HN user
An aside...
The automation machine at one station I worked at had 2047 programmable steps. (well, 2048, 0 was a step)
As a 16 year old, I could not fathom why it was not 2400. With 2400 steps, you could program each hour the exact same; not so with 2047.
Editing was a dream on the ASR33 teletype. Seems scissors and tape are very effective.
In 1980 I worked in local radio.
The playlist was set by corporate (or by a consultant). You could maybe change the order of the songs, but you were not allowed to add / subtract any songs.
By 1980 over 1/2 of the stations were "automated". Music was provided by a service, on Reel to Reel tape (played by Revox B77's).
Path to a radio job in 1980? A Third Class RadioTelephone License with Broadcast Endorsement.
AM stations, in particular daytime only licensees, are almost free at this point. Most cases, the land value where the antenna is located is the sales price.
Not that many 50kw stations.
Efficiency is up, more in the upper 70%'s now days. (of course broadcasters will use a transmitter until it is unfixable, so there are some 50 year old units still on the air). Each user requires a 9 volt battery to listen (maybe a bit more...)
Compare that electricity with the streaming cost. The streamers computers and routers. The infrastructure cost for the internet (not all amortized to streaming, of course). The desktop / laptop / phone electricity for EACH user / subscriber.
Once you hit a certain audience size, broadcasting is more efficient.
Note: I agree with you on the billboard trucks. A waste.
we could make a similar observation about determinism. given a set of inputs, the compiler will create the same output each time.
not always true. but very close (pathological coding defects and explicit randomization excluded)
very different than an LLM.
If the system was used to control something it was obvious.
There would be some kind of main / idle loop. When this was running, you could see the pattern in the data buss and in the address buss. The loop of code would not be many instructions, they would all be together, so the pattern on the address buss would be quickly repeating.
If you had a slow peripheral, you could see the ISR getting called. It would be at a different address than the main loop, and you could see it flash periodically, like every time a line went to the printer.
As an operator of the system, you had a unique perspective of watching the program run as the system operated; if it was data processing it would not mean much but in a control system it was uncanny.
The academic job market is flooded. No PhD's could be produced for 10 years and it would still be flooded.
Not a Problem.
the cheaper the switch, the longer the bounce.
go to switzerland. gas leaf blowers and jet ski's. not allowed
live by a railroad track. takes about 6 months till you don't notice it. at all.
What are we talking about? 5% more? 200% more?
Get those rich people out of the private jets and into the supersonic ones. Then the rich people currently in first class can move into the private jets.
Eventually, that means that there will be some seats in the back of the regular plans for everyday wage slaves.
If only the staff at the regulating agencies were there. I think they got a dose of DOGE last year.
If your design work is not based upon science and mathematics, it is not engineering.
Not saying engineering is required to build or improve a product; it is not.
"try this" is not engineering.
"reasonable" is for a jury to decide.
in the context of being charged with a crime, his name should be released. just like everyone elses.
Not solved. Made less effective. So it takes 100 of them to make any military effect.
The thousands and thousands of FPV drones being used have not been decisive on the battlefield.
The war is a slog, and resembles WWI more than WWII.
Those tiny fpv drones pack a tiny punch. Sure, it will destroy a current generation Chevy Equinox. But two weeks after the war starts, countermeasures will be created. The vehicles will be changed to make them harder to find, and harder to kill. A small drone will be rendered ineffective by small countermeasures. As much as I dislike the current US administration, Ford moving to making missiles and other military hardware is a good idea. They sure can't build a cost effective vehicle; yet there is a lot more potential profit in a Standard Missile, not to mention less competition.
US doesn't enforce laws concerning financial crimes anymore. Or laws on milk purity, either.
because i am smarter than the next guy and will know when to get out.
so, are these bonds a good buy?
USAF did lose an AWACS plane to a drone attack. Why? It was out in the open. I would think some minimal concealment / camouflage would have made an easy drone target into an impossible one. Same with the early warning radars that were destroyed; someone was asleep in command not posturing these systems such that they were at least slightly harder to find and hit.
