Dalrymple

"Artificial" voices in telephone calls have existed since 1971. That is when the Votrax speech synthesis device was first developed by a company known at the time as the Federal Screw Works. The engineering was done by Richard Gagnon.

"Every car with pump in the tank has filter located in the tank in front of that pump"

In cars that use the older convention, this second "fuel filter" (always in the tank) is technically called a "strainer". My experience is the downstream fuel filter which in older cars is outside the tank needs to be replaced much more often than the strainer which is typically replaced as one unit with the fuel pump. I assume this is because the strainer does less rigorous filtering than the downstream filter which historically has been much easier and cheaper to replace.

'Right to repair' is important and I hope a good law along these lines gets passed, but other tougher problems to solve are also emerging, for example:

My understanding is many late model cars are moving the fuel filter to being part of a larger assembly inside the fuel tank. On an older car, a clogged fuel filter (a common problem)could be replaced cheaply and easily. My car's fuel filter cost less than $15. But once they put it inside the gas tank, the repair is much more costly. The shop needs to pump the gas out of the tank, remove the tank from the car and take the tank apart to replace whatever the replaceable assembly is on that model.

It appears that car makers are doing this to increase service revenue and to greatly increase customer cost and inconvenience. The inconvenience is a two hour trip to Jiffy Lube or an even faster self-repair becomes a two or three week wait for a major repair appointment and a bill hundreds of dollars more. I commonly replace discrete (stand-alone)fuel filters 6 to 8 times over the life of my vehicles.

If anyone has a list of car brands that have or have not adopted this design change, please post.

This headline is also initially alarming for those interested in the most performant type of hypervisor.

To be explicit, the outrageousness of this GM policy is that it forces the customer to pay in advance for GM's marketing promotion costs and then some for product optional features they may have no interest in.

An acceptable marketing approach to this problem would be for GM to make these features free for an initial period of one month or one year. After the initial period was up, interested customers could pay for the feature(s) to be continued.

This way GM would not be perceived as cheating customers interested in their base product, but not in their extra-cost optional products they are having trouble selling in an honest and non-coercive way.

This policy is a big mistake. The Board of Directors should remove GM's CEO for this and other bad business judgements.

This high voltage hot chassis was clearly a dangerous design but at least there has been little use of it in the last fifty years. I find dangerous designs in current products fairly frequently.

As an example I was debugging my electric clothes dryer that stopped drying and found the wire to the nichrome heating unit was disattached. It had been attached to the heater with a push-on, pull-off spade connector at the factory. I maintain it should have been attached with a bolt-on connector with a lock washer. Having what is probably a 230 volt wire slip-off its connection due to normal dryer vibration and bounce around the steel chassis is concerning. If the dryer ground had been faulty (it was good) that could have placed a 230 volt potential on the entire metal cabinet of the dryer in a laundry room that may have a little water on the floor and usually has other ground paths like turn-off faucets for the washer as well - a super dangerous situation. This danger is increased because dryers are heavily used by kids, women, and non-technical men, most of whom have no idea of the risks involved.

Katherine is correct, shutting down public schools was sheer foolishness for COVID.

This extreme safetyism is a recent development. No US schools were shutdown during the height of the Hong Kong flu in 1968-69. Not only that, but the University of Illinois at the time housed 1000 freshmen men on cots in a single large room (the Armory) at the time in the fall of each year. Those people were moved into a normal dorm in the Spring semester when space became available due to flunk-outs.

Admittedly, COVID-19 was probably worse (1 million dead in US vs 100,000 for Hong Kong flu) but the actual numbers are probably much closer, given recent trends to over count for financial reward reasons.

My graduating class learned to type by producing thousands of punch cards on the IBM 026 punch card machine.

RT-11 (a real-time, largely foreground/background operating system for the PDP-11)

I have heard that the RT-11 OS was a one man effort at DEC, which for many years was more popular than Unix on the PDP-11, but I don't know the details. Do any DEC experts know more about this?

