A Friend of a friend is a technical recruiter for SWA. They told me that SWA pays their Software Engineers below market salaries. They complained that because of that, its hard to recruit people, and they end up with mediocre developers.
I was able to copy a c64 cartridge by inserting it crooked and then dumping the memory to floppy disk. Then you could load it and run `sys 32768` to get it to run.
Back in the 90s, Joel Welling and Chris Nuuja at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at CMU developed a similar system called P3D.
It was really cool, and they had a bunch of backends to render on different high end graphic workstations. We even had a Pixar Renderman hooked up to a laser disk recorder. You could script a 3D scene with different light sources and cameras and over the course of a week, render some high quality NTSC video.
I looked, but I couldn't find a .tar.gz or anything.
I emailed Joel and asked him to put it up on his github page, https://github.com/jswelling
He has something called DrawP3D, but I think its just a library that you can call from C or Fortran that uses the P3D rendering backend. I could be wrong it was a long time ago.
I started at Akamai in July 2002 and I received an option grant as part of my offer. Since I had options before, I thought they were all priced at the closing price on the day they were approved by the board. But Akamai had a provision in their option agreement that priced the options at 4 different prices. The price of the first quarter of my stock was the closing price the day the grant was approved by the board. The 2nd quarter was priced 90 days later, the 3rd 90 days after that, and the final price as 270 days after the initial grant. No one mentioned this odd pricing during the interview process, and I never thought to ask about it in the interview process, I just assumed they priced them all at once like my previous options.
I was told after I complained to HR, that they did this for MY benefit! Because their stock went straight to $300/share at the IPO and then started a slow decline. This was a good policy for people that started after the stock hit $300 and before I started because each quarter of their stock was priced lower than the previous quarter. But for those of us that started close to the bottom $2/share, it sucked!
One guy who started after me quit when he found out about the 4 different prices.
His company is http://www.ave4.com/
I meet him a few times, interviewed to work there (didn't get the job.) I mostly talked to a lawyer who was very nice, but reminded me of Kobayashi from the Usual Suspects. The offices are a bit extravagant with some amazing original artwork on the walls, https://www.jendoco.com/portfolio/fourth-avenue-analytics/
Watson is basically a brand name for IBM's data analytics consulting services. My understanding is they're not that great at it, they haven't scored any major wins outside of that Jeopardy run. I don't have any articles on hand but i seem to recall reading about some failures with a medical partner in particular, but then that's been a tough field for other big names like Google, too.
I used a SPARCbook back in 1996 for a business trip to Germany to install our search engine at t-online.de. The CFO of the company wanted to know who had this machine at all times because it was so expensive, around $20k USD.
It didn't have any usable battery life, if you tried to do any type of development, it would last about 20 minutes before it shutdown.
The many disk partitions made us get creative to fill the 1.2GB disk with data. We had to put files all over the place, and use softlinks get our software to work. This odd setup lead a sysadmin to "clean things up" one afternoon. He delete most of the OS in the process. He was really mad because he had to stay up all night to do a reinstall.
I'd like to see the source code for Altavista released to the Computer History Museum. I think it is of historical significance. If anyone knows who currently has that code, please post a comment. I think there is a lot to learn from examining old computer code.
Radix Trees are used extensively at Akamai. They are very useful in dealing with blocks of network addresses. When I was there, they had 2 libraries which shared the on disk format. One was mutable and had all sorts of operations you could do on them. The other was immutable and optimized for very fast lookups.
<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/blob/release-2025-01-15...>
<https://github.com/boto/boto3/issues/4392>
<https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/1.37.0/CHANGELOG.rst#L19>
<https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/blob/2.23.0/CHANGELOG.rst#223...>
<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java-v2/releases/tag/2.30.0>
<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-net/releases/tag/3.7.963.0>
<https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-php/releases/tag/3.337.0>
and wait for your S3 Compatible Object store to add a fix to support this.