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Admin
Just think of the file sizes for common words for that magazine and language.
Any bets how big the files for "the", "a", "an", "is", month names, "issue", if it was here "WTF"....
-- just a blip on the dirt track, off the side road, off the main artery from the western spiral arm of the information superhighway.....
Admin
I'm afraid I've done similar things, but to be fair, some of it (at least in the early days) was out of necessity.
For my eighth grade science fair I did the venerable "which brand of battery lasts longest" (Duracell, of course) and had a bunch of voltage-over-time graphs to plot. Today's kids would just create graphs in Excel and throw the results in a PowerPoint slide show, right? Well back then, all I had was my Apple ][ and no software to speak of other than the built-in BASIC interpreter.
What to do? Why, I wrote my own etch-a-sketch program, of course, and drew my own graphs as on-screen bitmaps, which I saved to disk by dumping the raw buffers in RAM corresponding to the video memory. Then to display the slide show I wrote a program to read a buffer, pause, then read the next one, in sequence.
Did programs exist to do this sort of work on the Apple ][? Quite possibly, but certainly none that I could afford to buy nor wait for a diskette to be mailed to me.
What's less excusable is how I was still using a home-made PHP based simple content management system that was a mess of includes, global variables, and header/footer files up until 2009, when I finally realized that I could just use WordPress.
Admin
they would contain every article once. not that big
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no one every knows how badly you code if "it works"...
Admin
Is that a friend of little bobby tables? ;)
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AltaVista - When it was run by DEC.
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Lord help me, it still exists. dogpile.com still exists, and it's still a search page instead of a domain squat.
Admin
Excite had the best "find articles in this topic" feature I've ever seen. You entered some search terms to start it off, and then trained it by saying this article was good, this one was bad. I got all the late breaking news on cyborg technology that way. I have to this day never found a service that works as well.
Admin
Most of the old search engines from the early nineties still do. I know somebody in, no shit, a computer science class I'm taking, who uses AltaVista exclusively. In 2011. I mean, I'm pretty sure it's just a wrapper around the Yahoo/Bing search engine now, but still.
Admin
There is nothing to be ashamed of by cutting your teeth on Access. It has provided a tremendous amount of business value to organizations since its inception. It was difficult to beat
Admin
The worst of his crimes was murdering an innocent SID chip.
Admin
No shame in at all, I also am a former access dev. In fact I've just been asked to rewrite a .net application in vba.
The mind boggles....
Admin
The day before new year's eve, we did some experiments in our pyhsics lab. We connected some devices from our electronics surplus box to mains. The "best" result came with old (1950's) diodes in glass casings, followed by 1960's small tin-cap transistors. They produced fireballs (we hang them half a meter high below a very old, very rugged lab table over a solid ceramic floor) of 10 to 15 cm diameter. Great fun.
Admin
I just tried webcrawler, which was the first search engine I used back in the 90's. It is also still there... it spins together Google, Yahoo, and Bing now.
Admin
I have a similar confession about "repurposing" htdig a sort-of reverse of the OP.
Needed a search facility in a webapp, but no libraries - ca. 1998
Enter htdig, although at the time a monolithic HTML search app! Just need to render the entire database (hierarchically) as html (not many lines of Perl), and re-jig the htdig client source to return something I could use. HTML header tags etc could be used to indicate importance.
Good results, and fast, but neither dynamic, nor very maintainable.
Ash
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Ahh yes. Good old Tom's hardware.
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Little Wally Tables, they called him.
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Inovative solution. Must applaud creativity of programer.
Admin
I wouldn't help btkrr think this entire story was complete BS.
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couldn't help but
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With a parser like that I could -- dare I say it? -- RULE THE WORLD!!!
Admin
The idea, as described, depends on splitting the search string into individual words, so your search certainly wouldn't have the effect you intended.
Assuming he parsed only one returned file per search word, you'd end up with a list of all articles containing ";", "rm", "-rf", and probably "a". If, on the other hand, he parsed all files returned by the "ls" call, you'd end up with a really long delay followed by a results list that shows every single article on the site.
Admin
The AMD chip used a thermometer on the motherboard, not integrated in the chip.