The Schaum's book of most interest to the original poster (Abigail Rabieh)is the following:

Schaum's 3000 Solved Problems in Linear Algebra by Seymour Lipschutz. Below is a precis:

"Master linear algebra with Schaum's--the high-performance solved-problem guide. It will help you cut study time, hone problem-solving skills, and achieve your personal best on exams! Students love Schaum's Solved Problem Guides because they produce results. Each year, thousands of students improve their test scores and final grades with these indispensable guides. Get the edge on your classmates. Use Schaum's! If you don't have a lot of time but want to excel in class, use this book to: Brush up before tests; Study quickly and more effectively; Learn the best strategies for solving tough problems in step-by-step detail; Get the big picture without spending hours pouring over long textbooks. Review what you've learned in class by solving thousands of relevant problems that test your skill. Compatible with any classroom text, Schaum's Solved Problem Guides let you practice at your own pace and remind you of all the important problem-solving techniques you need to remember--fast! And Schaum's are so complete, they're perfect for preparing for graduate or professional exams. Inside you will find: 3000 solved problems with complete solutions--the largest selection of solved problems yet published on linear algebra; A superb index to help you quickly locate the types of problems you want to solve; Problems like those you'll find on your exams; Techniques for choosing the correct approach to problems; Guidance on choosing the quickest, most efficient solution. If you want top grades and thorough understanding of linear algebra, this powerful study tool is the best tutor you can have! Chapters include: Vectors in R" and C." Matrix Algebra. Systems of Linear Equations. Square Matrices.Determinants. Algebraic Structures. Vector Spaces and Subspaces. Linear Dependence, Basis, Dimension. Mappings. Linear Mappings. Spaces of Linear Mappings. Matrices and Linear Mappings. Change of Basis, Similarity. Inner Product Spaces, Orthogonality. Polynomials over a Field. Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors, Diagonalization. Canonical Forms. Linear Functionals and the Dual Space. Bilinear, Quadratic, and Hermitian Forms. Linear Operators on Inner Product Spaces. Applications to Geometry and Calculus."

The official settlement memo says that key information is all in Attachment A. However, Attachment A was not attached, and as far as I can tell, is nowhere to be found. If anyone should find Attachment A, please inform us of its location.

The official settlement memo says that key information is all in Attachment A. However, Attachment A was not attached, and as far as I can tell, is nowhere to be found. If anyone should find Attachment A, please inform us of its location.

TUI already has a far more established technical meaning. From www.yourdictionary.com:

TUI =

(Telephone User Interface) The combination of Touch-tone input from the telephone keypad coupled with speech output from the connected voicemail or IVR application. While early speech technology was struggling to recognize voice utterances for voice control and data entry, the ubiquitous Touch-tone keypad was a practical solution. It works with enterprise telephone networks, the PSTN, public payphones and traditional cellphones. Its centerpiece is the standard 12-key keypad and conventions such as using the pound key for "enter," the star key for "up one level" or "escape," and "1" for yes, "2" for no.

Using this abbreviation for new uses can only reduce readability.

Windows XP is reportedly the last version of Windows where Bill Gates played a key role in its creation and quality control – something he was very good at. In my view he should return to this job and stop listening to the Melinda Gates and Lorraine Jobs of the world encouraging him to work on saving the universe when Windows has been going downhill ever since he left.

If Bill were to start with a Windows XP sp3 base, here are a bakers dozen of tasks to get him and his new software team started. I am calling this new product Windows XP-TNG for now. Feel free to add to this list:

1. WinXP-TNG should be 64 bit only, at the same level of reliability or better as Win XP 32 bit. Support for disks larger than 2tb and main memory greater than 4gb.

2. USB 3 support.

3. Investigate if and how this 48 bit address business could be expanded to the full 64 bits.

4. DirectX 12 support

5. Directory printer option (like the best add-on utilities provide)

6. Print to PDF file print driver (better than the best add-on utilities provide)

7. Integrate the old Office 2003 into Windows XP-TNG without separate activation. Customers that really want a newer Office would buy a Cloud version or the Windows 10 native app.

8. Integrate a “cleaner” utility that would remove any malware from PDF, and, if needed, epub files.

9. Deleted file recovery (beyond restore points). Search entire disk and rebuild desired directory entries functionality (much better than the best add-on utilities provide).

