Random Thread

[dɮ the phoneme]

Now that that one-liner from kodé made it to the Quote Thread though, I guess I'll have to change my username again.

Why is that?

[bradrn]

Kinda thinking about changing my user name again, maybe to dlzh. It feels a bit more elegant, being just ASCII, but I'm not sure. Opinions?

I don’t see any problems with it being non-ASCII. If you’re looking for alternatives, other options I’ve seen for the same phoneme include ⟨dl⟩ and ⟨λ⟩. If you’re willing to consider similar sounds as well, you could also use any of ⟨ɣ̌ tl tɬ ƛ ǩ lh hl ł ɬ ś⟩.

Now that that one-liner from kodé made it to the Quote Thread though, I guess I'll have to change my username again. Sigh, I actually liked Nectar...

I see dɮ shares my confusion — I liked Nectar as well! Though of course Kuchigakatai is fine as well. (I must admit though, my immediate reaction upon seeing your new new username was ‘oh, did someone new join?’, followed by ‘I’m sure I know this person…’ )

[dɮ the phoneme]

I had that reaction as well, then saw they had over 1000 posts and was briefly very confused.

「口が硬い」って、どんな秘密を守ってるんだかなぁ

[Travis B.]

I don't see the issue with "Nectar" making its way into a Quotes post myself...

[Raphael]

Software question: does anyone know of a good free, or at least reasonably cheap, Windows file backup management software? That is, a software that, if I have a computer and an external hard drive where some of the directories from the computer are backed up, can keep track of which files and directories on the computer have been added or changed since the last session, and copy those, and only those, to the right place on the external hard drive? Note that I'm talking about backup to external hard drives here; I'm not interested in cloud-related stuff. It would be for personal use only, not professional or commercial environments.

[Ares Land]

If you don't mind using the command line a little, you don't need any special software. The built-in command robocopy can do just that for you.

There's a bit of tweaking around with parameters, and I don't remember the proper syntax, but search 'robocopy backup script' and you'll find it. (Then you can just paste it into a batch file, and use that).

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[malloc]

Rather nervous because I cast an absentee ballot today on rather flimsy grounds. I mentioned some health issues I had over the past couple of months, which included serious pain when breathing, but provided no doctor's notes. They have an airtight case against me for voter fraud if they ever decide to pursue it.

[Moose-tache]

Wait, does your state require a medical excuse to vote absentee? (google, google) Well holy shit, yes, the great state of Missouri does require an excuse to vote absentee! Ya'll have out-southed the south (this is not an invitation to complain about Missouri. Keep walking).

If it's any consolation, I doubt anyone is going to bother contesting any absentee ballot eligibilities since Election-gate 2020 will probably resemble an MMA fight between two tornadoes made of alligators.

[Yalensky]

Yikes. From the application PDF: "NOTARY REQUIRED UNLESS SPECIFICALLY NOTED BELOW". They really want to make it hard to vote don't they?

My own voting experience: Illinois has optional mail-in voting that anyone can sign up for. I got an email late September telling me my ballot was in the mail and linking to a website tracking its progress. I got the ballot a few days later, filled it out, mailed it back in, and before I could even check its progress through the postal system I got an email from the Elections Board saying they had received it and will count it. Smooth as butter.

Then again, my dad tells me a possibly apocryphal story about my grandfather, who also lived in Chicago: one election day he was running late to the polls but arrived just in time to cast his vote before closing. One of the election workers there, however, told him "Sorry, Joe, we've already voted for you!"

[Ares Land]

As they say, 'vote early, and vote often!'

[doctor shark]

One thing my state (North Carolina) does well with absentee voting is that no excuse is required, and the process is exceptionally clear and straightforward. You can even send a ballot back by e-mail if you're overseas! Part of why I've voted in every biennial primary and general election since becoming eligible...

