In 1979 I was 19 years old and had just started studying CS in community college. Through a lucky break I got a job at a consulting company and my first assignment was to write a 6502 macro assembler from scratch, in 6502 assembly language. At that point I had written less than 100 lines of 6502 code on my Apple ][, but I was fairly good with 8080 and IBM-370 assembly.
My mentor / manager outlined the basic model for the assembler and I wrote the entire thing myself, quickly getting it to the point where it could self-assemble, and adding features from there. I was making about $7 / hour when I started. However, I wrote a FORTRAN simulation of the hashing algorithm that I was asked to use, shared it with my manager, and got a raise to $8-something an hour.
I had macros, a very fancy listing format that showed all of the hex codes generated by the macros in neat rows, and a lot more. The entire thing fit on two tracks of the 8" floppy disks that we were using -- definitely less than 8000 bytes.
I understand the risks of inactive accounts, but as I have pointed out here before these binary policies do not address the all-too-common situation where someone is forgetful and/or incapacitated prior to their death. These people have more important things to think about than their email and their photos,and the transition from alive to dead (to be blunt) can easily take more than two years. By the time that the estate and the executor has control of the account it can easily be too late to save precious memories.
Are you referring to the universe or to S3? Corey and I were chatting a few weeks ago during his most recent visit to Seattle and I shared my thoughts with him while we were cooking and eating homemade pizza.
> Paul Allen, who would later become a co-founder of Microsoft, was a couple of years above Gates at school. Together they fixed the school scheduling software to ensure Gates was the only boy in classes of girls.
In 2004-2005 one of the most interesting features of Facebook was to see which students were in which classes (lectures), and even which smaller labs or sections of that class. So you could enroll and change your entire schedule if there were openings based on data made available within Facebook... it felt pretty creepy even back then.
It's a bit of legend in the YouTube community, but I've never looked into it myself. Thank you for motivating me to. The source in the article is from Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube itself, at SXSW.
Sergey Brin too, with company massage rooms at early Google.
As others have pointed out, it's also how Facebook was started.
Sometimes I look back at my youth, and think about how I used to view technology: as a democratizing force which could tear down artificial barriers. Then I look around today and wonder what happened.
It makes sense, though, if you look closely at the founding fathers of big tech.
Zuckerberg's case is arguably even worse (though I completely agree otherwise). If I recall he created a way for harvard guys to rate their female peers appearances and had some pretty disparaging comments on the site itself.
> Under many cosmological theories, the integers under 2^63 are adequate to cover the entire expected lifetime of the universe; in this case no extensions will be necessary.
Indeed. As they say, eternity is very long, especially towards the end. For proof, check out this video that explains how eventually even protons will give out and evaporate.
The thing that blew my mind: when things started getting very weird, and I was thinking "ok but we're roughly at the end now", I checked the indicator. It was only half-way. It is a 30 minute video. And the time speeds up logarithmically.
AFAIK, the most accepted theory is that the Universe will allow for useful computation forever. Always get slower, but adding up to an unbounded amount of it.
Experienced this first hand on an embedded device with an RTOS with a 5ms tick. The thing was locking up every 124 days (2^31 ticks). That’s long enough where it had to happen 2-3 times before someone put 2 and 2 together.
> As discussed in 2.4.1, the end of the universe is predicted to occur well before the year 10 * 30. However, if there is one single lesson to be learned from the current Y2K problems, it is that specifications and conventions have a way of out living their expected environment. Therefore we feel it is imperative to completely solve the date representation problem once and for all.
At the first day on my first professional programming job in 1980 or so, my new manager told me that I would be writing a brand-new 6502 macro assembler, in 6502 assembly language, to replace the slow & limited one supplied by the vendor (Ohio Scientific).
Under his guidance I wrote the assembler, and even earned a raise after simulating the hashing function in FORTRAN and finding it lacking.
I still have very fond memories of that job and of the 6502, and would be interested in purchasing a replica as soon as you go into production!
Oh yeah, we were in the same row!