rootbear

7 ms·

1.
by rootbear 6d ago
A pilot friend once told me that the Tenerife crash was a turning point for this sort of thing. I believe that was the origin of CRM training.
2.
by rootbear 29d ago
Cool! Thanks!
3.
by rootbear 29d ago
I was looking at IKEA's home automation stuff, some of which uses the name TRÅDFRI and I thought the "FRI" part sounded like "free" and sure enough this just means "wireless". I'm guessing the "T
4.
by rootbear 3mo ago
A hidden “book server” like this could be set up in just about any electronic device with a sufficiently powerful microcontroller. But I think there is something delightfully poetic about using a source of light to spread suppressed knowled
5.
by rootbear 4mo ago
A favorite film of mine. I was very happy when a decent quality bluray became available a few years back. I know someone who uses "Warn. There is another system." as an alternative to "Hello, world". I've wondered i
6.
by rootbear 5mo ago
One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on UNIVAC, suggesting multiple va
7.
by rootbear 5mo ago
Will this image also work on the 3B+? I have a spare one of those that I can try this out on.
8.
by rootbear 6mo ago
My friend M. Goode’s father was a urologist named Dr. P. Goode. For real.
9.
by rootbear 6mo ago
This sort of thing really bugs me! Marketing departments appropriate an existing term and use it in some new, often deceptive way. This goes all the way back to when IBM released “The IBM Personal Computer”, at a time when “personal compute
10.
by rootbear 6mo ago
A counter argument is that Mauchly was actually interesting in using computers for weather modeling and I’m sure that influenced the design of ENIAC. He could only get ENIAC funded if it was valuable to the war effort. I’ve read quite a lot
11.
by rootbear 8mo ago
The Dead Past is one of my favorite Asimov stories. We don’t have the tech that’s in the story, but the idea of lost privacy is relevant today.
12.
by rootbear 9mo ago
I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the worl
13.
by rootbear 10mo ago
It's fun to play around with, but unless I'm missing something, it's not possible to specify the size, in rows and columns, of the screen, such as 24x80. It's an odd omission.
14.
by rootbear 10mo ago
Agreed! Bees are my favorite social insect (we share a love of hexagons, for one thing) and they seem to be especially intelligent.
15.
by rootbear 10mo ago
I remember those monitors, but I forget what resolution they were. For what it's worth, Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. I believe they re-rendered the whole thing from the RIB files for the bluray release.
16.
by rootbear 10mo ago
Film weave is also the bane of the VFX world. If a shot is going to have, say, a matte painting added in post, then a pin registered camera must be used. These cameras have a precisely machined pin that centers the film stock in the gate af
17.
by rootbear 11mo ago
Ah, yes, you are correct, I had forgotten it was Yahoo that took over Verizon mail.
18.
by rootbear 11mo ago
Larry Niven called them slidewalks and I've always been sorry this terminology never caught on.
19.
by rootbear 11mo ago
Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com account.
20.
by rootbear 1y ago
I always wanted to rig up a laptop that has an IMU to detect when it was in free fall and play the Wilhelm scream.
21.
by rootbear 1y ago
That was from Algol 68. Algol 60 used BEGIN/END blocks when the body of a do loop (or a then or else block, etc.) had more than one statement. Bash was influenced by Algol 68.
22.
by rootbear 1y ago
All I can think of is that it was a way to look at the end of a long program which wouldn't all fit on a display. Predating, I suppose, the 'tail' program, or whatever the DECSYSTEM 20 equivalent was.
23.
by rootbear 1y ago
Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and
24.
by rootbear 1y ago
My best friend George (Gyuri) from college is Hungarian and I've picked up a few words (mostly cuss words) from him. One of the hardest parts for an English speaker to learn about Hungarian and Finnish is that the length of a sound (ho
25.
by rootbear 1y ago
Vernor Vinge could absolutely have included that in some of his stories.
26.
by rootbear 1y ago
Okay, got it, thanks. I suppose it could also be the FIOS router itself making those connections, or any of the other systems on my local network.
27.
by rootbear 1y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what this is showing me. I'm running it on my home linux system, which is connected to the Internet via Verizon FIOS. The map shows three red dots, none of which are near me.
28.
by rootbear 1y ago
I’ve wondered if there should be two string types in C, analogous to different length numeric types. Short strings (“tokens”? “words”?) could be Pascal style strings and longer strings (“buffers”) could be standard C-style null terminated s
29.
by rootbear 1y ago
I share your trepidation. I once had to use clri and such to clean up a mess and it was terrifying.
30.
by rootbear 1y ago
I believe the issue is that the ship leaves the star in a spin, perhaps too fast to be survivable.

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