Posts by jake 26710 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"Do you want to bet it is definitely not such an improbable plot?"
Yes. I am willing to bet the farm that is it not such an improbable plot. In fact, I am so absolutely certain, that I have done that very thing ... The alternative, assuming your scenario is anything close to reality, is to curl up and quit living due to the futility of it all. I'm not a quitter. Are you?
Many moons ago, I bid on a contract at a un*x shop. I won the contract without a face-to-face interview. When I walked in on the first morning, the guy in charge of the data center looked startled & exclaimed "Where's your beard‽‽‽" ... Despite over forty years of un*x experience, I do not now and never have had a beard. Still makes me chuckle :-)
Now git orf me lawn! (Beers all around.)
... my Satellite Pro (a 400CDT, if I remember correctly) triple booted. 4.4BSD, Minix 1.5 and this new-fangled thing called Slackware Linux. Slack had in the last year and a half taken over from BSD as my go-to OS. I wouldn't have been caught dead troubleshooting network issues with a Redmond based program loader pseudo-OS.
Actually, they ganged up on her and kicked her out of their clique because of a CoC that hadn't even officially been put into place yet. In some communities, this would be considered bullying. What does their precious CoC have to say about bullies?
Now that Stack Overflow admits to being built on argumentum ad passiones[0], and is thus to all intents and purposes useless, who do we send the wannabe programmers to in order to plagiarize b0rken versions of standard code snippets?
[0] Clearly, the most easily offended is in charge.
It's not a third of CO2 emissions. It's a third of exported CO2 emissions.
Note that China, which buys most of Australia's coal, doesn't even make the top 30 on that list, yet they are the largest producer of CO2 emissions ... and will stay that way thanks to internal mining capability, even if Australia shuts down all coal production completely.
As a result, Australia doesn't have the capability to even dent total global CO2 emissions, so they might as well profit from some nice Chinesium dollars while they still can.
Boats aren't all that expensive to buy. They ARE, however, expensive to repair. More so if you're not handy. Even more so if you're not handy and think you are. It's easy to get in over your head. Before purchasing, remember your Latin: Caveat Emptor.
Owning a boat is cheap. Just keep it away from the four things guaranteed to ruin it: Sunlight, oxygen, water, and salt. People in the know add humans consuming alcohol to that list.
You can get a used autopilot in excellent condition, built for a boat, for under $500. Bolting it onto your boat would be a lot less work than adapting an automotive product to do the job. Took me about a day to install one in my Monterey Clipper, and that included testing & tuning as I pulled half a dozen crab pots.
Speed is relative. And expensive. You can get a go-fast that'll take you across an ocean faster than legal driving speeds in most civilized countries, if you choose to throw enough money at the problem. At my age, I've leaned boating's about the journey, not the destination. My advice is to spend money on reliability and comfort, not speed.
I use a Daisy Wheel occasionally, but it's hardly a new affectation ... and I have the receipt dated in the late 1970s to prove it. I don't have a 1053, but I do have a couple working 2741s. Prefer the 1403, mostly for speed (and shock value). And of course there is the Smith Corona portable, which works quite nicely even during power outages.
Nobody has ever accused me of being a hipster. Packrat maybe ...
"That said... "I do confess that I had pulled a few hundred dollars out of the ATM in advance, just in case.""
I have had a couple of hundred dollars in cash available to me "just in case" since the late 1960s (a trifle more these days). It has saved me more times than I can count. Recommended.
Never say never ...
Picture a data center in the basement of a tall building in San Francisco's financial district. Card punch up against a wall, near the ancient Otis heavy goods lift. Every now and again, at seemingly random times, the punch generated errors for a couple characters. Nobody could figure out why.
Until IBM was traipsing in and out one fine weekend, upgrading who knows what hardware, as only IBM could. Someone (ahem) noticed that the gibberish was being generated about ten seconds before the elevator doors opened.
Turned out that the motor for the lift was drawing so much current when it first started that it was inducing errors in the punch on the other side of the wall. Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement (that level was key-protected) ... until IBM was in and out that morning.
Going in with a smile, a PleaseAndThankYou[tm], and the attitude of "I don't know if you can help me, let's find out!" when you discover an error helps keep folks on your side ... if you come storming in, looking for blood, you'll only piss 'em off. This is true when dealing with customer service in almost all walks of life. It's basic social engineering, innit.
The one that floored me was the field engineer who opened the back of a server, pulled the diagnostic floppy off the inside of the door where it was affixed with a magnet ... and the fucking thing still worked! Observing my surprise, he just shrugged and said "I know. I don't get it either. They did it this way for years before I got here. I don't ask questions, I just go by their playbook and collect my pay." He claimed to have seen several tens of these things, and the disk was only dead once.
