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wlindley

Re:OKI Develops 124-Layer PCB Technology on Saturday October 03, 2026 @10:50AM (#49944797)
OKI, as in ... my old Microline 82a dot-matrix?
Re:How We Pushed CDC into Postgres on Monday August 10, 2026 @09:23AM (#49243305)
Excellent that Control Data is contributing! Oh wait, I'm a few decades out of sync
Re:Curly braces: An evolution of Unix and C on Sunday May 24, 2026 @08:11PM (#48262300)
Isn't it odd to read "curly" braces? Every printed dictionary I have, up through the 1990s at least, says that braces are {these}, brackets are [these], and parentheses are (these). Saying "curly brace" is as redundant as saying "round parentheses." Yes, braces are curly, by definition.

At least that's how it always in American English, and ASCII. Apparently British English says more than [these] can be "brackets" and <these> were called "angle brackets" in the 1970s, but when did anyone in the computer industry ever start calling anything but {these} braces?

Re:Phone is about to stop being yours on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @08:33AM (#47947448)
The real mystery is why anyone remotely aware of the Free Software movement would have ever been duped into advocating for handheld computers so hostile to their own goals.
Re:We mourn our craft on Saturday February 07, 2026 @02:32PM (#46926846)
"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.
Re:Ephemeral Infrastructure: Why Short-Lived Is a Good Thing on Friday December 05, 2025 @04:17PM (#46167433)
What does "compute" mean here? It is supposed to be a verb, but here seems to be a noun. I have recently started seeing it apparently mean "computational capacity" but here it seems to mean "an instance of a virtualized computer installation." All this verbing is confusing. Excuse me, I have an eat.
As an emacs user since the mid-80s, I do note this functionality would be nice as a Major Mode, if one were an avid Lisp programmer.

As a Perl Monger since 1994, and as a developer who has used and extended Org::Parser from CPAN, I am happy to see support in any other language, as you have done with Go here. I wonder whether you plan to extend your parser to fairly complete support of all/most of what Org offers.

Thanks for this!

Re:Floppy Disk / Diskettes // retrocmp / retro computing on Friday October 31, 2025 @07:01PM (#45777664)
The original IBM PC could be purchased either with 160KB/180KB single-sided floppy drives, or the 320KB/360KB double-sided. Some early IBM PC users still needed the "flippy" trick!

See IBM advert, https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1983-10_OCR/page/n111/mo...

Re:Dotfiles feel too intimate and personal to share on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @02:06PM (#44815513)
"...whenever 'a software' doesn't...." Ugh. "A software package" or "a piece of software" or perhaps "a program" but you don't have "one software" any more than you can have "one hardware" or "one information." Grammar, please!
My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith) arena. I still have master diskettes and original manuals ready for taking to the Xerox shop, and only a few years ago tossed boxes full of registration cards (with 13 cent stamps on them).

We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.

It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.

Re:Google change is breaking some digital photo frames on Friday March 07, 2025 @12:59PM (#43292398)
And again, There is no cloud, only someone else's computer.
Re:Tell HN: O'Reilly sells DRM-free eBooks again on Friday February 14, 2025 @12:53PM (#43051022)
Thank you, and all the best for a long-awaited and much-needed update to the book!
Re:Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more on Monday February 10, 2025 @02:05PM (#43003910)
Also "napkin" (from nappe, old for "tablecloth"). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napkin#Etymology_and_terminolo...
Re:Tell HN: O'Reilly sells DRM-free eBooks again on Friday February 07, 2025 @05:25PM (#42978221)
Listed is "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide (6th ed.)" by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy from 2006.

However there was a 7th edition, ISBN 9781449302597, published 2011. Yet nowhere online can I find a copy to purchase. Does anyone have a clue what happened to the 7th edition or where it might be found?

Re:When AI Promises Speed but Delivers Debugging Hell on Sunday January 26, 2025 @08:54AM (#42830113)
Garbage in, garbage out. Code spewed by a random generator that has not the slightest understanding of what it is doing, whacked at by a hammer until it seems to be working.

What is this supposed to produce other than a mass of bugs and vulnerabilities? "A.I." is utter garbage and always will be, it is foolish to think otherwise.

Re:The Supreme Court Rules Against TikTok–Now What? on Sunday January 19, 2025 @12:46PM (#42759365)
According to: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8038...

"FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION.—The term “foreign adversary controlled application” means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by— (A) any of— (i) ByteDance, Ltd.; (ii) TikTok;…"

How is that not a Bill of Attainder? Although it does not explicitly say that these companies are guilty of a crime, since when is it legal to make a law against a specific person, group of persons, or a specific company? That cannot possibly be Constitutional.

Re:The Supreme Court Rules Against TikTok–Now What? on Friday January 17, 2025 @04:53PM (#42743657)
What exactly is being forbidden here?

Outlawing installing a program ("app" being short for "application program") on your computer (even if it is called a "telephone" it is obviously a computer)? Surely there cannot be laws against running whatever program you want on your computer.

