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

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  • This is true, but…

    Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.

    So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.

    You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.

    And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.

    Same curve.

    Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.

    The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.

    Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.

    Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.

    While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.


  • Actually…yes. At least for the “war criminal”. I think the point is that you can’t hide your inner feelings from the feather. So if you genuinely, in the deepest depths of your heart, have no qualms about bombing civilians then you’re fine.

    I think this points out the fundamental relativistic nature of morality and how the feather copes with it. Everyone has some sort of moral compass, and the feather measures how true you were to it. And really, what more can you ask of anyone? Decide, for yourself, what is right and what is wrong and stick to it.

    Putting aside the fact that a toddler probably lacks the intellectual or emotional development to have a truely personal morality, I cannot imagine that someone who “broods” all their life over kicking a kitten when they were three is anything other than the nicest most moral person you’ll ever meet. I don’t think that have any trouble with Anubis and Thoth.




  • Anubis and Thoth weighing the heart of the dead to see if it is as light as a feather before letting them into the afterlife.

    I love the idea that there’s no “do this, do that”, or a concrete set of rules or commandments. But the idea that if you can look back on your life, and if your heart isn’t weighed down with the burden of all of the things that you did that know we’re just wrong…then you can go on to the afterlife.

    It’s just no much more of a reasonable, adult approach to morality.




  • 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.



  • Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

    So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.

    We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

    And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.

    In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.




  • 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.



  • Calling customers, “guests”. A customer is someone with a business relationship with someone/something else. They’re exchanging money for goods and services and have a right to expect certain value for their money.

    A guest is something else entirely. A guest has no implicit right to expect a certain any particular level or quality of services. They are dependent on the magnamity of the “host”.

    Calling a customer a “guest” robs them of status.