dmm10 · HackerTrans

dmm10

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4 mesi fadiscuss

Slight correction: I just received an advertising blow-in from Ollie's listing Hanes and other brand women's tees for $1.99 each. That's for short sleeve, long sleeve or tank top in various colors. The indicated competition is stated to sell them for $2.49. Not that this is RETAIl pricing in the U.S.A.. I'm guessing wholesale will be even less.

2 anni fadiscuss

Add RCS to that list.

3 anni fadiscuss

With powder bed printers overhangs and detached captured parts aren't a problem. Try making your own from an old inkjet printer.

3 anni fadiscuss

Or perhaps the Lisa

3 anni fadiscuss

I mean the following more to elucidate than criticize.

A minor point of clarification (admittedly rather pedantic though in line with the many comments in this discussion which relate to scientific rigor) but the statements indicating lichen sourced D3 is plant-based can be misleading. While many lichens contain one or more algae species/strains (hence containing a plant) some do not. Some lichens contain cyanobacteria as their sole photosynthesizing member in symbiosis with fungi (ie. no plant involved.) I don't know the specifics of the lichen source for vitamin D3 production. So a plant may or may not be involved.

Based on vitamin D being produced by other fungi than lichens and no (known to me) plant source of D3 I'll venture a guess that the source of the D3 in lichens is from the fungal component. If this holds true then claiming lichen sourced D3 is plant-based is a bit of a stretch.

Of course a popular reading of "plant-based" as used in current diet marketing -which seems to mean anything not derived from an animal- could hold. But marketing speak is anything but scientific.

[Quick searches didn't lead me to clarity on whether algae are part of the lichens used for commercial D3 production. I do wonder why lichens were chosen over mushrooms. I'd have thought mushrooms would have multiple advantages.]

3 anni fadiscuss

Your comment does not reflect history in the U.S.A.. And judging from the GP "our day to day lives" is very much U.S. centric.

Transportation: ""By 1981, all GM vehicles would be equipped with their new Computer Command Control System ("CCC") emission control system that featured an ECM (Electronic Control Module) that featured a Motorola 6802 based 8-bit microprocessor manufactured by Delco Electronics. "" https://www.chipsetc.com/computer-chips-inside-the-car.html

Entertainment - video games:

""we saw the release of all-time classic games such as Pac-man (1980), Mario Bros (1983), The Legend of Zelda (1986), Final Fantasy (1987), Golden Axe (1988), etc."" https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/evolution-of-home-video-game-c...

Financial - personal:

ATMs were quite common if no ubiquitous by the mid 1980's "" "The origins of the cashless society: cash dispensers, direct to account payments and the development of on-line real-time networks, c. 1965–1985" "" https://web.archive.org/web/20140714184815/http://www.ebhsoc...

Business:

VisiCalc came out in 1979, and spreadsheets were common in business offices in the U.S.A. through the 1980's.

Entertainment - TV and movies:

Computers were also used in commercial and movie production (ex. the 1984 Macintosh commercial, Pixar founded 1986 more or less out of Lucasfilm, and note that the VideoToaster came out for the Amiga in 1990 bringing professional level video production to a much more accessible price point.)

3 anni fadiscuss

Others have mentioned using spaces with an en-dash or hyphen instead of an em-dash. Having used a typewriter -back in the day- I learned to produce text like this.

How I learned the Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money -rather than for art or pleasure- is really quite enjoyable.”

To the teacher I learned from this was a standard way of punctuating on a typewriter.

4 anni fadiscuss

Anecdata and another case against center-dash touch control panels -which are integrated with control units.

Our 2013 Prius just had the center-dash unit crash likely due to the audio sub-system. And it would have burned but for a fuse blowing (replacing the fuse lead to smoking.) This took out the rear camera display along with climate controls, audio, ...

Fortunately someone at the Toyota shop we patronize had just replaced their same model year working unit with an iPad (hence learned that's a thing in the US even if illegal in the UK.) So what was going to be a ~$2,000 USD rebuilt unit (~$5,000 OEM new but a guy in town rebuilds them because there is apparently enough demand) was going to be less expensive.

Unfortunately, our Prius's unit seems to be unique to a particular finish/package for the model. And this particular unit type (a JBL variant) has connectors different from all other Toyota center console units.

Gist of the situation: failure of what is likely the audio section of the integrated center-dash unit took out rear camera, climate controls, audio, etc. with high price tag to repair when simple loss of audio unit would have been ignored.

4 anni fadiscuss

I believe Alan drew his observation of the 'value rule' from work on ASP, Analytical Spreadsheet Package - a part of Analyst, done in the Xerox Special Information Systems Group. This system is also interesting because it used blocks (aka. closures - the object version of lambdas) as the formulas for cells as pointed out by Kurt Piersol's article in the OOPSLA '86 proceedings, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/28697.28737 .

Spreadsheet rules (or formulas) in The Analyst are kept as Smalltalk blocks. A block is a common Smaiitalk object class which allows a section of compiled code to be kept as an object. They can be passed as arguments and stored as variables. Obviously, they are an ideal choice for rule storage and execution, since they allow the rules to be directly executed by Smalltslk at compiled speeds.

