I remember Joel of Joel on Software publicly working through the process of creating a remote desktop for normals type product called Copilot back in the day. If I remember correctly he had to pay quite a pretty penny to acquire copilot.com.

I wonder if MS Copilot meant he made money on that investment?

We should probably be grateful Microsoft didn't name it .NET

386 grams, the extra 0.2 grams is not only irrelevant it's non existent because the process of converting from one measurement standard to another never increases the precision of the measurement.

Using 3 digits of precision also avoids being temped to use the rather niche ,2 convention when claiming to embrace a region as large as the rest of the world.

Comma as decimal separator is actually the most common format, by number of countries, though dot still wins by population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...

Interesting notion, but how do you know it's 13.6 and not 13.600?

By convention if it was 13.600 they would present it as 13.600 not 13.6. If I remember correctly Everest was first surveyed as 29000 feet tall and they changed it arbitrarily to 29002 to avoid the apparent imprecision!

C dev wasn't a problem with MSDOS and 640K either. With CP/M and 64K it was a challenge I think. Struggling to remember the details on that and too lazy to research it right now.

The almost regretful "I'm not Norwegian" clarification here is charming.

I thought my Z80 project (https://github.com/billforsternz/retro-sargon) was close to the whimsical end of the practical to just for fun spectrum but this takes things to a whole new level, kudos.

It's very interesting how the "you know the city, the state, the country" mantra here is really "you know the city, the state and obviously the country is the USA no other possibilities are considered or worth considering"

Not the person you're replying too, but ... because it would be weird if they didn't.

There are legitimate questions if physical constants are constant everywhere in the universe, and also whether they are constant over time. Just because we conceive something "should" be a certain way doesn't make it true. The zero and negative numbers were also weird yet valid. How is the structure of mathematics different from fundamental constants, which we also cannot prove are invariant.

The constants don't have to be the same everywhere. It is sufficient that everywhere in the universe follows some structure and rules, that's all.

Otherwise we have a random universe, which does not seem to be the case.

> It is sufficient that everywhere in the universe follows some structure and rules, that's all.

What is that sufficient for?

>Otherwise we have a random universe, which does not seem to be the case.

Why jump to randomness, rather than to the possibility of undiscovered laws?

What the heck, how is "undiscovered laws" different from "structure and rules"?

One of my best rescue jobs involved doing this in 1999, yes that 1999. The client had shuttered their development department years before but was expecting to continue happily supporting and selling their simple enough alarm system products indefinitely. Testing revealed that come 2000 the alarms would just fire continually. Whoops. Fortunately there was one dev PC they'd decided to keep and not touch. Found the offending .c code and the corresponding offending machine code after some disassembly. A little bit of creative assembly language was required to squeeze an extra check in but really no big deal and the day was saved. I remember the client manager being ridiculously happy and grateful.

He meant once every 4 years not once every quarter.