Posts by Mike 16

Re: Which xkcd?

You mean you don't have the editor extension that does a search of the text archive for xkcd and return the appropriate URL for the cartoon you dimly remember? Back in the day, I used it often, mostly when composing email replies. (my MUA paid attention to $EDITOR)

I suddenly occurs to me that the "prison joke" (or variants like the "antarctic research station joke") about everybody telling jokes by number, because the all knew them. may have been started by a time-traveller after getting one too many of https://xkcd.com/936/

I guess I don't tell it right...

Re: Ironically

Mmmm, Bacon!

Re: Performance limits

Replacing x86 (and x86_64 aka amd64)? Go for it!

https://www.ebay.com/b/Intel-Itanium-Computer-Processors-CPUs/164/bn_5757133

Maybe compromise with a nice i860 box?

Yeah, barely touched a 4U Itanium server back in the day. Wouldn't mind picking up an Itanium VMS pizza-box, but really only for much the same reason as keeping my KIM-1 running)

Re: Amazon choosing to publish / not publish seems like a no-win situation

Not in the UK, so no experience of this Jihad.

I wonder how this cabal for Coercing Christian Commerce would react to one of my favorite stores in my youth:

[county redacted] Religious Book and Supply, Electric Trains.

Would they force removal of all Diesel locomotives as either "Killers of glorious Steam" or perhaps "Polluting oppressors of Electric Traction"?

Re: I salute that man!

Oddly, DuckDuckgo has no hits, but of course Google has plenty (well, 33) including one that has

koala trebuchet simulation software

in the word-salad which is apparently just there to game ranking.

_One_ Google result actually includes the (one word) TrebuchetKoala, in the search results, but

visiting that page turns up no such thing on offer. It does have

Hallmark Plush Hug 'n' Sing Tootin' Koala Sings, Dances And Passes Wind Sound (not my memory of Hallmark items of old).

Anyway, I can just imagine someone with _way_ too much time on their hands actually making, koala trebuchet simulation software by re-skinning an Angry Birds clone.

For nerd-completeness: Bing also has no results (natch). eBay and Wikipedia likewise (although it would be easier to make a Wikipedia page then to re-skin Angry Birds). Amazon, as usual returns four results, all of them "Close, but no cigar"

(No koalas were skinned in the making of this comment)

Re: All my CRTs have been

Yep! Still have my 13inch SONY TV. Still use it as a monitor for the VCS and Atari800. And maybe teh Video Music if I come across it in some stratum of the shed.

Half-baked ideas

That would be https://www.halfbakery.com/

Must Carry?

I have heard of the "requirement" that cable companies carry any locally receivable channels, and of course pay those channels for the privilege. What bothers me is the increasing pace of local broadcasters shutting down the transmitters (repeaters) they used to use for "A bit outside city limits" folks. How miserable can they make OTA before one _has_ to buy a cable plan? And of course the "basic package" will include "Standard Definition" (480i in the U.S. case), down-sampled from the HD it was broadcast in. And there must be some convoluted rule about what, _exactly_ they must carry, as I do get, OTA, some sub-channels of local stations that my son does not get in his extended lineup on cable.

I assume that eventually, the major networks (or owners, like Sinclair) will operate a 10W transmitter within a few blocks of the local FCC office to qualify. Meanwhile, the physical-disk Netflix subscription is looking better.

Maybe a revival?

Of Quark

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077066/

Or Salvage 1

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078681/

Re: Overpriced joke

Give Apple a chance. They seem hell-bent on making MacOS at least as annoying as iOS. (And as buggy as the worst stereotype of Windows in the mind of a rabid Windows-hater).

No way they are going to achieve iOS/MacOS parity by improving iOS.

I am actually typing this on a MacBook Air, and have an iPhone SE (original). Neither has been "upgraded" all the way to uselessness, yet, but life is too short to chase Android updates, and the Mac _was_ a decent blend of "consumption device for web-grazing and email" and "decent Unix implementation". Catalina seems to be aimed at "fixing" that issue.

Re: wood fired

Careful, you might get some pushback from the sort who take fuel (and by implication cooking temperature profile) very seriously. There is one restaurant in San Francisco that segments their menu that way. No, the choices do not include propane or styrene (side effect of a clueless roommate's reheating strategy), but do include coal-fired. I don't _think_ they included more specific choices, but I'd tend to go with the anthracite, not bituminous.

My credentials? 1/2 Italian, but that half was from the north, so we tended toward Focaccia.

More "crust" than "topping", but bread is a main food group, right?

Not using social media at all

I (dimly) recall when a certain U.S. State mandated that nobody be allowed to block caller-id, with the exception of undercover police officers. I hope that idea went away, along with the idea of slapping a Police Lot parking sticker on Crockett's Ferrari Daytona replica.

Optional?

The problem with any code that one inherits is that the "options" were exercised by the original programmer (or the boss's nephew who "improved" the code). They can only be changed by the current maintainer when the ramifications are completely understood. Good luck with that.

I have written very little Algol 60, but it was the subject of a compiler class, early 1970, and the experience of implementing Call-by-name left me with some useful techniques, and some scars.

As for crap-code from compilers, a friend and I implemented a "code cleaner" for the assembly language output of a then considered very good C compiler, known for producing fast code. Sometimes not so fast, and I'm not sure it was a good trade-off against _correct_ code.

Re: VPN?

It doesn't matter what _I_ find horrific. In the U.S. today, if some plod thinks you _might_ have viewed either (based on "your" VPN provider using your computer as an exit node for someone else), you are in for a world of hurt. I chose those examples because they frequently come up in court cases.

