amygdyl

<It was possible to spend more >than $100k for a Symbolics >Lisp Machine with accelerated >color graphics and HDTV >in/out.

Quantel Harry was the competition.

Link below, is for the 1981 Quantel Paintbox, the existence of which is responsible for the direction of my juvenile mind.

I should love to one day get together with like minded folk and assemble a complete ca. '89 broadcast graphics suite. I'm in advertising (London, independent, founder) and I'm not convinced that I couldn't work out the financial arithmetic favourably. I am persuaded by artist friends of the merit, tempered I expect by the reality of the working interfaces, if they actually used a 80s Quantel - we take instantaneous responsiveness for granted.. Time and place required, but I'm serious enough to have scouted premises and allocated budget.

I digress. Sorry.

I only have read about Pharo in the last couple of weeks, but I am taken by the sophistication of the ambitions and delivery thereof. I say this here, rather thanon a Pharo list, because I am unsure of what skills and specialities are required, but I have a professional itch to scratch, which is estimating the work of supporting a new language to the fullest extent possible, in Visual Studio. If this could be accomplished in under half a man year for a senior developer, I really want to know. (result to be released to community, purpose of exercise purely personal curiosity about what consequent effect is possible)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantel_Paintbox

I must add the Bangladesh Civil War, 1971-87 , to the pogrom count, the other way around. Calcutta Brahmin Hindu families intermarried and converted to Islam. The Muslims were supposed to go to Pakistan, as it became. But the ties were deeper than just family; Calcutta was a technical powerhouse in its prime. Skilled workers couldn't find work outside the community, which of course moved to East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The numbers were not few, and the fact that the war is officially dated to the first year of Independence, is the start of the most sorrowful tale. Three million women and children were killed or perished. Veterans of that war, ten years ago, suddenly were allowed to immigrate to the UK and America. The UK dropped the prohibition of entry and settlement, of elderly, infirm, uneducated and dependant relatives. I have friends whose futures were ruined, as the burden, despite having free healthcare and extremely generous benefits, if you have cooperative society, which in a majority ghetto concentration, you can rely on as friendly, my friends watched younger siblings lose education and housing chances, the family resources depleted entirely. Caring for unwell elderly is not compatible with the part time jobs which young mothers and school age children forwent to be on hand to attend often multiple great grandparents and even aunts and uncles. THE EFFECTS ARE CATASTROPHIC the strictly patriarchal Bengali society was obedient to elders who alienated the younger population from general society. The youngest are growing up in houses no longer bilingual, but Bengali only for avoidance of offense to the elders. The elder men collect voting cards. Twenty five, in my friends family. I see families suffering from organised indignities. I see racial discrimination in sensitive positions like social workers, who are largely another race altogether. Unusual in i predominantly, 80% Bengali area. We have frightening frequency of forcible adoption and removed from mothers and the most amazingly brazen aggressive and fraudulent routine abuse of Family Division of the High Court. I experienced this obviously through friends but then with my mother because I fought in Court Pro bono and started winning the kinds of cases that sicken me to know many go unchallenged. I became unwell as a result.

I suspect that this is because a human propensity exists to allocate and apportion blame, particularly in cases where the interactions involved in the immediately prior actions are unclear.

I have actually not even once encountered this 5 Why's method.

I neither heard of it before.

But I founded my company in 1996, starting out with almost two hundred years of experience surrounding my incredulous and lucky younger self, including several PhDs and former Fortune 500 board members.

I will hazard that this 5whys technique is fundamentally flawed and easily susceptible to manipulation for procuring a scapegoat.

I only hope that explains why I have never encountered this before. I hope moreso I can feel a little like something​was going on in the right way, in my business, to filter and reject what I think is, and definitely comes across as bogus to me.

I used to wish I could publish my email correspondence as a RSS feed, to which the "recipients" could more selectively subscribe.

So they're always engaged in seeking the information they need, which is so duplicated between correspondence and emails, I could even avoid copy and paste.

This was when I didn't get funny looks for suggesting that I send a email.

Did anyone else notice how regular people seem to have been killing off email and all forms of communication that require any configuration, lately?

