Here's a solid if perhaps not great hour with McArdle, good for a commute or something.

Coronavirus really isn't jelling fast enough to add excitement to our daily lifes: The first death outside of China only happened today (Thursday) in Japan.

Want something else to worry about? Here you go.

Background.

Why would you want to date a "unwoke" dude? oh, free dinner and drinks? ok, got it.

Not wanting to date "woke" women, far from being laughable, is actually one of the more insidious aspects of it. Spend an afternoon on any major dating app and you’ll come across (generally white) men saying openly sexist and misogynistic things. They might say "no psychos" or that they "fucking hate big eyebrows" in their bios. And, by and large, they also tend to hold extremely right-wing views and see themselves as victims of liberal thinking.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2020/01/9244509/laurence-fox-anti-woke-meaning

Oh. Emphasis mine. Sucks to be Schiff-for-brains.

Separately, Fox News has identified clips of Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., now the lead House impeachment manager, in which he says Bolton had a distinct "lack of credibility" and was prone to "conspiracy theories." This week, Schiff said Bolton needed to testify in the impeachment trial as an important and believable witness.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/schiff-bolton-lack-credibility-senate-impeachment-trial

Technical details on the mitigation for Y2038. Y1901 refers to epoch times from 1901 (Mac OS HFS+ filesystem). Seems Mac OS and iOS use "Core Data" times, which start on 01 January 2001 00:00:00

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corefoundation/cfabsolutetime

The intent of this page is to serve as a central point for describing the Y2038 'proofness' design.

Y2038 'proofness' means that application calls to glibc-provided function should never return wrong results when UTC times outside -2^31..2^31-1 seconds from the Unix Epoch are involved.

This document is only about Y2038 (and Y1901) and is not about any other time boundaries such as Y2106 (unsigned 32-bit Epoch-based times), Y2036 (unsigned 32-bit 1900-based RFC 868 times) or Y9999 (four-digit years).

https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Y2038ProofnessDesign

Date rollovers, sigh... I work on system X for the U.S. military. It interfaces with system Y, which was developed on another contract. Last year, system Y got bit by the GPS week number rollover (Google it). Because the change process for system Y is like something out of an Ayn Rand novel, we had to put together a crash effort to modify system X to accommodate it. (They still haven't fixed system Y. Government work, man.)

Here's a funny story about how computers count dates and times. The basic concept behind Darth's post is that most computer operating systems figure time starting from an arbitrarily-chosen "epoch" date, which by definition is date zero, time zero. Then they just count up from there. Back in the 1970s, I worked on a computer built by a long-gone company called Data General. It used an operating system called RDOS. Now, RDOS figured dates and times using January 1, 1968 as its epoch date. But for some reason it defined this date not as day zero, but as day 1. That meant that day zero was not really defined.

The RDOS file system had some "special" files that were really interfaces to devices, like printers and tape readers. These were created by RDOS when the disk drive was formatted. Unfortunately, for the file creation date and time of these files, it put in all zeroes. The system library that converted dates and times to a readable format didn't know how to handle this. The result was that if you listed the files on the disk, it would insist that the creation date of the special files was January 0, 1968.

Putting aside who the people involved are and which side they are on: If you're a political operative, this sort of thing is a really stupid thing to do.

(Lesson to Republicans here: If you refrain from mocking people who live in big cities, you might be able to persuade some of them to vote for you.)

Here's what came to mind when you said Data General.

At the time —on paper— it looked like one of the most desirable works from the hand of man!

Turns out it had problems.

One more reason to tax the churches.

Politics in the pulpit. Blech.

Politics in the pulpit.

Wonder what that pastor thinks of David, or Samson, or even Cyrus the Great.

Somewhere, John Moses Browning is crying. Tears of laughter, or of sorrow?

In the video, Democratic Virginia Del. Mark Levine said the biggest difference between hunting rifles and “assault weapons” is “how you hold the gun.”

Speaking at a public meeting, the author of legislation to ban AR-style guns and large, bullet-holding magazines used in semi-automatic weapons also said shooters could use several fingers to pull the trigger and that deer know the sound of a bullet shot through a “silencer” better than humans.

As audience members were heard chuckling in the background, Levine said: “In terms of the differences of the guns, the heart of the difference is how you hold the gun. It makes it a semi-automatic.” He showed his trigger finger moving, and added, “Meaning you can shoot with each finger, not like a bolt-action” rifle typically used in hunting.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/anti-gun-expert-says-how-you-hold-the-gun-makes-it-an-assault-weapon

Don't worry, the cops have each other's backs, even when one of them does something criminally negligent. I wonder if anyone will ask the offender why he didn't call dispatch to report a negligent discharge?

“Yeah, my wife was home. She was up, she was getting our kids ready for school and then like a wall in our apartment exploded,” he told a dispatcher.

The dispatcher asked him why it took an hour to call authorities.

“She just told me. She had to get the kids up and to the school bus before it left and she just got back,” he said.

A Holly Hill officer lives above the apartment and he told police he was attempting to move a rifle, according to the incident report.

He told police he was walking with the rifle and must have had his finger inside the trigger guard, according to investigators.

Investigators said he told police he tripped on something and the rifle discharged.

