bbanyc

11 ms·

61.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Yeah, it is. It just feels like there's a lot less energy in the Linux dev scene than there was back then. Not entirely a bad thing, mind you, a lot of that energy produced heat instead of light, but still...
62.
by bbanyc 7y ago
On the one hand, there are no serious alternatives to systemd. (There are unserious ones like OpenRC, and abandonware like upstart.) And there's no point in Debian crippling itself in the hope that a serious alternative will spring up.
63.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Maybe "version freeze" or "feature freeze" is a better term. The sudo bug was fixed in version 1.8.28, but Ubuntu LTS didn't upgrade to the new version. They're still on 1.8.21p2 from 2017, but with the bugfix
64.
by bbanyc 7y ago
It's been this way forever, though - when I started woody was "stable" but obsolete the day it was released. Since "stable" and "testing" are aliases of branch names, changing them would break scripts all
65.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Ubuntu LTS (freezes every two years) or "regular" Ubuntu (freezes every six months)? I'm wondering if the periodic freeze-the-universe model that many distros use reflects a world that doesn't really exist anymore where
66.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I'd turn it around. Has there ever been an instance of a CoC being used in an unreasonable way against an actually reasonable person? There's been a few cases that blew up because the behavior fell into an arguably ambiguous z
67.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I don't blame Sentry. FOSS is a fine ideal for hobby and academic projects, but it doesn't pay the bills. 36 years on and the most successful business model for FOSS is to convince someone rich to lose money on it. (Cf. Gilmore at
68.
by bbanyc 7y ago
It's only in the last couple of years that Notepad's been able read txt files from Unix properly...
69.
by bbanyc 7y ago
It used to be that the .doc format changed incompatibly with every release and if you had to share documents with someone on an earlier version you had to manually select the format on the "save as" screen. I have distinct memorie
70.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Ever heard of Eolas v Microsoft? Anyone can get burnt. Of course MS is a joke now, but a random troll forcing them to cripple IE plugins was a big deal at the time.
71.
by bbanyc 7y ago
There's an old quote from a legal scholar to the effect that it was a mistake to introduce patents, but now that we have them, it would be a greater mistake to get rid of them. I honestly don't know. With regard to software, it&#x
72.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I was an intern at USPTO a few years ago, during my failed attempt to become a patent attorney. What I saw and experienced there was a closed-minded agency with a very narrow bureaucratic focus. The only "prior art" that normally
73.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Solaris, HP-UX, AIX are all in hard maintenance mode as far as I can tell. Illumos seems to be the last System V still being actively worked on.
74.
by bbanyc 7y ago
My suggestion is to set up a proxy. This has long been necessary to run browsers like Mosaic on the modern web, since many websites are inaccessible from HTTP/1.0 (or earlier!) It's funny how ever-moving Internet standards mean an
75.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Univision bought most of the remains of Gawker, merged it with their own site Fusion (later renamed Splinter, now defunct) and the Onion/AV Club, and sold it to the current owners of G/O at a massive loss. In this media environmen
76.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Yahoo and then dmoz. Search engines existed (AltaVista was the best of a bad lot) but before Google you needed a curator to sort the wheat from the chaff.
77.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Back in the day, your ISP would give you an email address, a login on their Usenet server, and a few megs of free web space under "~username". That was part of the standard package. Nowadays it easily could be, but since approxima
78.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Garbage in, garbage out. An algorithm trained on data from a bigoted society like ours will return bigoted results. You can try to fix the algorithm but the only thing that can really work is to fix society...good luck with that.
79.
by bbanyc 7y ago
And Google Groups, which had a truly wonderful searchable Usenet archive (inherited from DejaNews), but several redesigns later is nearly useless. Though given how many people have old Usenet postings they'd like to forget, maybe it&#x
80.
by bbanyc 7y ago
There's also the trick where you can redefine the palette for each consecutive frame, and set the "delay" between frames to zero, in order to get more than 256 colors in a single image. This is so horrendously inefficient it
81.
by bbanyc 7y ago
LZW is a lovely algorithm. It's simple enough to explain in a page of pseudocode and fast enough to run on 1980s hardware easily. The compression rate is "good enough." If not for the patent issue, there'd be no reason t
82.
by bbanyc 7y ago
> FTP puts data and commands on the same socket. Not on TCP it doesn't. And some of the Arpanet FTP RFCs refer to separate connections as well, e.g. for the MAIL and MLFL commands which send email over the command and data connectio
83.
by bbanyc 7y ago
And most of the other 99% are vaporware and media hype, just like this one. Source: I was there for the worst two years of my life.
84.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Also, Telnet was originally port 1 and FTP was port 3 (RFC 433, December 1972). On an incompatible protocol change (mentioned in RFC 542, August 1973), they were "temporarily" moved to 23 and 21 respectively until the old versions
85.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Stallman is a perfect example. He's one of the most obnoxious and disrespectful people on earth, not to mention a rape apologist, of course he should be expelled from society! And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly
86.
by bbanyc 7y ago
There are only two endgames for a subculture. Either it goes mainstream and loses everything that ever made it special, or it walls itself off from the mainstream and goes mad, like how the Students for a Democratic Society turned into the
87.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I expect the standard would be something like 80x25 regardless, given the size and resolution of early terminal monitors and how small you could make text before it's unreadable. Whether a different sized greenback ends up making a 70
88.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I think it was just for the council, and mayoral races were always FPTP. Fusion voting is the odd practice in New York State of allowing one party to endorse another party's candidate. For instance, in last year's election for gov
89.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Netscape was "free for educational use" and anyone could download it free of charge. According to one old hand at Netscape (JWZ? Eich?) they checked their server logs for which corporate IPs downloaded it most often and had their
90.
by bbanyc 7y ago
No other New Yorkers here to comment? If this were in place in 2013, it may have flipped the mayoral primary to Thompson, since he and Quinn combined had more votes than de Blasio, and both were more aligned with the centrist "machine&

More ›