⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

@brucelawson (a member of @owa) on the recent iOS engine choice news:

https://brucelawson.co.uk/2024/apple-and-malicious-compliance/

By the way, the one time in my career that I've ever pressed "The big red button that shall never be pressed!" was at RAND.

It is standard for computer room facilities to have a way to kill all power to the equipment quickly in cases of emergency. Traditionally this is a very large red button that can be pressed for this purpose, often just inside an entry door. Typically it's under some sort of plastic shield or such to avoid it being pressed accidentally.

This button is never to be used in the course of normal events. Because it abruptly terminates all power to associated equipment, the risk of data loss and even equipment damage is very significant.

So one day, I walk down the stairs to my basement computer room at RAND where the PDP-11s and ARPANET interfaces lived. I open the door ... and there's nothing there but a wall of white.

When faced with something like that, it takes a couple of seconds to figure out what the hell is going on -- it's not in your brain's expected scenarios for opening that door.

The room was full of white smoke.

Within a few seconds I reached up under the shield just inside the door and slammed down the "never to be pressed" red button.

Instantly power was cut to the UNIX PDP-11s, the ARPANET equipment, a bunch of peripherals, and even a number of disk drives that were in an adjacent room that serviced the big IBM mainframe on the ground floor above.

As it turned out, the Halon fire suppression system was within a few seconds of firing when I killed the power -- management was pretty happy about that since recharging the Halon was expensive.

I got a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) CE (Customer Engineer) out to RAND within a couple of hours. He quickly found the source of the problem.

A PDP-11/70 power supply had dramatically failed. It was partly molten slag. Very impressive. I tried to get the RAND photographer down to take a photo of it (this was long before cell phone cameras or even cell phones), but the CE grabbed the power supply, hid it under his coat, and ran out to his car with it.

Apparently he wasn't thrilled with the prospect of photographic evidence of the failure.

Interesting day.

Frontend vs Backend

#Programming

Man, that's a lot of bricks! If you're into #LegoSpace, check out some of Ben Hauger's builds.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B4NBqheJtcS/
#Lego #classic #space

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

Sad news - Mars helicopter Ingenuity suffered some rotor damage during flight 72 and its mission has ended.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/after-three-years-on-mars-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-mission-ends
#Ingenuity #Mars
9/n

Wow. RAND Corp has all of their old reports online for free - such as Paul Baran's 1962 invention of packet switching: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P2626.html #ComputerHistory #PaulBaran #InternetHistory

@nixCraft Wait, what? It's a bug in the bootloader regarding HTTP headers?

I love Elle Cordova and her clever, funny videos. This one is for all my writer and editor frends.

@airspeedswift This is funny, *and* I think 'new version' for users means 'UI changes’ which is unfortunate.

VICTORY! Ring has announced it will no longer facilitate warrantless police requests for footage to Ring’s users. This comes after years of sustained pressure from EFF and other civil liberties and privacy advocates. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/01/ring-announces-it-will-no-longer-facilitate-police-requests-footage-users

I wanted to do a desktop scene for one of the my original Mac cross-stitches, but 512x342 is just too many pixels to stitch! So I cut and pasted the original screen down to a more manageable size, but still with some classic bits. Puzzle desk accessory! #NerdStitch 6/10

That British Establishment thing of never admitting fault, even when it's been disproved in a court of law.
This guy only looks out for himself, which is why he's so desperate to mention his current charity work (it's for the Salvation Army so he's still no saint if they're still anti-LGBQTIA )

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/24/former-post-office-investigator-insists-cleared-horizon-it-victim-was-guilty-inquiry-hears

#PostOfficeScandal #UKpol #Ukpolitics #UK

New blog entry: Same bullshit, new tin

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/same-bullshit-new-tin.html

Happy birthday !

Mon premier a été un Macintosh 512, tout de suite upgradé en Macintosh Plus (changement de carte mère et de capot arrière.

C'était en 1986 et pour faire des serveurs #Minitel avec Dragster !

"That's why 1984 won't be like 1984"... Big Brother étant à l'époque Big Blue !

La pub diffusée durant le Superbowl (de Ridley Scott) a d'ailleurs été restaurée en 4K: https://peertube.amicale.net/w/d9WPENYy4p3nNsoQDQnypu

I ran @p_malin's program and got this.
Source: https://bbcmic.ro/?t=9fmQa #bbcbasic

Anyone know of places hiring mid-level software developers? Remote in the UK (or able to employ someone in the UK). Working on climate change or adjacent ideally, but open to other stuff, too.

Asking for a friend (no, really). Boosts appreciated.

#FediHire #FediHired #ClimateTech