bondolo

There was a CP/M machine that I knew of that would only work when plugged in to the printer.

The reason turned out to be a ground fault. The computer used only a two prong plug for power. The printer used a three prong plug with proper ground and the centronics cable/connection between the two units had a grounded shell and shielding foil in the cable.

I do the same but regularly get spam. I just got a spam email today for automobile insurance and the source was an automotive buying company I used about a month ago. The businesses don't appear to be related in any way.

The strangest one ever was an email address given to a boutique spa hotel in Oregon showing up on spam announcing a new production from a local California community musical theatre. I must have given the hotel my zipcode as well so the email was sold based upon my location.

I found an old sheep intestine condom in a 19th century engineering reference book. The pages where I found it had been water damaged, likely, I later learned, from the condom having been washed after use and put in the book to dry and then forgotten. Condoms were expensive at the time and frequently reused.

I did not keep either the condom or the book.

I loved the sentence: "We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project."

Do credit scores and the costs of borrowing associated with specific scores correlate to the actuarial risk of default or is it just a huge scam to justify usury? What is to stop them from charging twice as much for 2% additional risk? "It is not our fault you have less than perfect credit"

When was it ever just or working?

For more detail about JPEG XL: https://ds.jpeg.org/whitepapers/jpeg-xl-whitepaper.pdf

I remember something I read from the 1970s which suggested that the Earth’s carrying capacity was about 2.1 billion. That number of humans could be sustained indefinitely. Going higher than that would result in environmental degradation that would reduce the carrying capacity. We are now at that point and the population will go higher in spite of the the low birth rates. Every day we diminish the environment and de-terraform the Earth.

I am fine with the population declining naturally over time. I wish the Western countries could do more to absorb additional immigrants. This would have a positive effect for their own aging demographics but also worldwide as money flows to home countries.

I will probably die about the time population reaches the peak. I have always felt that that peak will be a difficult time because of poverty and demographics. Nothing we are doing now is preparing well for that time.

There are going to be a lot of people in this self-selected group who will have had experiences with gifted education or, like myself, felt the distinct lack of those opportunities.

In my own case, I grew up in a rural area with very small schools and limited resources, what was available for enrichment was likewise limited but thankfully included at least libraries and access to computers and eventually the pre-Internet network community.

I don't believe in meritocracy in education--I saw enough inequality of opportunity to disabuse me of the notion that achievement in education at every stage was simply because the cream rose to the top. The best student of mathematics I ever knew became a surveyor because that was the career available to him--he HAD to be earning a living within three months of graduation. Exceptional ability, for him, meant only that he had the option of a less physically demanding job. Regarding real meritocracy on the achievement side there are enough stories like https://twitter.com/cesifoti/status/1494369809538195456 or almost any female PhD can relate if you care to listen to hopefully convince anyone that meritocracy is certainly suspect if not absent in education.

If it is not a meritocracy then what is the purpose of the highly competitive educational system including gifted programs? There is almost always some element of talent to be sure but there is also the luxury to pursue the opportunity, willingness or eagerness to compete, additional resources spent in preparing for admission and even just motivation or focus on the opportunity. Not all of this is dependent upon the individual, as others have pointed out, but also on parents who try get the best for their child. Perhaps the competitive system exists to make it easier for resourceful competitors to apply influence to get the result they desire.

I would prefer to see efforts which reduce the value of pursuing the competitive game. Why not self-paced programs available to anyone? Why not MOOCs? The self-selective participation even in high profile MOOCs like Sebastian Thrune's Stanford robotics MOOC points towards interest and self-motivation being the most important determiners. This seems like something we should want to reward. Maybe the reward for completion of MOOCs should be more individual attention up to and including enrolment. Perhaps there were even those who thought that self-enrichment was an inferior choice to more traditional approaches for optimizing educational competitiveness. Should we really reward that?

The threshold problem of competitive programs has always bothered me as well. Rather than a bright line threshold maybe we should be using chance to select amongst candidates; the higher the competitive score, the more likely your admission, but near the "solely by ranking" threshold choose among those above and below it with some degree of randomness. Why? Not just because it is unreasonable to regard the ranking criteria as infallible, but because selection on a narrow criteria is an imperfect determinant of outcome. Increasing the breadth of people who can enter the program will improve the selection of people who are motivated to apply and encourage applicants to try again. (Certainly I am only suggesting that programs only accept people which a high chance of completion in the program). Again, self-selection will drive those who really want it versus those who might be "qualified" on a competitive basis but actually disinterested. It grieves me when I hear of people graduating from highly competitive research physics programs or similar to go off and be a quant at some bank. Not because of my hatred of banks but because producing a quant is a wrong outcome for a competitive physics program; what the hell is the point if it doesn't make research physicists as promised?

One thing that seems to have changed is the understanding of impermanence. I loved the things I built with Lego but quickly had to accept that none of them was permanent. Kill your darlings to build the next thing. Being too enamoured with what you built before reduced your options for building new creations and you found that you loved nothing so much that you weren't willing to destroy it to accomplish your new goals.

Imagine you have gym membership. The Gym is OK but the equipment isn't always maintained and the staff are underpaid. One day you come in and dead centre is a brand new expensive and loud fart machine. You decide this is too much and join a different gym. How is this "silencing" Joe Rogan?

GTA 6 was as inevitable as more Fast and Furious movies.

I feel mixed about this because "sold by Amazon" meant that if there was a problem I got to deal with Amazon customer service rather than trying to get service from some Joe with a mailbox 3rd-party reseller.

Yes, I often knew I was paying more and explicitly chose the SBA option as a loss-risk reduction strategy.

