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  • hoovesandheartbeats:

    “How Vaccines Work” Source

    Credit: Maki Naro

    Part One

    This is the rest of the comic from Naro since tumblr only allows 10 photos at a time. 

    hoovesandheartbeats:

    “How Vaccines Work” Source

    Credit: Maki Naro

    Part One

    This is the rest of the comic from Naro since tumblr only allows 10 photos at a time. 

    hoovesandheartbeats:

    “How Vaccines Work” Source

    Credit: Maki Naro

    Part One

    This is the rest of the comic from Naro since tumblr only allows 10 photos at a time. 

    hoovesandheartbeats:

    “How Vaccines Work” Source

    Credit: Maki Naro

    Part One

    This is the rest of the comic from Naro since tumblr only allows 10 photos at a time. 

    hoovesandheartbeats:

    “How Vaccines Work” Source

    Credit: Maki Naro

    Part One

    This is the rest of the comic from Naro since tumblr only allows 10 photos at a time. 

    hoovesandheartbeats:

    “How Vaccines Work” Source

    Credit: Maki Naro

    Part One

    This is the rest of the comic from Naro since tumblr only allows 10 photos at a time. 

    hoovesandheartbeats:

    “How Vaccines Work” Source

    Credit: Maki Naro

    Part One

    This is the rest of the comic from Naro since tumblr only allows 10 photos at a time. 

  • deducecanoe:

    thebaconsandwichofregret:

    birdsy-purplefishes:

    shananaomi:

    jaybushman:

    spytap:

    ralfmaximus:

    faisdm:

    the-most-calamitous:

    jibini:

    top-lotad-breeder:

    chocogoat:

    what. why? someone pls explain to me pls i wasnt born yet in 1999 why turn computer off before midnight? what happen if u dont?

    y2k lol everyone was like “the supervirus is gonna take over the world and ruin everything and end the world!!!”

    This is the oldest I’ve ever felt. Right now.

    WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU WEREN’T BORN YET IN 1999.

    Ahh the Millenium bug.

    It wasn’t a virus, it was an issue with how some old computers at the time were programmed to deal with dates. Basically some computers with older operating systems didn’t have anything in place to deal with the year reaching 99 and looping around to 00. It was believed that this inability to sync with the correct date would cause issues, and even crash entire systems the moment the date changed.

    People flipped out about it, convinced that the date discrepancy between netwoked systems would bring down computers everywhere and shut down the internet and so all systems relying on computers, including plane navigation etc. would go down causing worldwide chaos. It was genuinely believed that people should all switch off computers to avoid this. One or two smart people spoke up and said “um hey, this actually will only effect a few very outdated computers and they’ll just display the wrong date, so it probably won’t be harmful” but were largely ignored because people selling books about the end of the world were talking louder.

    In the end, absolutely nothing happened.

    Oh gosh.

    I’ve been a programmer working for various government agencies since the early 1990s and I can say with some confidence:

    NOTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE WE WORKED VERY HARD FIXING SHIT THAT MOST DEFINITELY WOULD HAVE BROKEN ON 1-JAN-2000.

    One example I personally worked on: vaccination databases.

    My contract was with the CDC to coordinate immunization registries — you know, kids’ vaccine histories. What they got, when they got it, and (most importantly) which vaccines they were due to get next and when. These were state-wide registries, containing millions of records each.

    Most of these systems were designed in the 1970s and 1980s, and stored the child’s DOB year as only two digits. This means that — had we not fixed it — just about every child in all the databases I worked on would have SUDDENLY AGED OUT OF THE PROGRAM 1-JAN-2000.

    In other words: these kids would suddenly be “too old” to receive critical vaccines.

    Okay, so that’s not a nuke plant exploding or airplanes dropping from the sky. In fact, nothing obvious would have occurred come Jan 1st.

    BUT

    Without the software advising doctors when to give vaccinations, an entire generation’s immunity to things like measles, mumps, smallpox (etc) would have been compromised. And nobody would even know there was a problem for months — possibly years — after.

