> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong.
Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!
Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents.
So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip.
Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper.
After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS.
After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend.
But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console...
Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind.
For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed.
You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does).
The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing.
One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS.
But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode.
I don't really understand the first episode. The idea as far as I can tell is that it's illegal to use employees who reverse engineered the BIOS to clone the BIOS, but it's legal to hire someone new, who presumably is also going to have to reverse engineer the BIOS in order to clone it.
The idea is that specifications are not copyrightable, but implementations are. So, the first team reverse engineers the work and writes a spec for the second team to work from. That way, you guarantee that the second implementation is free of copyrighted code.
I lived through parts of the tech eras depicted and I thought it captured the culture of people really well. It would have been boring to get bogged down in the details of historical differences, I'm not expecting this to be a documentary. Many of the people I worked with referred to the mushroom farms referenced in Soul of a New Machine from first hand experience The show had to change things as the years passed on the show in order to have the same main cast of characters involved as technology changed. I read Soul of a New Machine recently and one really has to have the right mind set to appreciate it, there are a lot of very specific details to that time in Massachusetts, working for what feels like a small division of ponderous Data General, competing technically and politically with separate groups within Data General, where every main character is a man, almost incidentally competing with the other computer companies, it does convey the feeling of a startup within a bigger company, so I don't hold the book in nearly the same high regard as others.
I used "value chain" euphemistically because you can get really complex on this and I wanted to spare the casual reader. I meant your credit card as an end-user product in your pocket and not meaning the card networks in isolation, but the value chain is roughly:
1. Merchant (bears little fraud risk but a lot of chargeback risk)
2. Payment Gateway (little direct risk but some liability risk)
3. Merchant Acquirer (more direct risk but mostly if merchants become insolvent)
4. Card Network (Visa/MC/AmEx - less risk but significant underlying costs managing a global technology that spans the financial system and needs to be distributed to almost every merchant of any scale in America)
5. Issuers (Banks + AmEx - most risk but get a big share of interchange fees)
I've surely missed something here that the very smart (and increasingly grumpy these days!) HN community will doubtlessly pile-on to correct, so I apologize in advance for errors or omissions... and I bow down if @patio11 swoops in to tell me about the complexity I've missed in either payments or Japanese economic/cultural conventions
Will also add that the benefit of credit is not overdraft but smoothing cash flow... if I'm living paycheck to paycheck and get paid every two weeks, I will incur essential expenses at the beginning of the fortnight that I can afford but lack cash in my account to pay now. I can't overdraft because I won't have the funds to deposit into that account for another two weeks. I'm getting a service that smooths my cashflow and there's a small premium added to reflect that. (Could you save up enough to avoid needing this? Is that a uniquely American way of living? I don't know! I'm making a descriptive claim not a normative one!)
Sadly I’ve noticed that comments on this topic usually devolve into tribal comments about how ‘things are done in the EU’ which always seem to not be actually that representative of the 27 different countries of the EU, but of course must be better than the US.
> ‘things are done in the EU’ which always seem to not be actually that representative of the 27 different countries of the EU
This is so true, the EU countries are super diverse, and yet EU citizens tend to believe that whatever happens in their country is common across the Union.
> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
It's a physics problem, as others pointed out, but even if we take it as another "just an engineering problem", have a look at the Hyperloop. Which is similarly just a long vacuum tube, and inside is like an air hockey table, not that big a deal, right?...
If anything, I think this is actually the other way around - channeling crazy AI bubble money towards SpaceX, after the funding from goverment contracts has dried up. Twitter is just the icing on the cake.
Quite ingenious, you have to give Musk that. This is why he is making so much money.
Currently SpaceX have managed to land the booster only, not the rocket itself, if you are thinking about Starship. And reusability of said rocket is also missing (collecting blown up pieces from the bottom of the ocean doesn't count!).
> They do expect bug fixes-- especially calculation bug fixes-- as the bugs are discovered.
Maybe I'm the weird one to expect reasonably bug-free software, and if a bug is found, an eventual bugfix "for free"? ESPECIALLY if they cause monetary or life loss!
A bug means the developer did not do their job. Let's not pretend this is OK.
I'd argue software isn't even special in this regard either. If your battery burns down someone's house you better recall all units and replace them with better ones. If you feel that is a reasonable thing to expect your industry, insurance is the solution to that. If anything, your job is easier as a software engineer given that you can deploy fixes remotely and immediately, not harder. Expecting people to pay a subscription as if this is somehow the only solution to a novel problem doesn't make sense, as I see it.
Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!
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