deltarholamda

In 2005, right after Katrina hit, a lot of people in the Gulf lost power for a long time. All cell towers were overloaded constantly. What kept working was radio.

A bog standard Sony radio would run for a long, long time on a few AA batteries. Back then, you could also pick up the audio portion of UHF and VHF analog TV too. It was the main lifeline for news and local updates.

Radio is a fantastic technology that is being wasted. Cheap to transmit, cheap to receive, and covers a wide area. It would be great to see a radio renaissance. Maybe the Zoomers reconnecting to older technologies will revive it.

Branded fleece vests, size: only Medium

I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!

On some level the Neo is just a new chapter in the story of the original iBook. The difference between 1999 and now is the much stronger Apple brand, so people on the fence were quite ready to throw down with a $600 Mac.

Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported.

Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot."

I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!

US healthcare is extremely productive. It is also quite expensive.

I'm not even sure how you'd define a great programmer. Like Justice Potter Stewart I sort of "know it when I see it". For example, I don't think anybody is going to put Rasmus Lerdorf on the Mount Rushmore of Great Programmers, but man alive is PHP really important and quite good, even at the time of release.

Email supports text.

Yes it does. However, I have sent messages to more than a few people who tell me that my message is completely empty. I have my client set to send text-only, no HTML, and apparently the system on the other side drops the HTML version altogether. Something on the other end only processes the HTML part. No HTML, no message.

(I believe these are Outlook/MS based systems, but I don't know for sure. It's certainly not ALL Outlook/MS systems that do this.)

For these people I have to set my client to send HTML. It's all well and good to blame them, but I can't make them do something. They may not even be in a position to do anything. And I don't have an option to tell them "too bad, so sad".

The email situation is really quite bad if you don't conform to the Big Three. I've run my own email infrastructure for a very long time, and it's quite irritating that when we get something good (like DMARC, SPF, etc) it gets forced by the Big Three because along with that we also get things like Google toying with the requirement that you have to have AAAA MX records too.

You missed the point. The guy thought she was playing a game, but she was actually using the built-in web browser on the PSP. Whether it was Candy Crush or Tony Hawk Pro Skater or Super Mario Bros. (also not on PSP) doesn't matter.

She was using what is broadly comparable to a WebTV browser to access a government site, and it worked because the guidelines for gov.uk are so very, very good.

(The UK gov sometimes gets a bit of stick for being needlessly useless, but their web guidelines are extremely good. Absolutely a fantastic starting point for anybody interested in web development.)

After the blowout success of the Macbook Neo, I'd think the bet would be on a cheap iPhone. Maybe not, as so many people finance their expensive phone through their carrier, but I suspect a $300 iPhone would eat the mid-range Android market.

Back in the day it was useful to know RPN. Because somebody will ask to borrow your calculator, and if you hand them an HP they'll say "oh... thanks, but no thanks". You get to be nice and you don't have to worry about some bozo forgetfully walking off with your calculator.

I'm old enough to remember Atari when it was new. Playing a video game at home was quite something, no quarters required! But it also had somewhat limited replayability. Doesn't matter how good you are, eventually Defender is going to beat you.

The NES was a radical departure in how games were played and how good they were. You'd never spend all day in front of the Atari, but you could with the NES.

Add to that the steady increase in the availability and affordability of cable tv, then VCRs and video rentals, and now the TV is even more central to the ordinary person's life. Then came computers, the Internet, etc.

I think there is definitely something to kids just not being as interested in going outside. Why would they be? All their friends are in the magic box in their pocket. Outside is where you get sunburn and ticks that make you allergic to meat.

But “education” as a public, taxpayer supported activity is about the economy

It sounds harsh and maybe a bit gauche, but it's true. A literate and numerate citizenry helps the nation advance. That's the selling point for widespread public education. Airy ideals sound great, but that's also how ideology slides into the public school.

It also blocks IPs from states with age verification laws. I mean, okay, I respect the principle, but since there's very little I can do about the laws, and since there are exactly zero politicians who are going to fret because they can't visit aphyr dot com, it's a bit pretentious. So I guess I'll just k-line all aphyr dot com links in my filter and move on with my life. Everybody blocking everybody is how we win.

Nobody wants the Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds

You fool! The WF-1000XM5 is the worst model of the line! You should buy the WF-1010XN5, it is far superior!

Apple tends to name things in an odd way, e.g. sometimes you need to remember whether your laptop came out in "early" 2014 or "late" 2014, but they have a remarkably flat, but consistent, product line.

I mean, honestly, if somebody just tossed you a random Macbook from the Apple store, it may not be the exact model you want but you wouldn't complain. All of them are pretty good, even down to the bargain basement Neo.

Somewhat related, in 1943 German POWs built a scale model of the Mississippi River basin to use for modeling of flood control methods. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River_Basin_Model) It's not in great shape now, but it's still walkable. Efforts are periodically made to rehab it.

Models are such a great tool, artistically, culturally, and scientifically. Joe's NYC model really helps put the scale of the city into perspective.

I do this as well. I have a decent number of domains in my control, but not hundreds, so editing a text file and updating a hidden master is a perfectly reasonable workflow.

We could have an AI Dang

"We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."

I abort when I see things like “just type c-C dingle bob to do x thing.”

I used nothing but emacs for several years (well, xemacs, but close enough), because I was using an old Thinkpad, and long-term use of the trackpoint gave me RSI in my finger. Being able to use nothing but the keyboard was nice.

Eventually I went back to BBEdit and have remained there. You can make it mostly keyboard oriented if you want, but sometimes using the mouse is easier/faster, and I have a lot of reps inside of BBEdit. It just seems more like home to me. A nice balance between GUI and keyboard-focussed IMO.

