etfb

8 ms·

31.
by etfb 12y ago
I used to work for AGIMO, and I personally implemented the first version of australia.gov.au. Funny story: I got caught posting something on Slashdot that they interpreted as critical of their decision making (spoiler: it was, because thei
32.
by etfb 12y ago
The Australian government is particularly stupid at the moment. I leave as an exercise for the reader the question of whether this is example or counter-example of that.
33.
by etfb 12y ago
Your comment would have been amusingly surreal if there were no closing tags for the <uint32_t> stuff in the article. I'm almost disappointed that there were. I wonder who was responsible for that particular bug in the Facebook
34.
by etfb 12y ago
He got himself fired for being an idiot. My Dad would have done the same regardless of who it was; the only difference is that some other kids (or parents) might have been too timid to approach him about it. But yeah, thanks for your interp
35.
by etfb 12y ago
Not a lot of call for that in Australia. Brilliant mental image though. "Now it's time for your 'Avoiding Hypothermia In A Hole In The Ice Whilst Being Stalked By Polar Bears' Lesson, children! Line up quickly please!&
36.
by etfb 12y ago
Dateline: nineteen seventy-mumble. School swimming lesson, small town rural Australia. Me, aged seven, evidently having a mild but irritating panic attack about having to go into the water. Swimming instructor gets sick of my shit and th
37.
by etfb 12y ago
Now I want to say something oblivious so I can be anontweeted too!
38.
by etfb 12y ago
I think it must have been. If he was aware of it at all, he would have associated it with the Reverse Polish Notation of his HP calculator, and probably knew that, while they were certainly powerful, RPN calcs were never going to make it t
39.
by etfb 12y ago
Woz is, for me, the ISO standard geek, the distillation of all that I aspire to. Somewhere in Paris is a vault, and in that vault is a platinum-iridium Steve Wozniak, against which all of us are judged and found wanting.
40.
by etfb 12y ago
https://google.com/search?q=define:irony
41.
by etfb 12y ago
The primary reason I won't work for Google is because I'm nowhere near smart enough. But I like to tell myself that the ethical shortcuts they've taken in pursuit of the almighty dollar are a good secondary reason. It'
42.
by etfb 12y ago
Sometimes, you gotta go for the Godwin. Victim blaming like the OP just indulged in, that was one of those times.
43.
by etfb 12y ago
Dude. Victim blaming. Not cool. Seriously not cool. As in, giving-a-ninety-year-old-Jew-a-shower-head-and-a-gas-bottle not cool.
44.
by etfb 12y ago
I'm sure there's an Autism spectrum upon which Asperger's syndrome lies, and I'm sure that psychology (as distinct from psychiatry) is a scientific discipline, so logic dictates that the weak link is your statement that
45.
by etfb 12y ago
I'm not aware of drinking being a huge problem in Australia either, but that may be the particular places I happen to have worked. Certainly "goin' out 'n gettin' pissed" is an important part of weekly (even
46.
by etfb 12y ago
The Rule of Steves says that, in any workplace, the number of female programmers will never exceed the number of programmers named Steve. I worked one place where that wasn't true, but only because it was overrun with Johns rather tha
47.
by etfb 12y ago
Definition of unintended consequences: I don't instantly recognise the names Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or whoever the other guy is -- I have to look them up, and to be honest I keep mixing up Larry Page and Larry Wall. But I know Vic G
48.
by etfb 12y ago
That comment was such an epic burn, it contributed to global warming! ... Which is why, I suspect, the commenter you replied to won't believe it either. Sigh.
49.
by etfb 12y ago
I was on Kubuntu when it shifted from 3.5 to 4.0. Gods, what a mess that was! I presume it's had time to settle down now; is it back to being as reliable as 3.5 was? Or do people with long memories still have to grit their teeth at
50.
by etfb 12y ago
Well, that was fun. The upgrade crashed halfway through. I rebooted in recovery mode, finished the upgrade using the dpkg repair option, and then restarted a few times and found that it still wasn't working. Looked like a video prob
51.
by etfb 12y ago
She's a war criminal. That's enough reason to put up with the inconvenience of switching to a different cloud storage solution, I think.
52.
by etfb 13y ago
There's a PDF there of Programming The PET/CBM, by Raeto West. I loved that book - read it from cover to cover, drained it of all its knowledge. I can still tell you random things about the CBM-8032's memory map and ROM code
53.
by etfb 13y ago
Read a statistic once that the language with the most lines of code written in it was probably Excel's version(s) of BASIC. Not sure when that was or how reliable.
54.
by etfb 13y ago
Yeah, w3schools is not a good example. Stack Exchange, however...
55.
by etfb 13y ago
One out of ten for me - I loathe Comic Sans, but item 1-9 don't fit me at all.
56.
by etfb 13y ago
Every complaint about "political correctness gone mad" (that's the Daily Mail catchphrase you're paraphrasing here) really boils down to this: I enjoy acting like a prick. Somebody with more power than me is forcing me t
57.
by etfb 13y ago
Interesting - I think your prejudices are out of date. Ubuntu has been an out-of-the-box thing for me for the last two or three years, on old and new hardware, laptop and desktop. Of course I avoid Acer on principle, preferring to stick w
58.
by etfb 13y ago
Hearts and minds. It's a free product and installed and activated (and pushed!) by default in Win8, as far as I can see, so you can't really measure success, but I would estimate one in three non-tech-savvy people I talk to unders
59.
by etfb 13y ago
Really? Intriguing! I'm used to MS jumping onto bandwagons late ("Oh, so Netscape is doing well? Maybe this 'inter-net' thingy isn't just a fad. Get Spyglass on the phone.") but maybe this time they had the pro
60.
by etfb 13y ago
That always seemed to me a bandwagon feature, like Microsoft's SkyDrive: they saw DropBox succeeding, they figured it would be easy to emulate, and they learned otherwise when they tried it. The only way this change affects me persona

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