Bob Mottram ✅
bob@epicyon.libreserver.org
<p>Software engineer developing federated and decentralized systems for a more habitable, resilient and human-scale internet, respecting people and the planet. Founder of the <a href="https://epicyon.libreserver.org/tags/LibreServer" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag" tabindex="10"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span><span>LibreServer</span></a> and <a href="https://epicyon.libreserver.org/tags/Epicyon" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag" tabindex="10"><span aria-hidden="true">#</span><span>Epicyon</span></a> projects. Anarcho-typist. Deadpan photographer. :cupofcoffee:</p>
Posts
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Post #1212199
I think I understand the appeal of retrocomputing. By today's standards, those machines were simple, and by reading a few manuals you could fully know how they worked. The electronics was large, and so component fixing may also be feasible. If we are heading into a worse future, it's the small, simple and maintainable kinds of computer which would remain usable.
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Post #827989
When governments are doing military conscription it's because they want more souls to throw into the fire.
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Post #790297
No well-defined upfront specification survives contact with reality. In the early part of my commercial software adventures there was one occasion where a manager forgot to update the well-defined specification. The well-defined specification had apparently taken a large organization multiple years to produce. And so I spent however many months writing to to the wrong specification. But it's not just about having the correct version of the specification. There were plenty of other occa...
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Post #790296
The problem of upfront specifications is that the world is more complex than you are, and it may change between the point of specification authorship and the point of software delivery. Even if the archetypal “panel of experts” creates the specification there will be gaps, things which just don't work, or aspects of the specification which are contradictory in practice. The perfect, toy world of your imagination is never the same thing as the actual messy and changing real world beyond your...
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Post #790293
The British Museum has always been a dubious enterprise. If Greece wants their statues back then I don't see any valid reason why they couldn't be given back (they have a lot of other stuff which probably ought to be given back). Fundamentally they are Greek objects of historical/national significance. You can argue about legal process from the early 1800s or wotnot, but that's just a weak attempt to dodge the issue.