watersb

51 ms·

691.
by watersb 5y ago
You mentioned Pottery Barn so I figure that's somewhere in North America. After a childhood in the Appalachian zone, I was dismayed at any furniture I found for sale at retail in California. Usually hopelessly expensive or very poor qu
692.
by watersb 5y ago
Lousy production and loudness wars can ruin any audio codec.
693.
by watersb 5y ago
Nothing is cheating if it works! Absolutely possible to get a display. I remember the single color Textronix display we had in the lab in college. The computer club managed to get a Mandelbrot Set renderer distributed across the Sun 3 compu
694.
by watersb 5y ago
Absolutely, yes color frame buffers and CRT display was widely available. The Cromemco S-100 bus computers were used for television news weather visualization and for engineering applications. Hmm. I think perhaps the limit was on resolutio
695.
by watersb 5y ago
In that era, rendering of the frame buffer was often performed by writing to a film slide recorder. That is, it streamed a bitmap to a printer that wrote to optical film stock. We had a slide recorder at one of my early IT jobs. IIRC, it wa
696.
by watersb 5y ago
I loved HyperCard, and of course it was out there in the wild, users writing all kinds of stuff, while: - the human-interface purists were trying to get the CDE nailed down - Apple sued Microsoft for Windows design "look and feel"
697.
by watersb 5y ago
Almost Kubrick...
698.
by watersb 5y ago
What an experience... Thanks. Glad it was relatively mild for you. Some of my folks live on a Native American reservation. They lost lots of people, at first. It burned real hard. The more I learn, the more confused I get. Immunology is com
699.
by watersb 5y ago
Ok, wow, actually that sounds like life in the world I live in. Returns will erase retail margin (profit) pretty quickly. Big companies like IKEA can deal with that, I suppose, but it does take work. I managed to get to Russia, in 1990. I
700.
by watersb 5y ago
"Oh God, it's from Waldo..."
701.
by watersb 5y ago
And now I feel like an idiot, for not knowing that the co-founder was the reason we couldn't turn in our CS60C assignments by the deadline that one time. Was a great week. I still have a copy of the email that Cliff Stoll sent around,
702.
by watersb 5y ago
In the US here... and I think that the notion of asking for help after a purchase is not evenly distributed here. I am used to figuring things out, but I did ten years of corporate tech, I got paid to provide that support for the employees
703.
by watersb 5y ago
Ironic shudder, as I just recalled that I paid $3000 for NeXTStep Developer in 1993. I was making exactly zero dollars as a developer at the time. Or, I suppose, negative-three-grand, actually... So another thing: all of the documentation (
704.
by watersb 5y ago
> Life goes on. (Me: triple vaxxed and have had Covid 2x) I can't agree with a lot of what you are posting here, but this totally got my attention. You've had all your shots, and had covid twice so far? Can you say more about
705.
by watersb 5y ago
I suggested immune-compromised people as a group who might need to avoid a vaccination because their immune response isn't working. They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional
706.
by watersb 5y ago
> [current medical consensus says] "If you need to gain protection from covid, we recommend getting it via vaccine rather than illness." That doesn't apply in this scenario, since protection has (as it seems to me we see
707.
by watersb 5y ago
Good question. I believe that it's common for kids to wear masks during flu season in some countries. They probably have some relevant data. I think there's a belief that strict adherence to vaccination and masks would get us to a
708.
by watersb 5y ago
I actually want to hear good reasons for avoiding vaccinations, because many people care a lot about that. I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Und
709.
by watersb 5y ago
I use a cloud storage provider to back up via Arq https://arqbackup.com But I don't expect to restore more than a few gigabytes at a time from that. It would take me a week or more to download a terabyte of data. I have ver
710.
by watersb 5y ago
Everyone who cares about backups chooses a backup system design. Anyone who cares about their stuff needs to practice a full emergency RESTORE. I have met very few people who actually do that. For most systems I've seen, the first full
711.
by watersb 5y ago
Also, on my MacBook tonight, the CPU core temperatures reported via Macs Fan Control were ambient temperature. Which seems kinda crazy. It was idling the CPUs, as it performs the most important task of the hour: downloading another 2GB syst
712.
by watersb 5y ago
The Alder Lake monster review on AnandTech is fun. A desktop replacement laptop: ten pounds! 150 Watts! nVidia RTX! Whips and chains! https://www.anandtech.com/show/17223/intel-alder-lake-h-core... It's almos
713.
by watersb 5y ago
> A better option is to build a case from parts you cut out of a sheet of plastic (anywhere from 1mm on up) that you then glue together. Not a bad way to go, but I found that for hand assembly, I had a really hard time with the glue o
714.
by watersb 5y ago
In the true sense that the people are the state, a democracy would hold that the people can push through changes to the system that might not be in the interest of those who currently hold power under the very system the people are trying
715.
by watersb 5y ago
By no means are you dumb. Some corollary of Dunning-Kruger Effect -- your frustration is probably proportional to your ability to think and to operate in this domain. My summer project for myself last year was making a big working desk and
716.
by watersb 5y ago
> had I been there 30 minutes early Sussman's wife, who proofread the book, would have signed it too! I have thought that J Sussman not only proofread the book, but also came up with some of the problem sets and tested many of the
717.
by watersb 5y ago
Ball Aerospace, who built the optics, announcing that all of the mirror segments have been released from their locked, launch position and are ready for calibration. Hundreds of moving parts, no longer a risk to the observatory! Congratulat
718.
by watersb 5y ago
Medium-Well Paywalled? I can only see the hero image and first paragraph.
719.
by watersb 5y ago
I don't recall if I've heard directly from pilots who have had enforcements dropped when self-reporting to the FAA - my brief time as a student pilot was 20 years ago. But what I do recall is a culture of risk reduction, working t
720.
by watersb 5y ago
Phone books from outside your service area were available for sale, but it was tedious and relatively expensive to collect them.

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