Viewing profile — simmons

Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrif…

Ah, that took a second to get. If anyone is stumped, it's a reference to Turner Time [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TBS_(American_TV_channel)#Turn...

A Sam's Club in my area has started selling fresh squeezed orange juice. It's quite delicious. (And yes, it's pricey.) I've looked around at many other stores (including places lik…

Yes, the latest chips were very expensive back then, and out of reach for most people who would continue buying new computers with older chips. (As opposed to how most people today…

Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP se…

I was excited earlier this year to discover that Micron (Crucial) was manufacturing 64GB DDR5 "laptop memory" modules, allowing me to pick up a couple in early September to build a…

I don't think it was ever common, since earphones weren't that popular until people started calling them "earbuds", but the term was historically used in at least some circles in t…

When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the b…

It's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here: https://www.micr…

I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the l…

I would love to hear your other theories! I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard proble…

Very cool! I had an MC-10 when I was a little kid. It was my first computer, and I didn't know anyone else who had one. I didn't have the book with this Arctic Adventure program, b…

2002 Honda Accord. An immensely reliable car that is built to last, and is inexpensive to maintain.

Neat! I sometimes play around with the idea of reverse engineering and transcompiling a tiny game that I think was probably written in Turbo Pascal 4.0. Maybe 4.0 supported optimiz…

> In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, wh…

Wow, the mention of SLS takes me back. SLS was the first Linux distribution I ever used. (Not counting the very early days of manually extracting tar archives of userspace binaries…

I thought I was the only one who preferred David Lynch's Dune. I'm glad to find out I'm not alone. I explain to people that it depends on if you're a bigger David Lynch fan or a Fr…

Even outside of gaming, people's needs are going to vary a great deal. Some people are sensitive to refresh rates, some people really need great color reproduction, etc. But since …

It's not completely clear to be that the original poster did anything nefarious. (Although the Stack Overflow post has been deleted, so I don't know what was mentioned there.) It s…

I've been doing this for years, as well. I've also found that the majority of companies I give an email address to are actually surprisingly good stewards of that information. Howe…

The idea of cars being driven remotely by someone on the other side of the world was mentioned in Charles Stross's 2007 science fiction novel Halting State. I think about it someti…

I'm a long-time user of apt-cacher-ng, but reading this reminds me of some of the pain points I regularly experience. Maybe others have some thoughts. It would be nice if my Docker…

I've been in a lot of different work situations over my career, including occasionally working part-time. Most of my part-time situations have tended to be very small, well-defined…

I'm not the poster who mentioned this, but I assume they're thinking about tax brackets. If you make a year's worth of income in a year, then take a year off starting in January, s…

I think it mostly depends on the particular engineer and the engineering culture of the team/company. I was hanging out in a coffee shop a while back, and some software engineers w…