[Ares Land]

Rather nervous because I cast an absentee ballot today on rather flimsy grounds. I mentioned some health issues I had over the past couple of months, which included serious pain when breathing, but provided no doctor's notes. They have an airtight case against me for voter fraud if they ever decide to pursue it.

Usually I try to avoid US-bashing... But I'm honestly shocked at what you Americans have to put up with.

Over here, elections are sensibly held on Sundays, and by tradition all primary schools, city halls, and kindergartens serve as polling stations. I don't remember ever having to wait more than 5 minutes in line for voting.
Absentee voting is always done by proxy, and you don't need any special excuse. The worst that can happen is having to wait an hour at city hall to get the paperwork done (and, being French, we complain about it a lot when it happens!)

I don't mean to say we have a perfect system or anything (voters in some right-wing consistuencies used to keep active in politics after their death, but AFAIK the last time this happened was twenty years ago).
I'm just saying that if that sort of thing happened in any other country than the US, we'd never consider it a democracy.

[Moose-tache]

Aside from the voting on Sunday thing this is pretty much how it works in most parts of the US. Sometimes you get long lines when they don't have enough volunteers at polling places, and most states prefer mail voting over proxy voting, but malloc's situation is not typical.

[linguistcat]

Kinda weird that Utah is just like "Here is your free mail in ballot but if you want to go to the polls on the day, you have a good portion of the day to do so, even if you're working that day." But then Utah has historically been very homogeneous, both racially and religiously.

[Travis B.]

Just remember, the Republicans don't want you to vote, because they figure if they make voting very difficult, then only Republicans will vote.

[kodé]

Now that that one-liner from kodé made it to the Quote Thread though, I guess I'll have to change my username again. Sigh, I actually liked Nectar...

Sorry! One line is usually all I can muster.

[Raphael]

Sorry, I'm not sure how to phrase this as a search engine request:

Does anyone know of any good resources on the history of the technology for putting letters on computer screens? That is, long before GUIs, at times when computers still had ridiculously slow processing speeds and ridiculously low other system specifications by modern standards, they were already able to control old cathode ray tubes in such a way that Latin alphabet letters appeared on a screen. And in all the texts on the history of computers that I've read in my life, I've seen basically zero references to the technology needed to make that happen. Any ideas?

[Pabappa]

I dont know.

You remind me of a dispute I had with a friend in college who was a big fan of Macintosh computers. This was 2001 but we were both behind the times just because neither of us could afford a modern computer at the time. So essentially we were arguing about mid-90s technology and before.

The dispute was over whether such a thing as "text mode" existed.

My belief was that DOS computers and DOS-era computers such as Amiga, Olivetti, etc came with graphics cards that had different modes of operation. All graphics cards had at least one mode in which they could only display text, and needed only one byte of memory for each character, not one byte per pixel as was the case in graphics mode. This saved memory and increased speed, since the effective resolution of the screen was not, say, 640x400, but just 80x25 ... thus text mode could display a screenful of information 128 times more efficiently than graphics mode.

There is good evidence that I was right .... for example, changing the color of the font on an old computer often required changing it everywhere ... there was no way to display, for example, a green A followed by an orange P, a blue T, and so on while looking at a command prompt.

There is good evidence that the NES was capable of "text mode" as well, but used it differently. In early games such as Super Mario Bros. and Excitebike, when for whatever reason a number greater than 9 needs to be displayed in a single space, rather than showing a 10 or a zero, instead a piece of a video game platform shows up, suggesting that both the text and the graphics in SMB and similar games were being stored in the memory as part of the same 256-character array.

My friend denied that text mode existed, saying that a mid-90s Macintosh computer running Linux was doing it just the same way as a mid-90s IBM PC, and that IBM computers did not have any particularly more efficient way of displaying text-only interfaces.

I never really bothered to figure out which of us was right and to my knowledge neither did he. But it might be a good start for you to find out more information.

[rotting bones]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mode#Technical_basis

?