Edit: configuration, not confirmation

I haven't thought of WiFi as a available infrastructure until this year, the development was so slow to arrive I missed it actually coming.

And this is the City Of London, I live close enough to consider the city home.

Ironically, I only noticed the ubiquity of WiFi in the city as a result of testing the lowest end phone and prepaid options possible. This is in reaction to the most ridiculous dispute with my contract network provider, over the fate of the premium number I've used for a long long time being held hostage. I only wanted it to move to another account..

I remember the Palms very well. At the time I carried a treasured HP 209LX, secretly wishing for a Psion 5 keyboard but not their systems environment. (I had the HP a while if you note the overlap)

I wish I could find the story again, but I think the sadness was just the classical combination of blunt management and silicon valley egos.

This is the canonical answer for every technological near miss, isn't it?

I mean cost driven aggressive B School management plus idealistic impatient but always sufficiently talented to change the world software and hardware Engineers, Always Always Always the same, WHY DO YOU GUYS KEEP DOING IT??!!!

I honestly care about the answer, because I thought this was the past and not the normal, when I learned to program, oh, thirty five years ago...

As for the infrastructure WiFi...

The Result has been I learned that I am almost entirely independent of any cellular carrier network for my voice connectivity.

I haven't quite yet, but I actually could drop the Networks out of my life!

The UK is blessed with a ISP called Andrews and Arnold, www.aaisp.net who will port my (once freed) precious memorable number to a SIM card that resides on their MVNO. This cuts my recurring payment to merely £2.40pcm! And, as desired, I can have more lines on that number. I must avoid starting in how good AAISP really is. If you want to be recognised by voice when you call, and get enterprise grade services, please mention John owes Phil Boddy one, and hadn't forgotten...

Oh, and my Networks- free telephonic life?

I am seriously contemplating whether it's worth the hassle of applying to install a VHF/UHF D-STAR Repeater, which our building management seems happy to let us do, to cover the Bank / St. Paul's areas.

AAISP let you port your number (any number, cellular numbers are new) to their VOIP services. I can route them as I please, so apart from the slight lack of duplex, why not over HAM RADIO? I have figured out how to use a freephone number to call in and take over the call, from a payphone, and the idea amuses me greatly. But the fact is, I'd rather carry a dedicated WiFi access device that provides me with use of a headset and the radio /audio processing power possible in a shoulder strapped battery and module, than I would carry another$1000 phone obsolete the moment the manufacturer cares to not update it.

I guess I'd just love to be serious about putting my call sign on my business card!

I'm reading Michael Bloomberg's autobiography, and he describes working his last day as a partner at Salomon Brothers, a twelve hour day, to end fifteen years of twelve hour days, six day weeks. He was not unhappy in his work.

What I find confusing, is the extension of work into outside hours, on call.

9-5 office workers are supposed to be able to complete only 2 hours undistracted work during their day. This figure comes up time and time again despite the original study of American workplaces was long before we had computers and modern distractions universally.

Is there a acknowledgement of the value of the on tap working capacity, implicitly in this insidious invasion of outside life from work?

Because I have been understanding the constant on call expectations of employers to be in effect a admission of the end of necessity for offices.

As in, "sure I'll make sure to respond to your demands 24/7, now I just won't commute four hours a day costing me £7,000 for the train tickets, to only spend a couple of hours a day doing actual work for you!"

This is quite the indictment of the way we manage our business, is it not?

