https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjollyrogertelephone.co... has been providing this service in the US for years - works with most any provider that offers call forwarding, with special support for Google Voice. It didn't start out using AI but it does now. Some of the recordings are quite amusing.

It seems right that since I announced the BBS Documentary production on Slashdot, I should also take the time to give testimony to one of its primary interviewees that took it from side fun project to meaningful historical work.

My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.

They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.

There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.

It isn't any more accurate to call Fortran a "language of the 50s" than it is to call C a "language of the 70s". As others have noted, Fortran has evolved significantly over the years, with the most recent revision, Fortran 2023, published just six months ago. It is still a very popular language in engineering and scientific applications.

"Less than" - it's the lowest my router's monitoring will display. This was after five or six loads. I agree that it shouldn't need much data, though I suppose the handshaking and TLS involves some overhead.

It's not and has been shown to not be the case. It's an Asus router misidentifying the traffic. I have an LG washer that is connected, and it sends less than 1MB/day on days it's in use.

I have a lot of electronic items that have USB-C ports for charging, but that won't charge when connected to a USB-C power supply. Instead, they require the use of a USB-A to USB-C cable. Europe already requires USB-C charging ports, but apparently doesn't require working with USB-C supplies. I am not sure this is an improvement.

It’s just in mice! This scientist is calling out hype in science reporting

Google did NOT âoeimmediatelyâ prove its superiority. In fact it was inferior in particularly significant ways.

As an example, searching for the phrase âoeto be or not to beâ would yield no results with Google (or garbage results), whereas AltaVista understood the query fine. This is because Google was cutting corners and throwing away short words.

AltaVista ultimately killed itself. I remember an internal email thread that made this defeat well understood to most of us. Someone asked if it was intentional that we were serving pop-under ads on the front page of the site (pop-under ads were where a popup window would be created and immediately be moved into the background.. you typically saw this on seedy porn sites). The short answer came back âoeyesâ, and it was almost universally interpreted (from my experience at least) as the most clear sign that weâ(TM)d lost.

AltaVista kept making the front page more and more complicated. Google kept its front page empty simple and clean. That was the only way that Googleâ(TM)s engine was superior at that time.

In early 2020 I left a three-star review for some wireless headphones. The seller deluged me with escalating bribes to delete or revise it. When I declined all, they took to forging my email address in requests to Amazon to "help me delete the review". Amazon's replies (form responses with directions as to how to edit or delete a review) went to me, of course, which is how I knew about it. This persisted over six months! I reported each attempt to Amazon - they didn't care.

I can't read the paywalled article, but I know this happens a lot.

The CNBC article says "Intel currently operates four factories, called “wafer fabs,” in the United States. In addition to its site in Arizona, which is being expanded, it also has fabs in Massachusetts, New Mexico and Oregon. It also makes chips in Ireland, Israel and has a single fab in China."

The Hudson, Massachusetts fab was once DEC's, where Alpha (and VAX) processors were made. DEC sold the site to Intel as part of a patent infringement settlement. Intel ran the fab for many years later, even though it was not a "copy exactly" operation, it did very well. Eventually it became unworkable to keep updating the Hudson fab and it was demolished a few years ago. Intel still has engineering offices there.

I plan to do these all in Fortran, as I did last year. Day 1 was easy.

The Amazon blog post announcing the service now has at the end:

Credits: CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder is based on the Headless recorder.

I don't know when it was added.

My wife plays Solitaire on her Kindle. She loves it so much that I had to buy a "refurbished" 6th-gen Paperwhite when hers died (later generations didn't support Active Content.) At least then I was able to re-load the game from the Kindle store. I gather this means that I won't be able to do that again.

I was a PLATO IV user in college in the 70s, and it consumed my life - a bit much so for my education. But I learned a lot developing "lessons" (what PLATO called programs) and tools for other lesson developers, and also the sort of hijinx, problems and friendships that reappeared many years later in online communities. Later I would work alongside PLATO systems developers at DEC. I still fondly remember That Friendly Orange Glow.

If you are a DirecTV satellite customer, call or chat and ask about the unadvertised "PREFERRED Xtra" package, which is cheaper than CHOICE, has more channels, and NO RSNs. (It does have ESPN, however.)