Hey, I saved $1000 bagging groceries to buy a hard drive for my Commodore 128, so I get where you're coming from. But that was in 1988. By '91 it was plain that except for game consoles the future held little room for machines that weren't pc compatible.

You bought an Apple II series machine in 1991. The answer must have been: yes.

The Apple IIgs was a fine machine... in 1986. By 1989 the whole Apple II series was on its way out, and it wasn't even a little bit ambiguous.

Then I guess I'm glad I refused the Thomas test and walked away.

I have a theory: if a company is arbitrarily rigid about something that's completely in their control, they'll be arbitrarily rigid about many things. That rigidity makes for an unpleasant workplace. So, during the application process it's worth identifying one thing about which they express rigidity and challenging them to modify it.

Before the pandemic, my test was usually to ask for a private office. Four walls and a door. They don't have to say yes, but the ones who offer a hell no have failed my test. I didn't even have to get that far with Canonical. They handed me a rigidity test on a silver platter.

This method has failed me only once in my career. In that case, the company simply lied to me: they made a promise that they never fulfilled.

I once applied to work for Canonical. Prior to offering an interview, they insisted I take the computer version of something called the Thomas International General Intelligence Assessment.

The problem with the computer version of the test is that they show you an image of something for a few moments, then they remove it from the screen and ask you questions about what you saw. If you're Aphantasic, as I am, the test is essentially impossible. I don't have a visual memory. My brain isn't wired that way. Remove something from my sight and the only questions I can answer about it are the things I happened to notice at the time.

I asked for an ADA accommodation. Maybe take the paper version test which doesn't have this problem. Not a chance. You take the test which every applicant takes or you don't get an interview. Period. Full stop. Goodbye.

That's my thought as well. The company with all its rocketry assets has $18M in cash, $17M in debt and they're buying it outright for another $17M. Unless their assets are pure vapor, that's a heck of a bargain.

Exactly right. Falling off the runway is almost always pilot error. Engines are a distinct part that is neither engineered nor built by Boeing. Tire problems are almost always a maintenance issue.

Correlation is not causation. Absent additional evidence, none of these issues should be attributed to Boeing.

Protectionism for Mexican farmers violates the free trade treaties unless they can come up with a plausible excuse.

Well, for one thing it leaves out words that warp the meaning. As you point out, correlation means causation is -plausible- while a lack of correlation makes causation unlikely. If you pinch "imply" hard enough you can make it mean "infer" or "deduce," but it actually means, "strongly suggest." Correlation doesn't suggest any particular causal relationship but it does suggest that one exists.

That was my thought as well: this will be the new favorite movie and TV laptop meant to show how technically brilliant the character is.

The correct quote is, "Correlation is not causation." Absent further evidence any implication is unfounded.

Quoting straight from bufferbloat.net at https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr...

Take Control of Your Network: No one else (not your router manufacturer, nor your ISP) has a strong incentive to fix Bufferbloat. But once you take control, the network will stay fixed for all time, and you can adapt to changing practices at your ISP or other vendors.

• - Enable SQM settings if your router already has them.
• - Install an off-the-shelf router with SQM
• - Upgrade your current router.
  Install OpenWrt firmware (version 22.03 or newer). The Smart Queue Management guide tells how to configure the luci-app-sqm package. Or install suitable DD-WRT, Gargoyle or Tomato firmware, all of which support some kind of queue management based on FQ-CoDel and/or Cake.

For what you describe, your best bet is to buy one of the generic home wifi routers that are supported by ddwrt of openwrt. It's not uncommon to find something used for $10-$20. And then install one or the other, giving a linux box with full control. Add a USB stick so you have enough space for all the utilities.

I just went through the search for mini-PCs for a project at work. The main problem is that almost all of them cool poorly, and that significantly impairs their life span.I finally found a few at the $100 price point that cooled acceptably... and they disappeared from the market shortly after I bought the test units, replaced with newer models in the $250 ballpark.

Modern software development is nearly impossible without routine Internet access. Routine communication, because it is necessarily unsupervised, is not allowed to prisoners.

The DNS is a better designed protocol than TCP, frankly. But I didn't explain by complaint well.

The low level programming primitives for using a TCP/IP network separate the "talk to this IP address" function from the "map this name to an IP address" function. They require the developer to implement that anew in every program or at least every higher-level library. They don't just encourage developers to think about low-level network addresses, they require it. That's a mistake that haunts both IPv4 and IPv6.

Ideally, you want the programmer to deal with the symbolic identity of the service the program wants to connect to. And they do. But the APIs make it seem like that identity is an IP address or includes an IP address. It doesn't. The IP address reflects a particular computer's current attachment to the network, not the identity of any services it happens to provide. At least, it's supposed to.

This conceptual error lies at the root of the routing system challenges, where addresses have to be messily rerouted to the current attachment when the attachment changes instead of simply taking on a new address that reflects the current attachment.