seoulbigchris

This was back in the early 90s. Our company used DOS and Windows machines for the most part, but we had a brand new Sun workstation for an advanced PCB layout tool (Cadence?). One day my buddy was working on the Sun, and wanted to make a backup before starting a new task. He did something like `mkdir backup` and `cp -r * backup`. It started churning away, and we went to lunch. Came back from lunch, and the machine was frozen. It took us a few moments before we realized what went wrong. He had copied recursively forever, or rather, until there was no more free disk space. In our defense, we were new to Unix and still learning.

Korea does this, also. Sometimes I'll get confused at a restaurant or other sign that is just 2x2 array of syllables. Is this horizontal or vertical? Even more confusing is when it can be sensibly read either way.

In the mid-90s I taught a night class on Unix, and was experimenting with shell scripts from The Unix Programming Environment. There was an example using a loop and the who command to alert you when someone logged onto your local system. My cousin was a professor at a university several states away, and we had already figured out the talk command. So I decided to expand the examples in the book to use finger. By parsing the reply, somehow I could tell if my cousin was logged on, and I would send myself a notice. There was an ISP in the same building, and one day the ISP engineer came to visit me with a stern look. He asked, "By any chance are you sending a finger command every two minutes to this university's mainframe?" I proudly answered, "As a matter of fact, yes, I am!". I eagerly got out my Unix book to show him what I was doing. He just said, "Stop doing that. They have a system console logging program that has churned out dozens of pages of paper printouts because of you". I sheepishly acknowledged my mistake and quit running the script.

I knew a few ham radio guys who could copy Morse code at greater than 20 WPM and simultaneously carry on a conversation.

At first, I thought you meant restaurants which had a big scrolling ticker along the wall so patrons could watch the market while they dine.

yep, I see those often here -- scary. Another sofa-related irony is that a lot of Koreans don't actually sit on their sofas. Rather, they sit on the (heated) floor and use the sofa as a back rest.

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-05-18/culture...

If you liked the Smith Chart, you'd love using the Spirule to solve root locus problems.

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

Oh, found a picture of one of these plastic ones flikr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonsphotos/218609214/in/album-...

I felt the same way. At some point shortly after graduation, I found a heavy plastic Smith chart that was designed to be written on with a grease pencil, and erased with a cloth when you're done.

I just did a spot check, since I live very near an airport. The airport is blurred / obscured on Naver and Kakao Maps. Google maps and Google Earth still show the actual imagery. I guess Google's blurring hasn't begun yet.

Most of our professors did allow them. As they explained their reasoning, the information you could store in your calculator memory at that time was roughly equivalent to what you could write on a single piece of paper. So they would usually allow either a cheat sheet or a programmable calculator, and designed the tests accordingly.

I have a product labeled Boogieboard that I bought on a whim at Costco years back. I want to say it was less that $10? Really simple, no connectivity, it does really seem like an etch-a-sketch with a stylus instead of knobs. Stuck it on the fridge with tacky-tack and it’s been going strong for many years. About the size of A5 (or half an 8-1/2 x 11 piece of paper).

EDIT: looking at the link above, it is called the Jot and sells for $18. Still made apparently.

A long time ago, a colleague and I visited a supplier in another state. While we were waiting alone in a conference room, we noticed an unusual looking note taking device at the front of the room. It was a very large easel that looked like a white board, with a tray of markers and an eraser. But it was clearly electronic because it had stuff attached to the top and bottom, some buttons, and was plugged in. We walked up to the easel, drew a large circle on it, and pressed what looked like a COPY button, curious how it was going to perform that task.

The machine whirred into action, scrolling the white board material (which turned out to be a flexible plastic-like film) over the top of the easel, and paying out fresh whiteboard up from the bottom. A perfect duplicate of our circle on paper spat out of a slot in the machine, akin to a FAX machine. As the scrolling came to a stop, it revealed a previously hidden drawing -- someone had drawn a large "X" in the middle of the page. I guess we weren't the only ones who were curious how the machine worked.

When I first was exposed to Lynx, I was also working on a project using the Lynx realtime Posix OS. To my knowledge, the two aren't related other than by name. I checked a couple of years ago, Lynx OS still exists but under a different name.

Here in South Korea, everyone who uses online banking has to renew and reissue banking certificates every year. While I'm not convinced the certificate process is 100% safe, using certificates is one good concept in the sh*t show of Korean online "security" malware users are required to install.

I also just remembered, these things had option slots. Which I had to use on my III, because I needed more memory to print many kinds of documents / images (I vaguely remember it may have been for printing from AutoCAD). Can't remember a modern printer having add-on circuit boards these days.

