As an owner of the complete History of Middle Earth series, these books are not for the casual fan, or probably even the average fan. They really are more designed for Tolkien scholars, and anyone picking up The Nature of Middle Earth expecting ripping yarns filled with Hobbits and wizards is going to be very disappointed.

So the assignments on the top of the stack, which were the last to be turned in, received the lowest grades.

That doesn't seem totally unfair.

That presumes there's a correlation between when it was handed in and the student deserving scrutiny.

Any paper could end up on top for any reason - perhaps the teacher tells students to put them in a pile as they leave class - so the one on top is the one that left class last. Which may be a student who was asking a question after class. Or maybe they had an accident packing up stuff and thus ended up being the last to leave.

Or maybe the teacher asks students to pass their papers forward and collects them from the front, so the top one depends on which aisle the student sat in and which end the teacher started collecting first.

Of course, then comes the question of why someone hasn't invented a paper shuffler that re-orders papers to prevent such bias.

The problem with leather is it's an animal product, and something that vegans and the ilk are strongly opposed against.

That's the main reason Apple moved away from leather. It's also why Tesla offers an alternative to using leather in their steering wheels (this was back when Elon Musk actually cared about such things). (Start to see an overlap in customer base?)

Plus, I'm sure, leather is out of the question in India for obvious reasons, and Apple is looking into moving manufacturing there.

It's not that you can't get leather accessories for Apple products, it's that Apple themselves don't want to offer it. They will offer it in their stores, but as a 3rd party manufacturer to make it.

I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind offering leather phone cases, because well, those change every few years so you'd be forced to buy a new one anyways. But I'm sure a large proportion of their customer base, being vegan, would strongly oppose such a move.

I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

That did happen. There was Concurrent DOS in the mid 80s, which was multitasking DOS. GEM was used in several other computers, but also was a competitor to Windows in the early days - because it was extremely lightweight and you didn't need to upgrade your 8088 PCs to run it.

But low cost licensing they didn't have.

In the famous "IBM visits Digital Research", the narrative often heard is that IBM came to Digital Research (Kildall's house) and his wife said he was out flying. That was all true. However, IBM did not leave nor demand Kildall return - the reason is that Kildall's wife handled the business side of Digital Research while Kildall did the technical side. Thus, he wasn't needed for the meeting at all.

The main sticking points were that IBM wanted an NDA signed, and Kildall's wife refused. The second demand was that IBM wanted an all-in price to license CP/M. They didn't want to have a per-PC license, they wanted an all-in price.That was the biggest stumbling block because DR did not offer an unlimited seat license.

So after that they went back to Microsoft to get an OS from them (Microsoft was tasked with producing and porting their suite of languages to the new computer). Microsoft did cheat Seattle Computer Products when it bought QDOS from them - because they wanted to pay per-customer. And they sold it to well, one customer - IBM. So that's why PC-DOS and MS-DOS existed and why IBM kept shipping PC-DOS. They bought it from Microsoft and had Microsoft maintain it for a while.

In the end, Digital Research did sue IBM and Microsoft because MS-DOS/PC-DOS looked too similar to CP/M (one of the first "look and feel" lawsuits - DR was known to sue companies for making something look like CP/M). IBM settled out of court by offering to ship their PCs with CP/M in the end. (The PC never shipped with an OS - that was something the IBM reseller added as a package deal). Of course, CP/M couldn't compete in the 16-bit world because MS-DOS was $99, while CP/M was $250 and never really caught on, because by that time, people have ported their CP/M applications to MS-DOS/PC-DOS. (Of course, Microsoft had a hand here - they made some source translator tools - thanks to the similar architectures of the 808x (8080, 8085, 8086), 6800, 650x and Z80 CPUs, it was possible to do a mechanical source translation to aid porting. MS-DOS/PC-DOS/QDOS was structured after CP/M's design which helped greatly because system calls ended up being similar.

I don't know how much CP/M cost on 8-bit computers - it could be cheap, it could be expensive. Just on the PC side, MS-DOS was far cheaper than CP/M ever was.

