With RAM access being the one big bottleneck of a modern PC, can anyone in the know tell me about those SoCs? How much RAM did they have, and was it faster than external DIMMs?

A bank tried to sell me a pension fund contract. Luckily, I know my math and found out that it was so bad that I’d call it a scam.

I had it worse. I needed to book a hotel for a business trip, and they offered me two prices: Either take them cheaper, but you cannot cancel or get a refund, or you can spend a bit more, and cancel it up to one day before arrival for a “cancellation fee”, which amount was not disclosed at that moment.

I booked the latter one, and in the booking confirmation it said that the cancellation fee is exactly the same as the cost for the room!

The Mitochondrial Eve.

Sometimes you learn things before, and sometime by doing them. This was the latter case.

Are you saying parking is gambling in Amsterdam?

No, but our family of four went on a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the by far most expensive part of the trip were neither the museum tickets nor the restaurant bill, but the parking: about €16 per hour.

We do have casinos. And parking in Amsterdam.

I was just using it. But the behavior/reaction to button presses showed me that a button was obviously connected to the wrong function.

I don’t know how to see a memory bug in an out of order elevator, but I once saw and reported a wiring error of a working elevator. It was an interesting talk at the reception desk, but as I could precisely describe what was wrong and the verifyable consequences, they took me seriously. And sent me a “Thank You” email later ;-)

Back then, the internet was a thing of trust and cooperation. We got an assigned port number the same way. Current problem: Our company changed over the decades, and I no longer have the email address that would identify me to the IANA as the one who requested that number reservation.

One key point here is: While you actually can replace a bunch of junior developers with AI in some places, any replaced junior developer will never become a senior developer that cannot be replaced by the AI because he/she is basically experince on two legs.

So, corporations, don’t complain about the lack of experienced, senior personnal because YOU have been the main reason they don’t exist.

Let’s come back to all of this when all those “quantum breakthroughs” manage to compute anything worthwhile that is not a quantum computer benchmark, but solves a real world problem.

But that would miss out the large amount of government control over the masses! Think of the kids, not of your rights being trampled on! /s

All batteries are replaceable. Some take a bit more effort and some specialized equipment, though.

Counter-Argument: Each camera in a bedroom can be free entertainment for millions!

Good luck holding a company sitting in China “responsible” for about anything.

Jokes on him. There is a whole infrastructure to make windows games work on linux, except those that are explicitely programmed not to work on that.

I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.

Well, at least there are people who still use Perl.

I remember being forced to learn this in university.

I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.

And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.

If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.

At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.