Just need to vent...

You'd probably really be holding a VT100 which could be used with a VAX or a PDP.

Mike

 

I broke the VAX, sorry everybody. It was me.

Spring 1993. I was in a very sleepy little college in New England (not terribly far from the old DEC) and working towards an undergraduate tv production degree. I needed something special for my project.

The computer science department had a miniVAX and maybe 150 terminals around the campus, mostly 102s & 220s. Most of the time this was used to run WORD11 or teach people how to mismanage memory in c. I don't know a lot about the actual hardware, never even saw the central frames.

Well I had a wild idea and stayed up waaaaaay too late one night and managed to compile an open source raytracer on that VAX.

I put the same software on a Mac computer that I had access to, and used that to previsualize a 3D generated scene as wireframes.

After many careful adjustments, I uploaded my scene parameters to the VAX and submitted the render job.

The whole system dropped to a crawl, and stayed like that for about five weeks. There was... talk.

It was a ridiculous pain figuring out how to XMODEM my output frames (individually, as they completed, about a half day apart each) into one of the school's PCs that happened to have the same size floppy disk drive as the Apple system in the video department.

This continued for weeks as the VAX chewed on my 3D animation.

Shortly before the expected end of the render, I met a cute girl and fell behind on collecting the output frames. The storage overflowed and caused some campus-wide consternation. Account storage quotas were initiated. I'd broken the VAX. (I was able to get my last frames and finish the video.)

But it also showed that there can still be value in an old VAX...

 

Don't know.....
Don't care.
I do not live in Tennessee, although I was once offered a job in Brentwood that we had to have prayers and a family meeting about.
Thankfully I decided to keep fixing phones for a living.
I'm thinking that people in the world outside of PC are conflating hormones, vaccinations, and using food as a vaccine delivery mode (think fluoridated water) which might be the real aim for this bill.

I personally do not eat out all that often but when I do I do not usually question the 15-year-old server about the life choices of the animal that I'm eating. MY PRESUMPTION is that all of the food is trucked in by the cheapest vendor.
I usually care more about produce and fruit that I purchase being domestically sourced more than whether or not I'm paying for 'organic' this or 'free range' that.
I do this because the United States is NOTHING if not highly regulated.
FORTUNATELY I live in the deep South where every third house has chickens and gardens - so "organic" around here is the same thing as people have been doing around here since they colonized the place.

My semi-sincere apologies....
In these hyper-partisan times, you put 'vax' in a story and the fish start biting.....

 

Produce animals get shots for other things; lambs need selenium in this area for example. Plus other needs, like tagging, mean administering a vaccine in addition doesn't have to a major extra cost. Used to give the cats and dogs boosters ourselves. Bulk costs of these established vaccines are low. The price for rabies is up there for the legal requirement of it having to be done by a vet here.

So they are a small cost vs the potential losses of an outbreak among the herd. Of course, those that opt to skip them over price will cry for support if an out break occurs.

The bill's cover page can be interpreted to also cover vaccinated animals, or least to over-compliance by farms to not have their meat called a drug.

This all seems to be a misunderstanding of the research caused by a throw away headline from an UCLA press release. Plants making vaccines won't eaten. An oral dose vaccine is a challenge to make because the stomach is a very hostile environment. Those challenges grow moving from a pill to salad where dosing can vary with growing conditions.

The research is about using plants to make vaccines and other biomolecules instead of the bacteria, fungus, and animal cells used now. The flu vaccine is made in chicken eggs, which is why those with the food allergy can't take it.Avoiding that is a plus, but the big advantage is that it costs less to grow plants in a greenhouse vs the bioreactors and incubators the others need.

This could lead to plenty of venting.

 

meh.

I let California California and Tennessee Tennessee.
There are whack-a-doodles in both political parties that are anti-vax.

Heck - we even have one running for POTUS.

 

And while I understand the world has gone all RISCy in the years since, still there was a certain charm to the VAX CISC. Reading MACRO-32 could be almost like reading a high-level language.

