Viewing profile — mwfunk

I assume the responses are from people who didn't know that and are now offended that they would've flubbed what the interviewer considered common knowledge in their field. I could…

Babbage's eccentricities and loopier thoughts were always more interesting to me than his writing about the things he's better known for. I read this many years ago but for some re…

Agreed. It's only broken if there were some ideal Utopian open source world that we were falling short of, where if only everyone can work out some issues, then that world will com…

I think another big part of it is, the conspiracy theorists only need one paper that agrees with them to instantly say the gazillions of papers that disagree with them are wrong. S…

Fun fact: in the UK they call it marhs!

Yeah there was no one even remotely credible up against him. If some insane radio host is the best anyone can come up with, I'll take the possibly shady professional politician any…

Really the entire personal computer industry's early success was due to VisiCalc, followed by Lotus 1-2-3. Likewise for WordStar, then WordPerfect. It was the first thing I ever he…

People need to be absolutely fearless about looking stupid. Whether or not you look stupid at any given moment is an imponderable, an unanswerable question. The fear of looking stu…

You don't search for locations with HTTP, any more than a shipping company searches for addresses to deliver to. The problem with bad metaphors is it derails discussion, which I am…

Yeah it's literally just a short list of companies that people see as being the big kahunas of the tech industry. In the '80s it would've been Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and maybe even…

As long as "money" means "everyone's money" and not "money for oligarchs", then that's infinitely better than what nations and empires have historically been built on: ethnicity, r…

Exactly. People can't do anything to ensure success, but they can definitely ensure failure. All anyone can do is the best they can, so that when and if lucky opportunities arise, …

If someone's going to whip out ancient slang like 'sweathog', at least use it right. It's either an overpaid/underworked caricature of a union worker used in anti-union propaganda,…

I would imagine that many or most (or all?) OpenBSD developers consider the Apache license less than ideal but GPLv3 counterproductive or even malicious. Not a tough choice from th…

If those are the only things that makes someone happy (it's not necessarily; all people are different, but let's say those are the basic needs at work here), and they aren't gettin…

That seems unfortunate but reasonable. I don’t begrudge anyone making that choice, and I don’t begrudge anyone thinking their prices are too high (and I don’t begrudge anyone buyin…

I haven't heard about this. Were they busted lying about supply chain issues as an excuse to raise prices? Their stuff is pricey but cool, but if it's documented that they lied abo…

My day-to-day Linux usage was mostly in the '90s and 2000s, but back then anything related to power management was just like that. Like, power management stuff was generally implem…

I"m sure it was matching funds for an employee donation.

Yuppies? Is this 1982? I wonder what the Reagan Democrats or the Moral Majority think. Or the preps or the goths, why not just go straight to high school cliques. I heard the varsi…

I don't understand anyone complaining about the UN not having teeth. The purpose of the UN was never to be a 'one world government', that's just propaganda from the black helicopte…

It's been said many times here over the past few years, and it'll get said a lot right here today, but rule of thumb: never enable WiFi on a TV except maybe temporarily to do an up…

If you lived in a big city there'd be a gazillion places within 10-15 minutes that you could drive to without dealing with traffic or parking issues, assuming you're not talking ab…

Agreed, marketing (and everyone, really) needs at least rough estimates. Software is notoriously hard to predict. As time goes on, estimates get updated as more is known about the …

This is the thing: you can always tell when people come from utterly useless propaganda bubbles by 2 huge red flags: (1) They don't understand the difference between editorial cont…