calculation
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by peckrob 9y ago
> It's a shame companies do this, not just to phones. Laptops and small-form-factor desktops have the same problem. This isn't unique to technology either. Making a simple repair to most modern cars is an exercise in frustratio
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by peckrob 9y ago
1. Hardcore History [0]. Even if you're not a fan of history, check it out because Dan really grips you with the story. I can't say enough good things about this podcast and look forward to each new episode. The episodes are LONG;
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by peckrob 9y ago
I'm just a bit older than you. In the 90s I got my first tech job while still in high school. The company I was working for was in the middle of moving to a new building that would have a 10Base-T network, but the current building had
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by peckrob 9y ago
I kinda read this as a stream of consciousness post about what happened. In that context, it's more an expression of astonishment that that actually happened than boasting or anything. FWIW, I had something kind of similar happen to
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by peckrob 9y ago
Vaccines are one of the major reasons we have so many people now (along with germ theory, hand washing, modern medication, etc). The billions of people who lived through childhood, who otherwise might have died, to buy our hardware and use
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by peckrob 9y ago
Let me see if I can explain this better. 500 years ago was 1517. This is just a bit into the Age of Discovery. We hadn't even managed to sail all the way around the world yet (that wouldn't come until 1522). The Enlightenment was
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by peckrob 9y ago
> Blockchain is perhaps the most economically important invention of the last 500 years Holy cow are you serious? The most economically important in the last 500 years? So the steamship, the airplane, the automobile, the railroad, the te
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by peckrob 9y ago
There was this wireframe rollercoaster screensaver that used to be available for Windows 3.1. Seems like I got it off AOL or Prodigy, or maybe even GEnie. It would only work on systems that had a math coprocessor (it worked on my -DX, but n
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by peckrob 9y ago
I stated my career early - while I was still in high school. I went from bagging groceries and doing checkouts at a grocery store to programming for a local company my senior year of high school. I continued doing this for my first couple y
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by peckrob 9y ago
> Before we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years When I started college in 2000, in-state tuition at my alma mater (a major state university) was $3,021 for 2 semesters. I j
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by peckrob 9y ago
What I would love to see is a reason . Any program that requests elevated privileges should have to state to me why it wants those privileges. It's really frustrating to get this dialog pop up and have no idea what it's doing.

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