Blog – Page 155

Reply to Hardware Issue – when did hard drive space get like this?

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Hardware Issue (Aquarionics)

So, I am a professional system administrator. It says it on my business cards and everything. Every couple of months, when I have to explain to the receptionist at the London office that yes, I do work here, and so

Nicholas Avenell (Aquarionics) wrote:

…

(My first hard drive for the Amiga 600 was second hand from my dad’s old laptop. It was SIXTY MEGABYTES. It held DOZENS of games. I would need over EIGHT HUNDRED of those drives to hold a 50Gb World of Warcraft install).

…

I remember my first hard drive. It was 40Mb, and that felt flipping MASSIVE because I’d previously, like most people, been using floppy disks of no larger than 1.44Mb. My second hard drive was 105Mb and it felt like a huge step-up; I ripped my first MP3s onto that drive, and didn’t care for a moment that they each consumed 2%-3% of the available space (and took about 15 minutes each to encode).

Nowadays I look at my general-purpose home desktop’s 12TB RAID array and I think to myself… yeah, but it’s over half full… probably time to plan for the next upgrade. What happened‽ Somewhere along the line hard drive space became like mobile phone battery level became before it: something where you start to worry if you have less than half left. I don’t know how we got here and I’m not sure I’m happy about it, but suffice to say: technology today is nuts.

Note #10619

@adactio: The ampersand in https://adactio.com/notes/14395 isn’t being properly escaped in your RSS feed, breaking the XML – see e.g. https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fadactio.com%2Frss

The Scrotum Is Nuts

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Why are testicles kept in a vulnerable dangling sac? It’s not why you think.

…

Some of you may be thinking that there is a simple answer: temperature. This arrangement evolved to keep them cool. I thought so, too, and assumed that a quick glimpse at the scientific literature would reveal the biological reasons and I’d move on. But what I found was that the small band of scientists who have dedicated their professional time to pondering the scrotum’s existence are starkly divided over this so-called cooling hypothesis.

…

Liam Drew (Slate)

Story: Trophy

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Another monologue… This time from a suggestion of “Trophy”:

It’s weird, right? Stressing over something so small. I mean, it shouldn’t be that big a deal, but it is. It’s my trophy. I won it. I put in the hours and effort, I sacrificed for it, it’s mine.

I mean, she doesn’t even want it. She said so.

She said to me “Karen, I don’t care if I win”.

That drives me crazy. How could you not want to win? Isn’t that the point? I mean, why take part if you’re not wanting to win? What is the actual point? Dad always said “If you’re not a winner, then you’re a loser, and we’re not a family of losers”. So that’s driven me all through my life. I have to be first. I have to be the one to win. Nothing else matters. The highest grades in school, medals at the sports days, being top of the class. Nothing else matters.

Nothing.

…

Bryn Salisbury

Fabulous short story by my friend Bryn. Go read it…

Digest for September 2018

Summary

This month’s blog activity was mostly dominated by 360° photos taken with my new camera, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I also had to archive two geocaches, Oxford’s Wild Wolf One and Two, as they’d been getting muggled/vandalised. I also shared a fabulous reinterpretation of Who’s On First? for the post-post-modern society.

All posts

Posts marked by an asterisk (*) are referenced by the summary above.

Checkins

Dan Q archived GC7Q9E6 / OK0457 – Oxford’s Wild Wolf One *
Dan Q archived GC7Q9FF / OK0458 – Oxford’s Wild Wolf Two *
Dan Q temporarily disabled GC7Q9FF Oxford’s Wild Wolf Two
Dan Q performed maintenance for GC7Q96B Oxford’s Long-Lost Zoo

Notes

Reposts

Reposts marked with a dagger (†) include my comments or interpretation.

Note #10603

Once you’re doing with adding #indieweb awesome to your website, @henrahmagix, you might like to add an RSS feed so people like me can subscribe! In the meantime, I made you a temporary one at https://rssey.danq.me/henryblyth powered by my RSSey tool ( like this: https://github.com/Dan-Q/rssey/blob/master/feeds/henryblyth.js ).

Note #10601

Oh, go on, one more 360° photo: view from @NuffieldCollege’s (library) tower, ten stories above the #Oxford castle quarter.

Note #10598

One last @NuffieldCollege 360° photo on my lunchtime walk. Cool archway!

Note #10596

Walking around @NuffieldCollege at lunchtime: love this long pond.

Note #10594

Lunchtime at @NuffieldCollege gave me another excuse to snap some 360° photos; this one’s part of the quad.

Note #10589

The @bodleianlibs Comms Team Away Day at @NuffieldCollege provides yet another excuse to play with 360° photography.

That way they would never know

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

Some 702 intimate examinations were done on sedated or anaesthetised patients (table 3). In only 24% of these examinations had written consent been obtained, and a further 24% of examinations were conducted apparently without written or oral consent.

…

Coldicott, Yvette; Pope, Catherine; Roberts, Clive (BMJ)

This 2003 study at an “English medical school” determined that vaginal/rectal examinations were routinely carried out on anaesthetised patients without their knowledge or consent. “I was told in the second year that the best way to learn to do [rectal examinations] was when the patient was under anaesthetic,” one fourth year student responded, to the survey, “That way they would never know.”

Well ain’t that a thing.