https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power...

You mentioned you have a therapist - this is something you might wish to explore with them.

The second question is related - what are you looking for in the "not alone"? What do you want? What would bring you peace? Are you looking for a relationship? A friend? Sex? etc? While you have to be comfortable with yourself, part of that comfort is knowing and being confident in what you're looking for. It may be that the world won't or can't provide it, but that's why I put this question second.

The final point I'll make is that there's nothing stopping you. You're an adult... within the constraints of the laws of your society, you CAN do what you want and there's nothing stopping you. It may not go the way you want, but it might, and wouldn't it be fun to try?

I do like Tedward's videos, though. He seems a lot more honestly enthusiastic about it, and definitely has fun with the cars.

I don't know, other than to say there's often a tendency in this industry to overlook the better in the name of the standard. 80-bit probably didn't offer enough marginal value to enough people to be worth the investment and complexity. I also wonder how much of an impact there is to the fact that you can't align 80-bit quantities on 64-bit boundaries. Not to mention the fact that memory bandwidth costs are 25% higher when dealing with 64-bit quantities, and floating point work is very often bandwidth constrained. There's more precision in 80-bit, but it's not free, and as you point out, there are techniques for managing the lack of precision.

> A bit of background - I wrote my one numerical analysis programs when I worked at Boeing. The biggest issue I had was accumulation of rounding errors.

This sort of thing shows up in even the most prosaic places, of course:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-you-dont-change-the-ui-nobo...

In any event, while we're chatting, thank you for your longstanding work in the field.

Up through the 486 (with its built in x87), the x87 was always a niche product. You had to know about it, need it, buy it, and install it. This is over and on top of buying a PC in the first place. So definitionally, it was relegated it to the peripheries of the industry. Most people didn't even know x87 was a possibility. (I remember distinctly a PC World article having to explain why there was an empty socket next to the 8088 socket in the IBM PC.)

However, in the periphery where it mattered, it gained acceptance within a matter of a few years of being available. Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, and many compilers (including yours, IIRC) had support for x87 early on. I would argue that this is one of the better examples of marginal hardware being appropriately supported.

The other argument I'd make is that (thanks to William Kahan), the 8087 was the first real attempt at IEEE-754 support in hardware. Given that IEEE-754 is still the standard, I'd suggest that x87's place in history is secure. While we may not be executing x87 opcodes, our floating point data is still in a format first used in the x87. (Not the 80-bit type, but do we really care? If the 80-bit type was truly important, I'd have thought that in the intervening 45 years, there'd be a material attempt to bring it back. Instead, what we have are a push towards narrower floating point types used in GPGPU, etc.... fp8 and f16, sure... fp80, not so much.)

The Weitek's were memory mapped. (At least those built for x86 machines.).

This essentially increased bandwidth by using the address bus as a source for floating point instructions. Was really a very cool idea, although I don't know what the performance realities were when using one.

http://www.bitsavers.org/components/weitek/dataSheets/WTL-31...

Emacs' notion of self documentation refers to something slightly different than the fact it has online help files. The help facilities can query the Lisp runtime for things like functions and keybindings. These update dynamically as the system is reconfigured. The result is something that isn't quite as cleanly presented as an online help document, but has the benefit of being deeply integrated into how the system is actually configured to behave at the moment. Very cool, and very much dependent on the open source nature of emacs.

This was super common for VB apps. The original architecture of VB was, loosely speaking, a GUI container for various pluggable controls connected to a BASIC runtime. The number of controls that came in the box would vary depending on how fancy a version of VB you bought, and you could plug in additional third party controls in the form of "VBX's" - Visual Basic eXtensions. Even though VBX's were designed mainly for GUI controls, they were the easiest extension point for VB and got extensively used for all sorts of integrations until OLE Automation became more prevalent. (Roughly contemporaneous with the switch to 32-bit.)

It is very much an engineer's engineering blog, and written by someone deeply in the trenches.

This could be useful to save on costs in computer labs... my grade school used multiplexer boxes to share a single 1541 across four C-64's.

> It's nothing short of a man-made miracle but I have to say it's also very umconfortable and stressful for the patient.

I think I must be strange, either in my reaction to the stress or the way I chose to manage it during my surgery.

I explicitly wanted to be somewhat awake during the procedure to see what was going on (how many chances do you get to see your lens emulsified from the inside)... and I remember having short conversations with the surgeon during the procedure. (She'd been concerned about zonular laxity, and we discussed during the procedure that she didn't see evidence.)

This is not something I'd want to reproduce if I didn't have to, nor would I suggest it as a general approach, but given that it was necessary for me, it was amazing to see it first hand.

My second procedure (second eye) was a little more stressful than the first, but for me all the material stress (which was significant) was in the run up and anticipation.

Asking out of curiosity, why is this? What's the functionality you miss on Mac?

On an iPhone, I can take the picture and I'm immediately a button press away from a photo editor and then whoever I want to send it to.

(A camera that automatically tethered to a phone and dumped pictures into the phone's camera roll would mostly solve the workflow issues I'm mentioning here. Would not surprise me if this already exists.)

> I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home.

Maybe. The camera still has to be charged and in mind and hand. (Then as soon as the kids leave the house you're back to where you were and having to carry something around that you might not otherwise.)

> I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone anyway

I see that... different people have different sorts of relationships with personal electronics. For me, it wound up being that I'd carry a cell phone and that was about it. Even in the pre-smartphone days, when I might have carried a PDA, I either wouldn't or couldn't.

I tried a Sony RX100 (1" sensor) when they first came out, optimistic about the possibility of using it for 'general purpose' photography. After all, it's small enough.

The problem was, it's a second device to carry around and keep charged. Then once you capture the image, it's largely stuck on the device until you find a way to offload your images. I briefly experimented with cables that would let me do things like transfer images from the RX100 to my (Android at the time) mobile phone, for archiving and sending to family and friends. That turned the whole thing into the sort of science fair project that I didn't have time for as the parent of a very young child. (Although in fairness, I can't think of a single time in my life when I'd have had the patience, kids or not.)

This is why, for all the arguments you can make against them as cameras, I've come to be very thankful for the amount of effort that Apple and others have made to get appealing images out of devices I always carry around anyway. I can take a set of pictures, edit them, have them automatically archived to cloud storage, and send them to whoever I want.. all with a single device I was carrying around anyway.

This leaves open the fact that the 'real' camera workflow is still an option when there's the need for higher image quality and the time (or money to hire a photographer) to take advantage of what a DSLR or the like can do.

(When I compare what I can do with my iPhone to what my parents had available to them (a 110 format camera and 35mm Nikons), I like the tradeoffs a lot better. the image quality available now is definitely better than the 110. Some of those 35mm exposures are probably better quality than what I can get out of an iPhone, but they're all stuck in albums and slides, and nobody ever looks at them. )

However.... it's really hard to overstate the workflow and convenience aspects of shooting with a phone. (Particularly as a parent, and even moreso when I was a new parent of a small child.) The phone has the twin benefits of 1) being present almost always and 2) being immediately able to process and transmit an image to the people you might want to see it. For the 99% case, that's far more useful than even a very significant improvement in image quality. For the 1% where it matters, I can and do either hire a professional (with better equipment than my own) or make the production of dragging out my DSLR and all that it entails. This is like so many other cases where inarguable technical excellence of a sort gives way to convenience and cost issues. IOW, "Better" is not just about Image Quality.