AMD's inability to make good software has been a recurring problem for decades. Many years ago I had some success with their optimising compiler, but everything else I've touched was bad. A real pity.
The UK student loan book regularly changes hands on the secondaries market at half of face value. Make of that what you will. Draw whatever conclusions you might about the market value of some of the education provided.
I support anyone's wish to gain an education, including the study of esoteric subjects if that is what interests them. However many young people have been mis-sold an education in the belief that it would result in a well paying job. Of course the young are the easiest people of all upon which to perpetrate such a scam. There are very few with a film studies degree, who manage to secure a job as film director. About 500 people every year study golf course management. We have about 2500 golf courses.
> The UK student loan book regularly changes hands on the secondaries market at half of face value. Make of that what you will. Draw whatever conclusions you might about the market value of some of the education provided.
The price of the debt says nothing about the value of education. The price is simply a reflection of the likelihood the debt will be paid.
The debt will be paid when the person receiving the education is able to obtain a halfway-decent-paying job. If the debts aren't being paid, it means the education didn't result in employment.
Considering the whole point of education is to be prepared for a job, it means the education is not worth very much.
Employment is not the whole point of education. The modern university started about 200 years ago in Germany with humanist ideals. An educated population was seen as a value in itself - many subjects taught weren't even very practical and that is still true today.
Supercalc2, Maxam2, dBASE II. You could do a lot with CP/M software, especially if you had access to a hard drive which would eliminate the "insert floppy disk X into drive Y" tedium.
It is quite common to find device manufacturers, even those of many years standing, who _appear to_ begin with the device and add the software as an afterthought. Paying little attention to security or even the software lifecycle (patches, updates, the changing landscape/ecosystem). I have even known it happen that the device brand subs out the software to a random small developer, who then closes up shop/dies/gets out of that business, and the device company doesnt even have the source code, let alone any ability to further improve/fix the software that drives their device. This leads to layers upon layers of subsequent middleware, UIs, shims etc.
It's frightening how often this happens. And these days with the boatloads of cheap computer and phone peripherals being bought every minute there's just no realistic way for an authority to monitor and regulate all of it.
I bet it's not an insignificant amount of devices out there that had their firmwares written by a "random small developer" who is in fact some kind of supply chain hacker.
(This is being taken as snark, and fair enough, it's not a high-effort comment, but I'm being sincere. I operated a relatively popular FidoNet-adjacent (same protocol different network) system in the mid-1990s. Reddit is the closest thing we have to the user experience (Reddit is substantially better).
Yes, I was around the same time and had a moderately popular local BBS. Reddit (and arguably HN) do feel like the closest thing we have to BBSes today.
I'm the downvoted poster above, and I used to run a BBS. Mostly hosting info files and CP/M software (Thanks U.S. Robotics, couldn't have done it without HST). I am genuinely interested in know where (and if) such a network of people could ever exist again. For those who may be too young to get the joke... Reddit is certainly not it.
One major thing missing with Reddit is the focus on geographic locality. BBSes had more of a community feel because 99% of the users were local, and this was enforced by financial reality. Few people in the 80's or 90's wanted to call long distance, unless they were distributing warez at someone else's expense (in which case they probably weren't reading and posting messages anyway!)
You can get "some" of this feel from the state / city focused subreddits... but... it's still not the same.
Some FidoNet boards did, actually! The FidoNet boards near me all carried "regional" forums / echoes that were available only within the regional network itself. I was actually way more active on those forums than the global ones.
(By "active", I mainly mean participating in flame wars. If any of those sysops are reading, I do apologize for the behavior of my teenage self.)
Does anyone know what that characteristic smell is DEC equipment has? It's different from the characteristic smell of (for example) Sun equipment. Rainbow's smell like VAXen.
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