Thanks, Nixon.

There is a big problem with parts obsolescence. If you have to substitute one part with another part, even a superior, there is a LOT of regulatory red tape.

I worked on the 747-400 Flight Management System. I haven't worked on that in about 30 years so I'm sure all of this was obsoleted and replaced so none of this should be sensitive. Some of my activities:

I updated the firmware on the 747-400 8086-based IO controller card to handle the "high speed" disk-based data loader on the transition from the tape-based data loader. The firmware was originally written entirely in PL/M. I had to recode some parts (like the Real Time Clock Interrupt handler) in assembler because data packets weren't being serviced fast enough. This code was stored on a UVPROM.

The 757 and 767 FMS originally used HDD for database storage. There was a Bubble Memory Card that had an HDD-type track/sector request translator (basically a device driver) to handle device IO. For the 747 I updated that driver to handle "double bubble" where two Bubble cards were installed and data could be spread across the device boundary. Double bubble was required for the "large" World Wide Nav Database.

The Mass Memory Card was designed to replace the Bubble Memory Cards. This 80186-based card consisted of EEPROM with Error Detection and Correction hardware. "Sectors" of EEPROM could be remapped when hard errors were detected and could not be corrected by re-initializing that bank. To determine when the write cycle was completed, after a clock-driven delay the data was polled until a valid read was obtain. Then a verification read of the data was performed along with a check of the EDC results. For nostalgia reasons I still have the source code for this product printed out on green bar at my desk.

After this I started working on the 777 AIMS-1 avionics cabinet, but that's a story for another time.

Actually worse than that. "Starlink is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021." Your "Podunk, West Texas" guy won't be able to get service as he's in the Southern U.S.

Twitter and Facebook have had a horrible effect on America. We would have been far better off without them.

Joanna Hoffman, the former right-hand woman of Steve Jobs, says Facebook is ‘peddling in an addictive drug called anger’
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/1...

Does Universal COBOL have anything to do with the Lords of Kobol?

Mirrors. Or highly reflective chrome bumpers.

Not quite. Certainly python is abused, used in inappropriate situations, but it has its uses. For example gluing together calls to the OpenCV computer vision library. All the heavy work is done in the library. Python however is more convenient for gluing together the library calls during development as you explore different algorithms with different parameters. Once all that is figured out I'll probably glue the calls together in whatever the native language of the platform is; Swift for macOS and iOS, java for Android and AWS, C# for Windows, etc since I'll probably be touching platform specific UI code to show work in progress and/or results. And if I wrote any custom image twiddling code during development I'll rewrite that at some point in C/C++ w/ Intel's portable SIMD extensions.

In the Real World:
"Now that you've got that working good enough, here's the next emergency. We'll get back to reimplementing your prototype Real Soon Now."

The question used to be "but will it run Crysis", but now even a phone probably will.

The absolute best thing that can be done to break the cycle of poverty is to teach personal finance as a full-semester standalone class in high school. If people are not taught that debt is bad and that you need to budget your expenses, and instead all they see is other people in debt and barely getting by, they will think that is normal.

I think a personal finance class is more important and more applicable to the average person's daily life than a general economics class (although I would probably pick some other class to replace).

I had a guaranteed military sale with ED-209! Renovation program! Spare parts for 25 years! Who cares if it worked or not!

I remember when monitors were measured in characters and not lines. That was a bit more than 20 years ago, but not a lot.

Actually, that is a special CNN Airport service that CNN PAYS the airports to use exclusively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_Airport/

You are confusing units with the Metric Shittonne and the Imperial Shitton.

300 HUNDRED songs?

Somehow I missed ever seeing this deleted scene. Hilarious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBY1G23Kb5w

My PS4 (and the PS3 before that, god was that thing loud) sees a lot more use as the "smarts" for the TV than it does as a video game console. While my wife will fire up Netflix on the Samsung I always run Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, YouTube, DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc, through the PS4. MUCH better interface for switching between applications than the slow-ass under-powered TV interface.

My PS3 was used mostly to play DVDs, Blu-Rays, the Resistance: Fall of Man series, and the Dead Space series (holy shit was that creepy). The Blu-Ray capability was one of the main reasons I bought it. It saw use on a "regular" TV and a "smart" TV.