Y’know Jane and I have devolved, this spring, from diet to just ‘being pretty careful about what we eat’ —and going back on the diet any time we pile on a pound or two.
Well, the wedding was a wee bit indulgent. Wine, champagne—that’s ok: there’s a limit after which you’ll stop. [One hopes!] But cake, icing, tortillas and barbecue, roasted chicken, nachos, etc…especially the cake and tortillas…well, we overate. And outright refined sugar is as foreign to our diets as it was to, well, all of humanity until the 1700’s.
Buttercream icing. Raspberry filling in chocolate cake…
Oh, my.
So, well, I’ve had a very iffy tummy all day Sunday, Monday… Tuesday I declared I wanted to go to Hong Kong Express for lunch. This is a tiny restaurant, a lot resembling a doublewide trailer, that serves dim sum and the best Chinese menu in town, as we see it, probably the best I’ve ever had. The seating is about 10 benches and two long tables and wine service is a glass-doored fridge standing in the dining room. That sort of place.
I had a plateful of the all-you can eat, with iced tea—and was cured. Iffy tummy was happy. And remains so.
What was it in the balance achieved? I have no idea. But I feel a whole lot better!
Not what one usually thinks of as ‘crackers’.
@Walt: I’m with you on that, strictly speaking. But how often does the public do that? So we speak in terms they understand.
AFAIK, the term was first commonly used in relation to computers at MIT’s AI Lab. Just as with the term “hack writer”, it was used in reference to a job that was done inelegantly, but quickly and effectively. So it’s essentially the common meaning of “to hack”. Now clearly, just as with a burglar determined to get into your house, a “hacker” trying to penetrate your computer isn’t concerned with elegance, just getting in quickly and effectively. It’s the same.
And we can insist the bad guys are crackers or black hats until the heat death of the Universe.
@Tommie: You mean biscuits? 🙂 This “living language” thing is all very nice, but now and then don’t you just want to put bullet through English’s heart?
My first thought was of the poor white males of the deep south, perpetually convinced of their own righteousness. Then I thought of saltines!
Both terms were in use as such, and already confused by the media and the public, when I was in computer classes in the mid to late ’80’s.
Ohh, bad memories of pointers and memory management from Data Structures class. Eek.
If I’d been at peace in my personal / inner life, I might have made a decent grade in that class. I’d made A’s in my computer classes up until then. I was ~lucky~ to pull out a D in Data Structures. Eek.
(That semester was perhaps the lowest point, internally, in my first run through college. Why it was or had to be that way on my path through life, I don’t know, but it was thus.)
There has been a lot of water under that bridge, from a very meandering stream of life since then. … If only I’d understood then the way I do now.
LOL, I should look up the specs on the campus’ best minicomputer back then. I’d bet my iPhone might even outdo it by a large factor.
I loved all CS, but then I’ve been programming since I was 15. I suppose it’s like writing for CJ.
I worked for a while on PDP-8’s. They’re a joke by current standards. A digital TV is far more powerful, much less a Kindle or a Nook.
If we’re going down memory lane … the first computer I worked on was a GE-225, made by General Electric. 8k 20-bit words, separate processor entirely for floating point arithmetic. It was upgraded to 16K words and we got the floating point hardware when we had the contract to do the calculations required for constructing the sails on the Sydney Opera House. We had to hire an engineer to do this and he used Fortran IV.
I think I predate both of you, on an IBM-1620. My IBM1620 homage page isn’t up now, but Google might have it cached.
The base PDP-8 had 4K 12-bit words, and direct addressing could only reach the 128* words in the same xxxxx0000000₂-xxxxx1111111₂ page, or “page zero”, 0000-0177₈. *No, I did not forget forget a K or other prefix! Clock/memory (core) cycles were 0.5µs; no floating point; no multiply! (My first computers were more “powerful” mainframes–Hollerith/IBM card fed, mostly.)
I think Paul’s CADET (Can’t Add: Doesn’t Even Try–it used an addition table–see Wikipedia) has us beat. My mom used Autonetics RECOMPs, which used Flexowriters (5-bit characters) and a 4K x 40b disk drive as main memory–the fast memory was the 2x density outer two tracks of the drive! It did have hardware square root, though.
I ignore a couple programmable calculators. Time did not permit, but I did have a shot at a Hollerith card sorter. They were used by the Nazis at Auschwitz [why did they care to document Auschwitz???], according to a Jewish friend, whose mother was there. He just, a week ago, visited the Holocaust Museum in DC and was gob-smacked to say the very least. Apparently, the HM has a cooperative agreement with Ancestry.com so they give visitors all the relevant documents they can find and effectively crowd-source the interpretation and data entry.
Needless to say, my friend is facing a bit of a biological clock with his mother. We so often put things off. I can think of many questions I did not ask my parents; but I would have felt intrusive asking them. [Though, retrospectively, I wish I had set my camera up, told them (Mom or Dad) I would only view the video after their death, and asked all the questions I could devise–we live in a wonderful time!] That’s my answer: each of us needs to find his or her own answer. (As i get older, I lose any moral absolutism, though–to be sure–some would say I’ve lost my moral compass.) Another friend became alienated from his father because his father remarried “only” a couple years after his wife’s natural death–a sweet Southern woman, to be sure. I’m not sure I spoke strongly enough to him: We each have our parents for only a limited time! Did they not act with perfect rectitude? Welcome to the human race! Get over yourself! (I speak not to any CC registrants, but to the un
washanointed masses, of course.)(Back, kind of, to computers, or at least computation: I had a high school teacher who dropped with little thought that Roman numerals could not be easily multiplied. I responded that I × I = I; V × V = XXV; etc. for X/L, C/D–six or eight (or ten) rules, very like each other. Much smaller than the 100 [or 81, or 45(? triangular)] element Arabic table of multiplication rules. Such are the benefits of not being within the Educational Industrial Complex!)
This was 1963 Paul.
OK, you’ve got me by 3 years. I started programming in ’66, but all we had was FORTRAN-II with FORMAT.
GE at that time was making computers. There was the BUNCH, GE and IBM as well as DEC and assorted others. You may be right about the Fortran II. My memory isn’t what it was.
Got me by time, unless you count mooning over logic diagrams as a pre-teen.