My sister lived in the Knoxville area and my whole family went to that Fair, the only World's Fair I've attended. We had a good time, but for Knoxville, it was a financial boondoggle. I've still never been up in the Sun Sphere, which has struggled over the years. And yes, I remember the jingle as well!
It's a great channel. I was also fascinated by his rice cooker episode. I had no idea they were so clever, combining thermodynamics and the physics of magnetism.
I saw paper menus disappearing before inflation started going up. I took it as a Covid measure - no physical menus that needed to be disinfected after each customer used them.
A person of my acquaintance owned a PDP-10 which he had in his apartment. Originally he had no memory for it and could only run programs from the registers and I remember thinking how strange that was.
I'm also a big fan of the Cyberiad, and Douglas Adams. When a bunch of us first heard The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio plays, we were sure Adams must have read the Cyberiad, as some of it seemed so similar in tone if not details. But I read somewhere that he had not read it when he wrote Hitchhikers.
That is not true. I was there. The film that was nearly lost was being made at Pixar. There was never any version of TS2 made by anyone else. I think this idea may come from the fact that Disney owned the Toy Story characters and if Pixar had later gone with another partner studio, it would be Disney making Toy Story movies, not Pixar. This was a major motivator for Pixar to stay with Disney.
The linked article is much better. This event happened right about the time I left Pixar and I heard about it long ago. In the end, much of what was recovered from Galyn's workstation wasn't used. Some time after this event, it was decided that the film was not working and a huge rewrite was done. John Lasseter stepped in as director and, through Herculean efforts, the film was completed on time.
My group at NASA/Goddard, which was almost all CentOS 7, is moving to a mix of RHEL and Ubuntu (with paid support). This has, of course, increased our costs, but the agency was under some pressure to only run OSs that had formal corporate support.
And Clarke had a tendency to be free with his usage of the word Universe, sometimes using it to refer just to the Solar systems. It throws me off sometimes when reading his short stories.
Pilots retire at the mandatory retirement age of 65, which a friend of mine will do next year. He'd rather keep flying and I imagine his employer would prefer that too, given the pilot shortage. But he will also admit that the job his harder on him now than it was when he was 25, so the rule arguably makes sense.
Agreed on both points. I remember seeing some of these images back in the 70s when space colonies were first seriously proposed. The idea that I might live to see such things built was thrilling. But looking at these images now, they seem very naive. I suspect the reality of space colonies, should we ever build them, will be much less like an idyllic space suburb and more like a dense urban complex.
I seem to have about three dozen. Many of them are very simple and quite old and should probably be turned into shell functions in my .bashrc. Only a few are of any complexity.
And a : in a file name at the GUI level gets turned into a dash! I just tried to name a text file "Foo/Bar 10:01.rtf" and it changed it to "Foo/Bar 10-01.rtf"!
Neither my grandmother, who died of a stroke that was probably related to her late stage Alzheimer's, nor my father, who died of severe Alzheimer's, experienced terminal lucidity. But it seems to be a real phenomenon, and worthy of study.
When I visited Bletchley Park a few years ago, I got into a conversation with one of the docents about the film and it was clear that they had a very low opinion of it there. Turing deserved a better film.
Thank you! I was curious about exactly this. But now I have a new question. If a photon is sufficiently energetic to be capable of briefly fluctuating into an electron-positron pair, does that imply that it would, over a long distance, be slower than c, since the e-p pair can't travel at c for the brief moment it exists?
I knew glob was short for global, but I've never been clear on how the word global applies here. Perhaps it was something like "apply this command globally to all matching files"?
As for the terse abbreviations common Unix commands, recall that much of the early work on Unix was done on very slow teletype devices such as the ASR 33. At 110 baud, brevity is a virtue.
My first personal computer was based on the Little Board. I put together a two floppy system and ran CP/M on it. I connected it to my HP19 terminal, which I had previously used with a modem to access the University computers. The system is long gone, alas.