DrScump

37 ms·

361.
by DrScump 7y ago
Most of this strikes me as mundane word salad, none of which can compare with human-composed entries to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest[0]. It seeks "an atrocious opening sentence to a hypothetical bad novel." This year's w
362.
by DrScump 7y ago
Not every element of a declassified program is declassified, as there can be technologies shared with extant programs.
363.
by DrScump 7y ago
The famous Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, the USAF's satellite control center I just got off westbound 237 at Mathilda an hour ago for the first time in years. It's so strange to see that entire side of the road leveled in the
364.
by DrScump 7y ago
I remember when every incremental advance in modem speeds and standards was a big thing. Companies like Sparco[0] were major movers. At home, moving up from a 300/1200 external modem to a 9600bps internal (backplane card) was huge. I w
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by DrScump 7y ago
people got together and conspired Hence Charles II's claim that London coffeehouses were nurseries of sedition and rebellion.
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by DrScump 7y ago
No, I just had the customer rep send a note appeoving the new system with unwanted reports removed. (This was a mainframe shop, where excess CPU, I/O, and printing had meaningful costs.)
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by DrScump 7y ago
between 100 and 1,000 users that experience the same issue but didn't bother to complain or call Which is often because users have no (established, straightforward) process for reporting, or recognizing, a defect. I found an
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by DrScump 7y ago
a rewrite... is still more of a risk than fixing what isn't broken. Defining "broken" is the problem. A long-extant program may be "broken" even while it meets customer expectations, and "fixing" i
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by DrScump 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 480+ points
370.
by DrScump 7y ago
(2014) Original submit from 2015, 330+ points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9019192
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by DrScump 7y ago
The Wyse terminals we used with UNIX in the late 80s had 25 lines -- 24 regular lines, plus a bottom status line. Almost half of that line could be written to using escape sequences -- in UNIX, a simple "echo" command with the pro
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by DrScump 7y ago
"The punch card remained a keystone of data processing until the 1970s, and its impact still remains." I worked for an aerospace contractor in the mid-80s, and the corporate computing center was an IBM mainframe shop (originally 3
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by DrScump 7y ago
in London Will you be needing "boots on the ground" in SV later?
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by DrScump 7y ago
kill lets you send any signal to a process you have control over. Corresponding signal handlers allow a wide range of behavior changes.
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by DrScump 7y ago
In SV, anyway, we had two free computing magazines that had a lot of ads: Computer Currents (biweekly) and MicroTimes (monthly).
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by DrScump 7y ago
The best, and perhaps the original, use of this concept: in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"[0] as Arthur complains about the surprise demolition of his home: " On display? I eventually had to go down to the cella
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by DrScump 7y ago
In SV, Metro (free, weekly) prints some quality journalism from San Jose Inside. Jennifer Wadsworth writes some very thorough pieces.
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19-Year-Fugitive Silicon Valley tech executive hauled into federal court(mercurynews.com)
3 points by DrScump 7y ago|0 comments
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by DrScump 7y ago
I think ALTER usage was formally disallowed.
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by DrScump 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21340754 230+ points
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Eat My Phone: SJSU uses power of metal-munching bacteria in rare-earth recycling(metroactive.com)
6 points by DrScump 7y ago|0 comments
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A Condo Sale Became a Drawn-Out Bureaucratic Nightmare for One SJ Resident(sanjoseinside.com)
3 points by DrScump 7y ago|0 comments
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by DrScump 7y ago
It was odd to use the Referendum mechanism for this; it merely undoes the effects of SB10. A full-on Initiative Statute has the same signature burden but allows the authors to rewrite the law as they like. Maybe they feared the Secretary of
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by DrScump 7y ago
This is awesome. This would be useful for every science teacher and student.
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by DrScump 7y ago
how much uglier real-world code is One of my first projects in COBOL was to complete a rewrite, using structured programming, of a report writer that dated back into the 1960s. If you think COBOL is hard to follow, imagine COBOL co
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by DrScump 7y ago
There was an option in the old CAPEX optimizing COBOL compilers I used back in the 80s: you could print out the IBM 370 assembly language it generated from your COBOL source -- a look "under the hood", so to speak.
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by DrScump 7y ago
No, it wasn't. Non-programmers didn't program in COBOL. Non-programmers generally lacked access to IDEs (even basic TSO workflows), compilers, and computer time, let alone JCL and data sets. COBOL was intended for business cases f
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by DrScump 7y ago
Just FYI: your web page doesn't show any openings that I can see. Also, attempting to subscribe to the email alerts results in no response to the Submit button (using Brave on Android). And I live maybe 2 miles from your Sunnyvale offi
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by DrScump 7y ago
10:33pm Monday local time (PDT), 05:33:42 Tuesday UTC. It was preceded by a foreshock of magnitude 2.5 by 9+ minutes. Pleasant Hill is 23 miles (37km) NE of San Francisco, CA. The earthquakes are not hypocentered in either the San Andreas f
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Magnitude 4.5 Earthquake in SF Bay Area (1km SSE of Pleasant Hill) Monday Night(earthquake.usgs.gov)
2 points by DrScump 7y ago|1 comments

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