This tells you everything you need to know about UX designers:

It's a simple, intuitive interface element that everyone who uses a PC can easily figure out how to use. Yeah, terrible tragedy, that. It's so old and crusty now, right? Who cares if people are, you know, actually getting shit done with their PC. We need some hip, new paradigm that people have to re-learn all over again.

Seriously, what the hell? Stop screwing up interfaces that are functional and familiar! I wonder if the designer of the automobile's steering wheel would have "mixed feelings" about that interface still being used in cars nearly a century later?

I flew on Malaysian airlines recently and got two empty seats next to me. That hasn't happened on a US plane in a long time.

Where I live, it's a one. Check my photos out.

Turning off lights in cities isn't going to help astronomers much.

Actually, no. City glow is a huge impediment to astronomy for an area hundreds of times the size of the city.

There's a middle ground here. Lighting can be designed so it primarily lights the ground, instead of going every which way. Goes a long way towards reducing problems optical telescope use faces.

Also some moderately recent styles for t-shirts. And hosiery. And.... jeans.

It appears that giving someone scissors is a direct route to dolling out cuts. :)

Dunno 'bout the getting the original 16-bit version to run on modern OS, but you can always play the remake and sequel: Chips Challenge for Steam and Chip's Challenge 2

Before you get all hot under the color about how developers are abusing nostalgia for a quick buck, CC2 (and the CC1 remake) is written by the same guy who made the first and its only been held up these past two decades because of copyright issues.

If you really, really want the absolute original experience though, you'll probably have to resort to using a VM (DOSBox works too).

... Karl et al. conclusion is an outlier. And you don't have to be a scientist to know it... if it weren't, there wouldn't have been news media all over the place reporting "No 'Hiatus' After All". Outliers are outliers. They can be recognized from their conclusions, as I did, but by lay people they can also often be recognized by the media uproar they stir. Simple logic says that if it hadn't been NEWS, it wouldn't have made a stir in the news. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-07-23]

Jane's method of spotting outliers via media uproar is cute, but it would be more rigorous to actually look at Fig 1 (a) and (b). The new global trend's central estimate is within the error bars of the old estimate. ... [Dumb Scientist]

... All it takes is simple logic to clearly show that Karl et al. results are an outlier. I didn't exactly make this up, either. Lots of others have been saying it. In fact, even many of the big news sources haven't dared to touch Karl with a 10-foot pole. It's just that -- ahem -- "credible". ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-07-28]

Again, spotting outliers via media uproar isn't as rigorous as actually looking at the data. So let's reproduce Fig 1(b) in Karl et al. 2015, which shows trends from 1998 to 2012. Let's calculate those trends for all the land/ocean, global, and satellite datasets listed here:

HadCRUT4 trend: +0.050 ± 0.139 C/decade (2 sigma)

NOAA trend: +0.079 ± 0.131 C/decade (2 sigma)

Karl(2015) trend: +0.086 ± 0.148 C/decade (2 sigma)

GISTEMP trend: +0.100 ± 0.141 C/decade (2 sigma)

Berkeley trend: +0.096 ± 0.137 C/decade (2 sigma)

HadCRUT4 krig v2 trend: +0.111 ± 0.152 C/decade (2 sigma)

Karl(2015) krig trend: +0.111 ± 0.157 C/decade (2 sigma)

RSS trend: -0.055 ± 0.246 C/decade (2 sigma)

UAH trend: +0.054 ± 0.251 C/decade (2 sigma)

All these trend estimates are consistent with my previous statement: there hasn't been a statistically significant change in the warming rate, and there isn't a statistically significant difference between the projected and observed trends.

Do these results support Jane's claim that Karl et al. 2015 is somehow an "outlier"?

That's a protocol design bug.

Specifically, there's actually no reason that protocol traffic wouldn't include a "this is my idea of the current time" in the requests and responses so that delta times could be locally calculated from the packet contents on the receiving end. This would work, no problem, for a protocol like NFS.

Kerberos is more of an issue, but since all parties have to trust the ticket granting system as the trusted third party -- so you might a well trust their timestamp as well, since you've already established a trust chain dependency on the third party. You mode the protocol to send the timestamp within the security association, and you are golden (regardless of whether you are running an adjusted or monotonic clock).

This is how DCE RPC handles byte order: receiver translates to local byte order -- if the byte order is different. If it's not, then there's no need for translation, and it saves CPU on both ends of the connection. Receiver translates to a delta time from which the timestamps are derived, and timesync is no longer a problem.

In my experience, this tends to happen when marketing gets involved in the design process, and starts asking for previous_product++. One of the reasons Steve Jobs was so effective is that he understood the technical side of things well enough to help make design decisions.

The best way to get good at estimating is doing a couple of fixed price contracts that end up working out to you making less than minimum wage. Then you either get good at estimating, or you go out of business.

All managers who've worked with people who are bad at estimating automatically apply a scaling factor, which usually depends on the person making the estimate, and then you scale it for the real estimate, because people are frequently bad at estimating. In general, there are two types of people (substitute gender, if you wish to): Mr. Right, and Mr. Right Now. Both of these can be valuable to a company, but generally, if you want to scale to a large number of customers without huge built-in costs, your prototype is done by Mr. Right Now to get to funding, and then your released product is done by Mr. Right.

The oldest continuously running company is Kongo Gumi; it was founded in the year 578. Not dead yet.

FWIW, there are 5,586 companies older than 200 years. Like the Stiftskeller St. Peter restaurant in Austria, which was founded in the year 803, or Sean's Bar, an Irish Pub, founded in the year 900. Even the U.S. has gotten into the act; Shirley Plantation is a farm founded in Virginia in 1613. A surprising percentage of them are alcohol related, although there are also a lot of hotels, confectioners, and other businesses.

I'm actually okay with us not using our nukes.

The whole thrust of ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar essay...

You're about 30 years late WRT your reference. When I said "back in the day"...

I first saw the term "software priesthood" in print in Byte magazine -- it was 1976, I think. It was already in play among those of us who had already been programming for a while, and even more so among certain sectors of management.

For most specific problems thrown at supercomputers, you can go 30 times faster with a custom hardware architecture baked into silicon

To go 30 times fast for general purpose supercomputing, you use the latest silicon (2X) and more chips (15X) and come up with a super new interconnect to make it not suck. This would involve making some chips that support low latency IPC in hardware.

They are free to send me a few billion dollars, I'll get right on it and deliver a 30X faster machine and I'l even use some blue LEDs on the front panel.

My Happy Hacking Professional 2 keyboard has a control key in the place where a caps lock key usually goes.

Agreed. I wouldn't change a thing. I spend my time worrying about my current project or my programming skills, not the layout of my keyboard. I internalized key positions decades ago, and I don't see any real benefit in trying to relearn what I've already got down pat.

There are a lot of slightly sub-optimal things in our lives that hang around due to simple inertia. The "pain in the ass" factor of learning a new keyboard layout probably outweighs potential efficiencies of completely or partially relearning how to touch-type. Most of us don't rely on maximum efficiency when typing, unless you happen to have a very specialized job in which you type a *lot*. A slightly more efficient layout probably won't make any substantial difference for most of us.

As a practical matter, choosing a non-standard keyboard layout is going to greatly inconvenience you in many ways. You'll have a dramatically limited selection of keyboards to choose from, and you're going to have problems every time you need to temporarily use someone else's standard qwerty keyboard.