Outlawing access of such a program to the Internet? Obviously that cannot be possible, that would be a "Bill of Attainder" (a law against a specific person or group) which is illegal.

Outlawing access to the servers to which that program communicates? Likewise a Bill of Attainder, and illegal.

So what exactly is being done here? No-one is explaining

Re:Talking over a Wall Changed My Direction as a Programmer on Saturday December 21, 2024 @05:00PM (#42482677)
It's a program. "App" is a word, short for "Application Program," publicized by Apple for its handheld computers that masquerade as (and are euphemistically called) "telephones." "App" effectively means "proprietary closed-source program that talks to proprietary walled-garden programs running on someone else's computer, and acts as a spy sending all your sensitive data to who-knows-where."

No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?

Re:The tech utopia fantasy is over on Saturday November 23, 2024 @02:50PM (#42223408)
Most shocking of all is how almost every free-software, anti-big-government, anti-big-business, and libertarian advocate swallowed these allegedly "smart" alleged "telephones" -- which are obviously computers that someone else controls and utterly disempower the users -- to the utter disregard of every principle they said they believed.

Don't call it a "computer" (computers are scary), call it a "smart" "telephone." Or call it a "device" as if it were a can opener.

Don't call it a "program" (programmers are geeks), call it an (ugh) "app" [which is just short for "application program" of course]

Never had one of those nefarious handheld treacherous computers, never will, thanks.

In the 1940s, the Army used a phonetic alphabet starting Able, Baker, Charlie. My late father was on the first two postwar atomic bomb tests (the first after Trinity, and at Hiroshima, Nagasaki) which were Able and Baker.

Able was an air burst over Bikini (thus the name of the swimsuit).

Baker, the water burst, was the world's first atomic disaster; as a result of Baker, the third scheduled test Charlie was cancelled. My father died years later of colon cancer, perhaps not unrelated to contaminated air and water at the Eniwetok base afterwards.

FUBAR indeed.

Re:If your AI seems smarter, it's thanks to smarter human trainers on Saturday September 28, 2024 @06:38PM (#41683415)
a/k/a It is all a clever scam. True, or true?
Re:Android now allows apps to block sideloading on Wednesday September 11, 2024 @07:41PM (#41516275)
And this is why it is so shocking that even folks who should know better, who are technically savvy in the slightest, would ever consent to use such a brain-damaged computer system that runs nonfree software.
Indeed. Wouldn't be surprised if San Francisco tried to ban software, and criticism too. Perhaps "Software, critics, and software critics seek to ban San Francisco."
Re:The science behind an iPhone dumb phone on Tuesday July 16, 2024 @09:22AM (#40976342)
I have a kitchen phone and a desk phone (both VOIP), a Linux workstation, a DSLR camera, a radio, and read real books and play CDs. Also an RCA Orthophonic High Fidelity phonograph for 78, 45, and 33⅓. After the last Star Trek went off the air, and Jeopardy! went woke, there was nothing to watch on TV and it got left behind somewhere.

Computers are nothing but free software. Had a mobile phone (a flip-phone with real buttons) for years but never used it, and just let it lapse, as being unnecessary. Never understood why so many folks bought into being abused by their handheld pocket computers, and paying for the "privilege." Anyone who gives MS/Apple/Google/Amazon (the evil MAGA) money is being an enabler for the abuse of others.

Re:The deskilling of web dev is harming us all on Saturday May 25, 2024 @09:51AM (#40475081)
"De-skilling" would be a better way to write this. I was halfway through before realizing it wasn't about "desk-killing" or the pretending that workers are incorporeal gossamer entities that do not have to physically interact with the real world. (a/k/a "remote work")
Re:40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @10:31AM (#40428970)
Heath/Zenith's ZBASIC on the MSDOS-but-not-PCDOS Z-100 used a similar format but with at least different keywords. Somewhere I had a set of programs I had written in ZBASIC but could never load after selling that computer. Wonder if I still have the floppies squirreled away, now that I have a Greaseweazel to read those diskettes...
Re:Why We Practice Magic on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @12:50PM (#40054318)
Much of the world apparently believed that wearing a muzzle and living like a hermit instead of outdoors, exercise, vitamins, and a normal lifestyle would prevent the common cold. Pure magic over rational science. One wonders what the next generation will think of the insanity of the past few years.
After a few more revisions, you can make an RK05 ! (for the youth: That's a DEC joke)
Re:Anatomy of a credit card rewards program on Thursday April 04, 2024 @08:14AM (#39929403)
Bottom line: Pay cash if you want to support your local shops. Use credit cards if you love enriching your local megacorporation.
Butter in the USA is sold in 1-pound boxes, each containing four quarter-pound "squares" that are marked with tablespoon and fractional-cup gauges. Simply slice off five tablespoons. (There are "Eastern" and "Western" square sizes, depending on where you live.) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter#Packaging

Indeed, how would you slice cold butter by grams? Is there even a procedure?

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