In some cases, viewing Disney I.P. is sufficient to at least make your life suck for a while, and that is the purported _point_ (per the article, I have no direct knowledge) of this process.

Again:

1) I have no idea if the accusations in the article are true, although in this day and age they are plausible.

2) The offensiveness of any content is determined by the legal system, as the owner of the computer involved almost certainly was unaware it was ever viewed, let alone view it themselves.

Re: You get what you paid for.

This is one of those phrases like "I could care less" that seems to have been trimmed a bit from its original formulation: "You never get _more_ than you paid for".

It is entirely possible (likely) that you will get less, no matter how much you paid.

(Cue the wag with the "I'm glad I don't get all the government I pay for")

Re: Falls nicely into the area that computers and maths will remain bad at...

---

I also have a concern that if AI did indeed get good enough, we effectively stop training the medical staff that teach and validate the AI results.

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Black_Bag

Re: Enter the matrix @Robert

Looking back a little further, one recalls the time when a well-connected person needed to have accounts with a whole zoo of email providers, Compuserve, Tymshare, AOL, Prodigy (just kidding) etc. to be reachable for ones friends/clients. This, in turn, was an echo of when competing telephone companies made companies with much custom have multiple phones from multiple companies, for similar reasons.

(A boon for the pigeons, at least, in the days of open-wire overhead) .

We seem to oscillate between having to deal with a dozen incompetent providers and being pillaged by a smaller group of corrupt ones.

Domain roach-motel

One _can_ get a domain registered to (and hosted on, the folly of youth) GoDaddy out, but it takes work and perseverance. What I _can't_ apparently do is get them to acknowledge that I haven't had any business relationship with them for years, so bugging me with "Your account is suspended because the credit card we have on file has expired" emails is at best pointless.

Note the recent story in ElReg about shenanigans in Colombia, where Neustar is reported to be selling (or attempting to sell) their registry business, including .biz, .nyc, and .us to GoDaddy.

Re: Haircuts

You think you haven't gotten a haircut? Check your retirement account.

Re: Western terminology

@jake

--- In addition the "unlucky 13", the Chinese (Taiwanese, Indonesians, some San Franciscans, etc.) have an aversion to the number 4 ---

What part of my comment made you believe I was unaware of unlucky 4?

In any case, the cultural blindness to "missing floors" can be used to advantage.

In the case of the aforementioned hotel, there was indeed a 4th floor, but it was a "service floor" with environmental gear, laundry, and kitchens conveniently placed above the public areas and meeting rooms and below the guest rooms. The service elevators did have access to it.

Not sure how much to lean on the veracity of "Get Smart", but there was an episode where the main office of KAOS (main opponent of Smart's group CONTROL) was on the 13th floor of an office building.

Something of a Purloined Letter writ large.

defined almost entirely by what it does not say.

Reminds me of a certain software company that clearly stated it did not own or use any DEC mainframes. Indeed, it had "sold" the machines to a recently organized contractor and outsourced the tasks they had been doing to said contractor. Oddly, the contractor was located in a building formerly occupied by said software company and staffed by very-recently-ex employees of that company.

Meanwhile, NSO's stance of "We just make the tools, no idea what they are used for" reminds me of "Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department..."

msm.com

And here I was assuming it was an aggregator for Main Stream Media, clearly owned by George Soros and his ilk, and staffed by the usual suspects.

418 I'm a teapot

Subject says it all.

OK, (semi-) real content.

I recall a magazine article from the 1950s on how to implement "warm the house up until I can stand to get out of bed" that involved a coal-fired furnace, banked just right before retiring, and an old-school spring-wound alarm clock. When the alarm sounded, a string wound around the alarm winding key tugged on a "trigger" that allowed a weight to open the damper. As far as I could tell, this was dead serious.

Re: Hasn't it been able to do this for ages?

My recollection of various methods of tethering over the years was that although the manufacturers often provided it, some (most?) carriers (e.g. Verizon) would disable it (Serial/USB/Bluetooth DUN, even back to 1xRTT GPRS) or charge for an entire extra data plan for using WiFi.

Is that not a thing in the civilized world?

Re: Optics

-- No good will come from pandering to the uninformed. --

Pandering to the uniformed is a time-honored path to a cushy gig as President /Emperor for Life. Until someone notices the loophole in the retirement plan.

Or did you mean "No good will come to the _rest_ of the population"?

Re: Checkpoint/restart

Recall doing that on a machine that was old (built in 1956 or so) at the time (1971 or so) with long-running FORTRAN jobs. Yeah, checkpoint to cards was a PITA, but it beat restarting from scratch.

I imagine technology has advanced a bit since then (despite examples in recent memory :-)

how your average person expects the software to work

I once had the privilege of working with a fellow who had a talent for doing "the unusual". Got used to running new code past him, and trying to stifle my urge to ask "Why did you do _that_?", because if one person felt a particular action "made sense", then there may be more, and maybe I should consider not "What I expect them to do", but "What they might do"

Re: Enter Assembler

Not on the coding pad, but a fresh-out-of-school friend admitted, when applying for a job nominally involving PL/1 and COBOL, to experience in BAL (360 assembly). Got stuck for five years as the maintainer of those little snippets of library code that made the system actually work.

Re: Faithed based networking

" I submit to you: That which _is_, is possible"

My reply long ago to a junior engineer staring at a scope trace and exclaiming "That's impossible!"

(Yeah, complete with a very bad Jeremy Brett imitation)