    You think the fun & games caused by a few anti-vaxers is bad?

    Imagine whole populations going unvaccinated by accident… one case of measles and the death toll might be measured in millions.

    This is one example I KNOW to be true, because I was there.

    I also know that in the years leading up to 2000 there were ad-hoc discussion groups (particularly alt.risk) of amazed programmers and project managers that uncovered year-2000 traps… and fixed them.

    Quietly, without fanfare. 

    In many cases because admitting there was a problem would have resulted in a lawsuit by angry customers. But mostly because it was our job to fix those design flaws before anyone was inconvenienced or hurt.

    So, yeah… all that Y2K hysteria was for nothing, because programmers worked their asses off to make sure it was for nothing.

    Bolding mine.

    Absolutely true.  My Mom worked like crazy all throughout 1998 and 1999 on dozens of systems to avoid Y2K crashes. Nothing major happened because people worked to made sure it didn’t.

    Now if we could just harness that concept for some of the other major issues facing us today.  

    this meme came so far since i saw it this morning. god i love tumblr teaching tumblr about history.

    Holy shit. I feel simultaneously young and old.

    hey guys, how about a round of applause for the programmers of the 90’s for doing all this work and getting nearly no credit for it

    Shit son I was in tech then. I worked on updating everyone’s computers so shit wouldn’t go horribly awry. Your friendly neighborhood programmers coded away the problem which was installed and tested by your friendly neighborhood tech support analysts. I never thought about it before; I helped keep the world from falling into a post-technological apocalypse. I want that on my grave of something.

    I imagine some of you scary post 2k folks (back then all this was fields…) are going “but why would on earth would you do that, that’s dumb” to the concept of only coding years with 2 digits. Well, bear in mind two things: people really didn’t expect their software to be trundling on ten, twenty, hell thirty years after they wrote it… and memory was hella expensive and teeny small back then. My first home computer sported, I think, 4 or 8kbytes of memory. The second one sported an entire 32k of memory, it was VAST…

    When the computer my family owned had a hard disk (which was actually the second computer my family owned, and we were *way* ahead of the curve on this because my dad designed computer processors) it was hundreds of pounds to buy and sported a whopping 5 megabytes. It had a power supply the same size as the entire computer to run it, and had a stack of boards on top about 6 inches high just to interface it.

    I wasn’t allowed to use the hard disk….

    I had floppy disks with a whopping 400kb of capacity (and that was big), but at least only the games I had came on cassette tapes… with their loading screens that took forever to come up.

    Hell, even my RiscPC from 1996 sported an entire 4Mb of RAM when I got it.

    And now I’ll stop reminiscing

    Anyhow, my point it having that much memory was seriously important.

  • Oh Lord…so much badness… now I guess I know why it was misbehaving tho’ on Flickr.

    Oh Lord…so much badness… now I guess I know why it was misbehaving tho’

  • Whenever I replace a component on a board it’s like David and bloody Goliath… modern components, meet your 80s counterparts… on Flickr.

    Whenever I replace a component on a board it’s like David and bloody Goliath… modern components, meet your 80s counterparts…

  • Dear Tumblr

    Dear Tumblr

    shadesofmauve:

    I’ve been away a lot lately, I know. I should keep you better informed on my life.

    Today I spent the morning and early afternoon cleaning the clogged bowels of an elderly and poorly designed kitchen drain system, using the whole 15 feet of plumbing snake and covering myself in such unutterable…

    If it makes you feel any better, or at least, less bad about your current universe; our boxing day was finished off with the discovery that wool moths had made their home in Kathryn’s balls of yarn. So at 23:00 at night we were hoovering and attempting to sort/bin/freeze-the-salvagable ones. 

    …which was probably not great for our relationship with our neighbours, but given the number of eggs/cocoons we weren’t going to leave it. And also has led to us, for the foreseeable future, being totally paranoid about any small bit of dirt or fluff we find. 

  • thegits:

    fish-boned:

    shickalenia:

    dduane:

    thesuitsofwoah:

    that’s almost too cruel
    almost

    I had to do this once with Privateer II: The Darkening. It gained a bit when he said “I bet you didn’t play it through, I bet somebody just told you how…” and I was able to smile gently and say “God, possibly, since I wrote the game.” And plainly the Deity was with me that day, as I happened to be carrying docs from my UK agent (who’d done the deal) that showed not only that I was the writer, but the five-figure sum I had been paid. …It was a happy day for me. Not so much for him. I’d never had a referent for the word “slink” for a full grown male before. As in “slink away in utter dejection.” I smiled for at least three days without stopping. And am smiling now… I had completely forgotten about this.

    Reblogging because “I beat the game” is fantastic, but “I wrote the damn thing” is even better.

    I’m not a gamer but I’ll always reblog these.

    Vicious. I love it.

  • It lives!

    So I popped around to John’s today to take over his Xmas present (yes, I’m aware that it’s late), and also to have another stab at finding the Squeezebox2’s failure point. After much investigation, probing and poking we thought we had it down to a single component. Specifically a ‘high speed low voltage operation switching regulator control IC’. But there was just one oddity. It turned out, when John checked, that the Anode, that which we’d previously discovered was sporting a mere 1 volt instead of the target 55 volts was more-or-less directly shorting to ground.

    Odd.

    Eventually it boiled down to a faulty capacitor.

    IMG_20141228_173156

    See the teeny splodge marked C2? That evil object had turned from a capacitor into crappy resistor. Having extracted it, John then used his superior bodging soldering skills to attach to legs to it such that he could approximate it’s capacitance using a very fine piece of test equipment.

    That done it was a simple matter of replacing it.

    Only, neither John, nor I, stock a vast range of teeny tiny surface mount components. Through hole is more where I’m at. Thus:

    One of these components is not like the others...

    The repair’s almost invisible n’est pas?

    But regardless of the invisibility of the repair:

    IMG_20141228_185247

    Lo, it worketh.

    Hopefully we now have 3 streaming boxes. I say hopefully, because I tripped carrying the old one up the stairs, and then dropped it (hopefully from a low enough height that it’s survived).

  • It looked so innocent

    So Kathryn gave me some CDs for Christmas. One was St. Vincent, the other Elizabeth Cotten. Being as I’m trying to be better about these things; and also because I fancied listening to Elizabeth Cotten over dinner, I ripped it and plonked it over on the media server.

    Unfortunately, it did not deign to quite work as desired, and as occasionally happens the kitchen media player fell off the network (I think it needs a more powerful power supply) and refused to reconnect. So we ended up listening to it on my laptop…

    Today I ripped the St. Vincent album and despite, or perhaps because of my general malaise around doing anything today (the whole day has slid by without me achieving anything much) I suddenly took it upon myself to sort out the clean rips on the media server. I sat and manually sorted through each folder checking the names, that the format was correct, that the folder names were organised the way I wanted, then I shuffled the ‘clean’ ones over to a new folder.

    Then I did it. The button looked so innocent, and I’ve pressed it so many times in the past.

    logitech

    And Logitech Media Server disappeared. It runs as a service on linux and checking the services list revealed:

    [ ? ] logitechmediaserver

    After an XKCD worthy hour I finally managed to get it uninstalled, removed it’s special login, the preference files apt refused to remove and got it reinstalled. It still seems to be doing some slightly odd things, but I’m putting that down to the fact it’s still scanning ‘rather a lot’ of music files.

    And now I’ll get back to reading my magazine, which was the plan before it all started.

  • Glasses problems

    grapeyouinthemouth:

    • You can’t find your glasses without your glasses
    • your eyes always hurt for some reason or another
    • getting a new pair is both hellish and exciting 
    • you’re ALWAYS fidgeting with them. the never fit perfectly
    • when they do fit perfectly something happens that throws them off
    • having glasses