Hi Don, I hope you are able to see my post, I think I became a bit invisible here, but I just want to take the opportunity to thank you for all those ZFS filer reviews, back in the day. This had a profound utility for us, which I will date to mention, now shuttered fifteen years ago due to the sudden death of my co-founder and best friend, we were so struck by what you guys were doing that we spent ten man years on a competitor... Ahm, no, no we didn't actually intend to compete, that would have been unable to pass my late co-founder's stringent "is it any good?" test, where I had to convince him as nauseam we had no negative motivation..but we thought we saw a higher end need for photo hosting, in the advertising world, where we saw that a readily available search and lightbox app, like you see at Corbis, or Getty, plus of course actually reliable storage, would be in immediate demand from photographers who liaise with ADs, everywhere. We had nifty features like rendering photos for the display capability, and were planning to hook up deals where the AD could subscribe to get so many 10 by 8 or larger proofs bikes to them, potentially from the nearest photographer who upheld a minimum process standard. This had ambition to take on digital advertising delivery. We thought smugmug was the game changer able to bring credibility to our dream of expanding access to lucrative agency work, to normal photographers. So we set about making the tools... even the dot com is long lost during my life's upheavals that followed from personal loss in large part, I grew up knowing my co-founder, but I think we've still got the unused Twitter handle. It was to be called PhotoAlta. Or PA (short for Photo Agency, which we thought was cute) . This is still a dream about opening the industry in ways that can make advertising affordable to small businesses, which is simply not at all the case now. In 03/04/05, we didn't see the hockey stick of the cloud, not at all clearly anyhow, but we knew that rather than bike proofs about, we'd rather provide on demand runtimes of proofing software, fronted by preconfiguration and parameter checks for avoiding waste. There's a realm of incredibly expensive software loosely categorised as pre press, that we desperately wanted to democratize. This expense was the hurdle to starting out business almost a decade earlier, and I've never been far from my work for opening the advertising industry economy, so random as this is, shame faced and also humbly if you are at all interested in what I'm on about here, I'd simply be delighted to pass on, unreservedly, to where it may do some good.

The consumer pricing structures, when you start getting services like Dropbox used extensively in professional settings, such as graphic design for advertising, is a problem. When we've got to go back to the original files with a press deadline that's​missed at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, where do we expect to find the customer service, if we're impacted by a degraded node in Dropbox's cloud? I accept the problem is with the community of freelance designers, and equally the disinterest if agencies and other line of business data consumers to provide adequate alternatives (we do, with real enterprise grade systems and support contracts) but even Draconian measures to enforce control only back up a community who have been backed up and disenfranchised plenty enough by the large agencies pushing work off the payroll for the length of my career (decades...) and it just happens to be a hard sell to make any extra work for a highly talented community who are now treated as least cost providers.

Only if the diffuser is in the optical chain and not the surface target at the focal plane of a projection.

Whenever we crumple our eyes up to squint we're creating a diffraction grating that works a treat for the myopic amnesiac I am when without my spectacles.

The ground glass of the focusing screen in my Nikon is diffuse. This particular diffusion assists with guaging the lens focus, bit only for smaller apertures than f/2.0, so that expensive 85mm f/1.4 prime lenses need autofocus. Dunno how I managed for two decades professionally before the digital switch rendered great optics practically redundant*

So what's preventing the projection of the high resolution display information into a kind of focusing screen like the old fashioned Single Lens Reflex cameras won the market with in the fifties and sixties?

Is it more physical constraints of the imposition of the display into the field of vision for infinity focus?

If long ago my amateur interest would have carried my thinking further, sadly I have no applicable reading even on the subjects, so forgive me if this is a beginner supposition in error.

I certainly see the opportunity to directly encourage the hardware development, even if the equipment will be unwieldy to use, even more so than today, for specialist fields such as fabric design and magazine printing. I have been involved in the latter for the entirety of my career, two decades of that running the company I hoped would open up enormous markets and that field even defenestrated Google in 2004, leading to the most epic narrative and pivot story if I manage to get things kicking again. * Surely there is a very good overlap between the current generation of customers for whom the budget simply isn't the obstacle, and the same customers who will allocate whatever you want to charge in the future, if you can deliver real advantages? I'm optimistic about VR, but not in any kind of short term horizon. I founded my own business on a thirty year plan.. that still could be met, and made decades one and two, kinda just the latter. Maybe this is what we all need: real long term benefit analysis and commitment. This isn't a factor of the youthfulness of the Valley to which short termism is often ascribed,when flighty CEOs are discounted, I was very young and junior by a generation and some to my co-founder, when I realized how I had found my calling. Surely the VR sector has plenty of similar thinkers young enough to put such time to their dreams?

*I kinda continue a bit in my profile, where I may be more bold soon. I welcome any feedback or inquiry, I may be less than the epitome of clarity when I come close to professional engagement with ideas I can't believe.. the industry hasn't destroyed my hopes because of politics not technology, not yet anyhow..

