More advanced slide rules typically have a set of “folded” scales, that can sometimes save a calculation from ending up off scale. In theory, these should be offset by half the scale length, i.e. sqrt(10). However,…
The slide transition at 6:16 took me by surprise. =) Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!
Did anyone ever actually use trigraphs or digraphs in C? All I ever saw in Sweden (where the most commonly used seven-bit character encoding lacked brackets, braces, backslash and vertical bar) was to just use the same…
I remember seeing more or less the same bug 20 years ago... "Calling" process did connect, write, close. "Answering" process did accept, write("hello"), read, close. One of them got ECONNRESET on Windows NT, but not on…
As for the "who would want that", I think the use case for that kind of printer today is slow logging. With a laser printer that outputs a page at a time, if you log one line per day the power fails after 65 days, you…
Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted,…
I finally got around to it myself. Worked just fine. (VS Code, Github Copilot, Claude Haiku 4.5).
If you just toss the image at one of those newfangled AI thingamajigs (Copilot, Claude, whatever) and say "Compile this C++ program", does it work? Someone must have tried it by now – give us a report!
Thanks for writing this! I remember reading about dBase II as a kid, and now that I’m (much!) older and actually using some of the databases of today, I have sometimes wondered what those older personal-computer…
The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy,…
As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some…
From what I have understood, a significant part of the reason why Sweden scrapped its nuke program last time around, was that we found out that nukes pose more questions than they answer. Obviously, you need the nukes…
Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort of iterative set-up where one…
I haven’t studied the project that this is a comment on, but: The article notices that something that compiles, runs, and renders a trivial HTML page might be a good starting point, and I would certainly agree with that…
We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!
You take a language designed around the limitations of 1970’s computers and the absence of limitations of Donald Knuth’s brain, and then you build a document system on top of that. What could possibly go wrong? =)
Meanwhile, Cambridge has, or at least had a few years ago, at least one combined pedestrian/cattle tunnel (there was a fence down the middle!) under a major road.
If you want something to hang on your wall, an original strip is coming up for auction in Stockholm more or less as I write. The bid is currently at over 1 MSEK (100kUSD)...…
For the built-in float type in Python, the behaviour is a bit funny: >>> nan=float('nan') >>> a=[nan] >>> nan in a True >>> any(nan==x for x in a) False (Because the `in` operator assumes that identity implies…
I thought there was something about the king of the UK having to ask permission to enter the City of London, but apparently that is a misunderstanding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation#Tem...).…
I thought "this feels like Univers" when I saw the text. A quick check, and it turned out to be URW Classic Sans, a font that I had not heard about, but which is apparently a Univers clone. (Not to be confused with URW…
My IT department blocks me from seeing this page. I suppose they wish to preserve my sanity, by shielding me from yet another config-language spec. =)
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"? French web sites seem to have lost the plot…
I’m planning a trip to France right now, and it seems like half the websites in that country (for example, ratp.fr for Paris public transport info) require me to check a CloudFlare checkbox to promise that I am a human.…
Not quite the level of the 2012 IgNobel litterature price, which went to "The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report…
More advanced slide rules typically have a set of “folded” scales, that can sometimes save a calculation from ending up off scale. In theory, these should be offset by half the scale length, i.e. sqrt(10). However,…
The slide transition at 6:16 took me by surprise. =) Chap needs to have his suit jacket fixed, though... that collar gap!
Did anyone ever actually use trigraphs or digraphs in C? All I ever saw in Sweden (where the most commonly used seven-bit character encoding lacked brackets, braces, backslash and vertical bar) was to just use the same…
I remember seeing more or less the same bug 20 years ago... "Calling" process did connect, write, close. "Answering" process did accept, write("hello"), read, close. One of them got ECONNRESET on Windows NT, but not on…
As for the "who would want that", I think the use case for that kind of printer today is slow logging. With a laser printer that outputs a page at a time, if you log one line per day the power fails after 65 days, you…
Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted,…
I finally got around to it myself. Worked just fine. (VS Code, Github Copilot, Claude Haiku 4.5).
If you just toss the image at one of those newfangled AI thingamajigs (Copilot, Claude, whatever) and say "Compile this C++ program", does it work? Someone must have tried it by now – give us a report!
Thanks for writing this! I remember reading about dBase II as a kid, and now that I’m (much!) older and actually using some of the databases of today, I have sometimes wondered what those older personal-computer…
The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy,…
As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some…
From what I have understood, a significant part of the reason why Sweden scrapped its nuke program last time around, was that we found out that nukes pose more questions than they answer. Obviously, you need the nukes…
Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort of iterative set-up where one…
I haven’t studied the project that this is a comment on, but: The article notices that something that compiles, runs, and renders a trivial HTML page might be a good starting point, and I would certainly agree with that…
We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!
You take a language designed around the limitations of 1970’s computers and the absence of limitations of Donald Knuth’s brain, and then you build a document system on top of that. What could possibly go wrong? =)
Meanwhile, Cambridge has, or at least had a few years ago, at least one combined pedestrian/cattle tunnel (there was a fence down the middle!) under a major road.
If you want something to hang on your wall, an original strip is coming up for auction in Stockholm more or less as I write. The bid is currently at over 1 MSEK (100kUSD)...…
For the built-in float type in Python, the behaviour is a bit funny: >>> nan=float('nan') >>> a=[nan] >>> nan in a True >>> any(nan==x for x in a) False (Because the `in` operator assumes that identity implies…
I thought there was something about the king of the UK having to ask permission to enter the City of London, but apparently that is a misunderstanding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation#Tem...).…
I thought "this feels like Univers" when I saw the text. A quick check, and it turned out to be URW Classic Sans, a font that I had not heard about, but which is apparently a Univers clone. (Not to be confused with URW…
My IT department blocks me from seeing this page. I suppose they wish to preserve my sanity, by shielding me from yet another config-language spec. =)
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"? French web sites seem to have lost the plot…
I’m planning a trip to France right now, and it seems like half the websites in that country (for example, ratp.fr for Paris public transport info) require me to check a CloudFlare checkbox to promise that I am a human.…
Not quite the level of the 2012 IgNobel litterature price, which went to "The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report…