Actually, the "key" to soldering is finally buying oneself a very good iron. I learned soldering years ago (going on 50 or so now) but always used basic "wood burners". But I did enough that I got good at it with the rug burners.
A couple years back, I bought a low end no-name temp controlled iron, and it worked ok. A little better than the wood burner, but nothing great. Then about three years ago I bought a used Metcal SP200 Smartheat off of eBay for about $120. The tips are pricey (although Thermaltronics makes clone tips that cost less than genuine Metcal tips) but the difference in soldering performance is like night and day, even when one already knows how, but has just never used the really good systems.
Once you have the .mkv on your local computer system, then only actual hardware failures will prevent you from watching it whenever, wherever, and for as many times as you want to do so.
> Why were these sharp edges not discovered in UAT?
These kinds of sharp edges should *never* have made it as far as UAT. All of these should have been caught in the first prototype and never made it beyond that point.
The fact that they made it all the way to the shipping product shows that too many responsible parties were asleep at the switch.
> > My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching.
> Huh. That is interesting, it was before my time, and I never heard of this :D
Yep, it was a thing, and for /some/ programs that were originally CP/M programs (i.e., WordStar 7.0 for DOS) it continued for a long time. The WordStar 7 documentation included patch locations to use (this time, IIRC, for DOS debug.exe) to change various behaviors of the program.
> Yeah saving statements is important but banks make it so hard to automate. 2FA for login, and statements have to be navigated to, sometimes time range set.
Which is why all of my accounts mail a physical statement each month. Yes, just about every time I log on they beg me to switch to electronic only, I say no and move along.
> My bank just sends a note that a statement is available, rather than an actual statement.
Yep. If they had implemented it just like the mail, they'd just email me the PDF (encrypted if necessary). But they don't, so I don't ever agree to "go electronic statements".
> Microsoft’s core product, the BASIC interpreter, ran on almost all popular personal computers at the time1, including ... Atari machines
The blog author is incorrect here. Atari BASIC was not from Microsoft. I think the history was that Atari approached Microsoft, but Microsoft's interpreter for the 6502 was too large to fit the ROM space Atari had in their cartridges. Instead Atari contracted with Shepardson Microsystems to create a new basic interpreter for the Atari machines.
Same experience here. The one "monitor" employee is busy nearly full time helping out with some issue some customer is having, such that they simply can't be monitoring that everyone's items are ringing up as the actual item instead of "bananas".
But every terminal also has a spycam hanging above it to either "give the appearance" of a big-brother overlord watching to encourage honesty, or is recording everything so that someone can review footage later if some issue is discovered.
Depending on the store those cameras are definitely processing the feed locally to flag shady stuff. I've had a few times I've done something "odd" (not stealing anything but definitely not the normal flow of scan a single item and put in a bag) and have had those systems freak out on me, and the only part of it being weird it would have known was the camera feed.
A couple years back, I bought a low end no-name temp controlled iron, and it worked ok. A little better than the wood burner, but nothing great. Then about three years ago I bought a used Metcal SP200 Smartheat off of eBay for about $120. The tips are pricey (although Thermaltronics makes clone tips that cost less than genuine Metcal tips) but the difference in soldering performance is like night and day, even when one already knows how, but has just never used the really good systems.
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