palordrolap

Tell that to the unwashed masses.

If you accept Pluto, you have to accept at least half a dozen trans-Neptunian objects as well as the asteroid Ceres, in which case planet nine already exists and would be Neptune. Well, most of the time anyway. Sometimes Pluto passes inside Neptune’s orbit.

Or maybe you’d like to consider Triton, Neptune’s retrograde moon as a planet as well, on account of how it was probably a dwarf planet in its own right until Neptune plucked it out of its orbit. Once a planet, always a planet, right? Neptune even tried to do the same to Pluto which is why it has such a weird orbit.

Be team dwarf planet. Lots of new friends outside the regular eight, and Pluto’s a founder member.

Pretty sure my own education had a Tanenbaum book in amongst it, from which I learned a number of things. In another world, one where my brain isn’t its own worst enemy, I could well be one of those IT managers. There the FUD would have been the main factor in my decision. Probably. Because I’m not sure I’d be completely happy if it was a Linux buried in the chipset either. Especially one largely outside my control.

The whole ring -3 / MINIX business a while back put a serious amount of FUD into the market and Intel has been on the wane ever since.

This is not necessarily unfounded FUD either. MINIX is literally there, lurking inside all modern Intel processors, waiting to be hacked by the enterprising ne’er-do-well. (NB: This is not to say that there aren’t ways to do similar things to AMD chips, only that MINIX is not present in them, and it’s theoretically a lot more difficult.)

Then bear in mind that MINIX was invented by Andrew Tanenbaum, someone Linus Torvalds has had disagreements with in the past (heck, Linux might not exist if not for MINIX and Linus’ dislike of the way Tanenbaum went about it), and so there’s an implicit bias against MINIX in the data-centre world, where Linux is far more present than it is on the desktop.

Thus, if you’re a hypothetical IT manager and you’re going to buy a processor for your data-centre server, you’re ever so slightly more likely to go for AMD.

Clee-ent? Unsure if AI, a non-native English speaker leaking their native pronunciation, or, as allegedly happens later, someone having a minor mental malfunction.

I’ve been around just long enough to suspect that this will be part of a cycle going back and forth between tactile controls and touchscreens.

That is, give it a decade and touchscreens will be the in-thing again. And another decade and someone will have the “fantastic new idea” of bringing tactile controls back.

And there’ll be a combo breaker of some sort where a new technology comes along (probably no screens, or controls, only voice control) which a small few will absolutely love - due to sunk cost fallacy mostly - and no-one else will buy (compare: 3D TVs), and the cycle will begin again.

Bonus points for: 1) Manufacturers managing to have cycles out of step with others because the market forces aren’t quite enough (people not having the money to buy new cars) to bring them all into line. 2) External factors like, say, the world ending, breaking the cycle.

Is it just me or is this response the wrong response? I would have expected:

not everyone speaks bri’ish english

(that missing “r” in “ameican” inspires the use of the “improper” option here). It’s American English that uses “tire”, after all, and the rest of the Anglosphere that has “tyre”.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Among other problems, this fails to account for non-typing activities performed by the monkey, such as damaging the typewriter or attacking the researcher.

285 years increases to a few thousand if you alarmingly frequently have to clean the contents of a monkey’s colon out of a typewriter.

And at some point you’d want to further “refine” your selection process by “repairing” the typewriter to have fewer keys and/or causing the typewriter to jam after the required key press. Monkeys like to press the same key over and over again. Good luck getting them to stop once they’ve pressed a key once.

TL;DR monkeys are chaos, and this will not be easy.

They’re doubling it every week, so a googol is only ~4 years off.

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”

In before you’re going to need a telemetry spoofer in order not to attract attention. On the other hand, it takes an extraordinary amount of government paranoia before they start going after random citizens.

North Korea did this already. I expect that Russia’s effort will be as good if not better. Bonus comedy points if they use NK’s effort as a starting point.

But I wouldn’t try to use it if my Internet location was outside Russia. Or maybe even if it wasn’t.

Also: something something falling out something something Windows.

Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.

ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…

The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.

If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

For those interested in getting into listening to internet radio, see also: https://dir.xiph.org (Icecast network) and https://directory.shoutcast.com (Shoutcast network), both of which have been around for ~25 years at this point if the domain registry is anything to go by. Definitely in their current forms for over a decade.

Caveat: Lots of commercial content and stations, which is, of course, antithetical to Fediverse ideology. Still worth a look if you can’t (yet) find what you want in the Fediverse.

(There’s also http://radio.garden which has a very pretty interface but has multiple negative points: in-browser only, needs a lot of JavaScript access to station-associated domains on a per-station basis, is HTTP(no S)-only and may not work for stations outside your own country.)

I believe the joke was something like it was spelled “Netscape” but pronounced “Mozilla”. Web searches (at time of writing) for “pronounced Mozilla” seem to confirm this. I also seem to remember that its user-agent string identifier was “Mozilla” from the earliest version and never contained “Netscape”, which goes some way to explaining why I initially forgot the real history and assumed a rebranding to Firefox.

The apparent heat resistance was a surprise. Struggling to wade through the rest of it, but it currently needs human intervention to get the data into and out of storage. Even if they’re untrained volunteers as is says, this isn’t something we’re going to be replacing consumer SSDs with any time soon.

(Which I say half in the hope I’ll be proven wrong.)

And here I was about to say that it had simply become Mozilla Firefox.

I guess I pruned my knowledge (read: forgot) at some point because I know I went from using Netscape to the Mozilla Application Suite as my browser of choice, and then ultimately onto Firefox when that died. (Firefox and Thunderbird were well established and Seamonkey was still in its infancy, otherwise I probably would have switched to that instead.)

Looking at the facts, the AOL buy-out is what must have got me to switch to MAS.

My question is this: Do Microsoft ship crap-infested versions to people who could make their lives uncomfortable, like, say, intelligence agencies, or do those agencies take a crap-infested version and have their IT security strip all the crap out?

Because if I was in charge of an intelligence agency I’d be asking - with dangerous smile - for the crap-free version, turn IT loose on it anyway and then be, shall we say, horribly invasive to Microsoft if there’s anything still left in it.

… and if I wanted Windows, I’d want whatever the end result of that is.

On the other hand, maybe this has already happened and that “horrible invasion” is the cause of all the spyware crap in the consumer release.

Sigh.