bbanyc

24 ms·

241.
by bbanyc 13y ago
I got used to "open" on the command line on my late, lamented iBook. Now whenever I'm in Linux I put "alias open=xdg-open" in my .bashrc and it's pretty much the same thing.
242.
by bbanyc 13y ago
The punchline to this story is that a few years ago the Times stopped scrambling their .puz files, making all this reverse-engineering work largely irrelevant. (At the time I was using a modified version of the "xword" program in
243.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Package names are a bit confusing here. The systemd package includes all the binaries - one of which, logind, is required by GNOME - but doesn't install systemd as /sbin/init and doesn't boot with it by default. The pack
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by bbanyc 13y ago
At least here in New York, Uber cars are licensed as limos, not taxis. Taxi medallions are often artificially restricted, but I've never heard of limo licenses being capped.
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by bbanyc 13y ago
That's pretty much what Hailo is. It's not yet as widespread as Uber though.
246.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Unity is already moving from Gtk to Qt, so the move away from user-visible GNOME elements is natural. The question is what they're going to do with the GNOME "plumbing". To fork and maintain a mixed Gtk/Qt legacy codeb
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by bbanyc 13y ago
To clarify, this law also applies to LLCs formed in Delaware or elsewhere if they are operating within New York. It does not apply to corporations, regardless of the state of incorporation or the tax status (C or S).
248.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Among Robert Moses's unsuccessful development projects was an elevated expressway across Midtown Manhattan, with commercial development below the road and high-rises above it. One proposed route had the expressway passing right throug
249.
by bbanyc 13y ago
The Berne Convention (life-plus-50) was adopted in 1886 - before Walt Disney was born, before the first motion picture was made, when recorded sound was just a novelty. Publishing houses were small and there was no "copyright industry
250.
by bbanyc 13y ago
It's partly Disney (and the Gershwin estate) but the 56-year term was extended in 1976 to bring the US in line with the Berne Convention life-plus-50 term used in the rest of the world. The current life-plus-70 term originated in Germ
251.
by bbanyc 13y ago
In theory that's how convention centers should work. In practice, the Javits Center is isolated by the surrounding railyards and few desirable amenities have sprung up in the area. (This may finally change in a few years' time wi
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by bbanyc 13y ago
New York state law requires strict community rating, which means that an insurance company must charge the same prices to all customers. Elsewhere people with known health problems are charged higher premiums to cover their higher health co
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by bbanyc 13y ago
It's far from decided, and controversial to say the least. The systemd package maintainers are certainly acting like they're going to be the default, but it isn't their call.
254.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Previously the non-portability of upstart was seen as a reason for Debian not to switch to upstart. Now the non-portability of systemd is seen as a reason for Debian to drop the ports.
255.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Only for younger people - SSNs have only been assigned at birth since the 1980s. My mother was born in West Virginia but her SSN has a Minnesota prefix, because that's where she lived when she got her first job. Someone who wasn'
256.
by bbanyc 13y ago
For many years Bernstein explicitly refused to place any sort of license conditions on most of his software on the grounds that he didn't want modified versions floating around and copyright law allowed most of the things he wanted to
257.
by bbanyc 13y ago
It started out as "FOO ... BAR" but that made the header an odd number of bytes long. In the previous draft it was "FOO ... BA". It was briefly "STA ... RT" which made too much sense to use.
258.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Fedora has made some major changes to the hierarchy recently (merging /bin and /lib into /usr, introducing /run) that will be present in RHEL 7. /run has been widely adopted, but the /usr merge is a bit more co
259.
by bbanyc 13y ago
Oracle's files are based on the tzinfo files, and are just as vulnerable. If anything, more so because Oracle has a lot more money than the tzinfo maintainers. No, this is about write-once-run-anywhere compatibility as the other respo
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by bbanyc 13y ago
Can't toolkits use XRender over a network instead of sending huge bitmaps around? Or was XRender support dropped altogether when DRI2 proved so much better?
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by bbanyc 13y ago
The only point I get from this post is that too much self-congratulatory navel-gazing harms one's ability to engage in any sort of discussion. This goes for both the logic-in-all-things capital-S Skepticism the post argues against and the
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by bbanyc 13y ago
That won't do you any good - the first Logo interpreter was also written in Lisp.
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by bbanyc 13y ago
People think I'm weird for logging into Gmail with IMAP from Thunderbird. Not mucking with browser sign-ins is one of my reasons for it.
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by bbanyc 13y ago
A language that can be statically parsed won't allow runtime redefinition of itself, like Lingua::Romana::Perligata. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... As Tom Duff said in the "Duff's Device" post, I'm not sur
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by bbanyc 13y ago
The first IOCCC winner declared main as a short[] of VAX machine code: http://www.ioccc.org/1984/mullender.c You could probably do the same thing in x86 and it'd work on a modern compiler.
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by bbanyc 13y ago
Lane is also the former head maintainer of libjpeg, which means just about any web browser or image editor uses some derivative of his code. That's pretty impressive.
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by bbanyc 13y ago
Bash isn't really "minimalist" compared to the likes of dash or mksh. [rob-pike]Completion is a compromise, the Unix Way is to make your commands short and simple enough that you can memorize them all![/rob-pike]
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by bbanyc 14y ago
If you did this for Plan 9 it wouldn't be a joke. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if Plan 9 has already got this.