knuckleheadsmif

Before getting an actual prostate biopsy you should get an MRI. This is common outside the USA, I had to ask for this before my biopsy. The biopsy itself carries a somewhat high risk of serious infection which is why a MRI first is more prudent. MRI can rule out cancer or be used for a targeted biopsy if it says you might. Targeted biopsies are much more effective at catching the cancer verses the random poking method without the mri. If you end up testing positive you also get a PET/CT scan to find other traces of PSA in you body to see if the cancer has spread.

Not that the finger test is not used so much anymore because it’s very poor at detecting cancer for much of the prostate.

I went thru all this a year ago and the MRI was 95% certain I had cancer! Turns out the biopsy showed I didn’t have cancer but another benign condition that was a rare complication of a immunotherapy treatment for bladder cancer that I did have…which is a different story.

Your numbers are way too high. I live in the very expensive San Francisco Bay Area and my system 6kW before federal tax credits was 16k to install in 2021. After credits it was < $12k. I have a friend in Tucson AZ who just paid $12K for a 4kW system with no subsidies.

I did not add a battery because at the time it would have doubled the price. Also, because I have net metering the battery never pays itself off.

It is a blunder that Japan could not see that they just copied other characters in to JIS and it’s also why we see duplicated Romaji characters within Unicode. The duplication is frankly bad regardless of number of bits need to encode although with 16 it was indeed a requirement.

That’s correct, it was deemed critical to making Unicode 16bits (although there were other good technical reasons but they would apply to unifying other languages as well.)

I was involved in this before Unicode be a e Unicode when it started as discussions with Xerox and Apple—Xerox at that time had their XCCS standard. Those discussions directly morphed into Unicode. [[I was even there when we picked the name Unicode for what we had home to produce.]]

Conceptually we long debated unifying everything and in an ideal perfect world we would have done it. The reason was one primary goal for a new standard was to make it easily parseable and having unique rather than repeated codes was key to that. Sadly in the end we did not unify everything only to get buy-in from all major countries to support. That’s even why you see the roman/asciii characters repeated within Unicode itself—like as romaji. This was all well in good until we came to CJK and the number characters with semantical overlap was huge that this was more seriously considered—infact we started investigating this at Xerox before even thinking about Unicode and that work predated and influenced and leveraged the work done later.

That’s correct. The best example is that of cellophane tape which was a brand but it lost protection. Xerox very aggressive in the day and wrote lawyer letters to anyone who used Xerox as a verb to protect their brand.

I’m not sure if Google has ever done similar but people use google as a verb to mean web search and I’m not sure if they worried about losing brand protection or though of it as an advantage in acquiring users.

No one knew the market at the time. Clearly this was for large businesses and not a home computer. It targeted the same demographic as the Xerox Star which shipped before it and suffered a similar fate. No one knew what would work, easy to see in retrospect but at the time it was not easy to see. Apple also had a big disadvantage in the ‘office’ marketplace having no sales force that everyone assumed was necessary. Besides price, Xerox’s other problem was while they did have a sales force they only knew how to sell copiers. I suspect only IBM at that time with a product like the Star or Lisa could have succeeded. But the Mac was a completely different product for a different marketplace and even it was a failure at first—until desktop publishing turned things around.

All these years I thought The Dragon Book referred to the “Green” Dragon book (which was the text I used in my compiler class in the very early 80s) only to Just realize that when folks refer to “The Dragon Book” that it is the red/purple book by 2 of the same authors from ‘84.

I remember that I ignored most of the stuff when I did my compiler from the book I used and did a recursive descent parser which the book really, if I remember correctly, did not cover except maybe for a brief mention. The instructor was also pushing everyone to use lex/yacc and I thought that was not the right way to go if you wanted to actually understand things. Interesting most of the folks that used lex/yacc had trouble completing the assignment whereas I thought it was straightforward.

