wobbleblob

It was the Electron for me. Bought it new for the equivalent of less than #100 when Acorn discontinued it, the only computer I could afford from my allowance. Incidentally it also forced me to learn German and English as a kid, to be able to read the manuals and Acorn Magazine.

Second to learning to read, that machine probably had the largest influence on my career

I just heard energy analyst krutikhin explain on the news that Gazprom could have blown them up using so called "pigs", maintenance drones that move through the pipes.

Isn't that obvious? It's to strengthen Germany's resolve. The temptation to surrender and get the gas turned back on is going to be enormous this coming winter.

Germany and several other countries have made plans to shut down parts of heavy industry to save gas for heating. This is more than likely to put increasing pressure on governments to give in to Russia's demands. Now they can't, even if they want to, so that pressure is gone.

Start with source control, you can get that done in an afternoon and it could save you 20 million dollars a year.

I know RPG did that. I can't tell you if all programs do that, probably not today, but that was the origin. Keep in mind that at the time, all your data was on tape, punch cards or disk, you only had a few kb of RAM.

IBM still churns out new releases of the programming language, where they keep tacking on support for all the things programmers of today want to do.

What else it is going to do is keep looping until the end of the input file is reached, which was the programming model at the time.

The problem with this article is the same as with every article about COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, Mainframes etc:

  The assumption that it is only 50+ year old legacy code running on dependable 
  but obsolete hardware, untouched by human hands in decades is wrong. 

In reality, much of it is new. COBOL shops still develop new software. IBM still makes brand new mainframes. The developers are not all old men in suits, they look pretty much like C++ or Java (or any other established tech) programmers: all ages. That may look old to you because you're biased to think of programmers as males aged 20 to 35.

By the way, I'm not saying it doesn't suck. It's not something I ever intend to do in my life again.

I guess the raw vegetables contain just enough protein to survive

Ages ago, I had a colleague who was deeply into hacking of his mTOR pathway. Among other things, this included a permanent calorie deficit and removal of all protein from his diet.

I don't know if he's still alive. Maybe it was working a bit too well, I recall he looked like an extremely tall 13 year old with anorexia.

Not only that, it would have been highly inappropriate for the US to intervene in another country's domestic affairs uninvited.

The assumption everything bad is always our fault is just the other side of the coin of the narcissistic belief that we're the greatest of all time at everything and therefor always right.

I think you have this upside down.

The oligarchs didn't swoop in and ruin everything. The Russian government did not want their resources and industry controlled by foreign share holders, so they were dead set on privatizing the economy by selling to Russians only.

With this constraint, the handful of Russians who were able to raise capital in such a short time, without foreign counter bids, got the privatized businesses far below market prices as a result. This is what made them billionaires, and turned them into the oligarchs.

Automatic transmission is very rare in Europe.

Github Copilot won't give students anything they couldn't already google.

It seems to be a natural part of aging, to start to complain about education and kids these days because it's not the same as when we were in school.

I try not to do that, because I never forgot how my parents generation said the exact same about us when we were in school, and I guarantee my grandparents generation complained when my parents were in school.

I thought people lose their caste when they cross the "black water".

I can relate to this, I am a dedicated fan of the Toyota Corolla

It was just an example, I don't have any special insight into the China-Taiwan situation. Maybe the conflict would be over a TV show, or a sports match, who knows. It just occurs to me that if there's a situation where we cut China off, or China cuts us off, we would be in the situation Germany is in now.

China would stand to lose a lot of money in that situation, but our economy would be severely disrupted as well. Russia is showing that for a totalitarian regime, losing a lot of money may not necessarily be a complete show stopper. They could make that choice and decide it's worth it, if they don't have to worry about the polls and are able to shape the narrative their own population gets to see.

All the sources I've read agree that this had more to do with the complete absence of a long term strategy on the German side, not the weather. They had resources for 6 months, and went into the USSR with everything they had, no reserves. When that wasn't enough, there was no plan B.

It's more about being reliant on one source under the control of a potential rival.

