GnarfGnarf

After 59 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult.

It's the only place in the house where the wife can't harass her husband to tidy up.

I learned to program FORTRAN on a CD 3100 and a 3400 in the 60's, at the Université de Montréal. Also programmed on a 6600 at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Data

I hate the bad design of the QR menus. You come in looking for a burger, and they make you wade through page after page of beer and wine.

Let's put things in perspective. In Calgary, and many other cold cities, every apartment's outdoor parking lot has outlets where you plug in your ICE's block heater and battery blanket. Without them, you probably won't start your car this morning.

When I lived in Calgary, I sometimes had to spray a can of ether into the carburetor to get my car started.

The DNA date needs to be readable by third-party apps, if the user so wishes.

The hybrids are still saddled with all the reasons to ditch ICE and go EV: pistons, spark plugs, crankshaft, fuel pump, oil pan & pump, radiator, water pump, distributor, valves, timing belt, fuel injection, transmission, god it's a miracle that stuff ever worked :o)

In order to use DNA tests in genealogy, you need to know every segment on every chromosome that matches. Matching is not a go/nogo proposition. There are degrees of matching that depend on the biological relationship. Ex: Parent/children average 3,700 cM (centiMorgans), siblings are 2,600 cM, first cousins 900 cM etc.

See: https://whoareyoumadeof.com/blog/need-a-dna-centimorgan-char...

The whole point of DNA testing in genealogy is to quantify your connections with other people. So an isolated home test would be of no benefit.

What kind of genealogy service could you provide if you did not store users' data?

This is called the Silurian Hypothesis.

They taught RPG (Report Program Generator) to school kids? That is cruel and abusive. RPG is based on a primitive card tabulator paradigm.

We ran out of columns in our 80-column Hollerith card master file. So we divided the 12-row columns into three groups of four bits, giving us the “240-column” card, with triple storage.

This was the 70’s, so our cards looked like lace doilies (0111).

How much is a license for their OS?

We are approaching a time when there will be no one alive who walked on the moon.

Not only did I program with cards (Assembler) in 1970, but my employer managed a master file of 40,000 cards, sorted by account number. Every day we posted updates by matching transaction files to the master, and selecting out cards that corresponded to updates. In the second pass of the day, we merged new and updated cards into the master file. Two hours per run.

1,000 cards/minute is an infernal racket. Imagine a picker knife slamming 17 cards/second by the edges. It would jam occasionally, and we had to meticulously reconstitute the torn card on the keypunch.

This post has sloppy editing:

then it i was Eric Weinstein

You’re basis for truth (should be "Your")

Hasn't been corrected in ten months?

There is a strange paradox where sometimes you see a bit coming and it's hysterical, other times it's predictable and falls flat.

Ex (first case): In Ruthless People, they walk into a store to play a VHS tape on a VCR. They don't know (but we do) that the tape contains embarrassing scenes, which are about to be displayed to the whole store.

Another example of first case: In Asterix, whenever the Pirate Ship appears. We know (and they know) they're about to get trounced.

With the Three Stooges, we know he's going to smack him upside the head, the question is just how's he going to do it this time?

I think comedians and humourists are teachers. They examine things in new ways and show us how to look at our condition. Laughter comes from the joy of learning.

Comedians from earlier generations are less funny because their message has been absorbed into our culture, and what they discovered then, has become understood, accepted, and is no longer new or surprising.

No, dBASE (Clipper, FoxPro, etc) uses a separate file for each table (.DBF), index (.CDX) and blob (.FPT).

Link no longer seems to work.

I wish Brave/YouTube weren't such a dismal experience on Chromebook. You can't click on the red bar to jump ahead. You can't pause/restart by pressing the space bar. The navigation is awkward and crippled. Same for Firefox. I guess they're all using the same engine.

The only decent browser is Chrome, and the ad blockers don't work anymore.

Movement is simply matter going from point A to B. "Fast" or "slow" means, how far did our reference object (ex. Earth) move relative to the movement of another object.

Time does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative movement of matter. Every way we measure "time" involves the movement of matter: sun dial, pendulum, spring & gears in a mechanical watch, vibrations of electrons in an electronic watch.

When you say that an hour has elapsed, it simply means the earth has rotated 15°. When you go 60 mph, you have moved 60 miles while the earth has rotated 15°.

The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Time is a creation of the mind.

If there were no matter, there would be no time.

Proportional fonts draw attention to themselves and fail the criteria by being distracting.

The hallmark of a good font is that it does not draw attention to itself. It does not interfere with the reader’s grasp of the author’s meaning, and it recedes into the background.

A dog turd is "non-human" biologics.

This may be partly due to television. TV gets eyeballs by providing a constant stream of quick cuts that pander to the brain's addiction. See Neil Postman "Amusing ourselves to death".

Because it's hard and uncertain. You can spend hours and days on a problem and not be sure of finding an answer. You need to be driven by a passion to overcome the obstacles.

When my son was studying Electrical Engineering, he told me a story about how, at the beginning of every semester, a student would ask the professor if there was any programming involved in the course. The class would heave a huge sigh of relief if the answer was no.

It's not that students were stupid. Rather, they had a big course load, were pressed for time, and could not afford the bottomless time hole of programming assignments. They knew that the time they invested in lab work or math assignments, would surely result in success. Not so with programming bugs.