palordrolap

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.

ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…

The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.

If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

For those interested in getting into listening to internet radio, see also: https://dir.xiph.org (Icecast network) and https://directory.shoutcast.com (Shoutcast network), both of which have been around for ~25 years at this point if the domain registry is anything to go by. Definitely in their current forms for over a decade.

Caveat: Lots of commercial content and stations, which is, of course, antithetical to Fediverse ideology. Still worth a look if you can’t (yet) find what you want in the Fediverse.

(There’s also http://radio.garden which has a very pretty interface but has multiple negative points: in-browser only, needs a lot of JavaScript access to station-associated domains on a per-station basis, is HTTP(no S)-only and may not work for stations outside your own country.)

The ol’ postfix ‘not’. Wayne’s World is a thing of the past! … NOT

Not if Microsoft have deleted it off your computer.

aka: “you can’t use nine women to make a baby in a month”

There was that one bash.org quote where a script kiddie was given 127.0.0.1 as part of an “oh yeah I dare you” taunt after he said he could hack anyone, and he fell for it hook line and sinker. He was posting things like “Hahaha your K drive is being deleted! Now your H drive! [connection reset by peer]” and right after that the challenger was like “I don’t even have a K drive.”

(RIP bash.org though. I would have tried to link it otherwise)

How about, I don’t know, not yanking the cord (or setting things up so the cord is yanked automatically) and pursuing the payment later?

But then that could mean that someone might - even temporarily - get something for nothing, and they can’t be seen to promote anything even remotely similar to that.

Perhaps this tiny company are so close to the knife edge that they can’t afford to allow it to happen. Must have constant revenue stream or else close up sho… wait, Micro-who?

I just imagined a horrible alternative universe where it’s illegal for brand names to become corrupted regardless of whatever else happens to data. Eventually humanity would start communicating only in brand names to ensure messages get through. *shudder*

“Hurt me, daddy.”

“OK, now you’ve made it weird.”

“Aw yeah, that’s the stuff.”

Why do you think you wanted to run ELIZA on a Timex/Sinclair 2068?

If there was ever a time to replace this Drake format with the Geordi LaForge alternative, this was it.

The video’s suggestion of /dev/null makes that super easy.

“They’re back! In POG form!”

But seriously, with the way web search seems to be going these days, webrings coming back might actually be useful.

Well, it could be you, or it could be me, as I’ve hit the same waypoints.

fedia.io wasn’t taking sign-ups at the time I went to kbin.run, but they are right now, so that’s where I’ve ended up this time.

If this one dies too, I guess I’ll take the jinx with me back to Reddit and see what happens there.