mcclung

It kills me sometimes that I can't find my AD&D books. I haven't played in decades but I just like to look at them.

You see claims like this all the time but they are so blatantly ahistorical its fascinating.

No one but white men could vote in the U.S. until the early 1900s when women were given the right to vote.

And pretty much only white people were allowed to vote until 1965 when black people, Asians, etc were given the right to vote.

15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote in 1870.

I have assumed for awhile that they were either drones from an adversary or, in some cases, from our own CIA.

An extraterrestrial origin is going to require more proof. Easier for me to believe it is China or Russia.

I can remember way back around 1990 being told that waterfall was mostly a bad idea, and few shops really followed it. Rapid prototyping was agile back then. We were shown how to produce flow charts and static call diagrams in Software Engineering 201 or whatever it was called, and I felt they were doing it to show us how but also to demonstrate how much work it was, and how easy it was to get the analysis wrong.

As new fashions arose, instead of attacking waterfall as practiced (which, don't get me wrong, is still labor intensive), they criticized a straw man version, because it made the new methods look even better.

First thing I thought was "press hit." (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

I've been expecting that certain groups (people who own commercial real estate, for example), were going to want to us all back in our cubicles.

Not sure I'm right, of course, but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.

Thanks I hadn't seen that one.

If you're interested in planes like this, I found "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" a good read.

Sounds like CentOS Stream will bring the pain to users and admins. Going forward, the answer to every stability question will be "maybe you should go buy Redhat".

I had a bad feeling about the CentOS project when Redhat became involved as more than an upstream RPM source. I hope CentOS isn't turned into another Fedora.

I'm sure many of you will be happy to tell me that I'm wrong. Please do.

If you use open source software long enough, you will eventually be disappointed in a design decision. In this case, it was a big surprise when a tool I'd been using since the early 1990s suddenly changed its output with absolutely no warning. This is both an expected result from using Gentoo, and simultaneously very disappointing.

I don't think I was the only person unhappy with this. The fact that https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/quotes.html exists seems to indicate that others feel as I do.

Furthermore, I was disappointed by the reaction from both the developers and other people leaping to their defense who felt that they'd been personally insulted by users suggesting that this may have been better as a non-default option. If I can set QUOTING_STYLE=literal everywhere, surely the distro maintainers who wanted this could have set QUOTING_STYLE=shell-escape?

I'd be the first to say that everyone is free to disagree with me. I have the source, I have a workaround, I adapt.

I patch that behavior out of the GNU core utils on my Gentoo machines, and set the quoting style properly everywhere else.

This is one of the worst behavior changes ever to come out of GNU. It should never have been the default.

Very neat to see it on the storage side, and something I don't think anyone could fathom back in the spinning disk days.

Seagate had a product called Kinetic that was an Ethernet-connected key-value spinning disk. We had a 1U box with a number of 4000GB drives in our lab for an evaluation.

It was interesting but we didn't find a use for it. Product is dead now as far as I know.

Sticking to Gentoo for my personal systems (for many reasons, not just this issue). Slackware was my OS of choice once upon a time (there weren't many choices back then, though.)

It's getting harder and harder to find a distro where systemd isn't a hard requirement. I am hoping Debian will keep the choice of sysvinit available.

I had a lady next to me start to drown and grab me in a pool when I was getting my diving certification. Despite having a supply of air, wetsuit, fins and buoyancy control device on, she got that drowning sensation when her respirator came out. Once she had someone to hold onto, sanity was restored but I totally got why drowning people are dangerous from then on.

I know a guy that started cutting himself once with a small pocket knife. He just went back to his office and lost it. He was obviously asked to leave, as he was upsetting the rest of the employees. I saw him a couple of years later and he didn't mention it so I didn't either. How do you ask someone if they are still crazy?

Stress is a killer. I try not to let it get to me; I have responsibilities.

I'm suddenly glad they didn't have github when I was in college. I found some old printouts from my college days recently, and I wrote some terrible, terrible C and assembly for the VAX.

Writing bad stuff is how I learn though, so that's OK.

Remember BlueSteel? I'm using it right now. Still use the latest Enlightenment DR16 on all my Linux and Solaris boxes. It does everything I need a window manager to do.

The first non-ad result for me is mail.aol.com, as it should be.

Reading the original source completely changes everything. Thank you.

The only really interesting thing about this is the claim that it was weapons grade uranium. I wonder if they mean the same thing other people do when they say that (for me, 90+% U-235), or if the mention of californium means it was blended?

The Apollo command module orbit was approximately ~110 kilometers (~60 nautical miles) from the surface. The initial TLI leaves it with a highly elliptical orbit but this is corrected before the LM descent.

Super. My gentoo boxes are 1.8.2, and are broken as expected.

  $ ln -s /usr/bin/sudo ./%s
  $ ./%s -D9
  [some debug output with garbage]
  Segmentation fault
  $

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401533

Looks like it's patched on x86/amd64 already.

OpenIndiana looks unaffected. It's using 1.7.4p4.

There is advertising on the Internet? I almost forgot.

Advertising got a really bad reputation with a lot of people, and they are unlikely to turn off their armor for anyone. If you are having a problem with the relatively small community who uses ad blocking software, you are paying the price for years of annoying animated gifs, flash, and ridiculous punch-the-monkey win ipod scams.

I whitelist a few sites I use regularly and that I'd like to "support", after an article on arstechnica awhile ago. But it's a short list.

This video clearly takes place after all the undesirables have been sent to the Off World Colonies.

I just noticed today that my searches for "ipadm" return something relevant, rather than assuming that I meant "ipad", and forcing me to confirm that I did actually mean what I typed, which I think was the case just a couple of days ago.

My first was an Apple IIe at age 12. I was thinking the same thing.

Even though amazon.com is all on EC2 and capacity is demand driven, someone is still buying servers and has some capacity overhead, right? They've just shifted the spend from the amazon.com business unit to the AWS business unit (assuming that's how it's set up)?

That's funny. I followed your lead... but I was less polite.

I enjoyed reading it however. I will now mercilessly mock RIM along with you.

When I finally made the switch from a 4:3 panel to something widescreen, I had to find some that were 16:10.