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Amazed at some reactions

Found a few ref­er­ences to the trick ques­tion I post­ed a few days ago, and I re­al­ly don't un­der­stand them.

I mean, some guys say "y­ou throw the box away" or "y­ou are a masochist". Well, as it turns out, I had good rea­sons not to throw it away, and good rea­son why those con­straints were in place.

The good rea­son not to throw it away is, of course, that it's a sweet com­put­er. It's small­er than al­most any oth­er note­book sold nowa­days, rugged and it works just fine. And it can be use­ful. So why throw it away?

As for masochis­m... I have no li­cens­es for DOS, so I could­n't use DOS flop­pies. I had no PCM­CIA gad­gets and no mon­ey, so I did­n't use a PCM­CIA CD, or USB or flash disk.

Fi­nal­ly, I did­n't open it and move the HD to an­oth­er box be­cause it's a note­book. They are quite tricky to open, and the Li­bret­to more than most. I had just got it, if there was any chance of not break­ing it, I want­ed not to break it.

And of course... I ex­pect­ed most read­ers to be, well, hack­er­s, in the old sense. You know, com­pli­ca­tion for com­pli­ca­tion's sake is the ba­sis for tech­ni­cal fun some­times, as long as it's not over­done. Since I did this in one af­ter­noon, I just had fun for a few hours.

Say­ing that this is masochism is about as stupid as com­plain­ing that bas­ket­ball is masochism bea­cuse it would be eas­i­er if you built a con­vey­or belt to drop the balls in the bas­ket!

It's a game, folk­s! Part of the game is that rules re­strict you!

The rules I gave were the con­straints I faced. Of course oth­er sit­u­a­tions would make it eas­i­er.

And if the San An­to­nio Spurs were al­lowed to use a con­vey­or belt, they would have won the NBA fi­nals in 4 games!


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