SulphurCrested

10 ms·

31.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
I don't believe it's that. On macOS Monterey: $ which pv pv not found I've been using Unixes of various flavours since the 1980s and had never heard of it until I read this article. It's certainly more obscure t
32.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
Of course COBOL had comments. You put an asterisk at the start of the line, or in a particular column, depending on the compiler's extensions for doing away with line numbers. What the Stack Overflow link is saying is that it didn&#x27
33.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
How do I do that? fstat(2) is no help on macOS, and even if it were would return false positives from things like backup and content indexers ("Time Machine" and "Spotlight" on macOS).
34.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
> ... directories, if used properly, can protect a 777 file from being changed. The error in the mental model is in how permissions work, not how files are organized. There is a second possible misconception that I did touch on in my la
35.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
"But because of a subtlety of Unix systems (of which macOS is one), when an existing file is moved from another location to the root directory, it retains the same read-write permissions it previously had." And ownership. (The sen
36.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
Melbourne's general aviation airport (i.e. light planes like Cessnas) is Moorabbin, in the south east. The map shows the City of Kingston which contains it with a dark green dot, meaning safe. Planes often do a circuit south and then t
37.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
The first paragraph in the introduction claims the "failure to fulfill expectations" of Algol 68 and Ada were because they were designed by a committee. Leaving aside whether they were or weren't disappointments, neither was
38.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
They're even different sexually. Last year I learned from the mainstream media that echidna penises have four glans (heads). Researchers from the Universities of Melbourne and Queensland and Monash University studied the structure. An
39.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
The 2FA the site supports is either SMS or time-based token. According to them SMS doesn't work outside Australia, and having access to the site might be useful outside the country, so the time-based token seems the better choice. Exce
40.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
A background in "pure maths" is extremely useful. You don't necessarily have to remember many (or perhaps any) of the particular definitions and theorems, but the ability to formulate definitions and prove results about them
41.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
The obvious answer as to why people aren't writing software is that almost all of the people able to write good software don't like the language and are writing software in some other language or for some other platform. I know Li
42.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
I think they have their eye on the 20% – the return of the SD card reader on Macbooks is mainly for photographers and videographers – but they just can't see very well.
43.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
Since you pick on that example, yes I am unsurprised about an exploit in ColorSync. The bugs in ColorSync in combination with Photoshop are legend: for example, there was a "black crush" bug doing the rounds of photo blogs and for
44.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
The article says the QR check-in in the neighbouring state of Victoria works offline, but it didn't for me a couple of months ago when I lost 4G signal. Perhaps it's been changed since then – one would hope so, given the existence
45.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
The Schubert link demonstrates one of the real bugbears of classical music which is streamed or ripped using the usual online metadata database: "Death and the Maiden" is #46–49, presumably because it was tracks 46 to 49 in the bo
46.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
It's worth mentioning that the way this has taken away seats from the two major parties is not mostly through the rise of third parties, but the election of independents unaffiliated with any party. This has invariably occurred in elec
47.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
python3 is a developer tool because it is the extension language for the lldb debugger. For example, I have python3 scripts for formatting my custom C++ data types, and that formatting also works in Xcode's visual debugger (which is pr
48.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
Sometimes code relies on some condition being true, where that condition can be reasoned about by the developer rather than at run time by the program they are writing. I don’t think such comments fall cleanly into either the “what” or “why
49.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
This is not new. Pyrocumulonimbus (misspelt in the article) clouds were observed starting fires through lightning in the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia, most of which were nowhere near the coast. It was reported at the time in the l
50.
by SulphurCrested 5y ago
FTP is still used by some photographers at major sporting events. The cameras they use actually have RJ jacks in the side, and they run Ethernet cables back to a router, or maybe a second operator with a computer. The cameras have built-in
51.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
This is an example of a common antipattern in software: some piece of software fails to correctly implement something (here, modern HTML autocomplete="cc-exp-year"), and another piece of software goes through all kinds of contorti
52.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
ISO's argument seems to be that the fees fund the actual standardisation process – trips to conferences, meetings and other "technical work". I could agree for something like the international definition of physical quantitie
53.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
TOTAL was around and already considered old-fashioned (because it was hierarchical rather than relational) in early 1981, when I persuaded my boss not to use it.
54.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
It was an unfortunate choice because \ is one of the 12 characters that vary between country versions of ISO 646 (of which ASCII was the US profile). This was why Japanese MS-DOS used ¥ instead of \ for the directory separator: it occupied
55.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
It seems to me the way the UK went about this was not very efficient. Australia had changed from a nearly identical £/s/d coinage to its own decimal system five years earlier, with less wastage, by changing the name of its currenc
56.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
Point 22 in the linked article confuses static linking against the C runtime with static linking against your own libraries. It is perfectly all right on macOS to statically link your own stuff, or other peoples' stuff. Apple even reco
57.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
Those who want to read more might enjoy Leo Brodie's book "Starting FORTH", complete with hand-drawn illustrations and retro monospaced font. I never worked with the language, but found the book an enjoyable read in the 1980s
58.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
In the late 1970s/early 1980s VAX hard drives usually took cartridges which could be conveniently unplugged and carried across to a drive on another machine. But by 1986 drives were often "Winchesters" - sealed, rack width, a
59.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
Surely you should only be testing against major releases: that is, only the most-recent point release for each major release. So, for example, Big Sur is at 11.1, so test against 11.1 but not 11.0. No user should be running 11.0 any more, a
60.
by SulphurCrested 6y ago
Having fumed for years about the too-often poor state of software documentation and program comments, I was not surprised by the result, although it was nice to see it proved. What did surprise me, though, was the lack of similarity to math

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