justanother

In that case, marvelous. Here's hoping it's actually executed.

This refers only to Flock cameras. In Pinellas and Hillsborough counties (probably others or even most, but I cannot personally verify), there are non-Flock ALPR cameras on every major intersection stoplight gantry, feeding license plate and vehicular-fingerprint data to regional LE "Fusion Centers," where Palantir's Gotham product absolutely is in use. This is of course in addition to FDOT's PTZ cameras also. Forgive a cynic for telling you that banning Flock on state highways is purely performative in such light.

As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?

Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...

I have one of these in the garage. I think they're 6502-based with the OS on EPROM, or at least that's what I vaguely recall from last time I had mine opened-up about 20 years ago. I can dump the ROM if it'd help.

Yeah, I try to bleed it with a long-handle screwdriver for 30 seconds. In fact, the couple times I've managed to zap myself was with residual current even after that, so I can't imagine what the full potential is. It's just a no-fun job.

I understand he got permission and everything was checked out by actual RF eggheads, but damn. I won't even change a HV run capacitor unless i'm wearing crocs, standing on cement, and wearing the rubber oven mitts. And even then, I keep one hand behind my back. Because there have been accidents, and they hurt (the pool pump run cap fails approximately annually in this climate and if I paid someone to change it every time, I'd be a lot poorer).

That said, the food demodulating the signal into audible noise is badass.

That rabbit hole goes pretty deep.

In the early 1990s, the IIgs community went through this sort of "faux workstation" phase where we had 16MHz hotrodded accelerator cards, high(er) resolution graphics cards like SecondSight, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (GNO/ME) along with the beginnings of TCP/IP support (gstcp). If you squinted one eye, we could almost hold our own against something like SPARCStation 1 as long as you didn't want to run Mosaic. You could fire up a desktop with a few shell windows and compile C programs and telnet out while playing SoundSmith (not-quite-.MOD) songs. That is to say, we were pushing the whole mess beyond anything a sane person would even fever-dream of attempting.

The community today is putting out more releases more steadily than any other era I can recall since then, but we seem to have mostly backed off of the whole "workstation" application that was in a few dorm rooms at the time.

Edit: FWIW I just noticed the date today. Happy 8/16!

As a longhaired teenager, I rarely got the chance to physically touch these things (although it did happen a couple times). Mostly I remember telnetting into a machine, noticing that it was Irix, and being able to login as "4Dgifts" without a password for a root shell. The joy was short-lived though, because as soon as you tried to build software (regardless of how "portable" the package was), you ran into interesting problems, if the compilers were even installed. I eventually got to spend several days with a Webforce Indy and its fancy (what we would now call a) webcam, where I took my first-ever selfie in 1995 and made my peace with the dev environment. These lil things were definitely ahead of their time, even if their price tags weren't.

Nice to see you here on HN, Roger. Some of us still use Merlin 16+ every weekend when we get a little free time.

Not sure if this was intended, but in Belizean creole, "Fi Wi" (pronounced "fee wee", not like WiFi) means "ours" or "for us." Good name for an MIT-licensed kernel project.

If you want to make money, there's no place like eBay to move vintage hardware. If you're more concerned about it going to a good home, show up to any sort of vintage hardware meetup (KansasFest, VCF, etc) and someone will take it off your hands. Generally speaking, most vintage hardware is something that someone else wants, with the notable exception of generic Intel/AMD clone hardware, and even that stuff is gaining traction in the community.

It's a way of using Windows that is very tolerable to POSIX commandline diehards. The similarities are numerous and include enhanced scriptability and even small details like up-arrow command history. You could get all of that with Cygwin, but Powershell adds tight OS integration, access to COM objects (or whatever we're calling them this year) as well as the remoting of objects. It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.

I have never, and I mean never, been a Windows user, even though I've been using computers since 1982. During the rise of Wintel in the early 1990s, I followed the rise of Linux and 386BSD. When Win95 and NT ruled the business desktop in the late 1990s, I sought refuge in SPARCStations, Linux, and discontinued NeXT hardware. After the turn of the century, I adopted the newly-POSIX-compliant Mac OS. All this to say, avoidance of Microsoft products has been a cornerstone of my computing policy for nearly half a century (with the notable exception of Applesoft BASIC).

But PowerShell? PowerShell's nice.

I get one of these every week or two. If someone says they're "impressed with the work you're doing" at my family S-corporation that magically W2-ifies my contract gigs, it's kind of a giveaway.

Kinda related old guy story time: My high school had a small room full of 286es running Novell, which was dated even for its time. I was a self-taught nerd who took intro-to-programming classes to goose my GPA easily (it didn't help, I dropped out anyway, but that's a whole other story). Anyway, I had been exposed to early IRC and BITNet Relay and decided I could clone it easily by just appending a chat log to an ever-growing file on the Novell network, and the 'clients' would just periodically check this file for growth and print the new bytes. Once one important bug was fixed (you couldn't check the file too often or you'd melt the Novell server), the chat program was permanently installed as a plague upon the high-school programming classes. Novell had its own popup messaging in text mode, but they'd already locked it down due to student shenanigans, but this was a group chat that could be made to work wherever there was a world-readable Novell share, and iirc the network wouldn't function properly without at least one (the 'mail' directories? idk it's been awhile).

Gosh I was so proud. I never directly caused any computer problems in high school, but damn if they didn't try to find a way to blame me for every foul wind that blew. They deserved my little group-chat annoyance.