porlw

This can easily be done with a small shell script and standard linux commands.

   #!/usr/bin/bash
   
   MAILTEXT=$(grep "dbkey" db.txt)
   
   cat emails.lst|while read ADDR NAME
   do
      mail -s "Subject" $ADDR <<EOT
   Dear $NAME

   $MAILTEXT

   EOT
   
   done

Schedule with cron.

Another reason is that farming machinery compacts the soil.

Techniques such as min-till and no-till aim to minimise soil disturbance (to reduce emissions from deep ploughing and improve soil fertility), but to achieve this you really need to make sure the equipment accurately follows the same path through a field every time, so that the area affected by compaction is mimimised.

Not a farmer, I learned this from the youtube channel Harry's Farm.

grep has a bad interaction with set -e, since it (infuriatingly) exits with 1 if no lines are matched.

I remember back in the day these were used by the A86 assembler to identify code assembled with the unregistered version of the software.

I think it was because in the 80's the US was wealthier and systems with disk drives were a lot more common.

People would swap games on disk, and there was less pressure to learn how the underlying system works.

Having a disk drive also enables more complex, larger games, which would be harder to produce as a lone programmer.

Contrast this with the UK - we had much less money, it was common to type games in from magazines, which is how a lot of us learned programming.

We mostly had to make do with tapes, which limits the size of a game and its sound and graphics to physical RAM. It was entirely possible as a lone programmer to create a commercial level game with a few weeks of late night hacking.

The thing I miss about Usenet is maintaining article and comment scoring in trn (based on the subject, keywords and/or author)

With this I could easily surface interesting articles or replies by insightful people, while avoiding subjects and authors in which I had no interest.

This worked at a thread level, so I could quickly see any new threads, and new replies added to threads I was following, skipping over everything I had already marked as read.

For me this was more effective than the communal post scoring that took over on web forums, reddit, hn etc.

I'm curious - are there any features of System/360, that we don't have in modern operating systems, that would be worth implementing?

1) The contracting scene in the UK is massive, that's where a lot of the higher paying UK tech jobs are. I suspect this skews the salary averages.

2) I'm in South Africa, I've recently been approached on linked-in to (quote) "Earn a US based salary working remotely from South Africa". So it seems some US recruiters are starting to look further afield.

It's not really a conspiracy, just the natural outcome of design optimization - any part that still works reliably at the end of the design lifespan is a candidate for cost cutting in the next iteration.

Ben Eater's Youtube series building a simple CPU from scratch was a real "lightbulb" moment for me. After 40 years of programming (including Z80 assembly back in the 8-bit days), it took my understanding of the CPU from a mysterious black box to what's basically a simple look-up table and some control signals.

What I find fascinating is that Lisp, commonly perceived as too high level to be practical, is actually at its core (in its original implementations!) an incredibly low level language.

The problem is latency, which actually will get worse as bandwidth increases.

1 request pulling down 1 Mb can be quicker than 4 requests for 10Kb each.