This illustration is missing a layer. Buried down in the silt, under the abyssal plane at the bottom of the ocean.. Ken Thompson.

Just yesterday I was working with a data storage system that uses 6 bit bytes organized into 12 bit words.

Haha, this is one of many 6 bit byte systems still used in aviation every day.

It's still around, they just changed the name. And it's still a boondoggle.

It is. The story of modern GIS systems is mostly about figuring out who dumped what <choose your own chlorinated organic compound> into a river.

His book Insanely Great has more info on PARC, although only through the lens of the development of the Macintosh.

This is very good advice, even though 95% of the people who hear it will still think they're special and don't need to learn their craft before jumping into cool stuff.

The thing I always remember from reading Feynman's various autobiographical essays -- he would always try to figure out something from first principles.

If you don't know the 'simple, always true' laws of what you're working with, you're going to be afloat on a sea of conjecture and fuzzy thinking.

I can't upvote this enough. "From first principles" is the only way to master something -- math, programming, automotive maintenance, whatever.

There aren't ever that many foundational principles to a field of a study, but if you understand them -- really understand, until it becomes intuitive -- you're 80% the way to being an expert.

A cable winch like they use with sailplanes would work really well for this.

From a 30s plan, or something more modern?

There's something about the moving starfield in that game...

I like that it's near field, drawn with particles that zoom through the player space. They aren't "far" away, yet have a nice feel.

The end result is a really great sense of motion.

The day I got georeferenced, shaded, 3d terrain working for a synthetic vision system, singlehanded, in bare OpenGL ES 2.0.

Friend of mine at work took my picture seconds after I got it working, you can see the crazed look in my eye.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/24025582@N03/4150935582/in/dat...

The worst day of my professional life was probably the day Derek Sivers canned me because, "I want to do your job myself."

Stellar. Out of interest, how did Derek fare, Was it objectively a decent decision on his part or what? Also, looks good from the flickr img.

Oh man... Derek is an interesting guy. He hired me to do encoding and distribution -- both the business and software sides. I did ok with the software (except for ~2006 Ruby GC unknowingly causing me problems), but my business/people skills weren't up to it at the time. The business side was very very difficult though -- it was really difficult to get the retailers to take more music after the initial load.