jsrcout

What a fantastic idea. You should absolutely write this.

I dunno, this sounds like it might actually be useful. (Haven't read the paper yet).

Agree. "Defaults matter".

I, too, was shocked to learn this. I only learned about it fairly recently, from my older brother who read a book from the school library on it as a child:

Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957

https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Who-Survived-Hiroshima-Nagasaki/...

The codebase I've been working in lately is mostly pre-77 FORTRAN, maintained as such for all this time. "Stuck in the past" is an apt description.

What a wondrous book. So many hilarious anecdotes. Tom Quartz the mining cat. The escaped tarantulas. The retired Admiral. But it's not just the little stories. His characters, the comical exaggerations, his poking fun at his younger and ridiculously naive self, the description of the places, the little observations serious and humorous, the very language are all just a pleasure.

Same here. Made the money working for my home builder dad in the summer. I still have it - need to check if it still runs.

I'm so sorry. We were using it in the late 90s, and on a monthly basis it would be down for a day or two while the admin plunged out the database. Good times.

This is so interesting. As a test, I wonder if you could make something out of Legos without any issues if you blocked your vision so you couldn't see them or your hands. Guessing that that you could.

This was such a great game. Many fond memories.

I don't know the names, but I recall there was a large Polish contribution to Allied codebreaking in WWII.

I definitely want to keep working at home. My workplace rebuilt all the cubicles to be half their previous size. Coincidentally, this was just as COVID started. Now we're required to work 2 days a week in the office. It's great to see people in person, but if you need to meet with someone in their cubicle, you're either going to be hanging out in the aisle or sitting very very close to them.

It's refreshing to read the replies here as I am currently working in the worst codebase I've ever seen in my life. It's just unimaginably bad.

As did Yuri Knorozov, linguist who played a major rele in deciphering the Mayan language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov

> Knorozov listed his cat Asya as a co-author on his work, but the editors always removed her. He always used the photo with Asya (above) as his author photo, and got annoyed when editors cropped her out.[32]

However, Asya was included in his statue.

https://coleandmarmalade.com/2022/08/16/yuri-knorozov-credit...

A friend calls it the Logjam Principle. There are always a few logs floating down the river and that's not really a problem. But a small logjam of just a few logs will grow over time until the entire river is obstructed. It's better not to let things get to that state.

There was. I had one at work, it was huge (for the time). It displayed in 4-bit grayscale IIRC.

Sadly the past several years have conditioned a lot of us to equate "no longer the default" with "about to be permanently removed".

I, too, remember when GUIs (not UXs!) respected the user's desires, workflow and general agency. That's not entirely gone yet, but it's going. Heck, Office 365 updated lately and now I have this ongoing little contest of displaying the tiniest number of coworker Teams comments in the hugest amount of white space. The results beggar belief.

Edit:

Teams (it's a Chrome browser window, but that's not really relevant to my rant) is taking up like two square feet on a 4K monitor, and 3-6 messages plus links to a couple attachments are all it will show me - along with enough white space for another 300 channel names (but only channel names, nothing else), headings the size of movie trailers, just oceans of space and garbage I don't need and can't use.

In an ideal world, there'd be some way to adjust the layout a bit, and in fact when we used Slack before Teams, that was pretty easy: you move the divider between channel names and messages to the left, thus giving less space to channel names, more space to message content. Done.

But that's too much power to allow a user to have, in these modern, enlightened times. So while Teams has such a divider, there's no provision to adjust it. Want to see more than a handful of messages at the same time? Gonna need a bigger monitor. Probably 55" would be a good size.

Of course, that's one example out of a billion. It's not that software won't cater to my particular workflow... it's is that software no longer allows me to make reasonable adjustments to support a workflow that works for me, and in fact removes still-remaining means to do so on a regular basis.

Really it's the whole "you're holding it wrong" mindset that I get so tired of. We all labor under our own constraints and just a little leeway on basic customization goes a very long way to making software more usable. Just let me view more than six messages at once, ok? Please?

Seconded.

Just wanted to mention my favorite ASCII art ever - Simon Jansen's monumental ASCII art version of Star Wars from the late 1990s. Comes with a great FAQ as a bonus.

https://www.asciimation.co.nz/

I have the same one, from way back in like 7th grade! Someone from NASA gave a talk about the agency's work including planetary science and Voyager at our school. They also did a memorable demo involving heating a handheld Space Shuttle thermal tile with a blowtorch :-)

The booklet on Jupiter was outstanding. I had it pretty much memorized.

I once worked with safety critical code that had a variable name 62 characters long, without any extra fluff. It made sense in context. The problem was disambiguating it from the other half-dozen similarly-named, almost as long variables. At times I resorted to diff to verify that two variables were, or were not, the same one. Good times.

They did the same at my first job out of college (Sun based company). It was my first introduction to free software. That was circa 1990... it's amazing that gcc is still going strong.

Ha. That kid would be proud to know what became of their prank.

Sites like this are why I love the Internet. Not the corporate, but the quirky, passionate, pointless, humorous, and fun.

Apollo wasn't at all a military program - it was about as far from military as you could get, at that time, and still use huge rockets. And would have been a massive waste of money, if it were. There was a military space program, but Apollo was not part of it. It was a national prestige program.

> Kennedy as president had little direct interest in the U.S. space program. He was not a visionary enraptured with the romantic image of the last American frontier in space and consumed by the adventure of exploring the unknown. He was, on the other hand, a Cold Warrior with a keen sense of Realpolitik in foreign affairs, and worked hard to maintain balance of power and spheres of influence in American/Soviet relations. The Soviet Union's non-military accomplishments in space, therefore, forced Kennedy to respond and to serve notice that the U.S. was every bit as capable in the space arena as the Soviets. Of course, to prove this fact, Kennedy had to be willing to commit national resources to NASA and the civil space program. The Cold War realities of the time, therefore, served as the primary vehicle for an expansion of NASA's activities and for the definition of Project Apollo as the premier civil space effort of the nation. Even more significant, from Kennedy's perspective the Cold War necessitated the expansion of the military space program, especially the development of ICBMs and satellite reconnaissance systems.2

Source: Project Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis

https://history.nasa.gov/Apollomon/Apollo.html

Bummer. The Microsoft hardware I've dealt with has been solid. I still live in terror of dropping my Microsoft Force Feedback 2 joystick on its head just one too many times and finally killing it. Looks like Amazon has them for $200 and up, guess that's a possibility if/when the worst finally happens.

It's my personal nemesis. I've finally just gotten to the point of memorizing "oh here's where the /real/ code is for this subsystem" after doing the interminable traceback enough times. Not a fan.

I can vouch for that idea. I dreaded taking statistics in college, because I'm just not a mathy person. But the teacher was fantastic. I actually enjoyed the class - which was 100% due to his passion for the subject, and deep interest in teaching it to the next generation.

Sounds like you'd benefit from adblock. I've used the Steven Black adblock host list [0] for some time now on all my PCs and it works extremely well.

[0] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts