Governments remain the owners of significant weaponry and willingness to kill on a large scale. The tech world has empowered authoritarians, usually to the cheers of the ideologically aligned, but modern tech systems are as incredibly fragile as they are powerful.
A classmate in elementary school lusted after the Adam. He had a Colecovision so I guess he was a bit narrowly focused on that world. As his family moved away, I don't know if he ever got one but years later a family friend handed one down to me. It was obsolete but I had fun taking it apart. It was a bit of a tank, which is funny considering how unreliable it was. Probably would have been wiser to keep it intact to use the daisy wheel printer for school papers instead of the lower print quality Gemini-10 dot matrix our daily use computer had.
> It was a bit of a tank, which is funny considering how unreliable it was.
There's a Ukrainian couple who do YouTube videos about Soviet-era computers, especially PC compatibles. That's the defining characteristic of many of the featured computers: they're built like Cherno Alpha from Pacific Rim and look like they could withstand a freight train, but simultaneously flaky and failure prone.
Zero is just as arbitrary as 32 but ever so slightly easier to remember. Anyone for whom that slight difference in remembering is actually a real impediment likely has other issues that require them to be under the care of others so it ceases to be relevant to them. At the other end, 100 vs 212 is of no practical use for anyone. Outside of the laboratory and manufacturing, people just boil water without thinking about the number associated with it. And in those settings, many other variables are tracked so the difference is of near zero consequence.
Is there a market for it beyond your employer? Ownership issues aside, if you're creating software for just one potential customer who hasn't even solicited you to create it, you're running a very high risk that they won't purchase it, even if it does fulfill a need they have. At least if there are other potential customers, you have a better chance of your time not being completely wasted.
People, especially here on Hacker News, have been warned for the past two decades that merging the tech sector with the government would eventually have negative consequences for them but most laughed this off because they were sure this combination would forever share their ideology and only do bad things to their ideological foes. The reality is that the monster has its own agenda that doesn't match up with any political party but it is willing to align with them from time to time if it means more power for the monster. Should have smothered it when it first appeared instead of fattening it up. And no amount of emotion mashing on that down arrow will make any of this less true. Maybe knowing it can and will turn on its current partners at some point will be of some consolation.
Never heard of that in high school but my university's student handbook explicitly stated that if the professor did not show up within ten minutes of the scheduled start time, the class was officially cancelled for that day. I only remember that happening once, maybe twice, during my academic career. A few times they cancelled a class ahead of time but no-shows were extremely rare.
Late production runs of the Color Computer 2 had the capability of doing true lowercase. Not sure if Dragon was still making computers by then, but it would have been a simple part swap as both VDCs were from Motorola.
Keyword driven and filtered application processes also heavily incentivize adding into projects whatever is being posted on jobs sites. If microservices are part of a company's standard template for developer postings, people who want to work at that company will find a way to get it on their resume.
Interesting how in one case it's the leader of the country doing the invading and in the other it's the country doing it without the leader behind it mentioned.
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