They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that

Every construction admin, supervisor, field inspection guy, etc. has a top of the line iPad Pro, in an Otterbox, with a kind of sling that helps you hold it with one hand, and an Apple Pencil, and they spend all day in Plangrid.

This setup has completely eaten the entire market.

Can't speak to ditching a preferred text editor for this one, as text editors are one of the most highly personal preferences in computing.

But as a guy that teaches kids about computing and system administration, having another option to demonstrate is excellent. For many things something like nano is fine, but for something a bit more robust? And is available for many platforms? And is small and self-contained? It's a great option. The Lua extensibility is also a bonus.

Teaching teenagers how to use vim or emacs is, not surprisingly, a bit of a chore.

The old Macs really were the perfect form factor for a compact desktop computer

For certain types of work, they are excellent. I used an SE/30 as a dedicated writing and light programming machine for several years. It presents a friendly face, and the intimacy of the small screen is nice.

The small screen discourages distraction, though the small resolution was a bit of a chore while programming (lots of scrolling).

I'd like to see a toaster Mac-style box, perhaps with a slightly bigger screen, say 12", and with a decent resolution.

The article mentions "Building software at Google's scale is extraordinarily difficult...", which I've seen many times before when one or another of these big corporations has a serious security flaw.

If a company like Google, with its ability to attract the best of the best, cannot handle the complexity of security and safety with SaaS/PaaS products, at what point do we say that perhaps this sector needs much more oversight?

Agree with this strongly. It's nice to have thousands of photos, but if what you're trying to do is preserve memories, you do that best by interacting with the photos.

Choosing the photos to include, plus doing the scrapbooking bits to decorate the photos, and including all the bits and bobs you might have acquired from whatever even you're memorializing, this locks the memories in far better than a carefully architected storage system that, in the end, is just a giant wad of binary data.

This goes double (or triple) when you have young children.

By all means maintain some kind of digital storage, but make your primary physical.

For a small island nation, Britain has had an outsized influence. Culturally, politically, technologically, etc. There are many reasons for it, some accidental (like geography) and some purposeful, but it remains that Britain has punched above its weight for a very long time.

America has followed a similar tack, and for many of the same reasons. High-minded ideas like "international cooperation" sound especially good to those nations who are not sitting at the top, but for those that are it does seem less than ideal. I.e., I'm sure that Montenegro is big on international cooperation, but China will justifiably ask "cui bono" (but in Chinese).

His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing.

There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.

On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.

I got one where the called script ended in ".pl" and I had a flashback to the 90s. My trousers grew into JNCOs, Limp Bizkit started playing out of nowhere and I got a massive urge to tell Slashdot that Alan Thicke had died.

That is possible, for sure. But think of it like a person learning the piano. You could practice your arpeggios on a Steinway, or you can buy a Casio with an arpeggiator button.

At a certain point, the professional piano player can make much better use of the arpeggiator button. But the novice piano player benefits greatly from all the slogging arpeggio practice. It's certainly possible that skipping all that grunt work will improve and/or advance music, but it's hardly a sure thing. That's the experiment we're running right now with AI programming. I suppose we'll see soon enough, and I hope I'm utterly wrong about the concerns I have.

I think there is a danger in the enthusiasm for AI inside of these excellent points, namely that the skills that make a good programmer are not inherent, they are learned.

The comparison would be a guy who is an excellent journeyman electrician. This guy has visual-spatial skills that makes bending and installing conduit a kind of art. He has a deep and intuitive understanding of how circuits are balanced in a panel, so he does not overload a phase. But he was not born with them. These are acquired over many years of labor and tutelage.

If AI removes these barriers--and I think it will, as AI-enhanced programmers will out-perform and out-compete those who are not in today's employment market--then the programmer will learn different skills that may or may not be in keeping with language skills, algorithms, problem decomposition, etc. They may in fact be orthogonal to these skills.

The effect of this may be an improvement, of course. It's hard to say for sure as I left my crystal ball in my other jacket. But it will certainly be different. And those who are predisposed for programming in the old-school way may not find the field as attractive because it is no longer the same sort of engineering, something like the difference between the person that designs a Lego set and the person that assembles a Lego set. It could, in fact, mean that the very best programmers become a kind of elite, able to solve most problems with just a handful of those elite programmers. I'm sure that's the dream of Google and Microsoft. However this will centralize the industry in a way not seen since perhaps IBM, only with a much smaller chance of outside disruption.

It also impressed me, as I'm not sure I'd have that sort of dogged patience. Samba is one of those incredibly useful pieces of open source software that sometimes I feel I take for granted.

I won't take it for granted now.

As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)

If you are interested in keeping backups, including the ability to go back in time to recover accidentally deleted/changed files, then ZFS with its reliable snapshot facility is fantastic. Other file systems offer some version of this, e.g. btrfs, but they don't have the same reliability as ZFS.

Snapshots on ZFS are extremely cheap, since it works on the block level, so snapshots every hour or even 15 minutes are now doable if you so wish. Combine with weekly or monthly snapshots that can be replicated off-site, and you have a pretty robust storage system.

This is all home sysadmin stuff to be sure, but even if you just use it as a plain filesystem, the checksum integrity guarantees are worth the price of admission IMO.

FWIW, software RAID like ZFS mirrors or mdm is often superior to hardware raid especially for home use. If your raid controller goes blooey, which does happen, unless you have the exact same controller to replace it, you run a chance of not being able to mount your drives. Even very basic computers are fast enough to saturate the drives in software these days.