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Comment Long term, and fair (Score 1) 132

Couple of years ago I bought a FairPhone 4. It has replaceable battery, and almost everything else. I am not sure about guarantees, but the company is still supporting previous versions. It can be opened without tools for battery and sim card access, and the rest just needs one screwdriver. Unless it gets stolen or seriously broken, I hope to keep it for 5 or 10 years more. Extra bonus is their policy of fairness, taking care where they source their materials and components from.

Comment Re:The Finns don't agree, even if WaPo says they d (Score 2) 84

Also from the Finnish news: The police is investigating this as a crime, the ship is being held back both for the criminal investigation, and now also for a private suit from the cable owners. 9 members of the crew are forbidden to leave the country (a bit less severe than getting arrested). They have found traces of a dragging anchor that are over 100km long, and the anchor itself right where the ship was stopped. Even if they can not prove it intentional sabotage, the ship owner is still responsible for the damage it caused. The authorities are carefully not blaming Russia, at least until they have all their evidence laid out. It may be difficult to prove Russian influence. But there is not much question that it was this ship that broke the cables, and it sure doesn't look like an accident.

Comment Seen it before (Score 1) 111

Once upon a time programmers struggled with writing machine code. Then some clever people came up with a system for specifying what you needed in almost plain English, and the computer would do the rest. It was called COBOL, and coding was never quite the same. But still, programmers were badly needed, and once everyone was on board with these newmodern "plain English" ways of coding, the requirements just escalated so we still had more than enough work to do. After COBOL, ALGOL, and FORTRAN, there came new and improved languages, and yes, the machine coding guys were a dying bunch. But there always was work for people who could make computers do the things that were needed. I guess it will be the same this time...

Comment Yes (Score 2) 293

I have not seen a single case where daily micromanagement meetings contribute anything. Except frustration.

Now that I am (semi?)retired, I have decided not to accept any work that involves such.

Comment Makes some sense (Score 1) 199

When making an item for yourself, like the kayak paddle in the article, it makes good sense to use your own body measurements as a starting point.

I have heard of a modern harpsichord maker, who starts every instrument by defining the inch for that instrument. If I remember right, it was the width of the wide ("white") key. Everything else was derived from that with geometric methods, so the proportions of the instrument came out right.

I have read that in the middle ages, most European cities had engraved some (local) standard measurements in the walls of the city hall. That was good enough when there was not big need to standardize things. But today things are more international. A German M6 nut is going to fit on a Chinese M6 bolt, without any big discussion about the thread pitch etc.

Comment Not so simple (Score 1) 224

Long time ago there was a movement to explain what the computer should do, in more or less plain English instead of mysterious codes. It was called COBOL. It, and other high-level languages of that time did indeed change coding a lot. But the need for programmers did not go away, at all.

The real art of programming includes being aware of different failure modes, error handling, and considering malicious user input, as well as a deep understanding of what the program is supposed to do, and finding an acceptable compromise between the clients vague specs and what is technically possible. Maybe an AI can some day handle all that, but not in the near future.

Comment Telmac (Score 1) 523

Bet most of you have never heard of it, but my first computer was a Telmac 1800, built from a Finnish kit. Loosely based on RCA's Cosmac. Running on a RCA 1802 processor, with 2kb of memory (and room for another 2kb, if someone can use so much), audio cassette tape for storage, a lousy keyboard, and using an old TV for display, all of 64 pixels wide. Me and my dad soldered it together somewhere around 1975. Later we got an extension board with 16kb memory, and a better display, 16x64 characters, and a Tiny Basic interpreter. Soon after that, I dived into machine code... At a time I had nightmares directly in hex.

Comment Re:Nigeria (Score 1) 138

Meanwhile Nigeria is about to have a larger population than China by 2100.

According to a graph at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fourworldindata.org%2Fgra... Nigeria is expected to have some 733M people in 2100, way behind China (1060M) and India (1450M). Of course such predictions are full of uncertainties.

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