nickdothutton

6 ms·

1.
by nickdothutton 5d ago
Spend some time in Flight Sims :-)
2.
by nickdothutton 6d ago
If you follow a constant compass heading you will spiral toward the poles in a helix, not travel in a circle around the globe. To travel along a great circle, your compass bearing must constantly change as you move.
3.
by nickdothutton 6d ago
I thought everyone learned the Mercator use case in school? It is for marine navigation. A line of constant bearing will always appear straight on it. If you want to see the relative size of continents that's a different use case and y
4.
by nickdothutton 11d ago
This sounds like the next iteration of "nobody understands their runtime environment these days", which I've been saying for many years.
5.
by nickdothutton 27d ago
At least Dekker is referenced.
6.
by nickdothutton 28d ago
I've begun and abandoned a "modern take on finger" a couple of times. Sits in the pile (folder) of unfinished projects and at the back of my mind cluttering up the synapses. The reason I began thinking about this... my dissat
7.
by nickdothutton 1mo ago
Once had a lengthy battle with a marketing person. They attempted to change "uninterruptible" (as in Uninterruptible Power Supply) into non-interruptible, and then finally into interruptible. Took the best part of a week to get it
8.
by nickdothutton 1mo ago
I found it essential for the same reasons, in those early Internet days... PAD, -> UNIX host (x.25), -> VMS "mainframe" (dual stack), on to Internet (TCP/IP).
9.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.
10.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but Eternal September was abrupt. To a degree there was an
11.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow,
12.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
While TCP/IP was open source and not controlled by any 1 vendor, quite a few companies made good money from selling TCP/IP stacks and won themselves billion dollar valuations in the process[1][2]. Of course this was during a time
13.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line whe
14.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
In the 90s I visited a datacentre in an a central London location. The providers charged for both power and space (and bandwidth). I had cause to lift one of the floor tiles to reposition a power cable slightly for the rack I was working in
15.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
We had a MUD at our university and many of us contributed to it as well as playing/hanging out there. The university was quite strict in terms of the use of central resources (mostly VAX VMS 6000 and 8000 series, already pretty long in
16.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
Many of the worlds solvable problems are "information problems", and therefore have a good chance of being solvable by software. Sometimes you'll even encounter a problem that looks like something else, but is in-fact an info
17.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
I started out on Z80 when HLL compilers were expensive for me and the shareware alternatives weren’t so accessible as open source is today. Everyone should do at least a little assembler to gain an appreciation of what they are asking the m
18.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
The 2 remaining blast furnaces need about 500m to 750m GBP spending on them within the next 2-5 years or they are just scrap themselves. UK Gov has ditched plans to fully fund the armed forces (would have meant a lot of new warships etc), w
19.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
I really wish LinkedIn would collapse and close so that something useful could take its place. At the moment I feel like it's squatting the "business networking" square on the board, but I don't know what it would take t
20.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
Seek out his various interviews on YouTube.
21.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
22.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
The "real banned books" are (in my opinion) generally those which have not been translated.
23.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
Reminder: In the UK we do not know where the trains are. We know what section of track they are on, but not where within the section. A section could be miles long. To know more precisely, we telephone the (manned) signal boxes to ask if th
24.
by nickdothutton 2mo ago
I don't think the Canadian government is dropping a big contract on a company that is 24 months old vs one 24 years old, more or less.
25.
by nickdothutton 3mo ago
They are planted in graveyards in the UK, it prevents grazing animals from entering and soiling up the place. The animals seem to know to keep away. They cant nibble the grass without getting a mouthful of the needles.
26.
by nickdothutton 3mo ago
"I want to do the thing that gets me the most votes and carries the least political risk". Note this is not necessarily the wisest thing, or even the thing that objectively solves or mitigates the problem the most. Many such cases
27.
by nickdothutton 3mo ago
This sort of shenanigan is why it’s important to have a competitive market for CPUs.
28.
by nickdothutton 3mo ago
We all live in Ballard's future now. I encourage you to check out some of his interviews on YT.
29.
by nickdothutton 3mo ago
AMD's inability to make good software has been a recurring problem for decades. Many years ago I had some success with their optimising compiler, but everything else I've touched was bad. A real pity.
30.
by nickdothutton 3mo ago
If I were a (potentially) hostile foreign power, I'd use a game to enlist people in the target country to record sensitive locations.

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