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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.

    At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.





  • That used to be really true when I was a kid in the 79’s, but not so much today. Back then, a quality guitar cost way more than the cheap stuff and the cheap stuff was rubbish.

    Nowadays, with CNC machines everywhere, there are lots of modestly priced guitars that are very playable. The junk that we used to have to settle with back in the day only exists in the realm of “toy” instruments that almost aren’t intended to be played.

    Seriously, $300 can get you a very playable instrument, especially in electric guitars.








  • To me, as a non-American, the most baffling thing is that everyone in the States just assumes, and accepts, that these appointed justices are going to rule according to some political bias.

    That’s not the way it works in the rest of the free world. Judges are, by definition, trusted to be impartial interpreters of the law/constitution. That’s their role.

    I live in Canada, and I’m vaguely familiar with some of the names of our Supreme Court justices, but I certainly don’t know their political leanings, nor do I care. Nor does any Canadian I know. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

    So as far as I can see, the problem isn’t that SCOTUS is stacked with Republicans, nor that it can be. The problem is that everyone seems to assume that this is the way it should be.




  • Canadian providers all charge about $15 a day to “roam like home”. For about $20 I can buy a 30 day 5GB data only plan for Europe. Getting a European phone number doubles the cost as most of those plans have much more data as well. You can buy the plans before you leave, download and install the eSIM so you’re ready to go when you arrive.

    The wife and I both bought Pixel 7’s this year as they support eSIM. We’re in England right now. Our cost roaming would have been $600+. Only one of us needed a local phone number, and the has just data, and the cost was maybe $70.



  • Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.

    But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.

    As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.

    Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.




  • I think that defining “done” as QA tested is way better than “the code compiles”, which is essentially what most teams seem to use.

    Developers need to get into the habit of not writing bugs. That’s technically the answer to all of these problems. “We have issues dealing with bugs found in the QA phase”. So stop writing bugs for QA to find, then the problem goes away.

    If the attitude is “Bugs found in QA kick the feature out of the release”, then the programmers are going to find that they work all week and end up contributing nothing to the release. Maybe the release is completely empty. Hold them responsible for it. Attitudes will change.