bbanyc

15 ms·

31.
by bbanyc 4y ago
Some of this is rose-tinted nostalgia. The bit about "five nines" reliability... big expensive servers and workstations got there but computers the average schmo could afford never did. Frequent BSODs and system freezes were the n
32.
by bbanyc 4y ago
I've dabbled in APL, and a couple of jobs ago I worked extensively in kdb/q. I found it to be an immensely powerful tool in its natural environment of time-series processing, and extraordinarily painful to use outside that domain.
33.
by bbanyc 4y ago
There is little chance of FSF changing the GPL as long as RMS continues to run it, given his monomaniacal, pathological obsession with software freedom at the expense of literally everything else, including basic human decency. But he'
34.
by bbanyc 4y ago
Only slightly. System V/386 was 1987, first release of GAS was 1989 (and GCC got 386 support in 1988)
35.
by bbanyc 4y ago
Replying to my own comment since I was curious - it was certainly Microsoft MASM, and cc was the Microsoft C Compiler as well. [1] So probably Intel syntax. There was also something called "SCO UNIX" which was apparently more of a
36.
by bbanyc 4y ago
I think there's a bit more to the story. It was before my time, but as I understand it the most widely used Unix for the 8086 was XENIX (initially a Microsoft product, later sold to SCO), which used Intel-syntax MASM as its assembler.
37.
by bbanyc 4y ago
Ghostscript used to have the most recent version under a non-commercial license (AFPL) and older versions relicensed to GPL, before they switched to AGPL only.
38.
by bbanyc 4y ago
I never saw what the Bell Labs folks had against Berkeley sockets, aside from them being from Berkeley and not Bell Labs. It's a crufty interface either way, because you can't shove all the complexity under the rug. They're o
39.
by bbanyc 4y ago
The lack of a business model is why any attempt to revive Usenet or run a new federated protocol like Mastodon is probably not going to get anywhere. Somebody's got to pay for it, and the quality of discussion isn't nearly good en
40.
by bbanyc 4y ago
Doctorow is gesturing at something significant, but he's still stuck in the '90s era copyright wars. I agree that the DMCA is awful, but it's irrelevant to the problem. Today's tech corps don't need to sic the cop
41.
by bbanyc 5y ago
> Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040. As about half of glob
42.
by bbanyc 5y ago
They still make playing cards, though. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/others/playing_cards/index.html
43.
by bbanyc 5y ago
Imagine if we were stuck in a world with a large bloc of users running MSIE6 regularly accessed web servers running 40-bit SSL2. Neither clients nor servers ever bother updating, because it still works for them. That's essentially wher
44.
by bbanyc 5y ago
I was thinking preempted by Section 230 is the easier call (and Volokh agrees, though he sees an opening that I don't).
45.
by bbanyc 5y ago
The exemption would also apply to Comcast, as owner of Universal Studios. It'd be funny to watch Facebook and Twitter get into a bidding war for SeaWorld... or, alternatively, buy their own patches of swampland and build some roller-co
46.
by bbanyc 5y ago
They'd need to do something about the hour-long stop at the border for CBP and its Canadian equivalent to go through the train checking everyone's passports. Decades ago I ran into it on the now-defunct Chicago-Toronto line and I&
47.
by bbanyc 7y ago
The logo for Disney Animation before their movies is a clip of a few seconds of Steamboat Willie. I expect them to lean even more heavily on trademark protection once the copyright expires. Besides, it's not like the copyright on the o
48.
by bbanyc 7y ago
The Gershwin estate was the other big force lobbying for the 1998 copyright extension, besides Disney of course. I guess United Airlines doesn't have to pay royalties for its theme song anymore.
49.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Wilbur Ross is even less trustworthy than ICANN. Which is saying something.
50.
by bbanyc 7y ago
In 1998 Jon Postel briefly "hijacked" the DNS root zone. Formal control over DNS had always belonged to the US government, but Postel commanded such universal respect from the internet community that they were willing to follow hi
51.
by bbanyc 7y ago
In the last year or so I've grown increasingly cynical about "genius." Maybe it's all bus tickets. (I know my obsessions certainly are.) Great people are almost never good people and I'd rather be good than great.
52.
by bbanyc 7y ago
This was all well before my time, but I find it fascinating. One thing I've noticed in going over the early Unix versions is that the Bell Labs people didn't care for VT100s at all and Research Unix has practically no support for
53.
by bbanyc 7y ago
https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history has the details... there's some Gosling code (notably display.c with the skull-and-bones warning) in Emacs 13, but none that I can find in 15 and later.
54.
by bbanyc 7y ago
To this day, the Configure script for Perl still outputs "Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice." https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure#L4614
55.
by bbanyc 7y ago
You know the term "opinionated software"? IMAP is an opinionated protocol, designed for clients and servers that work exactly the same way that Mark Crispin's PINE and UW-IMAPd did. Disagree with Crispin about anything, and t
56.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Certainly bizarre. Among other things, almost none of the archived distros can read the RAR format. It's weird, come to think of it, that RAR has existed for a quarter of a century, and yet the format has never been documented or rever
57.
by bbanyc 7y ago
The intent of Amtrak was to take the burden of passenger rail off the private railroads, lose money for a few years, and then quietly shut down. It's long been in a political gray area, just popular enough that the government wouldn&#x
58.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Big if true, but I don't know whether to trust these figures. The Rail Passengers Association has accused Amtrak of cooking its books - https://www.railpassengers.org/happening-now/news/releases/a... - b
59.
by bbanyc 7y ago
It used to be that every ISP ran a Usenet server. The reason why they stopped is a crackdown on illegal content (piracy and obscenity) on binary groups. The reason why almost nobody complained is that text groups were already in terminal de
60.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I knew that the decentralized structure of Usenet was born from necessity, but I didn't realize how hard it was just to get a modem back then. Can decentralized services work on the modern Internet? Even setting aside how spam and ille

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