omerhj

Edward Ashton's "After the Fall" explores this alien-human relationship. Good summer read!

K&R C

Absolutely! This was a very educational experience.

Nearly twenty years ago I had a little server farm of old PCs. Two or three Pentium-133s, one dual Pentium Pro 200 machine, and my pride and joy, a Pentium 3 running at 600 MHz. I was trying to get familiar with Gentoo and to make recompiling everything all the time more bearable I set up distcc so my P3 could do most of the work. It worked very well!

But after a few weeks every Gentoo box in the house started crashing regularly. It took me a while to figure out what was going on: one of the slower machines had developed a single-bit memory error and was sharing corrupted .so files with all other machines.

This is Moid Moidelhoff's fascinating two hour interview with science fiction author and marine biologist Peter Watts, covering consciousness, intelligence, SF books and authors that influenced him, and many other subjects.

One of my cats loved snoozing on my big 19" CRT as well. When I replaced the CRT with my first LCD monitor, he tried to hop onto the non-existent top of the screen. In a mad scramble to not fall he put all of his front claws in the plastic cover of the screen. The LCD went from zero to hundreds of bad pixels within a day :-(

I still miss that cat too.

I bought the PDF last year for $7 (a very steep discount) during Apress/Springer's Black Friday sale. If you don't need the book right now or are on a budget, it may be worth waiting until next week in case they repeat the offer.

Here's a list of all the bumblebee species that are or have been present in Vermont: https://val.vtecostudies.org/projects/bumble-bee-atlas/speci...

They figured it out on the DC to Orlando route:

https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train

Right, the TIFF creators were obviously inspired by the Hitchhikers Guide.

Also off-topic, TIFF files use 42 as a magic number in bytes 2 and 3 of the file header:

"The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance."

I believe AT&T was trying to build a "videotex" system based on the NAPLPS protocol which was developed by Telidon in Canada.

BYTE Magazine's July 1983 issue was dedicated to videotex:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-07/mode/2up

I installed Debian Jessie on my 320CDT just a week or two ago. That's the last version of Debian that supports the Pentium MMX CPU. The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore and the screen is pretty dim.

The 320CDT came with Windows 95 but I got a $200 or so Toshiba store credit in a class action settlement because of a floppy drive problem with the 320CDT that I never actually experienced. I used that to buy Windows 2000 which ran reasonably well on the 96MB of RAM I have in the 320CDT.

My next laptop was a Satellite Pro 6100 which was a truly awful piece of hardware... got sent in for repairs multiple times and never worked right.

The ACLU has been affected as well. From the email they sent out yesterday:

In all candor, we are frustrated with the lack of information we've received from Blackbaud about this incident thus far. The ACLU is doing everything in our power to ascertain the full nature of the breach, and we are actively investigating the nature of the data that was involved, details of the incident, and Blackbaud's remediation plans.

We are also exploring all options to ensure this does not happen again, including revisiting our relationship with Blackbaud.

I've been getting what sounds like the same emails. They used an email address and password that I used only on monster.com back in the early 2000s.

The NYT now has an option to cancel using a chat window -- and I'm pretty sure the operator that you're chatting with is a bot.

This probably doesn't qualify as a modern version, but I occasionally play Civ2 (the original Win32s version, in a 32-bit Windows 7 VM) and the empire splitting happens there as well.

-11 in both eyes here. Seeing the same thing!

It took CNN years to get the aspect ratio of their videos right -- all of their web video used to look like standard def TV stretched out to a HD screen. So the answer is almost certainly no.

Another Alastair Reynolds short story in the same vein is "A Murmuration" that I read (on my Kindle) in Interzone #257. In the story a flock of birds exhibits intelligence independently from the individual birds.

Apple used to call their computers personal computers: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...

It's funny how IBM was able to hijack the term.

Martin Hellman (yes, the co-inventor of public key cryptography) has a fascinating blog about the risks of stumbling into a nuclear war: https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/

I'm in the middle of his 1996 follow up book, "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" (http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/06848...).

The book details the Soviet nuclear program, as well as the truly massive amount of espionage that was going on at the various locations of the Manhattan project.

Debian Wheezy (stable) on most of my systems, and Debian Testing on my primary home laptop. I use backports for things like Emacs and Iceweasel/Firefox where I like to have recent versions.

I've been using Linux as my main desktop starting with Red hat 5.1, so that's got to be almost 15 years ago. Moved to Fedora, then Ubuntu, and then finally to Debian.

I've got an old MacBook and I may get a MacBook Air at some point because they're great travel laptops. Hate the keyboard on all Macs I've worked with though. The operating system is fine, I can get work done on OS X.

Occasionally I boot into Windows (7) to play a game but at least half the time Windows will update itself for what seems like an eternity and then reboot automatically straight back into Debian. By that time I've usually forgotten what I needed Windows for.

At work I have a Windows 7 VM for various corporate tools that only work in Windows. Usually use the Outlook web client in Debian for email and calendaring. That works most of the time.

Paul Krugman blogged about this subject last year:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/friday-night-mus...

with a followup here:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/life-in-the-slow...

I've got a Toshiba Satellite 320CDT (Pentium 233MMX, 96 MB RAM) from 1998 that still runs -- I installed Debian Wheezy on it last November. Toshiba went through a really bad spell a few years later, but now their machines don't seem much less reliable than HP or Dell's consumer laptops.

Informit.com (Pearson, Addison-Wesley Professional, Prentice Hall etc.) has a similar 40% to 50% off deal until January 31st:

http://www.informit.com/promotions/best-of-2013-ebook-sale-1...

This includes the ebook versions of The C++ Programming Language 4th Edition, Programming in Objective-C 6th Edition, Peopleware and several other titles.

I bought the paper book and the ebook (pdf, epub, mobi) from No Starch Press through this link for $70 last year:

http://man7.org/tlpi/purchase.html

I didn't end up doing as much Linux C programming as I expected but for the little I did I found the ebook version more useful -- the paper book is hefty and doesn't travel well. It looks great in my bookcase next to Knuth's TAOCP though.

O'Reilly seems to source their ebook files from the original publishers so I assume their version is identical.

nl -> us, and specifically vt.

Moved here because my wife is a Vermonter. I've lived in Vermont for almost two decades now and unless I really start disliking snow I'll probably stay here for the rest of my life. Not exactly a hotbed of technology though.

It seems some of the higher quality scans can be found here on archive.org: http://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-rescans