Reddit, is that you?

Most of them just bounce back into space, like the one that became the moon

I think maybe I could go for some deep fried cheesecake

This cat is using a computer.

Your argument is invalid.

Stairway to Heaven?

Except when companies do it in a gay way, then it’s against the constitution

Homer tells Barney he’ll strangle Bart if CPS responds to Ned’s call

1. Job security
2. its not COBOL

Kibimanjaro, the user-friendly rolling-release distro for cluster computing

In my experience, this often doesn’t happen. So many developers are either inexperienced or cowboys, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with either. But at places where projects are small and numerous, teams often end up with nothing but a combination of the two.

As one of our office’s engineering “fixers”, I’ve taken over maintenance of several such projects. They usually have shattered remnants of code taken from other projects, open source libraries, internal libraries, stack overflow, and so on. Whole source files copied into the project, modified in ways that introduce impressive new failure cases while failing to add new functionality, and used in ways that completely ignore the features natively implemented in that code while those same features are bodged in as barely-working piles of if statements, balanced on a knife’s edge to avoid triggering the failure modes added by the project’s modifications of the copied code. I’m usually able to purge 20-30k lines of code from such projects in the first month, simultaneously closing multiple outstanding issues the PM had been led to believe were intractable.

That probably sounds like arrogance and/or shitting on everybody else’s work but it’s just reality at many workplaces due to a pace driven by unreasonable expectations from management. I just happen to be the person here that ends up sifting through the wreckage when a project reaches the inevitable osteoporosis phase, because of a natural disposition for reverse engineering. It would be great to escape for this and other reasons, as far as I can tell, most places aren’t that different.

Hurricanes gonna be lining up around the block in excitement

This is correct. Additionally, if x is NaN, then x ≠ x.

Or maybe metric should measure in Hartleys

Leaded or unleaded

Never had the pleasure myself but my dad worked for a manufacturer of punch card machines and told me about a service call where he got the contractually minimum 4 hours pay for walking in, dumping out the bucket and leaving. They had been specifically asked whether the “chip bin full” light was on. It was.

Punch card chaff?

At a specifically technical level, that adapter box contained a RF oscillator and a “frequency mixer” - the mixer likely being made of a transistor or 2 being switched on and off by the RF oscillator at a very high speed, with the effect of frequency-shifting the signal from the console. It’s similar to the way a camera’s shutter speed shifts the frequency of things like car wheels, helicopter blades, old tv’s and some LED dimmers to make the frequencies of those things visible to the human eye. Radio systems are almost all built on that concept.

it’s possible that channel 4 just plain didn’t work very well in that design but in my area I’m pretty sure it was just interference. I remember that channel 4 looked empty at first glance but if you sat and watched the snow, it would occasionally pick up some very faint stuff - there was likely enough RF signal there to interfere but not enough for the TV to consistently lock on.

It’s because the console was encoding the video in the same NTSC format that tv stations transmitted over the airwaves at the time, and the little adapter box it came with would connect between the tv and the antenna and the console, and merge the console’s signal with the antenna’s signal, so the TV would detect it as if the antenna had picked it up.

It had a channel selector to let you pick which of two frequencies to center the console’s signal at, in case one or the other was in use by a real tv station. Where I and apparently the previous poster lived, “channel 3” was unused but “channel 4” had a tv station so only channel 3 worked for video games

Booting from a single floppy disk in A: and using the other floppy drive (B: of course) to store programs and files because there was no hard drive. And the floppy disks only stored something like 300 KB.