jhallenworld

The main point of selecting the country seems to be getting you to consent to the country specific EULA. There's also region-based content management, but it's secondary at this point.

I have a new LG TV, holy moly what a terrible user experience. Out of the box it requires you to create an LG account. PITA, but OK. Except I was supposed to set the location first, instead I set it after. So now you have the problem that you can not log into LG.com using my own email (even from a web browser) because it says: "incorrect country". I contacted their tech support about this, the only fix is to switch back the country code on the TV (to US_Other), then delete the account from there, then set country code to US, then create it again. OMG. I guess there is no fix if TV breaks before you do this..or if you forget what the original country code was. You are then forced to use a different email for any future LG product. I notice that all LG smart products use the same phone app, BTW.

Also, I bought an LG soundbar to go along with it. You would think they would work well together. The soundbar sounds fine, but the synchronization drifts over time. I've tried optical, LG's enhanced optical (allows you to control the volume) and HDMI eARC. In theory optical in PCM mode works better, but then you give up the volume control. Why should an end customer know about any of this? Lip sync is a simple problem to solve (timing pulses and code slipping will always work) and they have failed at it.

Also: their remote sucks (compared with Roku).

Anyway, so no respect for LG.

2008

I bought a 2017 Kia Forte S recently.. ($4000 for 137K miles) no touch screen, but many safety features that are not too bad like radar collision detection and blindspot warning. 2019 they started with the touchscreen, and in 2023 they added "Kia Connect" with OTA updates. Anyway definitely check the year.

Problem with 2008 is some cars didn't even have Bluetooth audio or backup camera yet (like my 2010 VW CC- I had to add an aftermarket radio).

Also don't get direct inject only engine. At least for Kias, the non-turbo engines are much more reliable (but underpowered for sure).

When Boston ended rent control in the late 90s, all of the sudden the landlords invested in their goldmine buildings and generally improved the city. It sucks for those trying to rent or buy (including me, I paid 60% more for a house in 2002 than what it was worth in 1996), but the city has certainly had a renaissance.

IMHO, the problem now is bad zoning. The rich car-centric suburbs are preventing denser housing- to their own financial detriment. A recent fight is that the state has forced them to allow higher density housing around commuter rail stops. Similar fights about rail trails, future abutters are afraid of change but they are valuable everywhere they exist- in that they are a desirable feature and raise your house's value.

Another problem is that they overbuilt $100/sqft bio-lab space. These are sitting empty, and the owners refuse to lower the rent.. I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.

Suppose you want shelter. It used to be that you could buy a house for a reasonable price and move in. But now that's unaffordable, so instead your have to pay rent. In CPI thinking these are equivalent forms of shelter, but I bet if you asked most Americans, they would not agree with you.

No it's cooked. For high tech items, they assume that improved technology means you are getting more for your money even if the price goes up, so they discount it. It's true that you get more for your money, but it ignores threshold effects, like you just can't buy an equivalent phone for $10 even if todays phone's are 200x better.

Then there's the "owner's equivalent rent" BS and this is 25% of CPI. It answers the question "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished, and without utilities?" It assumes rental price and housing costs are somehow linked when in reality asset prices have far outstripped rent.

There are no dark GPUs

This might not be true. Someone was comparing Nvidia's production rate with known data center capacity, and they do not match. Their conclusion was that people (possibly even Nvidia) were hoarding GPUs- in the very short term this might be a good strategy, but GPUs go EOL fast. There are other stories about paused datacenter builds that match with this.

TSMC is definitely fully allocated, based on current 40 wk lead times for FPGAs..

Also: Musk's shares have 10x voting power, he can not be overruled by anybody (he will retain ~80% of the votes).

Also: SpaceX debt is $20 billion.

See also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI

Yeah, it's how you pay dividends at capital gains rate instead of income rate. But also, Apple is kind of stagnant.. if they had something better to do with the money they wouldn't be doing the buybacks.

Not only that, the operating itself was configured by a process known as "sysgen". You relink the entire operating system with options set the way you wanted. It was generally a miserable slow process.

