Ward was ALWAYS inventing new tools, and new ways to do things. He was a Hacker's Hacker.

One night, I was visiting, and downstairs was "The Ward Board", his personal BBS. He had the console running on an old 9" Sony Monitor, he was watching someone logged in, and decided to throw a toggle switch to take the BBS offline. He said "Oh.... he's a Twit".... and I asked what a Twit was... and he told me it's not a nice person. Decades later, along comes Twitter... ;-)

Ward entered the "shortest usable program" contest back in the days of CP/M... here's his COMPLETE entry

    # 1731751
    Author: Ward Christensen
    Length: 2 bytes
    Memory clear.
    0000 063 INX SP
    0001 307 RST 0

Source: http://vtda.org/docs/computing..., page 6

Ward was a good friend to all who knew him, he'll be missed.

If we pushed hard on regenerative agriculture, we could suck gigatons of carbon out of the air, and back into the soil.

Of course cybersecurity can be solved... the solution was worked out in the 1970s, and there are commercially available secure systems. The Operating Systems most of us use daily, on the other hand, do not support multi-level security, nor the Bell-LaPadula model.

If we did use such systems, the user interface would be almost identical, but our applications would only be able to open the files we fed them, and not everything, by default. The world would be a much more secure place, but that would have made the NSA's job a lot harder, so such systems aren't talked about much.

It's the same effect as giving them all free (as in beer) software, it will crush their domestic ability to pay programmers, and accelerate the ongoing brain drain.

Meanwhile, zero announcements have been made for desktop operating systems that support capability based security.

It sounds to me like Tesla China might be getting nationalized soon.

It's the damned upselling that has me considering ripping the things out. The thing is dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to answering questions, which is fine, just don't ask it questions like you would Google, etc.

What really grinds my gears is when I ask it something simple, like the Weather, then it tries to UPSELL something... and leaves what should have been a simple response format by then asking ME an unwanted and unappreciated question that might cost me money if I answer wrong. F*ck that noise!

They make the EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) gear that everyone uses, in Europe... why couldn't they make a fab or two as well? There's no good reason for them not to have a native fab, even if it's low volume. They have CERN for crying out loud.

If living anywhere in the US becomes an option for most non-farm, non-industrial work, I'd expect a reversal of the flow into large cities. Having a nice house, and a $100,000 mortgage is far more attractive than owing 4 times the amount, and being shackled to a limited set of employers who've been shown to collude to reduce labor prices in the past.

Public utilities get to burn fossil fuels in exchange for offering the public a fairly stable supply of electricity. The pollution is tolerated because it is in the service of the public. I strongly suspect that legislation will be coming along shortly to remove exceptions from those emissions not created on behalf of the public.

They'll probably tax the heck out of their emissions, after all, the public isn't paying those taxes. So it won't upset voters, in fact it might make them happy.

I used to browse for hours at the local Borders, have a drink, buy at least 5 magazines, and perhaps a book or two.

I purchased 1 book this year so far, and now Amazon seems to have gone away as well.

You know, if the NSA had decided that National Security was best served by keeping computers secure, instead of keeping them hackable, we might actually have capability based security in widespread practice, and our nation would be more secure.

Chris of Clickspring published with a team on this subject... https://bhi.co.uk/antikytheram...

He's done quite a bit of very good work recreating the tools and processes used.

Old school light dimmers, with old school light bulbs, have a circuit that delays turning on the flow of electricity for a portion of the 50/60 cycle AC power. The longer the delay, the less average power to the bulb, and the dimmer it appears. If you have no delay, you get all the power. Instead of smooth continuous AC, you end up with a series of (P)ulses whose (W)idth is (M)odulated.

Motors have a large inductive component, and thus require special consideration when being driven to avoid creating large voltage spikes, but that technology is also as old as the hills/

In 1980, my Science Faire project involved Class D modulation, with NE555 timers, at 10 Khz, needless to say, the technology to do PWM of high power motors predated that. So, I've been interested in PWM drives for 40+ years.
Turntide has a promo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

At 3:04 in the transcript, they say "we have to switch the current on and off really fast 20 000 times a second the computing power software and sophistication required to do that made it quite simply impossible"

This claim is false, otherwise... I'm ok with what they say.

It's true that using a high frequency PWM drive could save a large amount of power in places where the motor wasn't properly matched to load.

The implication that 25% of all electrical power, worldwide, is wasted because of this is very sad, and an opening for profit.

Turntide isn't the only vendor who has products to fix this, though... its not a monopoly.