CP/M produced MP/M which was a multi-user version of CP/M, which begat 16-bit versions CP/M-86 and MP/M-86, which then became Concurrent CP/M-86, which evolved into Concurrent DOS. That eventually transformed into Multiuser DOS in the 90s (after Novell acquired Digital Research).

Incidentally, MS-DOS 1.x/PC-DOS 1.x was very CP/M like. MS-DOS 2.x started adding more traditional operating system conventions that Microsoft adopted from their Xenix. In that in CP/M, and DOS 1.x, files specified on the command line were opened for you by the operating system and you basically manipulated pointers and asked the OS to bring it into memory. DOS 2.x later acquired the more traditional open/read/write/seek/close style semantics and system calls.

The Kickstarter goal was $53,000, it is over $75,000 now. I'm definitely not an expert, but that sounds like 1% of the money I would expect is needed to manufacture a tablet.

I guess they already make a phone, so maybe I'm wrong, but that's a suspiciously low number in my mind.

The tablet is already manufactured. You can probably buy it off AliExpress today.

Most of the hardware kickstarters you'll find are simple repackaging of AliExpress. For example, there was a walkman with Bluetooth - it already existed in a form you could buy immediately, the Kickstarter was just a slightly modified and rebranded version.

Likewise, this tablet is probably the same thing - they're just going to tell the company to make a few modifications and then ship it. So you're really just getting a cheap tablet resold at higher prices.

Quite a bit of the hardware Kickstarters are really just a curated form of AliExpress.

It's kind of like how vulnerable most of the world is to an EMP attack. Think it through. Someone blows off an EMP above North America. It fries everything imaginable, including our electrical grid. We don't have the spares in stock to fix it, and in fact we have to go to China to manufacture them with an ungodly lead time. Meanwhile, the majority of the world's advanced semiconductor production is in Taiwan.

We're all fucked for years. Your new Teslas (or anything made after the early 90s, including ICEs) are bricks. I've been into places that have had a power failure and they literally had to shut down because the retards that they hired as cashiers can't do basic math and check people out.

Thankfully such an attack is extremely difficult because of two things - shielding and the inverse square law.

Even the largest nukes known on the planet, the EMP area is rather small - an EMP large enough to take out everything in North America would basically destroy the globe in which case I think we have bigger problems than our cars being dead.

The other problem is shielding - those metal cans on everything do a really good job at blocking EMPs as well - by orders of magnitude. If an unshielded device can be affected by an EMP at say, 2km, wrapping it metal foil reduces the range to around 2m or so.

So your car's ECU, which generally lives in a very hostile environent is already sealed inside very thick metal boxes designed to keep out lots of electrical noise and other things but also protects it from the EMP. Chances are, if your car dies from an EMP, you won't have much of a car left anyhow.

Also, the most effective protection against an EMP is basically turning it off. With enough warning, it's possible to shut down the electrical grid to protect it.

Of course ,let's also not forget that gas pumps require electricity, so if it ever should come to that kind of scenario, you're still pretty screwed without having to siphon gas endlessly.

The biggest threat to the electrical grid is a CME (coronal mass ejection) because those wobble the Earth's magnetic field, and because power lines are long, those wobbles induce currents in them which can burn out transformers if the protective equipment doesn't react fast enough. But your car will be just fine other than the compass might be slightly messed up.

The 6502 is still available today brand new along with several of its companion chips as well as the 16-bit version.

Though, honestly, I don't see why those chips haven't been long discontinued - the Z80 and 6602 basically should be soft cores these days and implementable in basically a reasonably cheap FPGA able to run at full speed. I know Western Design Center (the current provider of 6502 chips) already sells such a design so you can implement a 6502 core in your product and achieve reasonable integration density.

