soneil

I have a couple of devices that are 12V over usb-c. The devices themselves are fine, but the wallwarts the mffr provided are just that - 12v over usb-c. No PD. If a device is expecting 5V, there's a healthy chance it'll .. stop expecting 5V.

We blame usb-c for all this, but it does feel like some mffrs are going out of their way to screw it up.

I'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto?

It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.

This feels like a good place to reel out my favourite anecdote; community college IT (or for the natives; BTEC), 1998; our programming tutor told us to "ignore the internet" because it's a fad.

Almost 30 years, and every so often I still wonder about where that got him.

SNDMSG-over-ftp pre-dates UUCP by 5 years, so I think that one's pretty clear-cut.

(Not that I'm claiming anything's original here, ftp & smtp are both in the nwg/ietf family tree, which makes it easy to draw parallels. There's probably 100 other influences.)

It used to be even more literally so - network mail started off as using FTP to SNDMSG onto a remote system instead of your own. In RFC475, FTP has MAIL and MLFL (mailfile) commands to support this.

I think it's neat that you can still find echoes of this. MAIL worked by just appending to MLFL, separating records with CRLF.CRLF - which is still how Data segments are terminated in SMTP.

I think what really stands out about this, is that having it installed as a pre-made brick is very cost-effective.

But this cost-effective route isn't readily available to most people, as most people don't build homes. Developers build lots, and then sell finished homes. So you need to entice developers. And historically, "the stick" is the only enticement developers remotely pay attention to.

"If you want a swift brick, install one yourself" is much easier said than done - you're talking about removing an existing brick, replacing it, hoping you don't damage the course or the cavity, probably voiding any warranty on a new home, etc. It's certainly not a £35 retrofit.

It may amuse you to know they're both essentially the same thing. GBP is formally Pound Sterling, formerly 1 pound (tower pound / 20 troy ounces) of Sterling Silver. Which is why £ is a stylised L.

2100 entries over 40 years is pretty much a show a week. Talk about artefacts of a life well lived.

Sigur Ros have a surprising number of shows on their ftp, which is delightfully retro.

I think it's interesting that traditionally Ireland used a different calendar for seasons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_calendar

So Winter is Nov, Dec, Jan - and Spring is Feb, March, April. Which honestly, makes sense to me.

Except it's the middle of April, I'm freezing, and got pelted with hail yesterday. The west coast cares little for seasons!

The last one is so close to the point. Iran had Internet blackouts earlier this year, Russia has been experimenting with the same - options like shortwave are just as relevant as ever.

I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's allowed to tell you about the wrong?

Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead?

I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anymore.

I have to admit - I still grind my teeth every time I see "dns propagation" used without a direct follow-up that it's a myth, you're looking at cascading cache expiry.

Propagation might be a useful way to visualise it, but doesn't match reality unless every cache is a warm cache.

Compelled speech is protected, fingerprints aren't.

Imagine it's 1926 and none of this tech is an issue yet. The police can fingerprint and photograph you at intake, they can't compel speech or violate the 5th.

That's exactly what's being applied here. It's not that the police can do more or less than they could in 1926, it's that your biometrics can do more than they did in 1926. They're just fingerprinting you / photographing you .. using your phone.

later, like 1956? The world's first commercial HDD was 5,000,000 characters.

with the context mostly being HDD manufacturers who want to inflate their drive sizes

This is a myth. The first IBM harddrive was 5,000,000 characters in 1956 - before bytes were even common usage. Drives have always been base10, it's not a conspiracy.

Drives are base10, lines are base10, clocks are base10, pretty much everything but RAM is base10. Base2 is the exception, not the rule.

It goes back way further than that. The first IBM harddrive was the IBM 350 for the IBM 305 RAMDAC. It was 5 million characters. Not bytes, bytes weren't "a thing" yet. 5,000,000 characters. The very first harddrive was base-10.

Here's my theory. In the beginning, everything was base10. Because humans.

Binary addressing made sense for RAM. Especially since it makes decoding address lines into chip selects (or slabs of core, or whatever) a piece of cake, having chips be a round number in binary made life easier for everyone.

Then early DOS systems (CP/M comes to mind particularly) mapped disk sectors to RAM regions, so to enable this shortcut, disk sectors became RAM-shaped. The 512-byte sector was born. File sizes can be written in bytes, but what actually matters is how many sectors they take up. So file sizing inherited this shortcut.

But these shortcuts never affected "real computers", only the hamstrung crap people were running at home.

So today we have multiple ecosystems. Some born out of real computers, some with a heavy DOS inheritance. Some of us were taught DOS's limitations as truth, and some of us weren't.

They almost always mean power of 10, unless you're discussing RAM, RAM addressing, or RAM pages. (or flash, which has inherited most of the same for most of the same reasons)

This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts.

RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture).

We apply it to all the wrong things mostly because the first home computers had nothing but RAM, so binary sizing was the only explanation that was ever needed. And 50 years later we're sticking to that story.

Pretty much anywhere you have networked storage? Gigabit is about on-par with pre-sata ATA133.

This was one of the "lessons learnt" from the XZ incident. One of the (many) steps they took to avoid scrutiny was modifications that existed in the real tarball but not the repo.

The sad thing is that's pretty accurate.

I do value the inconvenience. When I put an album on, I put an album on. I don't hit next, random, go wandering off down rabbitholes. I put the album on.

And I do see the cost as a feature, somewhat. It feels like I got something for my money, in a way that paying for a zip doesn't.

What you'll tend to notice with "willing participants" is that they're not looking for truth, they're looking for confirmation. No-one asks for proof when you tell them what they want to hear.

In my family it's the other way around - it's the people that used to tell us not to talk to strangers on the internet, and not to believe everything we see on the internet, who are now doing precisely that.

Isn't it great being able to rely on tech that isn't doing what we think it's doing.

I don't even need to keep an eye on my cooking anymore, the smoke alarm beeps when I get too close.

My understanding is that the "nugget of truth" that birthed the "routing around nuclear attack" myth, is that it was a consideration in Paul Baran's packet-switching work at RAND.

So it wasn't a design consideration for ARPANET, but it would have shown up in enough early papers to give the myth some legs.

bps are easy. packets per second is the crunch. Say you've got 64 bytes per packet, which would be a worst-case-scenario - you're down to 150Mpacket/sec. Sending one byte after another is the easy bit, the decisions are made per-packet.

How do you physically solder a chip the wrong way around?

With effort, and bodge-wire. I've seen chips done dead-bug style when the board's been messed up (eg, the footprint is orientated for the bottom of the board, but placed on the top, and vice-versa).

It's definitely not something you'd ship, but a kludge that can get you working until the next board spin.

Nit: It's the Pi 500+

I really want to hope the name is a nod to the Amiga 500+ (which had twice the RAM of the A500 ..)