rootbear

8 ms·

61.
by rootbear 3y ago
Bruce Perens, a major figure in Debian Linux, worked at Pixar for years. He was my officemate for a while when I was there in the late 90s.
62.
by rootbear 3y ago
I think it was peppermint she liked. I read a bunch of the Miss Pickerell as a kid.
63.
by rootbear 3y ago
I drag this story out most years about this time and reread it. It’s wonderfully crafted.
64.
by rootbear 3y ago
I have read that the Baby was disassembled and parts of it used to build the Mark 1. The Baby had been a proof of concept system for the Mark 1 design.
65.
by rootbear 3y ago
This was a long time ago, but I think you’re correct. If the system didn’t recognize you, it asked if you wanted an account. I only used the account for a year or so, mostly to access some mailing lists. I assume it died of neglect.
66.
by rootbear 3y ago
Interesting comparisons. Students were definitely using Unix in 1975. My first Unix was actually sixth edition running on a PDP-11/45 at the University of Maryland. I started using it in 1979, but the system had been in use for some ye
67.
by rootbear 3y ago
I know someone who uses this phrase as his preferred "Hello world" string when doing some simple test.
68.
by rootbear 3y ago
I’ve also seen the opposite, where in-room Wi-Fi was charged, but in the hotel’s function spaces, it was free. The economics of this are confusing, at best. I have also had the situation where the in-room wi-fi was so slow that using my pho
69.
by rootbear 3y ago
I always attended her talks at Usenix. I'm still sad about her loss.
70.
by rootbear 3y ago
There are some channels on my cable service that seem to be rebroadcasts of these sub-channels. They are unwatchable. Sadly, PBS likes to make use of the sub-channels to offer various educational program streams, but their main channel suff
71.
by rootbear 3y ago
I am an old person and your notions of what we watch are insultingly uninformed. I have played around with OTA on my upstairs TV, where the signal is better, and it's fine for local news, PBS, etc., but I rarely watch much else on it.
72.
by rootbear 3y ago
The linux image on the beagleboard site for the Black is three years old. Is it possible to just boot generic ARM linux on the Black now? Is there another site for official images?
73.
by rootbear 3y ago
"SUSE forking RHEL" sure sounds like a double entendre in this context.
74.
by rootbear 3y ago
A friend who worked at PARC in the 80s said they had printers named for snakes, such as copperhead, rattler, etc. The sales guy named his "trouser"...
75.
by rootbear 3y ago
When I worked at NASA, I basically did both. We had fixed format official "cattle" names that included the organization code and the computer's inventory number. Those names were useless to humans, so I always also registered
76.
by rootbear 3y ago
There is a link what appears to be part one in the article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hx8RixhoOM
77.
by rootbear 3y ago
For a long time, the only (official) DVD available was a pan-and-scan version that was not very good. The new Shout Factory Blu-Ray release I have is excellent and worth buying if you want the best possible version. I need to hunt down a co
78.
by rootbear 3y ago
I meant email, which is generally my default meaning for "mail". I could have worded it better...
79.
by rootbear 3y ago
Thank you! I took a programming languages survey course when getting my Masters at GWU in the early 90s. It was taught by Dr. Maurer. I couldn’t remember his name, but I did remember that he was into SNOBOL. I really need to find his “Forty
80.
by rootbear 3y ago
When I was a sysadmin at the Naval Research Laboratory in the 80s, I was asked to install Icon, Ralph Griswold’s follow-on language to SNOBOL. I had a little trouble installing it on our Gould minicomputer and mailed in a support request. I
81.
by rootbear 4y ago
When I first read about the MTS, and saw that it was used at Wayne State, I asked my friend if he remembered it from his time there in the 70s and he said he used it quite a bit and remembered it well.
82.
by rootbear 4y ago
The book “Robots of Westinghouse” has a lot of information on Elektro and several predecessor robots Westinghouse built. The book is uneven and needed an editor, but the technical content is fascinating. Elektro was built largely with compo
83.
by rootbear 4y ago
The educational angle is far from gone. The Raspberry Pi Foundation handles that part of it now. https://www.raspberrypi.org I would agree that most of the Pis sold are not used for education, but that doesn't diminish thei
84.
by rootbear 4y ago
Yep. I worked for a half dozen different contracting companies over those years and in three different groups. I was at Goddard two separate times, with a three year break in the Real World in between. My two stints together amount to just
85.
by rootbear 4y ago
Argh. I just finished Project Hail Mary and I missed that.
86.
by rootbear 4y ago
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is in Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside the Beltway. I was a contractor there, mostly as a Unix and Linux system administrator, for nearly 30 years. It's a great place to work, but the salaries won&#x27
87.
by rootbear 4y ago
When I was at the University of Maryland in the late 70s, we had a student chapter of the ACM that met regularly. Once a year (or semester, I forget) we had "Career Night" when local IT companies would do a presentation of what th
88.
by rootbear 4y ago
I was fascinated to learn that the Apollo Guidance Computer was wire-wrapped. A good wire-wrap is a very reliable and durable connection.
89.
by rootbear 4y ago
Thank you! When I encounter an unknown term on HN, I try to find out for myself what it is before bugging everyone, but it doesn't always work.
90.
by rootbear 4y ago
Alpha Rho Epsilon? Alpha Pee Epsilon? Google isn't helping me here...

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