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Comment TIL (Score 2) 124

First, a correction:

the company's fourth personal computer iteration

True only if you ignore the Apple I and Apple ///, because there was the Apple ][, Apple ][+, and Apple ][e.

Now, the Apple ][c came out during a brief time when I was trying to ignore computers, so I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, but this from the summary caught me by surprise:

first attempt at creating a portable computer

How can anything requiring an external CRT be considered portable? I mean, even by Compaq and Kaypro standards? Looking at Wikipedia, there was apparently a 1-bit LCD display available, but even that was external with no fixed mount. I mean, yeah, they shrunk the form factor, which I would hope they could do after seven years, but portable? No, regardless of their claims.

Comment Re:"We also walk dogs" (Robert A. Heinlein) (Score 2) 110

Edward Bellamy, cousin of Francis Bellamy who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance along with prescribing its Nazi-like flag salute, wrote Looking Backward in 1888 which included a prediction of "almost instantaneous, Internet-like delivery of goods". Well, that quote was from Wikipedia. Because the book predates Mickey Mouse, the full text is available on gutenberg.org:

But, Mr. West, you must not fail to ask father to take you to the central warehouse some day, where they receive the orders from the different sample houses all over the city and parcel out and send the goods to their destinations. He took me there not long ago, and it was a wonderful sight. The system is certainly perfect; for example, over yonder in that sort of cage is the dispatching clerk. The orders, as they are taken by the different departments in the store, are sent by transmitters to him. His assistants sort them and enclose each class in a carrier-box by itself. The dispatching clerk has a dozen pneumatic transmitters before him answering to the general classes of goods, each communicating with the corresponding department at the warehouse. He drops the box of orders into the tube it calls for, and in a few moments later it drops on the proper desk in the warehouse, together with all the orders of the same sort from the other sample stores. The orders are read off, recorded, and sent to be filled, like lightning. The filling I thought the most interesting part. Bales of cloth are placed on spindles and turned by machinery, and the cutter, who also has a machine, works right through one bale after another till exhausted, when another man takes his place; and it is the same with those who fill the orders in any other staple. The packages are then delivered by larger tubes to the city districts, and thence distributed to the houses. You may understand how quickly it is all done when I tell you that my order will probably be at home sooner than I could have carried it from here.

Comment Re:[citation needed] (Score 1) 180

The Wang patent was actually for having nine chips on a SIMM. When Wang started enforcing its patent, competitors switched to putting three chips on a SIMM instead. During that transition, parity RAM was scarce and expensive -- 9-chip because it was being phased out and 3-chip because quantities weren't available at first. It got people to reconsider whether parity was necessary, and it became "socially acceptable" to have non-parity RAM.

Back in the days of discrete RAM chips, they were always installed in multiples of 18.

Comment Here's one (Score 3, Interesting) 348

This was forwarded to me today by a colleague:

Job Description:

The selected candidate will design, implement and deploy custom applications on Hadoop (Using Map reduce and/or RDD). This person will also be responsible for designing, implementing and deploying ETL to load data into Hadoop/NoSQL.

Required Skills/Experience:

  • 4+ Years of JAVA Development
  • Excellent understating of HADOOP ecosystem
  • Experience in scheduling workflows using Oozie
  • Has Knowledge On Relational Data models
  • Excellent Knowledge of Linux

Preferred Skills/Experience:

  • Troubleshoot Production Issues With Hadoop/NoSQL
  • REST Web Services Experience
  • Linux Administration
  • Familiar with RDD (Resilient Distributed Datasets) like SPARK
  • Knowledge of Scala Programming Language
  • Knowledge of NoSQLs (Like HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB etc)

Location: Nashville, TN

Duration: 6 months Contract to Hire

Rate: 30/hr on W2

Comment Re:file transfer (Score 2) 466

That will work if the hard drive is IDE. If, however, the hard drive is RLL or MFM, then I personally would go the (expensive) route of buying a modern desktop PC with an ISA slot and an ISA MFM or RLL card. Reportedly from various message boards, "drivers are not needed" when using ISA MFM/RLL cards, and I've never tried it myself. But I'm guessing it's probably true for some version of Windows (e.g. Windows 98 or Windows 2000), which that computer vendor seems to specialize in.

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