asciilifeform: i never understood the popularity of the crud. an ip-kvm is what, a few hundy? why attach proprietary strange to your front bus?
asciilifeform: who the hell has impi on a 'human' box ?
asciilifeform: someone actually uses wake on lan !?!
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu is one of those weirdos who actually turns his computer on and off ?!
asciilifeform: bus driver can demonstrably suck (machine careens of a cliff.) it does not follow that bus should be rebuilt with a steering wheel for each passenger - etc
asciilifeform: that many of the titles bear a striking resemblance to each other. "Adaptive Mesh Analysis" reads one and "An Adaptive Algorithm for Mesh Analysis" reads another. Dividing the total remaining by the average number of repetitions halves the list again. Mozart disappears before your very eyes.'☟︎☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: of these epics. First, the author rarely appears alone, sharing space with two or three others. Often the collaborators are Ph.D. students who are routinely doing most of the spade work on some low grant in the hope of climbing the greasy pole. Dividing the number of titles by the author's actual contribution probably reduces those hundred papers to twenty-five. Then looking at the titles themselves, you'll see
asciilifeform: 'You can routinely find lecturers with more than a hundred published papers and you marvel at these paradigms of human creativity. These are people, you think, who are fit to challenge Mozart who wrote a hundred pieces or more of music. And then you get puzzled that, in this modern world, there should be so many Mozarts - almost one for every department. The more prosaic truth emerges when you scan the titles☟︎
asciilifeform: the thief may or may not have 'insider' tip on who just ordered new laptop, gold bar, etc
asciilifeform: this scam will never die. every so often around here you hear of somebody caught stealing packages from doorsteps. same idea.
asciilifeform: e.g. bank doesn't eat the loss from fraud
asciilifeform: dignork: whenever you see a field where it seems as if 'cryptography never happened' - answer is always a misallocation of 'skin in game'
asciilifeform: for those who don't own this toy - it is rather like the spark of static one sometimes gets when touching grounded objects in winter time, but - constantly
asciilifeform: benkay: my parents had a soviet gizmo that consisted of exactly such a tube, with small tesla coil in the handle (dermatological crackpot medicine) so i got to see/feel mr t's tube on own hide.
asciilifeform: ask a fellow who's into vintage musical synths
asciilifeform: if you want an analogue part with known 'curves', you usually have to work at it.
asciilifeform: funny that you mention roms, because vintage arcade machine enthusiasts go through astounding gymnastics to replicate the behaviour of '80s roms.
asciilifeform: that was the objective. some semblance of guarantee.
asciilifeform: what computer-based product, on the shelf today, can be guaranteed manufacturable 50 years hence?
asciilifeform: (naggum is known to have worked in ada. hence his familiarity with the matter)
asciilifeform: one of the last gasps of reason from that institution
asciilifeform: us dod realized that computer would remain 'a thing' - wanted hard specced formats.
asciilifeform: all of this took place in the long-gone era when usg insisted on full blueprints, chip masks (!) etc. to ensure longevity of a complete design
asciilifeform: they could have, in principle, picked tex, but the latter has no hard spec for graphics.
asciilifeform: the result was a mega-backbreaker - like Ada. but it sorta worked.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: with the idea that under no circumstances would the death of one, two, hundred vendors lead to unreadable texts
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: cals is/was a mind-bogglingly pedantic spec from us dod (circa early 80s)
asciilifeform: public vpn is like a public reusable condom in whorehouse
