Seems like their homemade ones were working pretty well at a fraction of the cost.

You would need to ask the department for a copy of its policies to see. The ones I have seen say the officer should have it on for every interaction with the public, but sometimes they forget and some other times they “forget”.

You will need to watch the next one to see how a transistor works. It to, is very simple and very clever. I do know how these guys figured it out.

If you have questions I am very happy to try and help. Someone did it for me decades ago.

I had to find this. This explains on an atomic level how semiconductors work. For me this was important for me to gain an intrinsic understanding of what is going on in computers.

https://youtu.be/33vbFFFn04k?si=5W_ymFgYJByXf3sR

It is simple and fascinating and brilliantly clever.

I think you’re asking all the right questions and I think knowledge of these things makes you much more capable.

I think a good answer that you will understand is too long for this format. I gave a brief answer but then I went off looking for better information. Sorry to offend you.

I think this course from Ben eater on how he built his own CPU from logic gates might explain a lot.

I think it also covers how transistors work which is fundamental to how gates work.

https://eater.net/8bit

1. Flashing code to a chip doesn’t really involve light.

2. you used switches on the front panel to load code into the computer by setting individual bits high or low. Typically you toggled in the bootstrap loader, which was a program that read a sequence of number directly into a spot in memory. The first program loaded by the bootstrap loader was usually the absolute loader. This was another program that loaded data from some peripheral, similar to the bootstrap loader, but it could do error checking and also load to non- sequential locations.

3-the Internet isn’t light. It’s electricity. On fiber the bits may be temporarily encoded as light, but overall it is electric.

4- You can understand it all if you want. It depends on the depth to which you want to understand it. You can understand a mouse has a plastic shell. You need some organic chemistry and chemical engineering to understand how to design plastic.

5- I recommend Ben Eaters YouTube channel to get a good overview of the basics.

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It’s a cleanse

I had too, but apparently that is not the case.

The news requires we be upset. That’s where the money is.

Good things are happening around me all the time. I try to stay in the present (though sometimes I do dwell on my future too much.)

Voyager - it was on f droid and it works.

Including a small compact neighborhood uranium mine.

And the rest of you are COBOL programmers.

When IBM did this with mainframes it launched Amdahl into existence. His machines were basically the same machine except they were unharnessed.

I read an article recently that talked about enabling and disabling cores on the fly.

I think chip binning is perfectly reasonable.

I believe Intel is on track to do it again.

So that big pharma can get a piece of the action.

I had a friend that was very good at it.

Get in and get out. Dont hang around. Don’t hesitate.

He said he thought it was like fishing in that you just didn’t know what you were going to get.