The NDA thing is a bit embellished. Yes, Gary Kildall of CP/M was out flying the day IBM showed up unannounced, and his wife and business partner did not want to sign anything without him around, but the issue was resolved quickly once Gary got back into town and they had a deal with IBM. The problem occurred when Digital Research started getting way behind in their benchmarks and IBM was getting nervous that they would miss their release date. They mentioned it to Bioll Gates whi decided to pounce on a potential opportunity. IBM got to release on time with something. CP/M 86 did release later, but IBM kind of throttled them by charging more to include it instead of PC-DOS. That might have been revenge or, most likely, the fact that Gary got a better deal for CP/M than Microsoft did for DOS, and they passed along the cost savings to teh consumer. Gates had done this kind of stuff before. He sold the complete rights of Applesoft BASIC to Apple for $20,000 total.... no royalties! He had a similar deal with Commodore. It was basically all loss leader stuff to get their name out there. Honestly, I don't know how they survived basically giving away their main product.

Some of the Casio watches back then had a game on it called digital invaders where numbers would "invade" from the right, and you had to match the numbers streaming in to destroy them. There is a standalone version on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/...

I've also seen other versions on the web... There may be an iOS version as well.

Anyways, those watches were highly prized as they could provide much needed always available boredom relief back before cell phone games. I'm surprised that casino's current models (or this one) do not host the game. It would be a trivial cost and effort to add it on with today's technology.

Ahem. Ask 12 people and you'll get 1 answer, and it may not be an answer you like.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

Oracle? There is your answer why it failed after throwing away $50 million. They got off cheaper than a lot of other companies trying to do the same thing.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.

His design for both the Apple I and Apple II were amazing, maximizing the available hardware available at the time. He wasn't just a wiz with hardware, he wrote some amazing software, too (in assembly without an assembler, so basically direct machine code as he hand assembled the software), and used it to further optimize his hardware designs. He truly is a genius and deserves way more credit than Steve Jobs who only managed to merely supply am external case.

Oops. To continue: I'm just not seeing that it is so hard to access. But then, I use a Linux desktop, which has always come with a proper PDF renderer, there has never been a need to download "Acrobat".

Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.

PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not