workergnome

My father worked with him at CMU and the story he always told (while possibly apocryphal) was that the reason that the ASCII bell character sequence was CRTL-G was because of Gordon.

My grandfather spent the last part of his career doing this sort of work—often on classified projects, I'm told. Usually there was an assumption made on the project about the useful working life of any part, and the expected duration of the program, and they made the "right" number of spares.

Things change, and the factory/tooling/people are long gone. Also, often the underlying tech isn't available. But the part needs to weigh the same amount, meet the same guidelines, and fit in the same hole.

It's cheaper to pay someone to spend the time to figure out how to make the replacement then to mothball the entire airplane—almost regardless of how expensive it might be.

If there was anything keeping on the internet, it is the fact that I may some day get to read that post.

Hopefully some day deep into my retirement.

This, more than anything else, might be the reason that I stop using Uber. I've loved the idea that I can pay a fixed fee, and that I don't have to think about money at all—having to tip, or think about tips, is so much of what I hated about taxis. Uber was great because it was a fixed amount.

If you want the driver to get more money, raise the price. Don't raise the price by making me feel guilty.

Hell is "other people".

-- Jean-Paul Sartre

Quite possibly—most likely the PERQ and Three Rivers Computer stuff is the hardest to find, though I don't know how much of it is already out there.

Hi there—original tweeter here.

Some context for the picture—my father, Paul, was the business manager for the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon at the time, and is a fabulous record-keeper, so he kept all sorts of interesting things from that era.

He was also one of the founders of Three Rivers Computer as well as PERQ, which were tech transfer spin-outs from the CS dept in the seventies.

We found the same—using OSM data that just had points was problematic, both because of accuracy and because it tended to often be the front door, not the centroid of the object.

I believe we limited our model generation to selecting places that had outlines, and computed the centroid of that outline. One of the benefits of our technique is that we didn't need to be comprehensive—we can throw out lots of places and still have enough to be useful for the model.

On the front end, it's easy——Add a couple lines to a configuration file, make a couple images, and it's done.

The difficult part is that the search is not optimized to be RAM-efficient; each city takes between two and ten gigabytes of RAM. You also need to have several hundred thousand tile images, which are commercially available, but not free.

If you've got a hefty server and the images, then it takes about a computer-day to compute the features and create the search index.