I don't see many people implementing the 6502 or Z80 as a standalone chip other than retro enthusiasts. If you need a Z80 core, you probably will just have one for your FPGA already or build it into an ASIC.Though, oddly, the 8051 has shown incredible robustness for an embedded controller - they're seemingly everywhere especially in USB applications

Think of something like Linux. When you boot it up, it prints a banner, which contains the version and timestamp and who built the kernel. (Linux 6.7.1 built on date by blah). That's a timestamp - it's handy during development because hey, the version number might stay the same, but the timestamp gives you a rough idea of where to look at what changes it might have. But they're murder on reproducible builds.

Another one is if you're doing parallel builds - the build server may have 20+ cores on it to make builds speedy so you build Linux using all 20 cores. But which cores get which source files is completely random and if you have an Intel performance and efficiency core thing going, the E cores would take longer, and this can affect the link order of the kernel objects. Changing the link order may mean objects are laid out differently in the final binary as well as branch and jump addresses. Especially tricky since the kernel partially links every file first.

The fun one to get is filesystem layouts. When you traverse a directory, you often get files in the order the files were created in the directory. If your build system does parallel builds, the order the files are created may no longer be deterministic because as the code is built, it's placed int he output directories randomly. When the filesystem image is built, it's often done by pointing the tool at a directory, so the tool enters the directory and then traverses it creating the image as it encounters files and directories. If the build system puts files and directories in a non-deterministic order you can often get files added randomly which can mess up the image. COmpression and encryption compound the problem. (Most tools use calls like opendir() and readdir() to get through the directory tree so the file order they add to the final image is dependent on the order they were created in the directory). This is the hardest to solve, but it can be done if the tool sorts the files first in alphabetical order before processing, thus ensuring files are processed in a deterministic order.

The biggest non-determinism is that, usually. But especially since it can be caused by parallel builds so even if you start with exactly the same files, the final arrangement can vary. If you're unpacking 20 tarballs in parallel it just creates chaos.

Of course, the easiest way is to make it deterministic and only allow one build to proceed at a time, but that means what takes 20 minutes to builds completely now takes hours. And even then you might get some randomization because the disk cache might cause a file to be written ahead of another

And the problem is that women often don't know they can enter these fields.

There are tons of women who want to enter trades. However, all they see are men everywhere - and thus society has set up a stigma that "girls can't code" or "girls can't be electricians".

The assumption is "girls aren't interested" is about as true as saying "boys don't cry". It's a sexism thing - girls play with Barbie, boys play with GI Joe. Heaven forbid you have a boy who's interested in Barbie, or a girl who wants Transformers.

In fact, many trades have "girls do trades" type events where the whole purpose is to show that yes, if you want to sling a hammer, or do electrical work, or plumbing, or whatever, you can. Often there's no role model to say "yes, you can!" in a family context, so plenty of people make the assumption that no, you might like to work on the computer and have a great time at it, but only boys code, so go and be a nurse instead".

I'm sure there's probably a huge dichotomy of people who are in unhappy careers because it "fit the stereotype" rather than actually exploring options in what they are more interested in. I know people who did computer science in university because they didn't know what to do, so their parents said to do computer science as it was popular. I'm sure you all know how that usually turns out

And the reason I think it's cultural? Other cultures have often no such qualms. I've seen lots of women from Indian, Chinese, or Eastern European backgrounds. They were encouraged to do the sciences and they pursued them Also, take a look at advertising for video games prior to the videogame crash - you'll find it's often done as a family activity with both a son and a daughter enjoying what little game there is. But afterwards, it's purely something the boys do. And it has something to do with Nintendo - because in order to sell the NES, Nintendo couldn't market it as a "video game" as that was poison. So they marketed it as a toy (aided by Robby). But if you do that, you need to pick - does it go in the boys section or the girls - heaven forbid a toy might actually be interesting to both sexes.

All I can say is that the race to the bottom to cut salaries on IT workers can't end in anything good.

You just have to look at other industries. You know, like say, manufacturing. Most things are made outside the US, because it's cheaper to make stuff there because pay is lower.

The same forces that pushed manufacturing overseas is the same forces pushing IT salaries lower.

>"Also there the issue of let's say I want to port my giant CAD app to Linux? Which distro? Which installer package? There's a lot of variables with that."