Mesa was my first language that I used out of Collage for the seven years that I worked on the Xerox Star document editor. The job where I learned more in 6 months than I did in 4 years of collage or my entire working career afterwords.

It was by far the best language that I used for my entire working career where I had to endure such languages as PL/1 (and PL/S), C, C++, Java, JavaScript and PHP. While Java as a lang was not too bad it still paled in features and usability compared to MESA and it too was influenced by MESA.

But as was true at Xerox was it was the complete network that was revolutionary at the time in the early 80’s. The fact that I could source debug any machine remotely on the corporate would wide network of over 5000 machine and that the source code would be automatically done loaded to my machine (mean I could easily debug from any nearby random machine) was just something I could never “easily’ do elsewhere.

MESA was missing a few things (which CEDAR solved and used generally within only Xerox PARC partially because at the time it really only ran on Dorado class machine) such as Garbage collection and in the case of Star it would have been much better if the language supported OOP. For Star we had had a system called Traits to support objects but it had some serious issues IMHO (which would be fodder for a separate post.)

When talking about Mesa you also need to talk about Tajo, its development environment built onto- of the OS Pilot (Star also used Pilot.) But systems also supported a mouse and a large bitmapped monitor and had overlapping windows (although most of Star have automatic non overlapping windows that was a UI usability decision.)

There is also more because the network was very important. Print severs, file servers, mail servers, cloudless store for all of Star’s user files/desktop. All this in the very early 80’s was unheard of elsewhere. It’s very similarly to what Steve Jobs missed when he saw Smalltalk where he only really saw a new UI and missed much more that was demoed.

It was a magic place to work at the time, I had left in the very late 80s for Apple and it was a huge step backwards at the time (but did amazing stuff with their limited tools but made working not fun.)

Being a physics researcher he built a time machine and in late 2001 went back in time to post it.

More likely late 82 or even 83 when you saw it.

The desktop metaphor absolutely was in the Xerox Star and that was copied by the Lisa team (and carried over to the Mac) after they viewed it when Star was first announce. That’s well documented. The Star also had limited pull down menus mostly a single menu item on the top right of every window that was hamburger-like in design that had items in it.

The Xerox Development Environment (TAJO/XDE) was more windows like where windows were processes and shrunk down to the bottom of the screen when closed. Star was developed using Tajo but are completely separate systems with very different user interfaces. For example Tajo used cut/copy/paste and any window could be set overlapping where as Star use a MOVE, COPY where use selected the object pressed the verb action button, and then selected the destination (use that was modal!). Also Star choose to have non-overlapping tiled windows (except for modal dialogues & style sheets.) The windowing was changed in later versions to allow any window to overlap.

What’s even more confusing is that Xerox had lots of systems including smalltalk, interlisp, star, Cedar & Tajo at the time Lisa was released. They also had lots or prototypes systems including Rooms and the Alto for that matter.

Apple absolutely also did their own research and design that was unique. And in cases the duplicated earlier research but came to a different conclusion (for example the number of buttons on a mouse.)

I think Apple did more with direct manipulation than others did taking it to more extremes — but you can still see that in other earlier systems.

I was there and it’s true. Another point that people forget was the Head/CEO of Palm (which was an independent subsidiary) at the time was Jon Rubinstein who was head of software at NeXT and Apple.

I’m pretty sure the decisions were made before he was consulted. I also think everyone at the time had a very low opinion of the CEO of HP and the entire board. HP was dysfunctional.

I was at Palm when launched working on the device end user software startup experience. The software I think was ready but the hardware was far inferior to the current iPad at the time. However it’s possible that the next iteration could have been more competitive, they just had to stick with it. But neither the hardware or software mattered because it was the CEO who killed it through poor long term judgement As the author noted.

[I remember sitting in meetings where HP seemed proud to be selling more and more PC at below their manufacturing costs. They raced to the bottom and were happy they were gaining market share in the race to the bottom.]

There is mortality and there is quality of life and someone who is fit will have a better quality of life even if they don’t necessarily live longer.