This was the first thought I had, also, but from a optimistic point of view:

If you are interested in modelling the behaviour of a modern fabric loom, which can be a four storey high proposition with thousands of spindles feeding air guided bobbins, where the weight of the threads in your weave design affects the entire process, the way your thread hangs requires a different tension, how it stretches affects the feed and speed with which the bobbin can fly through the weft (vertical line frame into which the pattern is woven) and the elasticity and friction tension the weft sometimes intentionally... I am willing to bet it would suit me if the visual rendering is put on ASICS or FPGAs, while the physical modelling for cloth behaviour might be a more general purpose solution.

No anti entrapment rule or law in the UK.

Azure's cognitive services, particularly because you can spend the free development dollars for a start:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/sp...

I have been very pleased with customer reviews when we used the service to custom voicemail greetings per caller for a call center app, where the client was losing too many tickets to SPAM filters, before we could move them to a new SMTP server. And afterwards, too.

If contrarian debate includes technical debate, I learned that I enjoy reading the counter arguments for programming solutions that I'd probably not learn about, if for any reason I am by experience or knowledge or style or ability, the longer in tooth or lesser as is inevitable in this Cambrian explosion of the web, if I'm going to instinctively assume that I would take another approach to the similar goal. Learning about the depth and even shallowness of the industry that touches large database installations has been most eye opening, in a good way, to this fifth decade enterprise maven. This, and comparing my experience with start-up in the early nineties, and generally the sheer variety of voices, keeps me returning

Is there a real hurdle in patents on map graphics held by the major mapping companies and national organisations?

Could a goal of being truly open and complete, be incompatible with the interests of privacy, national security even?

If community involvement is lacking, I immediately thought about the cimnunies who have real interest in mapping and particularly free open mapping, such as conservationists, residents of small towns concerned about planning and in my home Sussex county, hikers always fighting losing out to farming interests over ancient byways.

But these constituencies need tools. I would immediately donate to such efforts if I knew they existed. Or a corporate like ACDSystems, who publish Deneba Canvas which while sadly lost adrift far from the software I remember, incorporated superb GIS and technical drawing capabilities. This would be the kind of marketing that traditionally worked very well, tools and support for local news stories, which use to run a long while anyway.

This is why I think it possible that we may yet have a text centric app to rule them all, as has China gravitated to WeChat.

Last night I was in a discussion about the whole shift in market power that a central role playing app like WeChat could enable: the premise of debate was that Alexa and competitors are potentially a step towards a new interest in text interfaces. Only our own generation has had our vision occluded by growing up in the command line interface, which is too involving and too complicated for widespread use. The word involving, we chose to describe the experience of working with a CLI, which, having stripped away every attribute we could, we concluded that you had to be involved in a continuous thought process to gain any utility from a CLI. Whereas we figured casual users wish to receive answers to questions, or refine queries without any parsing or precise expressions. So if we had a text interface that was more, so to speak, open ended, then also voice might be workable, and the interface become a widely used interaction. This then could really create the foundation for individual customisation, as local processing power can be applied to learning from the user's total interaction with many different types of connected application, as well as from existing phone voice command systems. We imagined further, that the opportunity might exist for a newcomer to enter this space, as the need for a independent and unaffiliated party for brokering online interaction is potentially a strongly perceived need, whilst we figured it remains one that is subject to the same negative perception of big internet names in a era when I more than my colleagues think that saturation reporting of privacies dying by the thousand cuts has engendered public apathy. We all agreed that public apathy or cynicism, even straight up hostility towards any attempt at selling a "do no evil" message, is a significant hurdle. The question we retired to consider, is how you can organically grow the required trust, in a market where giant capital can leave you alone with outmoded paradigms and entirely whole technologies behind the willing big spenders. As we have seen, there's no marketing to generational segments, when it comes to a web where the generations would not willingly be separated by communications islands - at least presently you couldn't sell a safebook social network to seniors and expect them to get their grandchildren on the platform.

