GNU Image Manipulation Program (or Project)

A bank tried to sell me a pension fund contract. Luckily, I know my math and found out that it was so bad that I’d call it a scam.

The Mitochondrial Eve.

Well, at least there are people who still use Perl.

I remember being forced to learn this in university.

I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.

And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.

If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.

At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.

I had a number of occasions where Windows on my work PC f-ed up. None of the times, the windows “troubleshooting” wizard was anything but a waste of time before calling IT or digging into the problem myself.

Indeed I did. Not completly, as it started to dismantle itself (one leg was broken at the hips, and the arms were not much better), but of course I placed it into the recycling bin last, just before the pickup.

A life-sized cardboard skeleton. I bought it as a kind of “paper model kit” with a lot of little plastic and metal clips included, and it used some clever tricks to get all those bones into their proper shape. Intended as a training / learning aid for medical students, it was labeled with all the latin names of everything.

It experienced several outings and trips in it’s “lifetime”, always riding shotgun and waving to the people I overtook. It attended a math and a computer sciene lecture in university (I doubt it understood a single thing from it), enjoyed a day at the “beach” (properly attired with a speedo), and a number of Halloween acts.

It lived in my room for a good decade, moved into the study in my house later, but started falling apart and requiring repairs so it was retired to the paper recycling bin one day.

Very interesting technique to get the widths of the glyphs uniform without them looking ugly in most cases. OK, one can make it look bad if you know the “pain points” of the system, but in normal flowing texts, the fonts do look good.

I didn’t say that I agree, I just pointed out that there are way more prominent ways this sexualisation is done.

I also don’t agree with the headline of the article that this kind of pictures will somehow “flood” the internet. It might flood their hidden nieches for being cheap and plentiful, but I don’t think they will pop up increasingly in any normal users everyday browsing activities.

For “normalisation of sexualisation of children” go ask the people organizing child beauty pageants.

Good that we don’t do Halloween here.

If the disks are of the same type, check their serial numbers.

Once I set up a RAID with four 120GB disks. Back then, they were basically close to cutting edge technology as a 16TB drive would be today, and expensive as f-ck. Within a week, two disks failed, bringing the raid down. One failed in the evening, the other in the morning. When I called about warranty, I noticed that all four disks were within ±20 in their serial numbers, and got suspicious. I got the two drives replaced (with different, wide spread serial numbers), set up the RAID again, only to have a fail within less than ten days again - another one of the original set dead. This time I asked not only for a replacement of the next dead one, but also of the fourth, which was declined. I cut my losses and set up a way smaller RAID with only three disks. The fourth is in a drawer somewhere, wit a big red warning sticker.

Snaps and Flatpaks auto updates automatically

Nope. Firefox does not, because either Firefox is running, or the PC is down or sleeping. So I have to close Firefox, open a shell, update that snap shit, and restart Firefox. Which pisses me off to no end, apart from the point that snaps are a waste of resources and a bad idea in general.

European here: Driving manual for 35 years now. Yes, I think I can. Can’t cope with those automatic cars though.

What a joke:

go to Preferences | Settings | Cartridges | RAM Expansion Module, enable it and select the file reufile.linux, and make sure to select the correct size (16MiB)

So this only works if one adds a f-ing 16MB RAM cartridge to the system?

This is not “Linux running on a C64”. This is Linux running on a platform that marginally includes some C64.

I’m boykotting Canon and Birkenstock. The first for being total idiots, spurting “open source is theft of intellectual property!”, the second because I know the owner family (the son was in my class) and they are assholes that would make Trump proud.

I’ve read the documentation on that feature, and still don’t get over it. How can anyone with knowledge of computers be so dumb to even consider such an idea, lest implement it?

This feature is just a BIG flag waving “AbUsE mE!”

No, you bought magazines back then which had pages and pages of printed source that you typed in. And hoped that you didn’t make mistakes. That’s actually why I learned debugging before I learned to code ;)

And this also was the way I earned the money for my second computer - I wrote about 50 games on my own for my first one, some of which I sold to such magazines by saving them on casette tapes with a modified casette recorder. I wrote so many games, they published them under aliases…

Quoting from memory: “Remember the times when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?”