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beckerdo

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A very good article, well explained, and I appreciate the photos of fine watches.

As shown, date complications are very tough to calculate and there are many levels of features.

However, the phases of the moon complication is not discussed in much depth here. Is it a simple calculation independent of the date?

Portable EPUBs 2 years ago

I agree, I would like an ePub to have a robust note taking and exporting ability.

For instance, if I highlight in Chapter 8 "In 539" [next paragraph] "Belisarius" [next paragraph] "marched on Ravenna" [10 paragraphs later] "In 540 Belisarius entered Ravenna".

I would like to export this with the Chapter header and detailed highlight locations OR just as one sentence with subtle links to the locations.

Yes this is true, "the conversions did not generally work in their (employee) favor, although the old old timers were allowed to stay on the pension".

Once caveat was that the IBM older pension plan was more valuable than a 401k plan because IBM investment strategy was far better than the average 401k investor options.

"Conversions did not generally work in their favor" for these reasons: 1) IBM originally announced (around 1999) that all active employees were converted to the less desirable 401k plan. After a lawsuit, IBM had a formula for who got the more valuable older pension. Two people have 18 years of service for IBM. The younger one (say 45 years old) had no choice but to switch. The older one (say 50 years) was allowed a choice.

2) IBM was able to control the amount for the 401k payout. Their pension value (easily calculated future value based on salary and years of service) was converted into present value based on IBM's estimation of the amount you could make in free market investments. So essentially they said "Your $2M pension is worth $36k today because we calculated you can make 20% per year in investing. Here's your $36k for 18 years of service." (By the way, IBM salaries were usually lower than most other companies because they always touted their great pension plan that no others could match.)

Both these points were argued in courts. The first point was won by some employees, not all, only IBM knows. The second point was won by IBM.

I am reading "Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive" by Philipp Detmer (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08XTNHRR5/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...). It is a great book for the layman, and explains a number of processes in simple and lively analogies. My understanding of the immune system increased greatly.

However this paper of all the interactions is at a higher level. I could just barely relate it to what I know. As an engineer I appreciate the presentation of the data and the amount of thought that went into it. I will have to study the paper more.

"Physical UIs also don't need to help the user navigate digital content. Hugely different to physical content."

Consider the Beat Buddy pedal (automated drum accompaniment pedal) which can play lots of digital content via user commands. Yes the foot commands are limited ("add a fill", "splash sound", "next phrase", "end song"), and so are the dials ("choose playlist", "change tempo"). However, the proper stomping really helps if you want to add an extra solo or just chill with a beat while you tell a story.

Imagine when the processor and materials become cheaper. You could have very large hex boards that support many game maps and pieces. With touch control, it would be fun have gestures to move and combat with the stacks of pieces.

Additionally, IBM made several good pivots in the 90s and later. IBM embraced the world wide web and supported many web products. IBM did well for a while with RISC processors, AI, and cloud computing. However, I think the expenses out-paced the revenues.

Weren't the IBM Ambra, Aptiva, and Vista brands efforts by IBM to out clone the clones? As I remember, these IBM brands from the 1990s gave the impression of an IBM computer, but they were all made by third-party companies.

HTTP/3 Is Fast 5 years ago

There are a few outliers in the HTTP/3 graphs that are slower than the HTTP/2 graphs. I might have missed it, but I don't think the outliers were explained.

It is interesting to me how many engineers hop from English ("3 inches to go on the rubber band") to the metric system ("400 meters per second"). Andy Weir touches on this in his book "Hail Mary".

This brings up a point related to the double-period/redundancy discussion above.

In a slight adjustment of this example, what if the text were a question and the quotation were a statement. Would this be a good construct: Why did Jake believe "the AI was going to kill us all."?

Similarly you could have a text statement with a quoted question: Jake asked "would the AI kill us all?".

Some color pickers allow you to load a palette of names and they locate those names and values in the color picker interface.

You can load common name sets (e.g. X11 color names, CSS names, Munsell names, Behr) and they map their values into your color pickers.

This works well especially with paint pigments as every manufacturer has their exotic names that they hype for that year. "Oh, 'Ice Blue' is really just a slightly blueish white."

I was a big reader of the rec.bicycles forums in the 1990s. That contributor Jobst Brandt was amazing in his reasoning on bicycles and their technology. Reading this brings back great memories.

I did not agree with him all the time, but he profoundly changed my views on endless debates at the time such as the effect of weight on the tradeoff of durability versus speed.

I like the map plotting in this article. You can see from the one second rays exactly how much time spent at a stop, and with a few calculations you probably can determine velocity.

TLDR: "the new functionality allows users to disable echo cancellation and post-processing, and get rid of compression, and increases the audio codec quality from 22kHz to 48kHz, 96Kbps mono/192Kbps stereo"