I used to run into programmers who didn't know what a floppy disk was all the time, well into the 1970s, trailing off into the '80s. I even ran across a few in the early 1990s ... These last were mostly folks programming industrial equipment with paper/mylar tape and card decks; seems that general purpose computers were outside their job descriptions. There may even be a few of this last set left in odd corners of the world.
In all likelihood, nothing happened to his hard drive. I've been winning bar bets with this one for decades ... Back in the early/mid 80s, a friend and I were tasked with bulk erasing a couple dozen Seagate ST225 20 meg MFM drives. Having recently acquired a couple of rare earth magnets (industrial surplus, as re-sold by the late, lamented Haltec in Mountain View), we figured we could wipe 'em across the drives and be done with it. But first lunch, at Fred's on Middlefield Road.
For those of you who didn't grow up in the wilds of Silly Con Valley, Fred's was (and is!) a dive bar[0]. Heavy emphasis on Dive. Home away from home kind of place, if you're into that kind of thing. A good place for planning destructive testing of all kinds. So naturally, we decided that we'd pull a drive out of the computer, but leave it plugged in, turn the machine back on and wipe the magnets over it "to watch the computer lose it's tiny little mind". Which we did.
To our surprise, nothing happened. The drive trundled on, ignoring us and our magnets. So we found a bulk eraser for tapes and the like and tried that. Still nothing happened. I wrote a simple "walking ones" program to run over them instead.
I've done this with increasingly strong magnets, and progressively denser HDDs over the years and have never, not once, lost a single byte of data EXCEPT mechanical data loss when the drive head gets bent into the running platter (the traditional meaning of a HDD head crash).
Don't take my word for it, try it for yourself. Or read this account of somebody else trying it and getting similar results.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —Samuel Langhorne Clemens
[0] If you pointy-clicky around in the go ogle link, you can get a look at the interior. Might not look like much, but a LOT of what happened in the proto-SillyConValley started in there ...
"I still can't understand why my daughter and her future husband just stayed indoors in a pub down in the village."
Cast you mind back to when you first became engaged ... Would you have preferred to have partied down the pub with your mates, or would staying in with your parental unit(s), partying like it was 1999 have been attractive?
I implemented a four hour minimum for on-site visits in (roughly) 1990, a couple years after I went solo. Double on weekends/holidays. A few clients balked at the new rate ... I simply told 'em "Don't call me unless you actually need me".
A new issue arose. Convincing 'em to pay 4 hours (or more) for a one minute visit. The old TV repairman's maxim applied, "I'm not charging you for thumping your telly with a screwdriver. I'm charging you for knowing where and how hard to thump your telly, and for showing up to do it". The explanation seems to have worked ... although about a year and a half ago, a child CEO wondered why I'd need to thump a telly.
The new-fangled alpine and Mutt can both be configured to do exactly what you ask. I still use (Al)pine for the bulk of my email. Works a treat, even over a 2400 baud dial-up. Or in a terminal emulator, if you insist on the massive overhead of a GUI for a function that is primarily text based.
(What do you mean, 2400's too slow? How fast can you read and/or type?)
"I think the point is that email is not a general purpose filing system."
The point is that people like the user in the story aren't even aware that the concept of "file system" exists. Software designers and support personnel should be aware of this and take it into account when doing their jobs.
... one should always takes a quick peak and ask the user "Are you sure? This file looks like it might be important!" before nuking the trash. Preferably with a witness or two within earshot. This has been true ever since Apple, Inc. invented the "special" class of computer user with the advent of the Lisa, and then lowered the entry bar to this "special" class with the Macintosh.
16 up and 16 down. That's good enough for me to sample them again ... it used to be more like 32 up and none down. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever admitted in public that they liked sprouts.
I have about a pound (half a kilo-ish) from a local grower, will cook them tonight and report back :-)
"In a pan with just a few drops of your choice of vegetable oil, slowly cook some fat bacon until it's crunchy"
Instead of veg oil, use a tiny bit of water, 2-3Tbs (50-75ml) or thereabouts (experiment for your quantity of bacon). The water comes up to boiling, which is hot enough to melt bacon fat but not hot enough to cause sticking. As the bacon renders, the water boils off leaving pure bacon fat to finish the cooking, un-tainted by any lesser grease.
Nuts make better cheese than tapioca. Cashews are by far the choice of various vegan friends of mine, followed by macadamias and almonds.
Note that I said "better than tapioca". While I've sampled a few concoctions labeled "vegan cheese" that were actually edible, not one of them seemed like any kind of actual cheese that I've been in contact with.
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