I don't know what they want in the end, but everything that I've read is that you don't ever have to pay it back. If I could get $300,000 I'd actually put a little effort into it and maybe create some nice Power Point presentation with a lot of bullshit buzzwords and fancy graphics. You'd be surprised at what good custom design work you can get off of fivver.com for a really low price. It's also interesting to see what else you can find on the internet...
Hmmm, what about researching the historical significance of the "dial-up community" that made up BBS's and the early internet. How much do you think a grant for that would be worth?
There was a lot of crossover with early internet and BBS' with usenet. Towards the end of BBS' there were usenet feeds being added to the different forums. What I think would be a good one is how BBS' were an early version of current social media sites - except well regulated forums kept the loud-mouthed, smoothed-brained, window-lickers from getting a foothold and controlling the conversation. Although, those users were fun to play with for a while until it got boring and then releasing the ban-hammer on them (or better yet, segregated to their own little playpen where their posts would get edited or deleted)...
Oooh, I hadn't thought of that one. BBS's were an early incarnation of social media. That is totally spot on, even to the point where you made friends and enemies and got together with those "computer friends" - the difference was that those that were on the BBS's back then were at least (somewhat) technologically proficient. Nowadays anyone can be on the internet, all you need is a phone...
I sort of wish technology still had the stigma of "geek" and "weirdo" associated with it. And the "normal" people would only use it begrudgingly when forced to. I think we'd have nicer things and people wouldn't be such butt heads. Or just ban social media for anyone that can't pass a simple test of:
- Is the world flat?
- Does the President have a button that controls the price of gas?
- Are people being drugged, waking up in bathtubs with missing kidneys?
- Did we land on the moon?
- Is the government seeding chemicals into the atmosphere using airplane chemtrails?
- Are birds real?
- 8 ÷ 2(2+2)
- Are your opinions more important than facts?
- Do you try and force your beliefs onto others that don't share your same beliefs?
- Have you ever raised your voice and said "I need to speak with your manager!"?
- Are you an expert in world economics, engineering and infrastructure, business management, political law, police investigations with only a high school education or GED?
- 00101010 = what's the question?
And that's funny because I do the same thing with connecting to BBS' that are on the internet for the exact same reason. I recently saw this device and was pretty close to buying it...
While I agree with pretty much every one of those and can add a few more, the "8 ÷ 2(2+2)" really does have two answers and it depends on when you went to school. (And I'm not counting that abomination that they call new math). So when you and I went to school the answer is 16. We follow the PEMDAS rule where parenthesis are first, then exponents, then multiplication and division, then addition and subtraction. But go back a few years before dad went to school and multiplication and division were performed in that specific order, they weren't equally significant and so the answer would be 1...
The point I was trying to make with the 8 ÷ 2(2+2) is that people have a freaking supercomputer* in their damn pockets and yet still argue over how math is done. You can literally copy and paste that into any calculator app and get the answer 16. We don't care about how math was done when using stone tablets and chisels.
* The Cray model 2 FLOPS: 1.9GFLOPS
iPhone 11 (2020) 154.9GFLOPS
Funny you bring up the UltraSatan, yesterday I was scoping out the used Atari 1040ST market and came across the UltraSatan on the AtariAge forum. Oh, the used market is silly. The asking prices are a little too high in my opinion...
Ok, good point. You could also argue that the problem itself is flawed in that it is missing a set of parenthesis... And the supercomputer in my pocket is more than NASA had when they put men on the moon...
You're absolutely right about the ambiguity of the math problem. Pretty much most of these types of "puzzles" always omit some important data where the person answering it will need to make some assumptions based on prior knowledge. There's two kinds of people: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
And someone has built a
2600 on a breadboard...
Just like there are 10 types of people, those that understand binary and those that don't...
But I was thinking, the 6507 isn't running that quickly. What if you built a breadboard 6507 (or 6502 since they are almost functionally the same except for memory limits) and then built the breadboard 2600, and once debugged and you know the lines are correct, integrate the two by replacing the 6507 that's next to the cartridge slot with your breadboard 6502/6507...
Hang on, you mean a deconstructed 6502 on a breadboard? There's like 4,000 transistors in that chip. Someone did something very close to that by creating a
MOnSter 6502...
Ugh, good point. I was remembering Ben Eater's project and it wasn't a deconstructed 6502, but was a 6502 breadboard PC. DOH! And now you show me that someone basically did that and I thought how cool... And even with modern components, it runs at maybe 5% of the speed of the original processor. And how cool that the pic has three Atari components in it, no Commodore pieces in sight!
The Ben Eater video, I've been re-watching his series and he does do an 8-bit from scratch computer on a breadboard where he creates the registers, ALU, ram, stack pointer, flags, etc... I've been tempted a few times to pick up one of his kits. Now I had linked a video of
David Crane a while back where goes into some detail on programming Pitfall. I also read an article about it too in Gameinformer. It still amazes me how brilliant the coding for that game was especially since the 2600 was literally designed for pong type games - hence player, missile, ball sprites...
Oh yeah, I saw that video and while I wanted to watch it, an hour was not something I wanted to give so it never happened. Maybe I'll take some time to actually sit down and pay attention. But what really amazes me about programming for the 2600 was that the developers had to fit all of the game logic into horizontal and vertical blanks. During the time that the screen is actually being drawn the processor is spending its cycles drawing the screen in real time. The first time I heard that my mind was blown and gave a lot more credit to those developers...
Him talking is about 40 minutes with the rest being Q&A. One thing I've been doing a lot is upping the playback speed to 1.25 because I've found a lot of people just talk to slow or there's way to many pauses in their speech.
I remember flipping through that book while killing time - seriously considered picking it up, but then I'd have to build a coffee table to put it on and I didn't need that hassle. But I thought for sure the bottom right picture was the 2600 Asteroid. I was wrong...