simonblack

They tasted very much better than my usual rather tasteless supermarket-bought bananas. I'm going to try the exercise again tomorrow to check whether this was a one-off or not.

After reading the article, I'm going to check with the grower whether or not these were Cavendish bananas which are the norm around this banana-growing area, or something else.

All that wealth from the industrial growth over the WW2 years.

On the other hand, if the the US Dollar goes the same way as the Zimbabwe Dollar, that value could be quite accurate.

I explained how the 8" held far more data than the 5". The HD 5" 1.2 MB didn't appear till the late 80s, early 90s. The 8" 1.2 MB was around about ten years earlier.

8" floppy (IBM-3470 SSSD format was the standard format for CP/M software to be distributed on.)

I had gone from North Star DOS (5") floppy to CP/M (8").

Yes. Starliner will never reach Earth in one piece. It will be discarded and disintegrate and burn on re-entry.

Though I started with a 5.25" single-sided single density floppy in 1978: 88 Kilobytes.

I actually upgraded to the 8" floppies about 4 years later, but by then it was double-sided, double density. I thought all my Christmasses had come at once to jump from 88 K to 1200 K in the blink of a eye. I transferred a whole 5" floppy to an 8" floppy and I still had more than a Megabyte of space left! Wheeeee!

Round about then the first IBM came out, and I remember we looked down our noses at that miserable little amount of floppy space it had (160K) and we considered it a toy!

We didn't think that way only 3 or 4 years later when that "toy" completely wiped out our 8-bit world.

Today that position is held by China. How long do you think that the US could replace its lost materiel and men against a country that is four times larger in population and probably ten times larger in manufacturing capacity?

The WHOLE OF THE WEST (5 eyes, Europe, and Japan) is smaller than just China alone in population and in manufacturing capacity.

We in the West won't know what's hit us when WW3 comes along. It'll be a lot worse than Germany's disastrous war against the Soviets in WW2.

(No such animal as a country called Taiwan. However there is an island called Taiwan.)

China doesn't need to invade the Republic of China. They just need to blockade it, just like Britain blockaded Germany in WW1 and WW2. The island of Taiwan would be out of fuel and food within weeks.

China invading the Republic of China would be like the US invading Hawaii. Why would you blow up your own stuff? You'd only have to spend perfectly good money to replace it.

If you can operate a jet fighter-bomber for less than (say) $200 K an hour* I'd be very surprised. And that doesn't take into account the servicing time on modern 'hangar queens' to get them ready for their next sortie. And what's the cost per hour of operating a carrier??

Try to include ALL your costs in working out the cost-efficiency.

* Let's be really generous and say you get 10,000 hours of service life out of a fighter jet. (The designed service life is only 8,000 hours.) The F-35 costs around 130 million bucks so over 10,000 hours that cost comes out to $13,000 per hour in just amortising the purchase cost, without adding in the operating costs themselves.

The question is wildly open. Do you want the subject matter to be specified in any particular field?

As in "What are your predictions for the next 10 years in geopolitics?" or "What are your predictions for the next 10 years in computer advances?" or "What are your predictions for the next 10 years in wildlife conservation?" or "What are your predictions for the next 10 years in flower arranging?".

Invariably you forget one of the pitfalls.

The things that annoys me about "Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Email Addresses" is that one person can have several email addresses, or use one email address for several different uses, so using an email address as a login to a website account can get really, really messy.

Otherwise I'd say it's just as silly for China to build obsolete carriers as it is for the US to keep building them.

Missiles outrange carriers which in turn outrange battleships. The battleships became obsolete in 1941. The carriers became obsolete in the early 2000s.

And my confusing typo above was supposed be "I'm not sure" instead of "I'm so sure"

    ~/wrk/projectname/

/a1 is "archive-disk number one":

/a1/comp is where computer code/information/manuals/etc is stored:

/a1/comp/j_wrk_master is where inactive code projects are stored indefinitely

    '/a1/comp/j_wrk_master/projectname'

Rinse and repeat.

Coming to Melbourne for the weekend? Why Not? (Even though I'd just spent a hundred bucks or so on a plane flight from there earlier that day! So what?)

Want to go out for Italian? Why not? (I haven't eaten Spaghetti Marinara for a long time.)

Want to go to the movies? Why not? (Never seen that actor before. He might be good.)

