bbanyc

13 ms·

91.
by bbanyc 7y ago
We've tried free speech, and it always turns into a cesspit of spam and abuse and illegal activity. Censorship is inevitable. That's not the question. The only questions are: who? whom? The writer linked here rants and raves, and
92.
by bbanyc 7y ago
J is APL in ASCII. My first PC was a hand-me-down from a family member who had installed APL on it and put a bunch of stickers on the keyboard for typing all the strange characters. Where I work, we have some production code in another APL-
93.
by bbanyc 7y ago
CVS started as a variety store (it stood for Consumer Value Stores) and there are still a few older locations that don't have pharmacies, but pharmacy counter revenue has greatly outpaced "front store" revenue for a long time
94.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Homeopathic stuff is typically harmless but there was a case in the 2000s where Zicam sold a "homeopathic" nasal spray at a low dilution of zinc (i.e., it actually contained zinc) as a cold remedy. The result: hundreds of people
95.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I've had the cynical thought that Eric Allman made the documentation that came with Sendmail intentionally shoddy to increase sales of the Bat Book. Likewise Larry Wall with older versions of Perl and the Camel Book.
96.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Back in the early days, the printed manuals for Research Unix and BSD consisted of two volumes. Volume 1 was the reference and consisted of all the man pages for every command (section 1), system call (section 2), library function (section
97.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Precisely my point. Are there any significant AGPL projects that aren't just advertisements for their commercial editions or services? Has anyone actually been forced to contribute back their private changes to AGPLware, or do they jus
98.
by bbanyc 7y ago
>pp. 145−169 >PDP-7 assembly listings for “t1,” “t2,” “t3,” “t4,” “t5,” “t6,” “t7,” and “t8” >Unidentified program. >Perhaps an interpreter for a programming language? B? Could be TMG, the language that B was originally written
99.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I've been reading up lately on the earlier OS's that influenced Unix - the Compatible Time-Sharing System, the Berkeley Time-Sharing System (Project Genie), and Multics. Bitsavers.org and Multicians.org both have a lot of informat
100.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Even setting aside RMS's indefensible behavior, his vision of what "free software" means is stuck in the '80s. [1] got flagged for its flame-baity title but it's a valid point. Nobody gives a damn about the firmware
101.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Either Micro Focus (through its acquisition of Attachmate/Novell) or Nokia (through its ownership of Bell Labs), depending on whether or not the Research Unix copyrights were part of the Unix business that AT&T sold to Novell. Bell
102.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Any tool that can be used by dissidents will be used by hate groups. Conversely, any method for censoring hate groups will be used against dissidents. I used to be anti-censorship, now I'm pro-censorship because let's face it, the
103.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I don't think there's a story, he just hates the VC/startup scene for exploiting workers and ruining San Francisco. And he's not wrong.
104.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I'm looking at the Gosmacs source right now, and just above the skull-and-bones warning it says "Copyright (c) 1981,1980 James Gosling" If nothing else, Gosling had a valid copyright. Mind you, there were no license terms on
105.
by bbanyc 7y ago
The first public release of GNU Emacs was 13.1 in March 1985. In July 1985, 16.56 was released with (RMS claims) all of Gosling's code replaced with new implementations. So we're talking about four months here. I think Gosling is
106.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Sturgeon's law applies. 99% of Flash was garbage - animated autoplaying ads that slowed your browser to a crawl, unnecessary unskippable splash pages for every restaurant website ever, DRM'd audio and video players... And then the
107.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I remember Flash being slow and buggy on Mac and Linux at the time, and updates lagged far behind the Windows version (on Linux in particular). And then I saw an article from a Macromedia/Adobe dev saying that it was heavily optimized
108.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Singapore is famously the country that banned chewing gum. Personal freedom has never been a priority there. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, or a good thing, it's just different. There are a number of ideas they've succ
109.
by bbanyc 7y ago
270 Park Avenue (215 m), the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, is currently being demolished to build a new headquarters building about twice as tall.
110.
by bbanyc 7y ago
It did, but CTAN was just a network of FTP mirrors. CPAN was that initially too, but quickly got supporting software to automatically download/update packages and resolve dependencies, which AFAIK nobody else did at the time. Even Linu
111.
by bbanyc 7y ago
I find Perl 5 best for the kinds of fire-and-forget text processing scripts that are a bit too complicated for awk but not involved enough to bring in a "real" language. It's a double-edged sword - in a throwaway script it&#x
112.
by bbanyc 7y ago
This is something like the fourth or fifth unrelated company with the Atari name, but at least the previous ones actually made games. This one just looks like the Infinium Phantom redux.
113.
Why native apps matter(anarc.at)
42 points by bbanyc 7y ago|16 comments
114.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Microsoft wants to compete with Amazon and Google, and god bless them if they've been humbled by their recent failures and want to play fair now. I'd be more concerned about IBM, which through its acquisition of Red Hat now contro
115.
by bbanyc 7y ago
Is this translating Knuth's WEB/Pascal to Rust, or a from-scratch reimplementation?
116.
by bbanyc 7y ago
You say that like it's a bad thing. Getting rid of gendered language would eliminate so many misunderstandings and bigotries (both accidental and intentional) that it seems like the obvious choice, especially when you consider that fut
117.
by bbanyc 7y ago
On one hand, you have a sclerotic political establishment that at best hasn't figured out that the '90s free trade playbook doesn't work on China and at worst only cares about the WTO for its handy role in policy laundering.
118.
by bbanyc 7y ago
AIUI, the paper giro was a direct interbank transfer decades before ACH was even a thing. They were widely used in Europe but never introduced in America. That might be part of it. Also, America has a lot more banks per capita than the rest
119.
by bbanyc 7y ago
The nice thing about a check is that you can give it to anyone. You don't need to know where they have a bank account or even if they have a bank account. (Check cashers may charge usurious fees but I'm glad they exist, as a bac
120.
by bbanyc 7y ago
The implication is that Morris used Stallman's (publicly well-known) username and password to log in at MIT, in order to cover up his tracks. Morris was a Cornell student at the time and wouldn't have had a login at MIT at all.

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