"the whole world is talking about the test certificates of a tennis player right now"

No, I don't give a shit about any tennis players and am tired of celebrity and sports activities being "news". Very few people actually do care, let those people read/watch niche media sources if they want to do so but don't make it part of the mainstream news. I would be perfectly fine if I never heard another tennis (or golf, or hockey, or football) story in my life. If a story affects nobody or very few people and has no advisory or actionable element then it doesn't deserve to be part of international "news".

The PDP docs only had the instruction set. The boot deck that was being used would have been a custom "site" deck that in addition to booting the computer also provided information about the peripheral configuration. The program listing we had was the assembler for the site deck. We had no idea how the assembly program was assembled in to a card deck because we couldn't do it ourselves without some boot working boot deck and we didn't have an assembler or any compilers anyway. We presumed that the deck had been produced on another PDP-8 at the time our PDP-8 was installed.

The problem was that the first card was damaged, it was "eaten" by the card reader and about the left third of it was completely missing.

One of my first summer intern jobs was recreating the boot deck for a PDP 8. The first card in the deck had become damaged and there was no backup. We had an old assembler listing of the boot program but no assembler. I did not know PDP assembly but knew 6502, Z80 and 370. I had done all my Z80 writing machine code directly as I had no assembler there either. So I read the PDP docs and hand assembled the first card. It was a relief when I found that the first instruction on the second card lined up as did the next several and the last instruction on the second card. We were pretty sure we had the right deck. I powered on the PDP, keyed the boot sequence, hit run and the deck loaded. The ready light came on and I loaded the next deck, the copy deck program. It loaded successfully as well and I reloaded the boot deck in to the card reader. Pressing the start button was a moment of suspense but when the card punch started clacking out a duplicate deck I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

We had talked at lunch that day about making a special boot deck whose sole purpose would be to punch a replacement standard boot deck, but it seemed too ambitious for something rarely needed.

Asking a few years later, the boot deck had lasted until the machine had been retired. The backup deck had never been used

I started on monochrome dark screens with white, green or orange phosphors. When I first started (briefly) using a Lisa in 1983 and then a Macintosh in 1984 I found that I really liked the paper-white look.

Eventually I decided that I preferred that the theme match the ambient lighting conditions. The recent operating system and browser features to provide adaptive behaviour is exactly what I sought. I now use light themes during the day–I am also a fan of natural light, and dark themes at night with reduced blue and lower colour saturation. I personally don't understand the preference for dark themes in bright ambient lighting. For me it seems to induce more eyestrain than relieving it.

Yes, I got it on the recommendation of a friend but have read less than a quarter of it so far so don't have my own opinion yet. Because I am cheap bastard I got my copy on eBay for $4.

I started developing software in the days before the Internet. It was indeed very different. My choices about what to remember and how I remember things have changed significantly since the ubiquitous availability of searchable information. I no longer have tomes of K&R, processor manuals, Inside Macintosh or Java books on my desk. The only technical book which happens to be on my desk at the moment is "Anti-patterns".

I have been "weeding" my paper books, especially technical books over the last couple of years and gotten rid of an entire bookshelf of books. I still have an entire bookshelf with Knuth TAoCP, math books, type theory, graphics, graph theory, control theory, physics and some nostalgic books like my original Motorola 68000 processor guide, Rodney Zaks Z80 book, "Adventure game programming in BASIC", Commodore 64 Innerspace Compendium, etc.

When a puppy chewed up my copy of "Linux in a Nutshell" I was tempted to buy the new edition but decided to try it online for a month with O'Reilly Safari through work and have not bothered to replace the paper copy for more than 2 years.

I would categorize the main change in style of memory as a shift from focus on remembering details and facts, which I can look up, to using memory for decision trees, processes and methodologies which either can't be looked up or are significantly personally customized. I consciously "outsource" the simpler and to me, less valuable, aspects of memory. Some of this is handled automatically by the IDE I use and the rest is done with mostly Google searches.

The only thing I liked about my c2003 Toshiba laptop was the physical controls; a volume dial and a wifi switch. I also did like the Blackberry dial, scrolling through messages on my mobile isn't as convenient one handed as it was with the dial.

Why would you want to live there? I can imagine the moon being a place for mining, industrial operations and as a staging base for outer system missions. But a place to live? No, sorry, if a place fails the test that Antarctica is more hospitable and commodious I can't imagine people living there without a specific purpose. And, just like Antarctica, the high cost of keeping people alive there is going to always (OK for at least the next couple of thousand years) limit the practical population.

"a citizen with the surname Li had signed up"

Well that certainly narrows it down.

Editor fetishism should have died in the last millennium.

This is more of a "hacker" tip than something for web developers but "Show Page Source" will show you the full raw HTML for any page. Be careful where you use it though as it is illegal in some states.

You mean this one?

https://container-registry.oracle.com/ords/f?p=113:4:1094175...

Or if you prefer OpenJDK: https://container-registry.oracle.com/ords/f?p=113:4:1094175...

That contract was signed by Sun before the acquisition and was discontinued by Oracle as soon as they could.

Sun did it originally during the waning days as well as an even worse yahoo toolbar. Oracle discontinued the contract as soon as they could after acquiring Sun.

Or you can pay to license the JRE and include it.

Does the password strategy really just truncate passwords over 64 characters? I don't use them often but since text passwords typically have low number of significant bits per character I have always assumed that the input string was hashed to a fixed length password that would increase in quality until the randomness of the text approached random bytes. My current secure passphrase is a paragraph that I have memorized from a book, about 250 characters, but I only type it a couple of times per month. Disappointing if 190 or so characters of this typing is indeed wasted effort and that at least 8 bytes or more (1-3 bits per character) of entropy is wasted per password because text doesn't use all 8 bits.