Once gone our ways to home, a few hopeful texts were thrown around, wondering if there was some way to get sufficient a body of technology figureheads to be part of a board approving technologies for some kind of do no harm branding evaluation. This died the moment one of our more cynical lot linked a sheet of the quick results of his rough and ready search for directorships held by the first ten names we'd bandied about. He signed off, "you already know each advertising budget for those."

This is the case of the least denominator in management"thinking". If managers were legally liable to shareholders for obviously bad decisions that benefit to the managers, it might occur less. Only Sweden makes regular management liable in this way, even on criminal penalty. I see all manner of arguments why this could be used to excuse sclerosis in innovation, but frankly I don't see it that way.

Tesco stores in London are removing from self checkout kiosks cash payment. A middle size store in the City, two sides of a aisle, left accept cash, on the right the machines only accept cards. The card only kiosks were all vacant. On the left, backing up a frustrated queue tailing behind me another twenty people at least, were a dozen self checkout kiosks, all confounding anyone's ability to pay for any goods. With the random completion of the process, the queue for the cash kiosks became chaotic. It was about 11pm. The store was otherwise almost empty. In other words, people were able to"do all their shopping" quickly, and then spend considerably more time being pissed off, probably like me, also unable to price see several items before getting to the kiosk, which is not a uncertainty I much care for.

At the kiosk, I realized I needed a carrier bag, and asked for one, none being visible. "A ten pence one is fine!" I said hopefully, the mandatory five pence ones nowhere. "We've only those." He said, pointing to one pound fifty fancy bags. Off I went, my basket left behind me. No sale.

Last night. Another Tesco store. This one has had random kiosks changed to accept card only. So I asked, as I approached the head of the queue and was told... This store doesn't accept cash. Another abandoned basket.

I have been able to complete less than half of every attempt at shopping in the second of those two stores, walking out each time over two years. Sainsbury's stock was paying ten percent dividends,last I looked. I see a classic long - short position.

The National Audit Office must publish the model for this system, forthwith.

Only then can debate begin.

And political parties must be compelled to publish their proposals both normalised to the NAO model specification and atomically for the inputs and outputs of specific effects of the rules, especially of housing rules.

In this way I could throw about ideas like my"basement benefit" contribution to a ring fenced home deposit scheme for all mature children living with parents whilst in work. This could be extended for those with parents over the age of fifty five, to build a capital cushion cover for care for parents, meeting with needs such as home modification and such things as mobility. Specifically I like the idea of subsidy for a station wagon or similar practical vehicle, for the adult carer if parents who are willing to give up their driving license.

Sadly this was the policy of my last defunct startup. We did get to enjoy the benefit, tho, twice:

For every day early we delivered a point release, the whole team got double days holiday, half paid for bonus.

Editing got in s twist somehow I have dumped the context in my profile because have to go away just now.

I'm quite sure that English is the language that I've been using for the longest time without exactly knowing how it exactly works!

Or metaphorically I don't know exactly how English works when it decomposes so gracefully as it is capable of doing.

Is there any kind of equivalence in programming languages like this? I mean theoretically is it possible to design or possibly write code such that it is capable of imprecision and yet compiling to equivalent instructions?

(I realize I may simply lack the formal language to describe what I mean, but if by virtue of any fortuitous inherent redundancy in my question, a passing expert may recognise their field and be willing to guide me, I shall be most grateful.)

I keep thinking about a future retirement business: a mom and pop electronics hardware store, stocking the widest variety of maker goodies and serious bench tools, the kind that are very much try before you buy, if a private buyer - in my ideal world - and my USP would be providing a RPi distro I'll while away my final years polishing the autoconfig for all the home automation kit I can manage to disconnect from the cloud.

EDITED REMOVING A REVERIE TO MY PROFILE, my apologies, often carried away when I'm enjoying the topics here, it's not my wish to spoil the flow as I almost did.

This said, I will surely be delighted to hear from anyone regarding my rather wistful wishes, to which I applied months of health enforced downtime last year. I still think the qualified opportunity isn't a total wash and would be willing to invest in a no tears no recriminations study, later in the year.