Yes, but it is not that difficult to overcome. Porting/coding it is mostly a single investment/code base and will essentially work on any Linux. The packaging of it is easy, in comparison. You just have to follow some reasonable practices of using conservatively-available libraries, or include your own. Probably target a generic deb and rpm for the major distros, and also flatpak. I have used numerous commercial Linux packages for decades and they figured it out :)

Porting is fairly easy. You port to the Linux most people will use.

If it's a CAD program and you expect people to use it in a corporate environment, you go RHEL and be done with it. Hell, the company is probably already paying thousands of dollars for support anyways (aka subscription) so using a commercial Linux isn't really too unusual.

If you were a little lower end and your package is used by people ancillary to the job, then you might target a more mainstream Linux, like Ubuntu. And let what3ever that uses be what you support.

That's all you really have to support. Everyone else using something different can figure it out for themselves. Linux Mint, Arch Linux, Debian, etc., those users are experienced in Linux so let them figure out how to get it working.

Heck, if your application is that damn important, people will find a way. If it means having to have a whole new computer just for your application, so be it. Computers are cheap these days.

I've only tried the original Half-Life trilogy so far, but Steam on Linux seems to work well for at least some games.

Steam has Proton, which because of the Steam Deck, it has significantly improved gaming on Linux. About the only things it doesn't work on are games that require kernel anti-cheat.

And while Proton only works with Steam (though its changes are pushed back into WINE), you can still run other stores using it since you can add any app you want and run it under Proton.

I've long held that the use of biometrics to replace passwords is a mistake. The classic "username" and "password" combo provides two pieces of information in order to verify identify: who you are, and something you know. A thumbprint, or an iris scan, more accurately represents who you are than something you know; so using those to replace your username would make sense... but using them to replace your password seems like a bad idea.

Except that the truth is far worse. The reason phones use biometrics is because without it, people were not using anything.

Remember "slide to unlock"? Have you remembered seeing anyone with that on their phone? Circa 2012 or so, studies conducted showed only about 20% of phone users had a PIN on their phone - the rest of them used the default password less slide to unlock.

The reason for this was simple - people were checking phones, and the added annoyance of having to unlock your phone was a deterrent - people check their phones hundreds to thousands of times a day, and unlocking every time turned out to be not worth the effort.

That's why they added biometrics - because now people would be forced to put a password on their phone, but it wouldn't be annoying since they would put their finger on the sensor and it would unlock for them by the time they got it into view.

So yes, password is best. however, it was interfering with the need for people to quickly glance at their phones. Biometrics solved that because now users would generally not be bothered with a password entry dialog most of the time so they could continue to use their phones with a password because it's not getting in the way, most of the time.

Phones still allow you to disable biometrics so you can have password only authentication. However you'll probably find people disabling it after a few hours of inconvenience.

And that's why all phones nowadays have SOS modes, so you can disable biometrics until the password is entered. Just lear the key combination (it's usually a mix of power button and volume button) and the biometrics will be disabled until the next successful login.

how does an six- to nine-month school cost 30K?
now an full collage can cost more and the loans are harder to get out of.

Private schools often cost that much or more. It's why Catholic private schools are an extremely popular option because their costs are usually 1/10th of what a normal private school costs.

No. The "ruling" was that there is no human creativity in AI-generated material, thus nothing subject to copyright.

You also appear to need reference to the sweat of the brow doctrine and its inapplicability in modern copyright law.

It's the phone book or recipe book copyright. The contents of the book (the phone numbers, the recipes, etc) are not copyrightable. However, how those phone numbers and recipes are laid out, that can have copyright.

But you're just as free to take those recipes and put it on your website as long as you don't reproduce the layout or other copyrighted content (e.g., photos).

So if the book gets published, you're free to re-type the text of the book out and give it away for free because it's in the public domain. However, if there is artwork and how you format the pages is copyrighted, So make sure you use a different font.

You're also free to make adaptations of the content - an audiobook, for example. You can't copyright the content, but the recording of it is copyrightable