Posts by Ignazio

Re: its "ultra-hard stainless steel" [...] "transparent metal" [...] "literally bulletproof."

Can't believe nobody has said anything about pissing on the hood.

Re: imaginative SQL one-liners

I had to write one with six self joins and I can't remember how many inner and left joins :-( I would use smart to describe the process only in its "pain" meaning. It smarted quite a bit, yes.

Re: If you're able to plug your phone into a USB port

Plugging my android phone on my windows worl laptop and activating the usb tether creates a network device that claims 433 mbps. *Claims*, I haven't had a chance to verify that, since the 4g uplink was never faster than 50.

Might not be as fast as the latest wifi but it ain't bad either.

"why would I want paper books I'm not going to read again?"

The article says it. They can be passed to someone else to enjoy.

Digital ones *could* do the same thing. But the sellers prefer to sell multiple copies, at a price often very close to the physical item. Naughty of them.

Re: 8GB works fine.

You're not hitting memory limits with docker and intellij AND databases?

You forgot the lie icon. It'd blow past 8 GB with Hello World.

Re: Depends.

Languages. Often entirely different from the official language(s) of the country in question, and at times called dialects by the local colonizer.

Re: Just a quick manicure.

I fixed a 3.5 inch floppy drive with a similar application of sharp blades.

Brand new PC (tower case) wouldn't write or read fro floppy. Year about 2001. My uncle gave me a ring about it two days after he bought the thing.

Much messing about looking for loose cables, at some point we had the thing on with the case open and its front off. To our surprise, floppy worked fine. Front back on, floppy failed again.

The front had a plastic facade in front of the floppy and a thingamajig to allow the operator to push the eject button on the actual drive. The thingamajig was about two millimetres too long and would keep the button half pressed when the front was screwed on. Snip snip and all was well.

Re: "All software reaches a point at which it's no longer supported"

When I told my dad I wanted to study computer science, he said: but why? The things have been built already.

Same as "Write it right the first time"

Funnily enough, in his daily job* he was very well acquainted with "needs change, things get old, stuff breaks". He'd even joke half his work was fixing the stuff he'd built twenty years before. Microsoft has just made a business that ensures things break at scale, instead of at their usual pace.

* he was a plasterer before retiring

Re: Did I read that correctly?

It's for Big Jerk on Board

Re: Fine

Fine grinding? Remote location? Waste of energy.

Chuck them in a spare steel container and leave it wherever. In a hundred million years it'll be a nice lump of easily mined minerals, with lower chances of poisoning the local ponds.

But if you wanted to finely grind DRM proponents, I shall start carving out the millstones.

Re: Pretty impressive

There are values of N for which O(N^2) is smaller than O(Nlog(N)) when you include memory requirements and multiplicative constants. Granted, if memory serves that limit is 12 or so...

Re: OK - you curse the beancounters

Yeah we should have fixed the bugs we didn't know existed

Re: Just... Wow

"has to"

You said it. Yet in your first comment you say it isn't possible to work well and so the CEO is right in saying everyone has to be in the office.

Re: Obligatory

Because all English keyboard variants are equally usable and that post was a dogwhistle.

Explorer on win2k was good. Everything else is crap. Finder creates these ._ds_store nuisances every time one opens a folder, which is positively diabolical.

There, now we all know.

Re: There's never enough staff...

Or that's what the pharaoh wrote on the wall, anyway.

Re: Ehm...

Only code that uses APIs that have been dropped is complicated to move. Complicated in a corporate sense, I urge to add: release and change management, specifically. I've updated a few code bases over the years, changes required have been minimal. Changes prompted by IDEs and static code analysis tools, plentiful - but those are suggestions. Often good ones, yes, but not necessary. Avoiding a 3 million bill, on the other hand...

Re: Rule one...

One flies once to Amsterdam for the weekend and one learns to doubt that

Posting this from a phone like an animal, I am.

Re: The old story, Employee is always smarter than the Founder

We need a CT scan stat to find the twist in YOUR underwear. Might be sanity threatening.

Just like that developer who broke that library on purpose that one time, eh? People like him now.

We just used socks stuffed in the goals.

Aside from ionisation immediately after a strike, features of the area make lightning more likely to strike, so yes, lightning does strike more than once in the same place. Rarely the same living creatures or fuses, though.

Re: "the plethora of deadly creatures found in the one-time prison colony"

That would have been the deadly flora, but the rabbits are worse.

Phalanx turrets, fore and aft.

Re: Never had good luck working for family owned businesses

Royal families everywhere want to have a chinwag

Re: This is a job for .... Justin Case!

One could argue that waiting for xmas 99 to install the y2k compatible version is something one does only under duress.

Seconded. I helped format a computer in 2002 with windows nt, both a few years old by then. Reason was it held an ISA interface card for a hydraulic press sensor of some description. Value of the computer, about fifty euros, value of the attached machinery about one hundred thousands, replacing the isa with pci or usb probably 10 grand. So nt and hopes of the psu not burning out it was. Still is, for all I know.

Came here to say the same.

> some do some do not

And we know from other statistics that those who can afford to do the work for free often are the ones already privileged with higher salaries, better job security, etc etc.

I say that as one smack bang in the middle of the classical western privileged class, and maintains a few (tiny) open source projects. We lose the contributions of a lot of smart people who are too busy making rent because the industry is skewed against their gender, skin color, religion, etc. It's not a problem created by open source but it endures the consequences regardless.

Hitting the escape key let you in, but in our uni lab it meant you didn't get internet access, only intranet.

Blank password on those machines, meaning pressing enter meant you were in agd good, pressing esc not so much. Fellow student had to be told loudly, thought.

"It doesn't work!", he pipes up.

"Press enter", I say.

"But it works if I press Escape!", he counters.

"Then what are you complaining about, Sherlock?", or words to that effect.

I wasn't the sharpest tool in the box but he made me look amazing.

Re: Blockchain

Sarcasm, right?

Re: Men

BS. People, engineers, or any other more specific word to describe what these people do would have been the right choice. Climbing plate glass to try and pretend "men" wasn't just a 1952 stance a few decades past its expiry date is just passé.

True, they just call it licensing.