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Comment Been there, done that (Score 1) 160

Here in British Columbia we just changed our clocks for the last time and will remain on UTC-7 indefinitely. Parts of B.C. (the northeast part) have been UTC-7 all year for a long time. The southeast part has been Mountain time (UTC-7/UTC-6) for a long time. Neither are changing how they do time.

I applaud losing the time change but I'm not crazy about permanent DST. People obviously haven't thought this through, what it's going to feel like come November.

...laura

Comment Just do it! (Score 3, Interesting) 182

Near-lifelong B.C. resident here...

People have grumbled about time changes as long as I can remember. Pick one. Stick to it. Just do it.

I can't say I agree with their choice. Not so much the crazy late sunset in the summer - we're used to that - but the very late sunrise in the winter. The sun will still set by 5 in December and January. So what?

...laura

Comment My big beef (Score 1) 124

"Please" and "thank you" are relics of a bygone age to most people.

The one that pisses me off is the habit of customer service people addressing men respectfully ("sir"), but not addressing women with respect ("ma'am" or equivalent). This isn't an issue in places like Texas, but it's very much an issue here in Canada.

...laura

Comment Different this time? (Score 1) 138

When I first saw 4k I was startled by the picture quality. I also winced at the price tag, and shook my head at the lack of native 4k content. I now own a 4k TV, stream lots of 4k content on line, and generally like what I see. I shoot my own YouTube videos in 4k.

Is 8K just not that much better? Lack of content? Or just bad timing, people would rather spend money on food than a new toy?

...laura

Comment Wrong assumption in the article (Score 5, Interesting) 83

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Comment Not cool! (Score 0) 155

Subaru do a lot of things well - they're masters of all-wheel drive - but this is nuts.

I bought a VW Taos earlier this year with the usual trial subscription to Sirius XM. I was going to pull the plug when it expired but Sirius XM offered me a steep discount if I re-upped, so I did. They did it so readily that I wonder how many people are paying full price...

The bulk of my listening is two channels, Hits One and The Pulse.

...laura

Comment Such annoying policies (Score 1) 20

The community college I'm attending a class in online uses Proctorio. The rules say that we shouldn't wear headphones during the tests because we could be getting answers through the headset.

I'm taking a foreign language class, and part of the tests involves listening to spoken words. I don't own computer speakers, so how am I supposed to follow that rule? I'd have to buy speakers for just Proctorio.

Comment I cut the cord years ago (Score 1) 108

Too much money for not enough content.

When I had my morning toast and coffee earlier today I chose between three YouTube videos. An analysis of a high-performance motorcycle engine, a review of an off-road vehicle and troubleshooting a hybrid car. All cable ever has these days is reality shows.

...laura

Comment 32 bits 64 bits big-endian little-endian (Score 4, Interesting) 28

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

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