This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"?
French web sites seem to have lost the plot completely. Buttons are sometimes imperative, sometimes infinitive, sometimes first-person present ("J’en profite!"), and probably others...
I’m planning a trip to France right now, and it seems like half the websites in that country (for example, ratp.fr for Paris public transport info) require me to check a CloudFlare checkbox to promise that I am a human. And of those that don’t, quite a few just plain lock me out...
Not quite the level of the 2012 IgNobel litterature price, which went to "The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports."
Handwriting seems to be becoming more and more of a niche phenomenon, actually paying attention to what one writes with even more so, and actually using fountain pens yet more so. Still, there seems to be an absurd number of ink makers around, producing an absurd number of inks. I suppose dyes and water are relatively cheap, and can be mixed in buckets...
I’m not sufficiently familiar with French culture or maths culture (and barely at all with their intersection!) to tell whether this is satire/parody, or just bonkers in general. Which is it?
I once did it with 0.3R + 0.6G + 0.1B < 128, mostly because I could not be bothered to think deeper than that. It was certainly not perfect — there were obvious cases where the opposite choice of black or white for contrast would have been better — but it worked well enough for my purpose (making a label at least not unreadable regardless of background colour).
It’s been more than 30 years since I took a (very basic) course in logic programming in general and Prolog in particular, so I can’t read the level of sarcasm in the text, but: Surely, when a course places various artificial limitations on programming, like “hands off the standard library”, the reason is that they are not trying to teach you to be productive Prolog (or whatever language) programmers, they are trying to teach you basic principles, and truly internalizing those principles often (not for everyone!) requires swimming around in them for a while. In Lisp, you are not just supposed to know that you can write a tail-recursive function for something, you are supposed to have done it so many times that you can do it almost without thinking. In calculus, you are not supposed to look up the derivative of arcsin in a table, you are supposed to feel it, so that to immediately see that that subsituting t=sin(x) makes that integral much nicer. They are not training you to use the standard library, they are training you to write it.
Admittedly, teachers sometimes seem to lose track of this and assign busywork exercises for no good reason.
Is this the same Oracle/Cerner system ("Millennium", I believe) that, despite protests from the medical staff, was deployed "big-bang style" in the Swedish region of Västra Götaland, with much the same results? (And where during a press conference, where the management was explaining how nearly everything was going to plan, a doctor, who had somehow sneaked in, got up, shouted something to the effect of "you’re lying, it’s a bloody disaster!" and stormed out.)
(That was not an outage, though — as far as I understand the system was working, it just didn’t actually work...)
Classic HP calculators used a fixed stack of four registers. In practice, you can do quite complicated things before you blow that up. Especially if you understand how the mechanism works, and plan ahead a bit.
Besides, infix-style calculators also seem to use a stack to handle operator precedence — if you squint a bit at the manual, you can usually see the shunting-yard algorithm at work behind the curtains.
Actually, some really early HP:s (only desktops, though, like the 9100) used a three-level “stack”, which I put in quotes, because it relied on the user to shift the registers up and down as needed. But they cheated a bit and displayed all three registers, so that the user could see what was where.
Some years ago, I was looking for London hotels on some booking site, and noticed that they were listed as being so-and-so many km (with .1 or even .01 precision) from London, which seemed amusing given that they were all in London. So I fired up QGIS and drew a circle (in some suitable projection!) with the indicated radius around each hotel, and found that they intersected on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
As I have written before, I like how a monospace, "typewritten", look gives a certain "straight from the lab" feel to the content. On the other hand, as you say, going to great lengths to imitate the effect of constraints which no longer apply is just silly. Maybe the "straight from the lab" look for the web is simply unstyled HTML. I always thought that was ugly without a good reason, because it can be styled to actually look good, but maybe the younger generations (who have not even seen a typewriter) think of it differently.
I used to hear this a lot — that (red European) squirrels are cute, but they take bird eggs! Then I started seeing, from lots of sources that should be reliable, that squirrels are in fact vegetarian, and that there little or no evidence of them taking eggs or animals. And then this article shows up, and I no longer know what to believe. Was "squirrels are vegetarian" a cover-up by Big Squirrel?
What, no operators? I want indexes on these columns, and some weird and wonderful operator syntax for doing cross-database joins between multiple DATABASE columns! =)
My complaints against long names are: 1) It becomes harder to see the shape of the code. 2) It often becomes harder to tell different names apart (if they only differ in the middle, for example). Well-chosen (optimistic, I know...) short names are often easier to read than long ones.
My guess would be that he opposition trained their agents to leave space on the first page of their reports for archive file numbers, estimates of source reliability, notices about which consumers the information has been shared with, that sort of thing. (This was probably around 1950-1960 or so, so everything on paper, probably often handwritten.)
Random association: Somewhere, I saw "leaves the top third of the first page blank without being asked to do so" as a sign that the person you are recruiting as a spy already works for the opposition. Maybe that goes for the bottom of the page as well. =)
At least some versions of HP-UX running on the HPPA architecture did the same thing. Writing to a NULL pointer would SIGSEGV, but reading got you a zero. There was a linker flag to turn off this "feature", but when I tried that, I started getting SIGSEGV:s all over various libraries I had no control over...
Yes, I love that font, and “DSE Typewriter” by the same creator. However, using them means emulating low tech, and I would like to find a way to avoid that.
Tangential, on the "lo-fi" theme: Looking at old stuff, I like how typewritten documents with charts literally pencilled in have a certain not-quite-perfect, straight-from-the-lab feel to them. By contrast, anything produced using modern methods, be they TeX or Pages.app, looks so damn... finished, for want of a better word (and any imperfections become jarring, rather than charming). What’s a good way of getting that feel, without resorting to downright emulation of low-tech methods (monospaced or even pixel-based fonts, that xkcd graph look for matplotlib, ...)? (Edit: grammar)
As I understood it, the dockapps of the Windowmaker world were basically a work-around for the fact that the X11 had no concept of a dock icon (or a dock at all, for that matter). On Nextstep, the normal Mail app would show status in its dock icon, much like Mail.app does on macOS today, the calendar app would show event reminders in its dock icon, etc. Your X11 mail app wouldn’t know that there was such a thing as a dock, so you had to run a separate little app to get the “biff” function in the dock. Then the Windowmaker afficionados took the concept and ran with it, creating lots of little apps that had nothing but a dock icon, a thing that didn’t really exist on Nextstep.