I can just imagine. Could you share some examples?

I used to be involved with web dev software. We'd make the effort to have it warn the editor if they use colour contrast combinations that are effectively invisible to colour blind folks. With the ridiculous way web pages are these days, I doubt anybody bothers with even that anymore

Damn that's hilarious. And I agree completely. Web site accessibility has utterly nosedived in the last few years.

The amount of layers of arbitrary and unnecessary popups and menus and crap has made the web worse and worse. It's become a challenge to put the mouse cursor anywhere and not have some unwanted menu or other idiocy pop into my face, obscuring what I really wanted to read. I used to use text browsers like lynx just to cut down on the noise, but these days hardly any sites work decently with lynx.

So what's a blind user dependent on text-to-speech to do? A few years back, that was workable. With today's craptacular web pages that use several megabytes of javascript, I guess they're out of luck.

I don't know why people keep bringing up the HP48 when the HP50g has been HP's flagship calculator for many years now. It's ARM based and plenty fast.

In music lingo, "tritone" just means an interval of six semitones, or an augmented fourth. It's the strange sound you get when playing a C and F# at the same time.

I am reminded of the Yogi Berra quote: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

I once saw a review where the buyer gave it one star because the item he ordered wasn't really what he wanted.

Yes, he ordered an item, they delivered it promptly, but he decided he really should have ordered something else and so he gave it one star. You just can't win with some people.

I think we can safely assume that he has already provided himself with Top Secret clearance long ago...

If you read the book, the movie makes perfect sense.

Now, I absolutely love 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I will freely admit that its one major failing as a movie goes is that it cannot stand alone. It gives absolutely no context or explanation at all for the "beyond the infinite" section.

Kubrick must have known that, and to this day I don't know why he chose to make such a lavish film that won't make sense without the book. I suspect a big part of it is that since Bowman is entirely alone at the end, it would take either internal dialogue, narration, or some back-and-forth with his hosts, all of which would have come across as utterly goofy or corny, so he decided to go weapons-grade primadonna artsy-fartsy instead.

So you have to read a book to appreciate this movie. There are worse things in life...

I'm dating myself, but I still have my copy of Sedra & Smith's "Micro Electronic Circuits" from my days at the University of Toronto. It's 30 years later, but I still use it.

It turns out that electrons don't change their behaviour after a few decades, and people who are good at explaining are still good at explaining in writing after a few decades. I also found a Quantum Mechanics book written by some guy around 1950 in German (which I can barely read but I managed) whose name I sadly can't remember but made my mind clear and pass QM with flying colours.

I really don't know what my kids are going to do with their pdf's. I really don't. I guess they'll manage, but I can grab the dead tree thing and it still works, despite some mold on the edges.

Well, how about this: my wife is Korean, and when I suggested to her that Korea is 68 years old she burst into mad laughter.

I suggest you go to Koreatown and suggest with a straight face to people there that Korea is 68 years old. The Japanese thing is a tiny blip in their millenial history and almost forgotten.

If you want to have some counter with a reset button based on some random criterion, fine, go ahead. Just don't expect anybody else to take it seriously.

Funny thing is, I find that easier to read and understand than the original. It's like "make a list of the elements in this range and print it", twice over, and finally "make a list of the stuff in x that's also in y and print it".

Like everyone else, you missed my part "how about year 1000" (a year I picked at random).

Japanese being assholes there for a few decades half a century ago doesn't suddenly erase the previous thousands of years of Korea being Korea.

I'm not even Korean and it's obvious to me.

Whether it was low pass filtering or just the card being at its limits I don't know, but the output was really quite weak. That's why I needed an audio amp. A 40W amp, no less. Since the audio amp wasn't designed for 60kHz either, the output still wasn't all that strong, but it was good enough for the watch to pick it up sitting next to the coil.

This one could, and I don't claim to know why. But I saw it clearly on my oscilloscope: 60kHz.

Actually it wasn't exactly 60kHz, it was 59 point something because of quantization according to a frequency counter, but apparently it was close enough to keep the watch happy.

Yeah, but if were to walk into Stockholm in 1250 and say hi to Birger Jarl and ask him what country you were in, what do you think he would have said? Not "Danmark" or "Kalmarunionen" or something like that, I can guarantee you.

A lot of the "independence" dates for European countries are really arbitrary, because they just gradually grew into place.

Equally idiotic is calling the Koreas "68 years old". So what the hell was there before 1945? Or how about year 1000?