About the necessity of a WAN and firmware etc updating your home automation system: are we not in cities now at sufficient density where peer to peer hops in a as hoc network, has become a technical possibility that maybe lacks a sufficient motivation?

I'm running Skype Lite on android.

Redisplay the stop sign in the (TI DLP) HUD.

Outline pedestrians, similarly.

Give me a distance, stopping reaction countdown, and alert me to children doubly so lest they suddenly break from adults. I would think that indication that pedestrians are facing towards or back to traffic is important for me to get quickly as well.

This kind of information would greatly reduce my fatigue when driving long journeys through England's west country and any area with narrow twisting, often tree covered, roads.

Does Azure's composable FPGA design offer potential for assemblage of a higher level of abstraction, my poor analogy is the web assembly reduced to instructions/ primitives but you control the gate logic that's run, and isn't that logic then totally isolated from any other design side effects?

If you by some circumstances had a terrific clean and tidy system in a functional language, wouldn't that offer a higher level of possible "primitive" operations?

Can parachutes deploy automatically safely?

I mean in cities I keep imagining much greater extent of elevation, moment we figure how. Above the smog line... I'm sure I was in 94 but 16 same place, in the middle, ugh.

Could it become unlawful to rent (Live in generally) homes without harmful particle filtration?

I'm thinking of renting out my filters just before tenant viewings, because this eliminates the obviously fresh air chill, takes out fat or any food Smell beyond the kitchen, let's a visitor smoke even..(friend closed rental dear by offering a cigarette excused by filters, it's your residence now) but from flu season to the decoration next door, the cost needs a artificial boost. Wish was a swapHN channel..

Very cool thank you! Also prewitt and Travis above and below..

Mortality rates.. Got it ,:-$ so, marketing for 7th floor Homes with kitty life policy in the service charge bill technically not the Blatant fraud I assumed, and if the building manager had run into trouble the lives of many injured kitties luckily lookalike to the residents could be the hardest sentencing hearing for any animal lover judge. English cities badly need dog license reintroduction. Asked to help a former neighbor become tramp beg court to return his dog. Second I met the man, who certainly was denied due process and on paper atrociously mistreated, he introduced the dog, unknown potential dominant bulldog mongrel, getting it to l so and lock it's jaw on his agitated arm. I passed him again, alone in rain, dog coat sodden, he was high and drunk careless no train still disgorge the fool he requires. Dogs need sorting out in London before brexit chaos

Imagine you are now the only person who has to be satisfied with the confidence you feel in map products.

Otherwise you equally weight everything giving nobody any preference other than no data and no location.

Now you realize that everyone has disabled maps until you switch them on because you rely on API location information.

However the five years since you began enforcing privacy has allowed everyone to reach parity.. partly because nobody is piggy backing the others.

I can't think of the way I could trade off the what next situation I just described: get everyone using power hungry chips to get you a chance at the bad guy .. how does it work if you balance the players?

I lived on the seventh floor, so always wondered if that meant I could safely keep a cat?

[Urban legend, afaik, cats can't right themselves with less than the seventh floor height to fall..]

I'm scarred by the CISC - RISC wars, which were serious for my business at the time. So in a year I'm anticipating Open VMS I'm x64 , having a indelible memory of the memory space rings and system calls depending on explicit separation, I remember thinking to myself, well only four rings in Alpha are critical to VMS, and Intel Pentium has that many rings...so why don't they port straight to the main Intel platform? Is this leaking mode the reason?

I recognize the positive spin, the fact of hardware vulnerability is still little understood, and the trust placed in the cloud ecosystems is almost absolute. I'm aware that I would be planning to go on a Microsoft like security commitment and the sheer resources available to Intel if concentrated on the silicon features capable of e.g. detecting a miscreant hypervisor look like the next wave of products and marketing. To achieve this spin, however, Intel needs to day much more than they have. They can maintain their current line but score points with sceptics by demonstrating how some attacks work on Intel processors in the wild. Coordinated with Industry wide patches, making more point which is missed here how Microsoft and others patched branches in November, the wrap is to offer all customers running on vulnerable silicon migration and s performance bump. This is not a cheap process, but the political climate almost demands resolution at this level.