watersb

69 ms·

871.
by watersb 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk :-)
872.
by watersb 5y ago
Green Bank. Good times. Microwave ovens are out, too, IIRC. Cell phones? Nope. That single-dish scope is simply unreal. Big. It is big.
873.
by watersb 5y ago
PowerShell is pretty good. But I still just use zsh and bash.
874.
by watersb 5y ago
All of my code in college, and to this day, some of my best code is pencil and paper before computer.
875.
by watersb 5y ago
PowerShell can take thousands of milliseconds to start up on my shiny new computer. Hold your breath for five seconds as it looks around for stuff.
876.
by watersb 5y ago
Legos ∉ Lagos
877.
by watersb 5y ago
Good book: "Emily Noether's Wonderful Theorem" https://books.google.com/books/about/Emmy_Noether_s_Wonderfu...
878.
by watersb 5y ago
Sorry for being confusing.. I have been digging in and refreshing my memories of that first and second wave of small computers in the early 1980s. It's a bit churlish to knock the IBM PC, the box that launched a thousand clones. The co
879.
by watersb 5y ago
The IBM 5150 Personal Computer isn't the same beast that we refer to as "PC compatible". It was a barely-16-bit computer, no protected mode, funky connectors for the keyboard (no mouse, of course), the interrupt vectors were
880.
by watersb 5y ago
I'm not sure about the Xerox Star being "too closed" to succeed; I believe it incorporated Ethernet networking (another PARC innovation). Upon release, the IBM PC was not PC compatible, as the not-quite-ISA was 8 bits, only a
881.
by watersb 5y ago
Yeah that issue is a masterpiece. You should also check out the BYTE Smalltalk issue: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
882.
by watersb 5y ago
Excellent. I was totally sure someone would post the Mail-a-Child™ glory days.
883.
by watersb 5y ago
I once took a contract to build a tool in Excel that I thought was relatively straightforward -- but they needed it on a version of Excel that was right before VBA was supported. So I tried to re-work the app using Windows event macros. It
884.
by watersb 5y ago
LPARs -- "Logical Partitions" I know the industry is full of technical jargon, but IBM is its own universe that pre-dates all of it. Are LPARs like virtual machines, or like FreeBSD jails (which are like Docker containers, I think
885.
by watersb 5y ago
Objective-See is great stuff. I threw a tiny amount of money at them via Patreon (IIRC). BlockBlock is a thing like "Little Snitch for kernel extensions" -- if a process tries to install a kernel extension, it is blocked until you
886.
by watersb 5y ago
I thank you both for a great thread of responses. I don't think the IBM PC pushed Apple out of enterprise sales. Apple didn't want to go into those places. Steve Jobs was fired by the board of directors at Apple because (among oth
887.
by watersb 5y ago
Wow! -- The inventor on this patent is Vannevar Bush, the Father of All Knowledge Base Systems. Zettelcasten before it was cool. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think
888.
by watersb 5y ago
Yeah, there are things that I wish would "click" for me, too. I have come to believe that recreational play can be a process of reinforcing the ability to acquire new skills. Or play, like dreaming, can be an unconscious way of so
889.
by watersb 5y ago
I used to live in a tiny town with a huge pile of tires out in a lot next to the airstrip. It caught fire and burned all month. They couldn't extinguish the flames, and we lived with heavy black smoke asphalt air for weeks. You could
890.
by watersb 5y ago
Excellent! Love seeing walkthroughs of data processing of radio telescope arrays. I've long been ashamed that it just doesn't seem to "click" for me, but I keep trying.
891.
by watersb 5y ago
Armor is hard. It slows you down, and you can't hear or see as well as the guy coming up behind you. If you are trained well enough to be effective with metal armor, you're probably trained well enough to be effective without it i
892.
by watersb 5y ago
For small telescopes, you can spend more on the mount than on the glass when starting out. A good mount really pays off for long exposures!
893.
by watersb 5y ago
Loma Prieta Earthquake, day 2. Bank calls the Tandem support line: "Our computer is down. It crashed! How do we get it back up?" It wasn't offline. It had fallen over, punching through some of the sections of the raised floor
894.
by watersb 5y ago
> Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals. Like radio spectrum bandwidth, a limited resource. Unlike bandwidth, availability is not fixed or guaranteed, and no human agen
895.
by watersb 5y ago
Acre-foot is the standard unit of agricultural water in the United States.
896.
by watersb 5y ago
I know lots of people who grow only alfalfa out here. Some are family members. They sell it as feed, or rent out a field. Small farms. Less than 600 acres. Not much water, here.
897.
by watersb 5y ago
The dirt-cheap clothes washing machine in our apartment was much appreciated, but easily ran 30+ gallons per load of laundry. I replaced it with a washer that uses less than a third of that. The kids would generate a 5 loads of laundry per
898.
by watersb 5y ago
We had a Problem out here in central New Mexico, a foreign investor (external to US, I think it was people in Italy) sought permits to drill very deep wells. At the time, the state of New Mexico technically stopped water rights at some craz
899.
by watersb 5y ago
> 20khz PWM can still have audible harmonics... there are actually spread spectrum/randomized PWM approaches to address this, and to help with EMI. !! Great.. now I have to consider Tempest shielding for all the displays; I had th
900.
by watersb 5y ago
I worked at a company that actually got a Connection Machine. I was not allowed to even think about touching it. It was good at sifting genome sequences... and so it was used by the Legal Department. For patent (intellectual property) sear

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