The description of ASP (and the Analyst package from which it was split out as a separate product) can be found at http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... . Of interest is the example of dropping a bitmap image into a cell and having an adjacent cell display the next generation of the game-of-life run on that initial cell. (That as opposed to having each spreadsheet cell in a region represent a cell in a game-of-life automata.)

As to homoiconicity, I wouldn't be surprised if Alan didn't at some point have a Smalltalk project window running full screen that was imbedded in a cell of a spreadsheet which was running in a Smalltalk project window within the Smalltalk environment. It's the kind of thing I saw him demonstrate as an aside during presentations as he popped out of the full screen project window which the audience had assumed was the root Smalltalk environment rather than a nested environment. What is a cell or window but a live code object running in the language environment after all?

4 anni fadiscuss

I took up the Arkansas Black cause from my grandmother who was born in the 1800's. They are unarguably hard. That contributes to them being amazing baking apples. Unfortunately whoever created this list of apples seems to have never considered eating apples that were baked in foods. Not even a mention of baking apples vs. eating apples appears on the site. Some varieties are good for baking and eating. Then there are those worthless for either (ie. red delicious.)

4 anni fadiscuss

As to 70's and 80's programmers knowing about printing presses I'll point out that a significant early AI program (1968-1970) was named SHRDLU. One familiar with printing history might recognize those letters as part of the second column of moveable type characters on a Linotype machine (and other type-casting machines.) I didn't look up a reference, but I recall that the first row of bins for hand set hot type letters followed the same convention of letter frequency in English text (for english speaking countries that is.) etaoin shrdlu That string of characters became more well know due to its appearance in hot type set news papers of the era. The characters sometimes accidentally made it to press rather than being pulled as part of an erroneous line of text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Etaoin_shrdlu

4 anni fadiscuss

Female ginkgo trees are the ones that bear fruit and hence produce the offensive odor. But branches of a male ginko tree can (rarely) change sex and bare fruit.

I've never tried Ginko kernels roasted to the point they were crunchy. But I find the ones roasted (some times on a skewer) to the consistency of firm cooked lima beans have a flavor similar to lima beans. Preparing lima beans is much easier though they produce very different medicinal effects.

4 anni fadiscuss

Would the early United States be considered an "individulistic society"? If so then consider the continental level genocidal practices which that society consciously adopted. Remember that all of North America was populated before the westward expansion. Feel free to extrapolate backwards in time.

4 anni fadiscuss

I encountered the idea of the 'night watch' and in fact the three traditional military watches of the night and their relationship with historical sleep patterns around the world thanks to The Paleolithic Prescription (1988) by Boyd Eaton, et al.[1]. Beyond introducing the idea of a paleolithic diet, Dr. Eaton along with his colleagues and students researched sleep and activity patterns in historical texts (records of Victorian doctors), the anthropological record, and practices of contemporary indigenous groups. As I recall, they found three sleep patterns commonly coexisting through recorded history and around the globe.

1) The night owl's late to bed and late to rise (first military watch)

2) The Dagwood Bumstead early to bed, up in the middle of the night, late to rise (second military watch)

3) Poor Richard's "Early to bed and early to rise" (third watch)

It was theorized that the three military watches possibly arose from prehistoric humans in small bands gaining survival advantages from having subsets of group members awake throughout the night.

I should also mention that long standing human practices involving nights when groups went without sleep showed up around the globe were studied as well. These existed independent of and seemingly well before showing up in academic settings and post industrial workplaces.

[1] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/brothers-grimm-...

5 anni fadiscuss

As klyrs mentioned, university bookstores typically have a section for writing implements where one can try out pens. Additionally, every decent art supply store I've been in has had a section for pens with paper to try them out on. Art stores don't usually carry cheaper mass market office pens, but I do see some of the Staedtler, Pentel, and other pens recommended. I've even found pens I like that Jet Pens doesn't carry.

5 anni fadiscuss

Most radio receivers transmit a very weak signal slightly higher than the carrier frequency of the station tuned as a result of how they enhance received signals. Look up superheterodyne for details.

5 anni fadiscuss

My favorite statement of this idea is that, "life is that which reverses entropy."

6 anni fadiscuss

Oroboros

6 anni fadiscuss

VistA has been a very successful open source project and is being continued in OpenVistA [1]. Originating as a software project in the Veterans Administration (named VA MUMPS) in 1977 it only took on the name VistA in 1994[2]. Internationally it has been used freely in hospitals in the U.S., Mexico, India, various countries in Africa, ...[3].

It was a truly open source project within the VA with programmers customizing this national patient record software in cooperation with doctors (to meet their needs) locally and sharing the modifications nationally. Perhaps its greatest technical challenge (besides complexity arising from decades of evolution) was finding programmers to work with the MUMPS language that it was written in. FYI MUMPS is a language with an integral db -a concept which was out of vogue for some time.

Political challenges are another story[4].

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista/ [2] https://www.hardhats.org/history/hardhats.html [3] https://worldvista.org/AboutVistA [4] https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/vista-computer...

6 anni fadiscuss

Programmers have a wonderful solution that builds on shared presence -reducing loneliness- while enhancing focus. By using a shared screen for WFH, pair programming seems an ideal fit for the current situation. It also allows for expensing a nice gaming headset.