Posts by Arthur the cat 3378 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
Remember that at one point, between billiard balls being made out of ivory and modern plastic ones, the balls were made out of nitrocellulose, aka guncotton. If the player put enough force into a shot the collision could do a lot more damage than simply smashing the balls.
"But, the GPS map TOLD me to turn into the river. It's not my fault!"
the last time he took ketamine he had this seemingly brilliant idea for a TV show, so he made sure to write it down while he was still high. He goes back to look at it in the cold light of sobriety and it's just one sentence of pure gibberish
Back when I was a postgrad a fellow pg had a revelation about the universe and its purpose while stoned, and similarly wrote it down for the future. Next morning he remembered writing it down and checked the piece of paper. His great revelation? "Must order another pint of milk." Well, at least it was coherent.
he typed the command "PURGE SYSTEM ALL" on the product console, saying this is one command you must never , ever use. Then, like he does a thousand times a day, he pressed the enter/return key
Catastrophic commands like that should really have at least one level of "are you sure you want to do that?" confirmation. Years ago, when IBM PCs were new, mine had a disk formatting program that asked "are you sure (y/N)?" first and then had a second level of confirmation "honest (H)?" that meant you couldn't just hit 'y' twice and lose the drive contents.
His absolutist, no-compromise attitude to software freedom has benefited all of us, even if sadly it's earned him detractors on the way.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
If ever that quote applied to anyone, it's rms. I'm more on the esr side of things, but you can't deny that without rms we probably would be more locked into walled gardens than we are now.
anyone here remember netbooks?
I not only remember them, I still have a working one - an EEE PC 900. It never ran Windows though - started with Linux, now runs 32-bit FreeBSD with XFCE.
Yes, it's underpowered as hell, but it's very small, and lightweight enough to hold in one hand while I type with the other while it's plugged into a ethernet switch as I debug networking problems.
That's about as stupid as putting backup power generators in the basement of a building that might get flooded. No, you put them on the roof.
Only worthwhile if you put the fuel tanks up there as well. ISTR that a few years back when a huge storm flooded Manhattan one company found out the hard way that leaving the diesel tanks in the (now flooded) basement was not such a bright money saving idea as they had thought.
Unix is clearly inferior to …
That very much depends on one's metric. Existence tends to beat most of them.
the Algol Mainframes of the 1970s
Pah! Mere latecomers! Burroughs stack machines existed in the 1960s.
However, simple fast RISC machines wiped the floor with complex architectures. It's just a Small Matter Of Programming to ensure the compilers are perfect(*). :-)
(*) I'm sure AI will let that happen(**).
(**) Anyone interpreting this as anything other than sarcasm needs remedial lessons in reality.
Unix-like systems (eg: Linux and FreeBSD)
Unless you're a lawyer banging on about trademarks, FreeBSD is not Unix-like, it's Unix. There's a clear line back via the Berkley Software Distribution to the original Bell Labs code. Of course, it's all a bit Ship of Theseus these days.
Yesterday I read an article pointing out the improvements in batteries since the turn of the century, and had to double take as I didn't think they were invented in 1900.
I presume you mean lithium based batteries? The first(*) battery was the voltaic pile, which was invented in 1799.
(*) As far as we know. Give it a couple of decades and I wouldn't be surprised if archaeologists claim the ancient Greeks knew how to make batteries but only used them to light farts at drunken parties.
Invaluable, he was. If you want to make a system idiot-proof, first catch your idiot...
In my case it was Pete. Pete could be totally relied upon to do the most improbable and ridiculous thing when faced with any situation. Absolutely brilliant for ensuring my code could keep running no matter what got chucked at it.
Strangely, the one time all our kit got fried, Pete was in the room but not actually touching anything. He turned up in my office white as a sheet making "bu, bu, bu" noises. What nobody had known was that building management had for some reason run the lightning conductor down the wall outside the computer room. Pete was the only person in the room when a lightning strike hit the building and every piece of equipment turned into a plasma ball toy due to induced EMF while Pete cowered in the middle of the room thinking he was going to die.
Not in the UK of course, the current gov here has had enough of experts...
Whereas experts and pretty much everybody else have had enough of the current government(*).
(*) I use the term loosely, as governing should mean guiding in a considered direction as opposed to executing a drunkard's walk in policy space.
His pithy comment above the code that accepted just a LF (or CR?) was to the effect "you can be right or you can work."
Postel's Law: Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept
Always good advice, although the latter part can get stretched to breaking point at times.
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