Phasor Burn

Falcons vs Stampeders, originally uploaded by SmugBastard.ca.

Junior football teams Stampeders vs Falcons, Al Azhar Shriner Field.

I need more practice and maybe a slightly longer lens, but all in all not too bad for my first try at action photography.

Breakout, a discrete logic (non-microprocessor) game, was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, after the latter had “rejoined” Atari after the merge of Atari subsidiary Kee Games.

They had an idea to turn Pong into a single player game, where the player would use a ball to deplete a wall of bricks without missing the ball on its rebound. Bushnell was certain the game would be popular, and the two partnered to produce a concept. Al Alcorn was assigned as the project manager, and began development with Cyan Engineering in 1975. The same year, Alcorn assigned Steve Jobs to design a prototype. Jobs was offered USD$750, with an extra $100 each time a chip was eliminated from the prospected design. Jobs promised to complete a prototype within four days.

Jobs noticed his friend Steve Wozniak—employee of Hewlett-Packard—was capable of producing designs with a small number of chips, and invited him to work on the hardware design with the prospect of splitting the $750 wage. Wozniak had no sketches and instead interpreted the game from its description.

To save parts, he had “tricky little designs” difficult to understand for most engineers. Near the end of development, Wozniak considered moving the high score to the screen’s top, but Jobs claimed Bushnell wanted it at the bottom; Wozniak unaware of any truth to his claims.

The original deadline was met after Wozniak didn’t sleep for four days straight. In the end 50 chips were removed from Jobs’ original design. This equated to a $5000 USD bonus, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak, instead only paying him $375

Full article on Wikipedia

*snort* I didn’t know that Steve Jobs had any technical abilities whatsoever. Maybe he never did, LOL.

It comes as no surprise that he was manipulating others, especially Wozniak, before Apple even got it’s start.

More background in this story :

Maybe they had an inkling that he’d actually work on Breakout with Wozniak, who they already knew from his low chip PONG. As Allan later said “Jobs never did a lick of engineering in his life. He had me snowed. It took years before I figured out that he was getting Woz to ‘come in the back door’ and do all the work while he got the credit.”

Is your boss a psychopath?

This wasn’t your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John’s restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: “We can move them. Well, for $299 a month.” John couldn’t believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.

In fact, something seemed shady about the state of his restaurant’s negative reviews. “When you do get a call from Yelp, and you go to the site, it looks like they have been moved,” John said. “You don’t know if they happen to be at the top legitimately or if the rep moved them to the top. You don’t even know if this is someone who legitimately doesn’t like your restaurant. … Almost all the time when they call you, the bad ones will be at the top.”

Full Article

Yow. I hadn’t heard of this before. (Yes, I am behind the times).

It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. There will always be people trying to make money in some form of ‘business protection’ racket.

Why is it that dishonest money seems so much easier to come by? Maybe because honest money doesn’t get this kind of press…

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Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’

Ahh, good old Onion News Network…


PGM
DCL VAR(&RTN) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(900)
DCL VAR(&DEVD) TYPE(*CHAR) LEN(10)
RTVJOBA JOB(&DEVD)
CALL PGM(QSYS/QDCRDEVD) PARM(&RTN X'0384' +
'DEVD0600' &DEVD X'00000000')
SNDPGMMSG MSG('I have determined your TCP/IP Address +
to be ' || %SST(&RTN 878 15))
ENDPGM


http://faq.midrange.com/data/cache/118.html

That apparently is how you find the ip address of your AS/400 machine.

… and you thought UNIX was cryptic!