Ben Clifford @benc@mastodon.hawaga.org.uk

Today in 2019, 4 years ago: in Wuhan, China, the first known case of the coronavirus disease SARS-CoV-2 appears.

#OnThisDay

Interrail have a 25% off sale. Run, don’t walk.

#Apple rushing its delivery from Prague to Hamburg in a day, sending me 4 different text messages about the progress with DHL doing the same, just for the delivery guy to decide not even to attempt the delivery and mark it "not home" while I was WFH the entire day. Human factor.

Will you vote in this poll?

Do you love old *nix systems as much as I do?
I have been playing around Xenix and SysV lately, and I haven't run pre-2.0 Linux in a while. Time to install the first public release of Debian - 0.91 - powered by Linux 0.99.14t and see what it has to offer.

The full OS tarball is a bit over 30 megabytes, and it comes with three 1.2MB floppies (boot + 2 base OS), and a bunch of "deb" packages. MacOS file says the files are actually gzipped data. Inside there's a cpio archive with package files, plus /var/dpkg folder with some meta-data.

Debian 0.91 recommends having at least 4MB of RAM.

The shell loads very fast, and then the OS offers to start a setup utility.

🧵 let's go!

Don’t get me wrong: I emphatically do not think absolutely everyone should go to a 4-year liberal arts college like the one where I teach. I don’t think everyone should have to go to college at all. Education can — should! — take many, many forms. Education doesn’t even have to happen in school!

What I •do• believe is that some form of education with that liberal arts philosophy — “Because you are free, you must prepare for the unknown” — should be present in the life of every human being.
14/

My favorite part of semantic versioning is that one where everyone agreed that you can do semantic versioning without following any of the rules as long as you keep the version of your software below 1.0.0. So everyone does.

How come it's always "What if abortion kills the next Einstein" and never "What if bombing people kills the next Einstein"

If the company that made business machines to manage the Holocaust can tap out of Twitter because it's too Fash, perhaps Apple could too, yeah?
EDIT: They did...for now
#Apple #IBM #Twitter

There is still a widely accepted narrative in the U.K. media that the fact that the people of the U.K. are so in favour of a ceasefire in Gaza is down to the U.K.s' large Muslim population.

I hate to let basic arithmetic get in the way of a cool story, but -

6.7 % of the U.K. population is Muslim.

76% of the U.K. population want a ceasefire.

#CeasefireNow

sorry I broke the ordnance survey website

More pressure on UK ISPs and telcos: a proposal to compel PECS providers to notify the ICO of suspected unlawful direct marketing

#surveillance #dataprotection #spam #privacy #telecoms #Internet

Apparently there's a vote TODAY on citizenship law which would make it next to impossible for those that oppose the actions of the Israeli government to get citizenship in Germany.

And it attempts to suggest the rise in antisemitism is due to immigrants (especially arabic people) and not h the, idk, unchecked rhetoric of the growing far-right homegrown neo-nazis in Germany?

To view this toot, you must be aged 18 or over.

Please DM/PM me:

- a photo of you

- a copy of the information page of your passport or driving licence

- your mother's maiden name

- the street on which you grew up, and

- the name of your first pet.

I will definitely not use your data for nefarious means. Pinky promise.

#OnlineSafetyBill

Herman Hollerith, American inventor, died #OTD in 1929.

He developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century. via @wikipedia

#science #technology