Overall, the drones were militarily a bunch of mosquito's. None of the US allies 'enjoyed' having civilian targets hit by the Iranian drones, but the military impact was minor at best.
Unless you want to put boots on the ground, you send missiles and drop bombs.
The Iranian drones would have been a lot more of a problem if they were harassing ground troops on the way to Tehran.
(does the US need counter drone systems? yes, absolutely. is air superiority dead? not at all)
+1 to pdp11. The workhorse of the 1970's. They were everywhere. City Library. Auto parts stores. And reliable; Maytag ain't got nothing on a pdp 11.
Downside, programs are pretty simple that run in 64k. And extended addressing in any form, sucks.
Strongly agreed. It is a signal. I did an analysis once at the end of the year. Work group of about 45 engineers. The CM system had a lot of steps, and work could get bounced around, but there was a step where some one "resolved" a software activity. Bug fix or new requirements, it did not matter. This step was when someone actually completed work and put into into the dev stream.
A quick DB query and the variance was substantial. A couple of people had over a hundred. About 10 had 2. For the year. The ramp up was slow, average was 8 to 10 a year.
Dig a little deeper. Those at the top were 'group leads' not only did they do IC work, they also got stuck with all 'paperwork' on the problem work packages. They had 'power', so they could override various things. So, they were doing a lot of work, and taking care of things. Good signal, matches what one would expect.
Those at the bottom. One of them had effectively been a 'systems engineer'; all of their time was working on requirements with the customer, making powerpoint, etc. Important work, so that signal was inverse of what it originally showed.
A couple were in the middle that had great reputations for technical expertise. They were spending almost full time in training / mentoring / very hard problems mode. Highly valuable, but not shown by looking at these numbers.
All the rest? 80% of the work was being done by 20% of the people. We could have dropped about 12 heads and barely noticed.
The problem is, you could not take action on this measure. It gave you a place to start, but you needed to know more about what was going on day to day.
not just the terminals. the bookshelf with the documentation was in the terminal room.
(buy a VAX, get a library. oh, and a computer too.)
the 6 months after the first screen editor was installed was constant questions and answers bouncing across the room on how to do things.
You are predicting the weather by saying tomorrow will be just like today.
Which has a good track record of being right, most of the time.
I agree!
I am ashamed to say that my mind could not understand these 'mac behaviors'. in my mind, closing the shell does not mean 'shut down the machine (or make it standby). maybe i have a job running. maybe i am ssh'ed into it. likewise, when it is opened up, why does it un-standby or turn on?
very confusing that the computer thinks it knows what i want; when i can push the power button to turn it on, or /sbin/shutdown -h now when i want it off.
The E and S rack was an 'image generator'. That one was called an SP1. I fondly remember the SP3T as being the pinnacle of that series; the T meant "texture processing".
image a computer display made up of 1000 line segments. that is what you would get. it was possible to buy these with an output that was not raster, rather it drew on the CRT with vector segments. incredible light points to simulate night landings.
what you have there is a coding sheet for a GP4. a stored program computer, with drum memory.
eventually, the company would call that a 'system design and mechanization report', which would document the math and equations needed to correctly simulate a small part of an aircraft.
note the marking "link division of general precision". the computer was made by General Precision, of which the Link aviation company was the biggest customer. i had always been told that Link purchased General Precision, but perhaps it was the other way around.
i worked in this industry for about 35 years. this stuff was ancient and forgotten about when I started.
waterfall and ada.
you used to have a thing called preliminary design (i think is specified in 2167A).
with ada, you write all the specs. so, all of the packages procedures / functions and visible variables are declared.
Feed this to the compiler. Does it compile? If yes, then your design is complete.
Implement the bodies during detail design.
JOVIAL. A blast from the past. At one time I was saving programmers manuals for JOVIAL compilers. (why? perhaps some mental defect or disease).
Late 1990's I was contacted via e-mail by someone that was looking for a JOVIAL manual. So, cool, I asked him which one? Hughes Aircraft? Boeing? Boeing J3B2?