It's a remarkably freeing mindset. And you end up doing so many unexpected things. And meeting new people.

So much so that there is a sharply-defined "before" and "after" period of your life.

I'm so sure if this is what you mean by 'Ego Death' or whether you are referring to what many of us call 'Transitions'.

There have been several books titled 'Transitions' one written by a man and another written by a lady around 1985. I read the one by the lady back when my first marriage broke up. Before I read that book my first wife described me as 'a beaten dog', and two or three weeks later she described me as 'almost arrogant', because I had changed so much in such a short time.

In other words, there is not much difference between "New Labour" policies and Conservative policies.

If you like you can say that Starmer is a member of the Uniparty that is always in power in most Western countries.

"If voting actually made a difference, they wouldn't let you do it."

I predict that in a month or two you won't be able to tell any difference.

When you start to build something you go through a huge learning curve. So much that, by the time you finish, you know dozens or even hundreds of design decisions that were poor decisions which you have made along the way. You have even learned lots of things that you didn't even know at the beginning of your task.

So throw that first one away. Use your new-found knowledge to build that thing again, but far more efficiently and far more easily this time.

Truth to tell, by the time you have completed your task again, you will have learned even more and have found even more of the previous poor design decisions along the way.

So throw that second one away too. And hopefully, on your third attempt you have learned so much that this third thing is actually usable.

It once used to be said that Microsoft didn't get things right till Version 3 was released. There's a lot to be said for that.

US manufacturing stagnated because US companies offshored their production. Great for the company bosses and their huge bonuses, but .... that led to two main failures: the loss of skilled workers, and the loss of company manufacturing knowledge. NOTE: Company money that gets wasted on huge bonuses is money that is not available to improve the company's future profits.

Take the example of Boeing: The replacing of aviation engineers by accountants means that decisions are made on the basis of cashflows, not on the basis of how to make better planes.

Or take the example of the US space industries: the men who were the skilled workers who knew how to make large and powerful rockets have retired and/or died off. Nobody in the US has the day-to-day working knowledge of those men of the 1960s and 1970s who produced the Apollo systems that put a dozen or so men on the Moon. Today we have men stranded in space because their spacecraft is a piece of garbage, and it's not so long since Americans had to cadge lifts to the ISS from the Russians for more than ten years.

Ah, but people are paying for it. They pay with their time and interest in the subject-matter. Their time has value. Their knowledge has value.

This "paying for it" mentality has arisen with the commercial takeover of the Internet. Back when the Internet was young, there was a completely different mentality. It was a 'How can I help the next Man?' mentality. It was quite literally an 'open-source' mentality, and that was because the early Internet was not the domain of the commercial interests, but the domain of the universities and other centres of advanced learning.

My earliest leafnode of Usenet was as an offshoot of the Adelaide University in South Australia. I was part of a UUCP 'store and forward' sub-network. I remember the excitement around 1991 or so when the buzz was that there were now a million nodes on the Internet(!).

I also prefer a TUI/CLI client.

When you're using pure text 99.9% of the time, you might as well use a text-based client. If you have a 'Desktop GUI' you merely run that text-based client in an xterm.

Hell, that ain't "retro", that's "modern". That's IBM-PC 16-bit (1980s!) for f's sake.

If you want 'retro' go back further to 8-bit (1970s CP/M!) or even 12-bit (1960s PDP-8!) or even (wait for it!) the 1950s!

I predict the Nixos setup will collapse and the people who aren't so political will form a new forked group, with a new name. They will 'win' by 'living their best life'.

Whether he helped one girl with sperm, or whether he helped a million girls with sperm is irrelevant.

Or did the girls expect exclusive rights to a baby of his? Why would they expect to be so special? Why should they expect to be so special?

It was a win-win situation. The girls got what they wanted. He got what he wanted.

One of mine got deleted because there were 'not enough words'. I kid you not.

Perhaps I should have added the first three verses of 'Jabberwocky' to the end of my post to make it turgid enough to keep.

    'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
    All mimsy were the borogoves,
    And the mome raths outgrabe.
    
    "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
    The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
    Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
    The frumious Bandersnatch!"
    
    He took his vorpal sword in hand:
    Long time the manxome foe he sought—
    So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
    And stood awhile in thought.