10. One button setup of “classic” Win 95/2000 options and developer settings like View-Details.

11. Fix bug that causes large, say 1tb file transfers, with Copy-Paste to fail. Drag-and-Drop works ok.

12. Long-term bug fixing and cybersecurity support.

13. Option for automatic registry backups, user can delay and specify number of backups before recycling.

It should be noted that the technology to do this is quite old. The Williams X-Jet was operational about the time the first Intel x86 processor came off the assembly line. The Army evaluated the technology and decided not to use it at that time about 40 years ago. Here are the specs from Wikipedia:

Specifications (X-Jet) Data from[citation needed] General characteristics Crew: 1 Length: 3 ft (0.91 m) approx. Height: 4 ft 0 in (1.22 m) Empty weight: 401 lb (182 kg) Gross weight: 550 lb (249 kg) Powerplant: 1 × Williams F107 turbofan engine, 570 lbf (2.5 kN) thrust (modified) Performance Maximum speed: 52 kn (60 mph, 96 km/h) Endurance: 30–45 minutes Service ceiling: 10,000 ft (3,000 m) Thrust/weight: 1.11

More recent turbofan engines combined with modern computer-assisted controls could result in a considerable boost in capability, particularly in reliability by using multiple smaller turbofans.

Given the extreme irresponsibility Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have shown in the last few days in censoring important voter information, let us hope someone at Homeland is keeping them from buying advanced turbofan engines: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/big-tech-in-the-tank-for-defen... https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden... https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/kayleigh-mcenany-twitter-has-m...

Speaking of print-to-PDF, this is tremendously useful functionality, but fails on over half of the web pages out there. Is this due to some intentional action by the publisher, as a copy protection mechanism, or due to faults in the print-to-PDF driver? If due to faults in the driver, whose print-to-PDF driver is the best at implementing this functionality - I've tried several and they all seem to be sub-par.

Another PDF issue, does anyone except Adobe make a good PDF malware remover (from inside the PDF file). PDF malware seems to be rare, but could be a big problem if it ever catches on.

Could someone explain why the thin flatbread known as the tortilla seems to last much longer in a sealed bag? Ordinary bread molds on me in 4-5 days. I have kept a bag of tortillas around for a couple weeks without any mold. They do get stale if one forgets to seal the zip-type bag.

Despite his wealth, Bill's father reportedly ran the slide projector for Bill's talk in the early days of Comdex. In those pre-powerpoint days a draftsman created a paper version of the "viewgraphs" which were photographed and then displayed with a slide projector or on a overhead projector. The overhead projector used a "burned" transparency created by putting a special type of transparency film instead of paper in a xerox machine and copying the draftman's original.

Bob Swan, a non-technical bean-counter, is famous for running a social club rather than a serious Board of Directors at Intel. It is a big threat to national security if Intel goes totally fab-less, or hits some other performance benchmark of severe management failure. Money alone can't fix this, only replacing Bob with a real technical leader will do, preferably sooner rather than later.

My HP Scanjet IIcx scanner is about 30 years old and still works fine. SCSI interface.

I did have to replace the scanner top with a white piece of solid plastic. The original top was very thin plastic veneer bonded onto a foam rubber base which of course by now has self-destructed.

How did HPE and HP fall from the top of the industry in respect to the bottom over those 30 years?

This is indeed a strange decision for MIT. The conventional wisdom has long been that the SAT subject tests are MORE predictive of future success at MIT, because the influence of test prep, cramming, test coaches, etc. is minimal for the subject tests. While there are reports of people raising their scores artificially on the non-subject tests by hundreds of points through these short-term methods, the subjects tests have long had a reputation as being more representative of what you really know.

Pure Pascal is not really suitable as an operating system implementation language. The obvious design choices are to:

1. Transition to C completely.

2. Extend Pascal (like HP did - HP called their resulting language MODCAL).

3. Support in-line C code in the Pascal compiler.

4. Support in-line assembly in the Pascal compiler.

For superior library support and other reasons, Apple made the right choice here.

It seems odd today that as the article points out, Microsoft was so slow to support USB. Win NT4 never supported USB. USB2 was not supported on Win 2000 until the sp4 update.

Does anyone else miss Comdex? It seemed to be highly successful yet nothing really took its place.