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It's a shame that the tyranny of volumetrics referenced in the article means that in the UK some of my favourite crisp flavours have been brief one-off novelty runs - coronation chicken, baked bean, and numerous flavours rolled out for world cups in the form of nationality-themed assortment bags.
When it comes to Christmas songs, I'm afraid you will have to prise Slade from my cold dead fingers
Built-in graphics commands are a massive win, and a big gap in today's standard language offerings for kids. Any old timer will tell you that the ability to trivially get sprites up on the screen, or hell even a coloured circle, is the clue to the young programmer that putting together a simple game is within their immediate grasp, and this is very much the gateway drug to programming in general.
see also: microwaves
A microwave needs two dials - one for power level, and one for time. Not a calculator keypad, not buttons with +1 and +10 on them or any of that nonsense - dials please. And start/stop buttons if you insist. That's it. It does not need a 'defrost chicken drumsticks' programme cluttering up the ui, because that function is far better fulfilled by a human repeatedly running the thing at low power for a few mins then poking the food with a finger
many years ago an older relative went on a holiday to Spain and was outraged that their apartment did _not_ have carpet. I deemed it futile to point out that carpeting is desirable here because our climate is so wretched, but as flooring in a hot country would actually be pretty icky.
I had no idea that each 'Spoons has its own custom carpet design. They are a much-derided chain but this is a nice detail, and by keeping drinking affordable they ensure the next generation of Britons can keep alive the vital tradition of a night in the pub laughing and talking bollocks.
In the UK a misplaced apostrophe (in a plural or in possessive its) is called a "greengrocers' apostrophe", presumably due to folks in that trade being particularly susceptible to errors in their signs, in turn partially due to the slightly unusual nature of the nouns they are pluralising; "bananas" is slightly teasing you to stick one in, but "mangos" more so as just looks like a Greek island otherwise, unless you opt for the -oes form.
I would have crashed the Greek paper because we were not taught accents, but the instructions make it very clear the answers require them!
It's worth reiterating that Go was created by Google to solve Google's problems. If it also solves your problems, or a worthwhile subset thereof, then that is a happy serendipity, but it's not a design goal.
Slightly younger than the punch card era, but one bit of "old" tech I don't miss is the line printer. We had one in an office with a nylon carpet, and you'd approach that thing with utter dread because some combination of the action of the paper spewing out at speed, the metal guide bars for the ejected paper, and that bloody carpet meant that collecting a printout gave you an even chance of a massive static electricity shock.
Dismayed to learn that it's now virtually impossible to obtain an RPN calculator of any sort. Swiss Micros make HP clones but for the more casual user their prices are pretty prohibitive when compared to how 'mainstream' calculator prices have tumbled.
Based on the attitude of its advocates, a flat earth would lack science and mathematics entirely, so pi would be undefined?
Prediction: one beaming grandma vs one bemused, crestfallen kid on Christmas morning.
My mum briefly worked as kitchen staff for Winston Churchill, and she tells the story that they had to wrap his stilton in a piece of greaseproof paper, hold it up and listen for weevils moving about - for only when it was at that stage would the great man eat it.
Ha, indeed! To test this theory, next time I re-read the book I'm going to imagine Louis Wu speaking in a West Country accent throughout :)
In Larry Niven's 'Ringworld' the explorers are always eating 'hand meals': for the longest time I resisted the obvious interpretation and imagined some unfathomable futuristic repast, but let's be honest - they're sandwiches aren't they.
Also - material science and computation being less advanced, they just built bigger margins of error into everything that required resistance to force etc. Compare to today where everything is done to wafer-thin margins to minimise cost, hence fiascos such as RAAC.
OK I'm now imagining a 19th century job interview when the candidate is given three weeks to 'devise and construct a steam-powered apparatus capable of emulating the popular parlour game based on multiples of 3 and 5'. I'm sure modern steampunk enthusiasts can be nerd-sniped into having a go !
The vocabulary section is also very iffy, assuming some common Japanese words haven't changed their vowels in the last two centuries!
The whole section is a reminder of how much we take for granted freely available and accurate information from the other side of the world, something that was absolutely not the case when this book was written, instead relying one presumes on sources based entirely on "travellers' tales".
Thought that as well, but try to imagine someone bellowing the word over the incessant clacking of teletypes and it _almost_ works ...
The London Underground used to have a freely accessible API for real-time data as well, it was useful to curl it to plan when to leave the house :) Sadly no longer.
I would say that if you want to do 'clean' Rust you could certainly end up in a maze of reference lifetime problems. However here your escape hatch is that you can just clone stuff or wrap it in Rc/Arc just to get it compiling, which is arguably the moral equivalent of sneaking a global or two into a python program: icky, but gets the job done
One thing not mentioned is that US usage has 'couple' as an adjective whereas in British usage it is a noun - hence "a couple hours" is incorrect in Britain, we must say "a couple of hours".
If I need to grok a complex nested data structure then YAML is a 'mare, but JSON is not much better - even with nice IDE support. TBH end up just running a script to flatten the whole lot into lines of key-value pairs, where each key is.the.full.path.from.root, with numbers for array indices - NOW I can see what's going on. I believe this is similar to how TOML is structured, albeit people criticise it for being too verbose as a result!
Here in London targeted use of parking enforcement is an infamous money-spinner for local authorities - in instances where they know they can clean up: case in point, our local hospital has basically no on-site parking, only metered parking on local roads. The problem of course is that people going to a hospital appointment have no accurate idea how long the wait plus appointment time will be. Hence, there is a bloke on a scooter on permanent patrols looking for anyone who is a few minutes over so he can do them.
Or indeed this poor sod whose surname is 'Null': https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
Heh - checkmate not stopping the game was also a feature of Atari 2600 chess; always fun to carry on until the computer had no pieces left
The real surprise, given the distances in miles and time, is how similar American and British English are - compare with Afrikaans vs Dutch for example, or how much (at least according to Wikipedia) Cypriot Turkish and Greek have both diverged from their mainland forms.
Ditto, and conversely, UK "apple sauce" vs US "applesauce": two nations divided by a common language and all that.
TIL that wanting to protect your rights is virtually indistinguishable from being a drug addict.