For a normal fan failure this was enough but the extreme temperature spike from removing the heat sink was to fast for the thermometer to react to.
Then next version used an on chip thermometer.
Admin
Are you making joke?
Admin
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(Why does everyone insist on exact conversion of inexact numbers? 10 to 15 cm is 4 to 6 inches, Mr. Spock.)
Admin
Possibly not BS, and here's why:
Many moons ago, when I was even less-talented and even more of a newbie, the call centre I worked in had, over time, amassed a series of common questions from customers, along with how to answer them, into this giant Word document that would get mailed around whenever a new F.A.Q. was added.
I was bored out of my skull, (mistakenly) thought I was brilliant and (correctly) felt this was inefficient, so I cobbled together a(n absolutely horrid) search engine myself out of grep, ls and a few other things, and felt like I was ten miles tall when I got it to work. I wouldn't do it this way now, of course, but it's certainly not impossible.
Admin
Does anyone remember using WAIS services to try to find things?
I've just looked and it's still around!
(I am only juuuust old enough to remember using it, missed BBSs by a hair though)
Admin
Something's fishy...
vs.
Based on the beginning of the story, I expected him to say "I glommed a textbook from a freshman-level database course, read the chapter titles, and was instantly an expert in <whatever RDBMS was available at that time>"
Admin
It depends, I programmed a snake game at that age...well typed it in out of a magazine with a few minor changes (sodding tape didn't save it properly either).
The rest of it reads like he's being self-effacing about believing he did know those things after minor effort. I know I thought the same when I was younger.
Admin
Sad thing is Microsoft bought this search algorithm and renamed it JetSQL
Admin
It stopped being possible within a matter of months, at which point the rate of new websites appearing had far exceeded what could be individually listed, and Netscape gave up running their "What's New" page altogether around a year or so after that IIRC.
Admin
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Also teach yourself in 24 hours book, when is it since available?
Admin
Today total number of website in world are more than apple company iphone sales.
Admin
while using Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition™
Admin
while using Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition™
Admin
The only thing exciting on Excite was the sheer amount of searches it would take to get something even tangentially related to what you were looking for to come up in the search results.
Not like Lycos. At least when that failed to find what you were looking for you still could look at the dog. And scream at it. Screaming is easier when there's a face to direct the expletive deleteds at.
Admin
Seeing as we're all sharing stories this morning....
Less than 5 years ago I worked at a fairly large organization who used to sponsor a prolific golfer before his personal life got in the way of his professional life (not that it's relevant). One of the things they used to like to do is have each person in any team do some presentation (on almost any topic) to the team, and in some cases a wider audience.
One day, one of my coworkers was due to give a presentation, and his presentation was going to describe a "wiki" he had made covering everything he had encountered on our system (which had a little bit of everything - COBOL, Borland C++ (OWL), SGML and probably other technologies I have long since forgotten). Turns out this wiki was a single text file (or as he put it: "Notepad File"). He went through some of hte challenges he would have had alphabetising it, and explained that he felt it would be too difficult. Turns out (after some questioning) one of the reasons he had decided to do it in Text format (in Notepad) was because "It is simple and efficient to search using the 'find' command in the menu".
For the record, this wasn't a Junior either - it was a middle-aged COBOL 'expert' (or I assumed expert) who had worked on the project for considerable time. I guess it's interesting to note that I left that Project not long later because I realised that compared to most of the others in a team of about 20 he probably was one of the more talented ones....(in fact my impression is that the small group I saw was representative of most of that arm of the organisation - and probably considered ahead of some of the other parts).
It was one of those situations where I honestly wondered how they could possibly have made the original System and assumed they must have inherited it from a previous acquisition.
Admin
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And, what's you fucking comment, dick? That you're smart? Hell, yeah, you're smart. Learned more than changing background colors since then? What else did you accomplish, genious?
Admin
And, what's your fucking point, dick?
That should say.
Admin
Gallagher!
Admin
Impressed. Words of a genius.
Admin
...while using Mosaic on VMS.
Admin
Isn't he dead, or slightly bludgeoned somewhere?
Captcha: sagaciter. I sagaciter for double parking.