Police said there aren’t criminal charges and the officer was off duty.

The officer is still on regular patrols, according to police.

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/01/29/a-wall-in-our-apartment-exploded-holly-hill-officers-rifle-accidentally-discharges-into-neighbors-apartment/

This week I've been going back through the old Byte magazines and recalling how micros overwhelmed business and social cultures which wanted nothing to do with them. Their conquest was brutal. Seeing these forces shuffling and coalescing in Byte was like a front-row seat for the whole savage tournament.

Data General, who I'd maybe never heard of in any other context, might be forgiven for selling schlock, But seeing Big Blue so gravely humbled by PC's (of their own specification!) was perhaps the most glorious story of business comeuppance in our lifetimes, and maybe in all of commerce. (Read any recollection of leasing arrangements for the 360 & 370, and be appalled by IBM's arrogance.) The eagerness of businessmen large and small to joust so casually was a delight, and it seemed distinctly American.

September 1985, Page #143: For thirty-five years I've marveled at the audacity of this mooky huckster in a Palm Springs garage to allege, however transparently, that he might be mistaken for Bill Gates (not yet the richest man in the world; but two years later it would be no surprise). This guy published one more ad the next month, but his enterprise leaves no other traces in Google.

Another one that stuck with me...

For about two decades, it was a snickering joke among PC enthusiasts:

Q. What is always coming but is never here?

A. Unix! Har!

Additionally— The apparel business is in the toilet, especially the fashion parts. The shared excitement in young generations is piped through their phones, not in trends of hemlines or spandex. They don't care about cars, let alone clothes.

I hope the guy who wrote the last paragraph of this box has lived to see the day. It's been much, much more lucrative to have given your career to Linux than to pants.

Y'know, as Bowie once asked, "Is it any wonder?"

We all knew this anyway, but it's good that someone's writing it down.

Crid, this is the Data General machine I worked on. (There's some Teletype ASR-33 love too.)
At the time, its products were moderately well respected. DG was founded by some engineers who broke away from DEC because they didn't think DEC was serious enough about building faster CPUs. The Nova series were among the first minicomputers to clock its CPU at the whopping rate of 1 MHZ; their instruction set was more efficient (for programming languages as they existed at the time) than DEC's, and they were able to undercut DEC on price. The DG/One was late in the company's history, after the founders had left. And like all of other minicomputer manufacturers, DG never quite figured out the personal computer.

It's largely forgotten now, but before there was the personal computer revolution, there was the minicomputer revolution. Thanks to it, I, a geeky high school student in 1974, was able to actually put my hands on a computer. (The school owned it, and they "allowed" us students to write most of the software for the school, natch. Of course, other stuff got written too, mostly games. I wrote a Yahtzee game that could beat most of the people who played against it.)

Sweetass blinkenlights! Moar later

But for now... The cover on that DEC brochure is fantastic. Saving it to disk, because this example brings the realization that I've been (quite incidentally) been building a collection!... Circa '69 computer illustrations often depict machines operated by jaw-dropping women.

I shoulda have moved on all that tail.

But it was sixth grade… Which was still pretty good!

Look, we're all adults, and sophisticated in the arts of persuasion: Does that pic on page three of the brochure, with that shining, draped hair, describe anything but fellatio?

Okay, time to do stuff, come back tonight for more computer rambles

That's a blast from the past. AT&T's unix, Xenix, DEC & Honeywell, VAX and Apple Lisa. That was about the time I was starting to get into serious computer work, and was teething on VAX, and the first time I was exposed to "e-mail".

It would be another 5 years until I got into unix (SGI) in a serious manner. Between them, I got exposed to WYLBUR and just enough job control language to submit batch jobs to IBM mainframes.

Oh, and above that box? A Laser Disk For Databases "The optical disk drive from Reference Technology won't replace Winchesters; it can only read, not write, data." Oh, you mean a CD-ROM? ;-)

> a geeky high school student
> in 1974, was able to actually
> put my hands on a computer.

Envy! The first computer I ever touched was the first I owned, a year out of school. More understanding came in the first week with that toy than came in a whole sophomore semester of Fortran on some godforsaken CDC, accessed distantly through Hollerith cards, which were passed to snotbastard CS majors behind a counter for submission to a 45-minute queue. (I detest sysadmins to this day. The reflex has never failed.)

But that was college. During High School (in that same university town, probably '74) a pal and I would sneak into the business school to play "Star Trek" (dynamic "Battleship" on noisy terminals with the green-striped paper) while timid accounting majors with class project to complete got pissed off in the room outside, waiting for us to get bored. It never took more than an hour.

In retrospect it's inexcusable that we weren't taught some kind of scripting, or at least basic, before our immortal souls congealed in innumeracy.

PS-- A few years later I came back for an abortive application to grad school, and was by then clever enough to hack into the (newfangled) VAX queues: By reading the papers the students were preparing to print, I figured out that the average Midwestern hayseed undergrad was not very bright. This hadn't been so obvious when I was one of them.

The Data General Wiki page:

Production problems with the Eclipse[12] led to a rash of lawsuits in the late 1970s.

Relax: Don't do the work of those with whom you are in conflict.