I have a book and cd. I tried using the cd image with Qemu but I couldn’t work out how to get the CD interface going. It requires some ancient device emulation (I want to say the creative soundblaster CD interface) but I’m not sure the limited ones it knows about are in qemu.
Try PCem
It has ancient stuff. I got os/2 warp and win98 running fine (with voodoo graphics!)
Having more trouble coming up with a plan to get bsd or Linux on it. So far I got Debian 9 installed and I'm going to install Gentoo from within on a new vhd.
I know 98 and warp aren't technically ancient, but I had gotten the Xerox star 8010 emulator running well yesterday and went to work on pcem.
Kind of — Harmony remotes still had way too many buttons, you had to keep them pointed at the thing being controlled for the entire duration of a sequence, things could get desynced, and we shall not mention the horrible software, right?
this is true for the IR based harmony remotes.
But they also have hub based systems where the hub blasts the commands (over IR or BT) and the remote talks to the hub using RF or BT. No need to point at things.
Oh man - I used to have a Harmony remote and thought it was the best thing ever for my multi-vendor AV setup...
...then the AppleTV was released, with a remote that made the Harmony look like the console of a nuclear power plant by comparison, and I never went back
Reliable? What a quaint idea for a modern car. Mercedes and BMW in particular have been designing cars that fail just after the initial lease period (think plastic water pumps, timing chains at the back of the engine, wet rubber timing belts, CVT transmissions).
Some crazy, unfixable magnetic suspension that lasts 3 years and requires $5000 a corner shocks is par for the course these days.
Smallblock Chevys have a timing chain at the front but it's basically never a failure point. I agree with your other points, however; the trend is to optimise for short-term efficiency and cost, resulting in complex and relatively fragile designs.
The flip side: is it beneficial to anyone to have cars junked at 200k miles with water pumps that have another 500k miles on them? Overengineering has costs, in both price and weight.
Yeah, I'm adding Audi to the list. Car just totaled for a blown engine with no determining reason a few months out of warranty. Audi won't touch it. Not worth the engine replacement cost.
Possibly antibiotic use paired with higher standards of hygiene. You're supposed to pick up your initial load of gut flora from your mother then the environment should really do the rest.
We (rightly) keep things cleaner now, but maybe too clean?
I am not sure how the system for most grocery stores works now, but in the ancient past there was a central authority that set the prices for individual stores (so in Australia, the Coles or Woolworths all have individualised prices per store for items except for advertised sale items).
The computer in the store that drives the POS scanners then can print out the shelf label stickers and a poor sod goes and replaces the stickers on the shelves.
This is all a big secret of course, so asking a grocery store for their prices is going to get you nowhere.
You could try scraping the websites, but often the price for online shopping is different to what is in store.
Best bet would be to offer an incentive for people to scan their receipts into your app. I don't know what kind of incentive you could build to do that, maybe for every 5 receipts you could offer a coupon or something. Not much of an idea and a massive PITA, it would also only give prices on those things that people bought.
edit: also gets complicated for multi-item discounts or combination discounts
It’s not incompetence it’s regulations and inertia. Getting your central banking system past the regulators in most countries is difficult enough that it shades the effort required to replace the core systems.
Has anybody played with newlib, but grown the complexity as the system came together?
It seems like one thing to get a bare-bones printf() working to get you started on a bit of hardware, but as the complexity of the system grows you might want to move on from (say) pushing characters out of a serial interface onto pushing them onto a bitmapped display.
Does newlib allow you to put different hooks in there as the complexity of the system increases?
Newlib provides both a standard printf, which is necessarily big, and a printf that does not support any of the floating-point format specifiers.
The latter is small enough so that I have used it in the past with various small microcontrollers, from ancient types based on PowerPC or ARM7TDMI to more recent MCUs with Cortex-M0+.
You just need to make the right configuration choice.
The ‘bee was how a lot of us Australians of a certain age got into computers. The only real competition it had was the C64 as other things like the Apple II and IBM compatibles were just too expensive in comparison to that $399 intro price.
It was a bit weird to program for, as you said the basic was not quite the same as the popular platforms. It did mean you learned a lot about the machine itself, how memory was laid out, how to get those PCG graphics right.
It’s funny now to be able to see very similar cultures sprang up around less successful machines in other countries.
Wow that was long and surprisingly nuanced. One thing I’ve thought about recently looking at my own daughters is that they are bombarded with a lot of fake “this is the good life” that rarely includes children.
As a consequence perhaps the right time to have them will never eventuate. A lot of our Gen X contemporaries who put off child rearing for this reason ended up with heartbreaking fertility issues.
However I don’t think a smaller population is necessarily a bad thing.
Anecdata: I can count only a few couples in my circle of friends - who mostly had kids in their late 30s and early 40s - who didn’t end up having long and sometimes heartbreaking IVF, copious miscarriages, kids with trisomy, and in our case, stillbirth.
I think part of the problem was an assumption that modern medicine around childbirth is actually better than it is, and thus delaying having kids is a safe choice.
I consider myself very lucky indeed to have two healthy sons and my advice to my eldest is to get on with having kids as soon as you’ve met the right person, ideally in your 20s…
I suspect part of the problem is that many people think fertility is like a step function with a sharp transition by menopause age (~45 years), when it steadily decreases since much earlier, in your 30s. Biology books in school should have a nice graph showing this clearly.
Our experience was that conceiving before 30 was much easier than even early thirties. Watching our friends and colleagues struggling as you said with AI and fertility treatments was a real eye opener. I certainly don’t want to pressure my kids but they definitely should be more aware than they are.