 

I worked on Yuck Twenties back when bit buckets (and bit bombs!) and drum memory were a thing.
I graduated to Sparc when I was working for Uncle back before I was lured away into the exiting and rewarding telecom biz.

RISC isn't riscy or else the Apples wouldn't be using them.

I was a hardware guy, but every now and then I would turn out the lights and crack open the hatch to the compartment that housed the software people and shovel in some not-cheese flavored puffs and not-chocolate cereal, and make sure that the coffee and carbonated beverage lines were pressurized and flowing.

 

. . . and don't smell the air. I was amazed by those who became OCD about writing code. Yet I tasted it too but somewhat differently.

I was an operating system guy, where the hardware touched the software. I liked the puzzle of unreliable software touching unreliable hardware. It paid well too. When I ran out of operating system problems, I moved to data networking where unreliable packets would tickle unreliable routers. I was literally paid to do what I considered fun, solving puzzles.

For fun since 1980, I've written 'craps' simulators to test playing strategies. So I periodically test the results with 'fun' money.

Bob Wilson

 

I thought I could guess what a "onesie" was, but the addition of "pants" made me uncertain.

 

A web-page title for the ages (and another case where an online article's headline differs from its web title):

In other news, better ignition prevention can help things not burn.

 

Really?
If you can figure out some of my posts you ought to be able to sleuth out what a 'onsie' is, but I would advise that you tread carefully!!!
There was a time, LONG before AlGore invented the interwebs that asking about 'onsies' was much safer!!!

I'm one of those horrible people that disabled the Amber alerts on my phone.
In America, we can disable all such automated alerts except for ONE - which in our country acts as something of a quadrennial moron identification and detection system.
...We have more than one such system.

Amber alerts are supposed to filter out custodial disputes, but we in the United States have MANY MANY more 'civil serpents' than you do.
Yes....even in the Canada.
These faithful public servants struggle furiously to accomplish much less work, about half efficiently as those that you may be familiar with in the far-off frozen North.
Every 3-4 years I have to get a new smartphone(*), and I have to turn off the AMBER alerts after I'm awakened more than once at OH-Dark-thirty to learn that some part-time parent is late dropping off their part-time kid to the other part time parent.


(*) See what I mean about the moron ID and detection systems?

 

Odd, I've certainly received a couple, I guess, but can't remember when the last one was

 

Bridges reopen after 26 barges broke loose and floated down Ohio River, damaging a marina | CNN

If not for the quick thinking of Brunot Island, this could have been a lot worse.

 

Dang, article updated and credit to Brunot Island erased before I could see it.

 

this. Every man should own one and be forced to wear it for self shaming when we do dumb things.

 

I had to disable the alerts when I was in Korea.

They've got a telephone system based on USA standards, but theirs is much better developed and generally made of more modern components. So they have all the same tools, including the same emergency alert stuff, but again it is more developed.

They use some very tight localization of their warning systems, and they warn everyone. A lot. And naturally they came up in Korean. The team of Americans I was working within all figured the first one meant "missiles inbound" or something, but it was just a warning of unusually low temps in the forecast for that neighborhood. And we got something like that 3-5 times per week.

It was less "civil defense you hope you never need" and more "helicopter mom you didn't want." On (___O)Off

 

JetBlue and Southwest planes nearly miss each other at Reagan National Airport, FAA investigating | AP News

I think the word they wanted was 'narrowly'.

I hope the word they wanted was 'narrowly'.

 

For most of the 20th century it could be said that America was the only country that had a telephone system that was low cost and worked reliably with almost 100% availability regardless of location and cost to provide service. In third wold countries it was not uncommon to wait for years to get phone service.

Once AT&T's monopoly was shattered the health of the phone systems started to degrade. The 3rd world countries started to pick up on the idea that they can use the cell phone service developed by AT&T's research department to provide the equivalent of a home land line.

 

I think SK got to where they are because they had a lot of relatively wealthy subscribers in a fairly small geographic area.

They had a mandate to guarantee that every phone jack in the nation could support 12mbit DSL service by roughly 2003, and it only got better since then.