cbd1984

17 ms·

121.
by cbd1984 11y ago
But if they did that, they might find that it's either not alien or not life at all!
122.
by cbd1984 11y ago
The "whoosh" spelling is older than xkcd.
123.
by cbd1984 11y ago
For more context: ioctl means "We made this object's API file-like, but there's something we need to do with this object which we can't express in terms of the normal file operations." Setting terminal options is a
124.
by cbd1984 11y ago
In a profit-making enterprise, everything is a profit center or a loss center. I'm surprised it took them this long to find out that, as far as the balance sheets are concerned, editors are a loss center.
125.
by cbd1984 11y ago
If you care about audio fidelity, as opposed to the "vinyl-ness" of the sound, vinyl is worse: http://www.mcelhearn.com/do-vinyl-records-sound-better-than-... http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?t
126.
by cbd1984 11y ago
It was originally part of an even more awesome concept called Future Systems, which was supposed to replace the entire IBM universe with capability-based single-level storage systems. http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/
127.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> Were personal computers replacing mainframes nuts? Personal computers never replaced mainframes. Personal computers replaced minicomputers and workstations. The difference is meaningful, even in this context: Minicomputers and workstat
128.
by cbd1984 11y ago
To expand on your point: "Quantity has a quality all its own." — Stalin The point of cheap computing is ubiquitous computing. Doing things you couldn't seriously imagine previously because it would have felt like an "inv
129.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> If you've not read or heard it, I highly recommend giving a narration by Ginsberg a listen. The narration I have is surprisingly sedate given the text of the poem. Not a criticism, really, just something which struck me as odd.
130.
by cbd1984 11y ago
z/OS is legally UNIX. So's HP-UX and Solaris (probably not any of the Open Source variants, however). None of the Open Source BSDs qualify as UNIX, however.
131.
by cbd1984 11y ago
We don't need the trolling.
132.
by cbd1984 11y ago
Also, public transit is by no means terrible. The premise is just fatally flawed.
133.
by cbd1984 11y ago
Perl is actually more in the "real language" camp, believe it or not: It makes it more verbose to launch other programs than to not launch them, and it doesn't have pipes. In a shell, any bareword is either one of a few bui
134.
by cbd1984 11y ago
However, if you want to string programs together and script pre-written code, everything except UNIX shell sucks.
135.
by cbd1984 11y ago
It effectively does: the fourth amendment. More explicit verbiage is unlikely to matter. Besides, nobody said Europe wasn't a surveillance society.
136.
by cbd1984 11y ago
You can do that with pure pipes, without cat: foo < input This replaces foo's stdin with a pipe reading from input.
137.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> (You'd guess that 40 year old Unix applications could work too without recompilation, though I've never tried it) 40 years takes you to 1976, at which point there's no longer any ISA-level compatibility between the hardw
138.
by cbd1984 11y ago
I figure that any markdown dialect enhanced far enough to be usable would be as complex as LaTeX, only without the tooling and pre-written macros.
139.
by cbd1984 11y ago
Good LaTeX is less about aesthetics and more about having boilerplate code and macros which greatly simplify the process of making readable documents with citations in the correct (nitpicky, archaic, utterly idiosyncratic) format and figure
140.
by cbd1984 11y ago
Right. It's possible to feel bad for someone murdered by a criminal even if they left their door open all night. What North Korea is going to do to this kid is going to be inhuman and totally disproportionate to what he did, which was,
141.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> (For the record, 3 half-litre beer steins of coffee a day turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea, even if hearing colours was briefly entertaining.) I've consumed caffeine to the point of serious gastric distress and very mild
142.
by cbd1984 11y ago
Actually, the usual place to stereotype as having crooked teeth is the UK, which is firmly in the "developed" group of countries. To answer your question, no, "crooked teeth" isn't in the usual list of stereotypes p
143.
by cbd1984 11y ago
What was wrong with the 80286 was that Intel expected it to be used like processors are used now: Flipped into protected mode once at boot-up and kept there the whole time application software is running.
144.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> This is plainly wrong. Free markets allow for testing and approval agencies which do not need to be run by the government. Yes, they allow multiple competing agencies, each of which approves a different list of products, none of which
145.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> Free markets in no way preclude torts. I just said they allowed torts. I also explained why torts alone are insufficient.
146.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> Libertarians like free markets, right? Has anyone tried applying free market principles to drug use? In a completely free market, there are no labeling laws, and no way to enforce purity until after someone has died or been harmed by
147.
by cbd1984 11y ago
I cannot possibly imagine how this could be true. Linux is, legally, not Unix, and it is released under a license which does not discriminate based on who you are.
148.
by cbd1984 11y ago
> it used to speculate that the supposed linux distro would be MIT licensed. Not even Microsoft could pull that one off. > ...There are several things I don't like about this article. It reads like an April Fool's Joke circa
149.
by cbd1984 11y ago
So how do you know about it?
150.
by cbd1984 11y ago
Advanced chess players require a society which produces enough surplus to afford enough leisure to allow someone to not only produce a brain not damaged by starvation, but to allow them to use that brain to learn chess at a high level. It t

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