That's not what I mean. Half the world's semi conductors are made at the TSMC complex in Taiwan. If China invaded, we would lose access to those.

That's a cliche that's not historically accurate.

Napoleon's army occupied Moscow by late summer. They started their retreat in early fall, and got stuck in the mud. His army had been mostly destroyed before winter even started.

In the first world war, the German army fought through 3 winters in Russia before Russia surrendered.

In the second world war, the German army fought through 3 winters before they were defeated.

In the February 2022 Russian invasion in to Ukraine, the Russian army got stuck in the mud and was forced to abandon their siege of Kiev under heavy losses.

The Russian winter isn't necessarily any more pleasant for the Russians than for their enemies. I'm sure they made use of the climatic circumstances, but the weather didn't do the work for them. Napoleon and the nazis were both defeated by an opponent with a better grand strategy and logistics.

It's easy to point at Germany and tell them they have only themselves to blame, for becoming so dependent on Russian gas, but aren't we in the US making the same mistake when it comes to manufactured goods? Even a slight disturbance in Chinese manufacturing due to Covid caused a massive supply chain problem here.

Imagine a scenario where China invades Taiwan. Besides losing access to about half the world's production of semi conductors, would we even be able to put sanctions on China without causing complete chaos here?

I've seen similar documents about Tito. In the end it doesn't change anything, you deal with the de-facto ruler of a country, not with his ancestors.

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

Why? I bring that up in every job interview. None of them have ever found it objectionable. In my experience, except for some startups, it's something every company in tech is at least thinking about.

As an industry we are wasting so much potential. How many great candidates end up not interviewing with you when they see your entire tech staff consists of white and asian men aged 25-35?

You forgot the part where the product owner negotiates the number of story points down for every story, and negotiates up the number of sp in every sprint, and complains that the team gets a velocity of exactly 50% every single sprint.

I haven't done a quantitative study either, but here are two examples of extremely influential open source projects that the internet runs on:

The spring framework has contributions from many volunteers, but most big contributions and all of the integration work come from Pivotal.

The contributions to the linux kernel are graphed here:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/175919-who-actually-de...

80% of new contributions are from companies. That shouldn't be surprising at all, because these companies are also the biggest users of the project.

As for myself, in the rare occasions I contributed a patch to an OSS project, most of the time it was to solve a problem I encountered at work, so I have anecdotal evidence that at least some from the category 'volunteers' also got paid to write that code.

OpenSSL has hundreds of contributors, not just one guy, and the 'heartbleed bug' guy they were referring to wrote the code during his PhD, so it wasn't a volunteer donating his spare time.

But they are not working for free, they're doing this work during work hours. Individual volunteer maintainers this article is about are a minority. The majority of contributions to the open source projects that "the internet runs on" are from businesses that use the software and maintain or improve it.

I'm not talking about your small hobby project with a few dozen users - as good as it may be, the internet doesn't run on it. cURL is really an exception, not the rule.

It's funny that now that I don't live a 12 hour flight away from those places any more, I can't go because I don't have any vacation days.

As a little boy, I went through the usual astronaut phase. There was this brilliant TIME magazine photo book of the space program up to and including the then new space shuttle that I kept renewing from the library every time. I remember at the time, that those events of 10-15 years earlier felt like ancient history.

I didn't know or care about wars, cold or hot, or any dark side. To me America was that place where they had a meteor crater and they put men on the moon.

Decades later when I got to visit Kennedy Space Center, seeing the rocket garden, the actual vehicle assembly building, a real Saturn V rocket, the actual Apollo 14 command module (!!!) in real life was an emotional experience, like that 10 year old boy teleported back into me. I felt like running around, crying, laughing, I can't describe it.

We dumped the kids with their grand parents at that Disney thing that trip. I thought they would be bored, but I'm definitely taking them next time.

It turns out that schema-first design is useful. It turns out that having a cross-platform industry standard for such schemas is useful.

What developers didn't like about SOAP aren't necessarily the features, it's all the XML.