greenbit

That means something, that is important.

Shocking..

Pretty sure the big A had a problem with older versions of the OS. I'll climb way out on a limb and guess that the API for the apps didn't support embedding control codes in the stream to disable various user controls at points of the content owner's choosing. So yes, the APV app is driving whether to try to force ads on you, buy they couldn't write the app to do that prior to some version of the roku os.

To be completely cynical about it, if APV hadn't demanded the os support, I think some other party probably would have.

Apparently leading up to Amazon prime video inflicting ads where no ads had gone before, they put out a requirement to streaming device manufacturers that said devices needed to support the ability of the source to disable certain buttons. Couldn't have people fast-forwarding through the precious ads, now could they?

So when they just stop your show to try to sell insurance or whatever, and you try to ffwd through that noise, you get a little caption that informs you that "fast forward is not available during ads".

When roku decided that Amazon was the rightful owner of my fastforward button about a year and a half ago, that nearly got it tossed, but since Netflix was still behaving, I still have my roku. But if (as I suspect) we're about to behold the power of this fully functional ad-server, it WILL go directly into the e-waste.

Right? My inner 17 year old wonders where that magic was, back in the day.

After the first cord or two, the ground around the block should be covered in chips and splinters. That might be easy to add to the sim. Otoh, it's a fun little sim as is.

Not to mention a cooler stack temperature and the increased creosote condensation that brings.

Or that it's just pain heavier to lug into the house.

Could add beech, yellow birch, black locust to that god-forbid list

Well, what about when you get into a piece of apple wood, and as soon as you hit it, carpenter ants boil out of it, all over your chopping block, up the handle of your axe, and you don't even realize 3 or 4 of them got up your pant-legs until suddenly your shins feel like they've been hit with white phosphorous rounds?

That would be pretty hard to simulate. Guess they had to stop somewhere

Elm is awful even at burning. Cold, smoky stuff.

Was thinking "Hesitance C" could work

Sometimes I actually want objects that are transparent, fully public, and 'struct' is perfect for that. But if I then go and put methods into those structs, does that make me unorthodox?

IMO it renders them kind of pointless, as you can then just leave out the field names (keywords, in pythonese) and get the same effect. It's very disappointing that they're naught but comments without the punctuation.

Well, hmm. well.. how many jira tickets were needed?

Greek 'anameixi' loosely means a mixture or a blending. The special states could be called 'anameixic', the property could be called 'anameixicity'.

Why am I trying to find a name for this? Otoh, why are so many physicists trying so hard to popularize their projects for the last 40 or 50 years? Oh .. I think I just answered my own question.

Calling something 'magic' is like an admission that you have no clue about what is going on. Seems to me, they do have some clue, namely that instead of codes with perfect isolation, there might be some advantage to studying ones that allow some blending. The resulting spaces may (or may not) lead to a better description of reality, but doing science means to peel back that mystery. So to go and promote this under the term 'magic' is disingenuous.

Not exactly airborne rabies, but perhaps a distinction without a difference.

If they had just raised the rate and left the service as it was, I'd only have been slightly annoyed at them. But to alter what I had, and then ask that same amount to put things back the way they were? That was a slap in the face.

Maybe it's the very molecules that the live cells were using, just doing their thing without the cells. Cells concentrate things by confining them in a small volume, but otoh, if you have damp particles, the thin water layer on the particles would be a kind of confining space, with the added advantage of surface area to exchange gases with.

This is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.

A G15 would probably have blown the doors off the Burroughs 205, but the 205 had way more blinkenlights.

CDs turned out to be terrible for long term storage, because the actual bits are pits in the very thin aluminum layer that's bonded to one side of the transparent polycarbonate disk. The back side of that aluminum often had nothing but a painted label to protect it.

DVD otoh, seems much more durable. The storage layer is sandwiched between two decent thicknesses of poly. But who knows, only time will tell.

You know, that's possible, I wouldn't be surprised. This was 20 years ago. I only recall a sense that the w2k system seemed more complicated than XP in that area.

I am continually amazed at the number of my nerdy colleagues who have never even heard of Pratchett, particularly when it's someone who's into D&D or otherwise enthusiastic about Tolken-esque works.

Imagine the dry humor of Hitchiker's Guide crossed with a generally Middle Earth setting, but with a good bit of contemporary (well, 90s/00-ish) cultural references mixed in, and multiply by the fact there are literally dozens of Discworld books, and it's incredible that finding another Pratchett fan is so rare.

What's that phrase, "derivative work" or something?

Look closely, you'll notice there's no network interface. The only vulnerability in a system like that is physical access by malicious individuals.

About the worst mal-ware it can have is a boot sector that installs a "terminate, stay resident" (TSR) that copies itself onto any floppy that gets inserted.

Except for "the hive". Remember the hive? Sort of an alternate registry, in addition to the actual registry. Granted, it was pretty invisible, until it got corrupted.

I had a win2k machine that was my daily (at home) that was fine until idk about 2006, at which point something happened (muons?) and it would go into some kind of panic state just after bringing up the desktop. Hive corruption. I tried on and off for a couple of years to repair it, no luck. It wasn't just about the files on the HD, it was easy enough to transplant the drive and read/write anything, it was that I really liked the way I had the environment configured. Sure, it was all kind of moot, but it became a kind of personal windmill to resurrect this old thing. In the end, I booted an XP CD in it, and selected 'upgrade', and voila, it was Duncan Idaho, back from the dead.

Anyway.. loved win2k, but not a fan of the hive.

"[..] card readers for BASIC"

Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything.

But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted.

From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.

I remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in various professors offices since the mid 70s, being taken to get read into some disk in the mainframe.