whartung

37 ms·

571.
by whartung 3y ago
Fun little Selectric and tech crossover anecdote. Unlike normal typewriters, the Selectric used a single use film ribbon. The letters typed were visible on the used ribbon. So each used ribbon essentially had a copy of every letter typed on
572.
by whartung 3y ago
I was thinking about DEBUG a bit ago. There's a story, it may even be true, that Chuck Moore bootstrapped ColorForth using just DEBUG and a floppy. Now, to be fair, you can develop in DEBUG with DEBUG, and an editor (EDIT.COM perhaps).
573.
by whartung 3y ago
It was made into a movie. Well, at least one movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095738/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_5_tt_8... It was really bad. I paid money for it. Did I mention it was really bad?
574.
by whartung 3y ago
Another hot tip. The weak ones don’t prepare you for the strong ones. I’ve been rocking and rolling in So Cal for decades. I’ve felt most of the major quakes that have made the news. I’ve seen stuff fall from my walls, transformers short ou
575.
by whartung 3y ago
I tried skydiving once, and was underwhelmed. Did nothing for me. I tried that "indoor skydiving" thing they had in Vegas, where you wear a particular style suit, and jump into an air stream powered by a propeller in the floor. Th
576.
by whartung 3y ago
It’s still “WOW” and tickles my “remember when” neurons.
577.
by whartung 3y ago
I was just thinking about the other day how much cash used to flow through grocery stores. The routine was to show up at the store with your paycheck, cash it, pay for your groceries, and keep the change. Our store used to have the safe up
578.
by whartung 3y ago
I had this happen to me, though I can’t recall how I fixed it. In general I’ve had good success with Time Machine. I, too, have lost TM volumes. I just erased them and started again. Annoying to be sure but 99.99% of the time don’t need a y
579.
by whartung 3y ago
The corollary is the scenes from the movie “The Grifters” where one aspect of Angelica Huston’s character is she goes to tracks to put large bets on long shots to lower the impact on the mobs illegal bookmaking system, in case the horse act
580.
by whartung 3y ago
I was a regular reader of his columns in Scientific American. I think I have one of the anthology books. I enjoyed the columns, tickled my geeky interests. Outside of what I read in SA, I didn’t know anything about him. He was just a by lin
581.
by whartung 3y ago
I hope it's detailed. Curious to see how I turn out in it.
582.
by whartung 3y ago
The back door is damage. The resulting sshd is like a door with a broken lock. This patch breaks the lock. Transmitting the patch caused intentional damage.
583.
by whartung 3y ago
Is that a distinction between modern SSD drives and the small spinning drives? The ECC? Is a modern SSD more resistant to corruption than a modern spinning drive? And the drives I’m talking about the external usb drives everyone (me) have d
584.
by whartung 3y ago
Is this a "cycle accurate" system? (For assorted values of "accurate".) That is, is what were seeing with this similar to what we'd see on real hardware, or is the browser the determinant of performance.
585.
by whartung 3y ago
Boy, I’d love nothing more than for some team at Apple to take the NS 3.3 source code and port it to an RPi 400. They could even punt on the multi core aspect. Just port the drivers and get the frame buffer to work with the raw DPS server.
586.
by whartung 3y ago
The Costco car buying program is pretty good, we bought one several years ago using it. We even ordered the car.
587.
by whartung 3y ago
What functionality blew you away? What part of OpenVMS, architecturally, can not be replicated today on open systems?
588.
by whartung 3y ago
What I like here is the "unix style do one thing" part of here's a simple ("simple") SQL script that pumps into GraphViz which does all of the heavy lifting.
589.
by whartung 3y ago
> I just can’t fathom how he was able to do that. Honestly, it's not that hard. Not for a decent assembler. The "hard parts" of assembly are things like trying to do multi-precision stuff on smaller precision machines (lik
590.
by whartung 3y ago
Now they tell me. I just had this done yesterday, and the prep is hell. It two factors. The first is the diet. It may as well be a fast. I had a couple things of chicken broth for breakfast and lunch, with some clear soda for a boost of sug
591.
by whartung 3y ago
So, do you think this was a twinkle in the back of Conways mind when he was scheming and coming up with the game?
592.
by whartung 3y ago
Semi-related, there’s an anecdote that the InterBase database was selected for use within the M1 Abraham’s tank because it was particularly robust in its implementation. Apparently an issue with the M1 is that because of the energy produced
593.
by whartung 3y ago
The magic of Postgres (and, quite arguably, MySQL, SQLite, etc.) is simply the idea that a sophisticated RDBMS is ubiquitous. I came from the Old Days when we had to chisel BASIC code into cooling silicon. Having something like a SQL RDBMS
594.
by whartung 3y ago
I drive along in my Jeep and now and again marvel at the bazillion pieces in it. How many man hours went in to the design, drawings, renderings, steps to make ready for manufacturing, finding a contractor, casting it, coating it, polishing
595.
by whartung 3y ago
Well, they cut communication lines in advance. They apparently used signaling to coordinate the attack. They knew exactly what they were shooting at, it wasn’t a bunch of yahoos blasting away at highway signs. It would be interesting to hea
596.
by whartung 3y ago
Yea, Metcalf. My understanding (if it’s the right one) was the NC attack struck a pair of stations that were particularly important to the network. That the loss of those two stations had a much higher impact in contrast to the loss of two
597.
by whartung 3y ago
Years ago, somewhere in Northern California, there was attack of (I think) power substation. Someone was shooting at parts of the station. As described it was a very well run, very knowledgeable operation. The shooting was quite precise. Fa
598.
by whartung 3y ago
Back in the day, we were use a SQL db on the PC. The planner wasn’t particularly sophisticated in those days, nor was the data volume crushing. But in the end, we would take all of our queries, and check their plans. We would pad the db wit
599.
by whartung 3y ago
An archival quality format can take this into account with error correction data and logic. Nothing says you have to use the common formats (which may be more vulnerable to data corruption) for the archives.
600.
by whartung 3y ago
The McDs ice cream experience is just flat out the worst. It's like ice cream lottery. "Boy, a bit of ice cream might be nice!" And it's a total crapshoot. Drive up with no idea whether it's going to happen or not.

More ›