At least on PDP-11 that's how it went for something like RSX-11. I believe same is true for early IBM mainframe operating systems like DOS 360- I think all programs had to be relinked because one option you had was to move things around in memory, and ancillary programs had to know the memory map.

Even later: I wrote a device driver for Xenix: you got a link kit for the OS, you relinked it with your custom driver object file included.

On CP/M you patched the running image (perhaps with DDT), then use the CP/M SYSGEN command to install it on a disk.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHKygZ7OHY

CP/M 1.0 was demoed to Intel in 1974, but they didn't buy it. iCOM FDOS was the first operating system that was available to people, and it sure didn't have environment variables.

Anyway, these operating systems didn't have multiple directories. But you could use CP/M 2.x's ASSIGN command to bind a logical name to a physical name. Minicomputer operating systems had this, also IBM mainframe had JCL DD commands.

My favorite cheap Casio is fx-115ES Plus 2nd Edition, $17

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-115ESPLS2-Advanced-Scientifi...

Includes GCD and LCM, some of the newer ones don't have them.

If you want graphing, there is the newish fx-CG100 has a nice display, but they removed Casio basic, it now only has micro Python (way too awkward to type on a tiny keypad):

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-ClassWiz%C2%AE-Calculator-Funct...

The older ones that still have basic:

https://www.amazon.com/Casio-fx-9750GIII-Graphing-Calculator...

BTW, here is a review I made of many calculators, measuring keyboard efficiency: (HP-15c still the best)

https://github.com/jhallen/calculator/wiki

(JOE 4.7 was also recently released)

VxDs and Watcom C... now those are names I haven't heard in a long time.

Do any screen editors work in the command prompt windows? Try with "export TERM=ansi".

A somewhat little know part is a "pre-biased transistor": this is a bipolar transistors with built-in resistors, and will often work as a drop-in replacement for a logic-level MOSFET (like 2n7000), but is an order of magnitude cheaper.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/diotec-semiconduc...

Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...

Now do a dynamic scheduling out of order engine with renaming, 20 pipes, speculative execution and hundreds of instructions in flight. I guess you could make a multi-person game for this.

I want to make something like this as a classic CPU ICE, with trace memory, disassembly, etc. (note that you need a crystal oscillator circuit for many CPUs- 6802, 8085, etc.)

It would be useful for debugging classic computers like Altair 8800, etc. What you do is get a boot trace (record the first 100,000 instructions) of a working machine and diff it with the one from your broken machine. This finds the problem in like 5 seconds.

How well do commodity systems protect your financial transactions from cosmic ray-induced bit errors?

I thought it was big time defamation risk for Afroman to call him a pedofile.. but maybe the cop is afraid of discovery in this case..

I gave it the .S19 file containing the EDOS resident 6800 FORTRAN compiler machine code and asked it to reverse engineer it. It wrote a disassembler in Python along the way.

The biggest danger of a nuclear weapon is being hit by flying debris.

I thought it was being burned alive in the resulting firestorm because the intense light starts fires over a large area: way beyond the blast zone. This risk could be reduced if we painted everything white- a double win since it would also help reduce the city heat island effect.

Colossus/Guardian was the first AI to realize that the humans could be easily coerced by using their own nukes against them.

From the Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) film.

NCO: 12 Numerically Controlled Oscillators generate carrier frequencies (505–1605 kHz)

This seems like a crude way to do it.. why not provide all 110 carrier frequencies by using a polyphase channelizer? The bandwidth of the entire AM broadcast band is pretty low..

Adding EXORdisk-I support to my MC6800 simulator so that it can boot EDOS and EDOS-II disks.

EDOS was a direct 6800 port of FDOS. FDOS was the first DOS available for microcontrollers, using iCOM's FD360 8-inch floppy drives.

https://github.com/jhallen/exorsim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHKygZ7OHY

Does it make a conforming preprocessor?

It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful.

So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.

The receiver is like the asset tag on computer servers- it's the one thing that is definitely not replaceable since it has the serial number used for entitlement.

If the end product ends up marginally cheaper, the company will be able to sell more of it, and this will lead to more profit. And sure, when you ignore the cost of the pollution, this certainly benefits the consumer, by allowing them to afford more energy and energy-based products (i.e., just about everything).

But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).