barryp

Not surprising, I often felt you could roll your face across the keyboard and it'd be a valid perl program.

Never got to touch the Cray, but did some Fortran work on a Perkin-Elmer minicomputer the Aviation department had.

Looking back, in the space of 3 years I got to work on quite a few completely different OSes (VSPC, VM/CMS, MS-DOS, VMS, Unix, whatever the Perkin-Elmer was) and languages (Pascal, 370 assembler, PL/I, Fortran, Lisp, Ada, C)

I wonder if kids nowadays get that kind of broad experience.

Oh cool, a UND Computer Science Alumni hangout. I started with Pascal on the IBM mainframe VSPC in the fall of '83. Batch processing was a shock coming from an Apple ][ background in high school. Was nicer when we got access to the interactive machines like the VAX and the PDP/11. I liked Ada, vaguely remember it being on the VAX.

Still have my photocopied manual for BSD 2.9 on the PDP/11 - never imagined at the time that that Unix stuff would take over the world. Nice to have had that early exposure.

(not the person you're replying to, but as someone with aphantasia I'll bite...)

I can imagine sounds extremely well. For songs I feel like I have a CD player in my head, remembering even surprisingly subtle nuances and bits of a song. No musical background at all - maybe I should have been one.

Dreams are sometimes extremely vivid - sometimes I wake up astonished and the colors and the imagery I saw, but the memory quickly fades. After finding out about aphantasia I'm frustrated to hear that others can do the same thing while awake.

Read tons and tons of SciFi for the last 40 years. No images through, it's like listening to a radio play. Maybe that's why I'm drawn to movies, TV, and comic books - for the supplied visual material.

I wish the login page, which contains two <form> tags, didn't have identical fieldnames in the two forms, "acct" and "pw" - it confuses 1Password, which always wants to fill in and submit the "Create Account" form when I'm trying go log in, which naturally then gives me an error "That username is taken. Please choose another."

Can you have more than one YubiKey associated with an AWS account? Or also setup TOTP, or have a set of backup codes in case you lost your hardware device? Seems kind of dangerous if you can only have one MFA method setup

Yeah, it's kind of a natural HUD. However even though it could definitely be mimicked with electronics, a biological self-hack would have the advantages of not worrying about battery life, software updates, security, etc.

If you were in a future Mad-Max dystopia, you'd definitely want a bio-hack to guide you around instead of a fragile piece of plastic and silicon.

Very cool. However it's not using great circle routes for airline directions, for example ask to go from Calgary to London. It should go well over Greenland, but instead just follows the same path you'd get from drawing a line on a Mercator map.

I thought this was going to be some kind of April Fool's thing where it went from spreadsheets and tables and eventually ended up with space combat.

That screenshot in the middle with the moon had me going for a second.

The Youtube video says 17,481.45 kg of glass. Maybe the IEEE article meant to say 17 metric tons.

"if you don't speak nerd" ... seriously "fcuk" you you mouth-breathing Biff Tannen wannabe.

I hope somebody at Apple can get it through their heads that a Mac Pro desktop doesn't need to be the thinnest, lightest box full of the most exotic parts with corners engineered to within fractions of a millimeter. It just needs to:

1. Run macOS

2. be fast as hell

3. be quiet

4. be reasonably priced

5. be somewhat expandable on the inside with RAM and disks

6. have a variety of external ports

7. be spec-bumped at least once a year.

Do that and you'll sell units, and more importantly keep devs and creative types happy

I really enjoyed Dave Grohl's documentary "Sound City", a large part of which revolves around his purchase of a Neve console, and bringing together many famous artists who recorded iconic albums on that very console, to relate their stories of recording at Sound City, and record new tracks with Dave and the rest of the Foo Fighters.

Dave's enthusiasm for the Neve and analog recording in general really opened my eyes.

I was curious about the workers from Ohio who went to the USSR to help setup the transferred equipment (did they make it back? end up in a gulag?), found this short article:

https://dueber-hampden.blogspot.com/2012/12/to-russia-with-l...

Sounds like they were treated like kings and came home after their contract was up

As a cyclist, I find it frustrating when cars behave unpredictably. If you get to a 4-way stop before I do, I'm basically planning on timing my crossing to go after you do - and maybe use the delay for a chance to catch my breath.

But if a driver suddenly decides throw the 4-way stop etiquette out the window and start directing traffic from behind a windshield I often can't see through clearly because of tinting/my sunglasses/glare-from-the-sun. I'm at a bit of a loss...are they waving me though? talking to a kid in the back seat? messing with their phone?

If I go, I'm risking my neck if they were in fact distracted and not waving me though. If I resist going out-of-turn, that's awkward because my feeling is some drivers get frustrated I'm ignoring their attempt to help me out.