Back in college one summer, I had an HP calculator crammed full of programs I had written for various circuit and RF design courses I was taking. I didn't have any way to store them, other than writing them down on paper. On a whim that summer, I went to take the Ham Radio Extra class exam one weekend. The proctor said I needed to erase all the memory from my calculator before using it on the test. I told him no way was I going to do that, but suggested an alternative.

I had been curious how slide rules worked, and had found one after searching high and low for in half a dozen stores before finding probably the last one for sale in Atlanta. The slide rule was in my backpack, so I asked the proctor, could I used the slide rule instead? He chuckled, and said no problem. During the test, one of the proctors tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if he could bring me a bucket of water to cool down my "slip stick". I did pass the test that day, and I used to brag that I got my Extra Class license with a "Slide Rule endorsement".

I had a LaserJet III that lasted forever, like over ten years. It just wouldn't die.

I've used that article several times in the past. I'll also note that many years ago, on projects which were not cost sensitive, we would often use the MC14490 IC for hardware debouncing (mentioned in part 2 of this article).

I live less than a km from a small airport in South Korea, and hear that "cannon" going off all the time. Now I'm curious, is it propane or a person? I'm going to be on the lookout now.

One report I read here (I'm in South Korea) said the gear was down for the first aborted attempt and were then retracted for the go-around. I can't remember where I read that, however.

> A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps.

Not about the phone (I have iPhone 12), but I have an app called Trunk Notes which is a wiki reader / editor. It was one of the only wiki apps I found that could work cooperatively with my own markdown vimwiki that I keep on my desktop (and sync via Dropbox or similar).

A few years back, it complained that it would no longer work in iOS version something-or-other and the author apologized because he could no longer maintain it. I never got around to deleting it, and to my surprise it still works to this day.

It makes sense that new rules should apply to newly made/sold phones. Why not grandfather existing phones? Isn't any communication better than none in an emergency? A working phone, even if it doesn't support placing official emergency calls, would still be able to place a phone call for help. Even sending an email or WhatsApp message is better than nothing.

This makes me wonder, is calling the emergency services number (911 / 119 / etc) now restricted to only such mobile phones officially supporting the protocol? This means you can't dial the emergency number from a pay phone or landline? I'm really confused about the underlying logic here.

That makes sense. So perhaps the immediate impact on operations on election day coverage / reporting is more symbolic than real?

> Pretty much any production compiler can do this.

I'm curious how a compiler could know this at compile time? If you mean a runtime checking feature, I get it. I'm referring to an example statement like `ix = ia + ib` where all three are, say, u8 integers.

EDIT: I will agree in some situations, the compiler could deduce that a certain equation like above would or would not ever overflow, by context. But for the general case, I don't see how.

I have digital / print subscription to the NYT. It seems like stories were being published online Monday, and the paper paper arrived. Strike doesn't start until Tuesday?

I think why this has always stuck in my craw is that a compiler can complain if the result and operands aren't the same size. But if they ARE the same size, the compiler doesn't similarly complain "your result may overflow the destination variable". If it did, all calculations would be flagged. Imagine a strict clerk in a government office who approves vital documents based solely on whether the paper size and ink color are correct, regardless of the documents' content.

I'm not saying the status-quo is wrongheaded, and I see no obvious way to solve it -- just an observation.

Yeah, I get that. Existing hardware supports double-width integers for multiplication (`u16 = u8 * u8`, etc ). But for addition, typical ALUs don't support oddball widths like (`u9 = u8 + u8`, etc). And then what do you about chaining calculations? Sum up a huge column of numbers that way and you could get a u41593 value. Maybe this could be solved if there was a concept of a floating width integer, which is on paper just a special case of floating point. Maybe.

My remarks have been about integers -- the typical programming language floating point rules (`f32 = f32 * f32`, etc) make sense to me.

EDIT: Markdown editor didn't like the asterisk in my example equation.

I've always wondered why programming languages define that mathematical operations should result in the same type as the operands. But this isn't true, mathematically.

As a young engineer right out of university back in 1985, one of my early tasks involved merging together a bunch of telemetry data provided on mag tapes recorded at different radar sites (in the USA). One or two of the systems time stamped their data in local time, and all the others used UTC. I remember buying one of those old Farmers' Almanacs in order to make an algorithm to account for DST. When I read the rules, I threw up my arms in despair.

The almanac gave nominal rules for the transitions. But there was a footnote explaining that these transitions had and will continue to be adjusted year to year due to Congressional intervention. I showed this to my boss and said, "If I could write an algorithm that predicted future votes of Congress, I would be a billionaire and could quit this engineering job."

I think in the end I coded the algorithm with the recent known transitions, and the nominal rules for future ones. What else could you do (this was before everyone was networked, and the code ran on standalone computers like a VAX).

I also learned that task of merging three sources of tracking data, each with its own validity and measurement degradation status, was an absolute nightmare. But still easier than predicting future actions of Congress.