Viewing profile — joblessjunkie

Really enjoyed this. But I believe the goal isn’t a place - some absolute location to the right. The goal is an action: to always be in the state of holding the right d-pad button …

BASIC had been aggressively trimmed down to fit into an 8K ROM on the first machines, and there just wasn’t room for much more than crude SAVE and LOAD commands unless we gave up s…

We are in an era of extreme demand for GPU and limited supply. Every inference we push to the edge frees cloud resources for other tasks. Every efficiency gain increases what we ca…

Laughing agreement. I’m very sentimental for BASIC. By the standard of getting kids started it’s an amazing and wildly successful language. By any other standard, it is absolutely …

I’m a greybeard, I played Oregon trail on the II and remember the first Mac. IMO Apple (well, Jobs) was always trying to create a sealed, perfect appliance for regular people, even…

Reminds me quite a bit of Asimov’s “The Last Question”, which mines the same “computer-as-God” vein, is also very short, and has a suspiciously related title. Asimov’s story appear…

GDPR states that consent must be freely given. If there are financial incentives, the consent may be invalid.

Bandcamp workers voted to unionize five months ago. Is this a bust?

As an old fart who actually used a typewriter, I must point out that the bell does not ring when you press the carriage return. The bell rings when you are nearing the end of the l…

I agree, "legitimate" companies usually want to comply and to do right by their users. That's why I get hired. But currently the entire online analytics and advertising industries …

I am not a lawyer, but my full-time work involves reviewing codebases for GDPR and CCPA compliance. I do not believe this strategy will achieve what OP is hoping. In response to a …

There are many correct answers here, but I recommend the Pentax K1000. It is possibly the world's #1 most-manufactured camera, and was the standard camera for beginner photography …

Under CCPA, businesses do not "demand" data because there is no restriction on its collection. Businesses simply need to provide notice of what they collect. Consumers cannot opt o…

I appreciated this article. I agree that "Microsoft was never in it for the history." Not to sound cynical, but I believe MSFT wasn't trying to sell encyclopedias, they were trying…

You are of course correct; mea culpa. We had internet; what we didn't yet have was HTTP.

One product design goal was to run on the mass market 386 PCs of the time. It wasn't so much about oomph as it was about buggy device drivers that would inevitably blue screen at s…

It was in fact exactly that. The WinHelp team got folded into our group, and then WinHelp became something of an orphaned project for a while (or maybe forever?).

Encarta was part of my first job out of university. I worked in Microsoft's Multimedia Division, tasked with creating the first video and audio drivers for Windows. IIRC the BMP, W…

My reading is that levels were once randomly generated, but the updates ends this. The update provides a fixed series of 10k hand-checked levels for everyone to play, regardless of…

GeekWire recently ran a profile with some more background: http://www.geekwire.com/2017/feedme-food-delivery-aggregator...

I do not believe it was a mockumentary or wheels-within-wheels meta-commentary. I was just struck by the irony that all the accusations leveled by the filmmaker at the media and ou…

I also spent a lot of my time watching the film trying to sort out how much is truth, and how much is propaganda or deliberate misinformation. However, I think this also exactly th…

I found a plausible explanation here: http://www.network54.com/Forum/27140/message/1296951241/More... . tl;dr: The BBC reference pitch was generated by dividing and multiplying a 1…

It makes it seem like the "journalist" doesn't believe his own "reporting".

It sounds like you actually worry about his kind of thing a great deal, considering the amount of effort you put in.