dhosek

166 ms·

1. 2641.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   I remember how shocking it was when SoftTalk came out. It didn't have program listings in it!
2. 2642.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   It varies depending on the agency, the scope of the request and the purpose of the request. For just one example, here's the State of Illinois FOIA FAQ: https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/FOIA/Documents/FOIA_F
3. 2643.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   The speed difference is really quite dramatic. When I replaced the boot hard drive on my Mac Mini with a SSD after it died, it was an immediately obvious increase in performance.
4. 2644.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   I think the HDD vs floppies comparison is more sensibly analogized to SSD vs HDD. That was a massive change. I think the Apple Silicon vs Intel upgrade is pretty exciting (although a lot of that feels like promise of what might be coming in
5. 2645.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   I think that it's also a depression thing. Certainly, when my mood is down, it's more likely that I'll do low-emotional-calorie activities in bed instead of sleep.
6. 2646.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   Or there is the distinct possibility that this was a heavily-traversed border pre-Brexit and with Brexit it now requires a lot of border checks.
7. 2647.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   Ah Julian Jaynes, the Erich von Däniken of psychology.
8. 2648.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   It's amazing how many people jumped in to comment without even a minimal glance at the article. Please folks, before jumping in to comment, at least make sure the article is about what you think it's about.
9. 2649.▲
   by dhosek 5y ago

   In the Perec instance, it's what was called by the Oulipo group (of which he was a part), a Lipogram. Perec wrote a follow-up text in which the only vowel used was e. A Canadian author wrote a suite of five novellas each restricting th
10. 2650.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I remember doing this by accident in an email back in the days in which all interactions with a computer were in monospace (on a 80x24 terminal screen). Fiddling with margins to make it work is kind of cheating (and curiously, it seems to
11. 2651.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I remember reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and thinking it was like reading an IKEA catalog thanks to all the Scandinavian names. And then there was a scene (in the second book, IIRC), where there literally is a listing of product
12. 2652.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    It seems to me that few if any of the businesses that need all the tracking information are really productive. Most of them are really just playing arbitrage games between the rates for advertising and fees paid for leads from other busin
13. 2653.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    If Apple had negotiated with Epic, we'd all be arguing about how unfair it is that Epic gets a better deal than everyone else.
14. 2654.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I'd add that a not insignificant part of that 1 in 6 is the car choosing to use gasoline power to keep the gas engine operable. It also likes to switch to gas power during the winter when we're running the heater.
15. 2655.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    Not in Norway, but my wife and I have the Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrid (our only car). We average about 1 in 6 miles on gasoline power. With more widely distributed charging infrastructure and a bigger battery we could easily make that
16. 2656.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    That's the case with pretty much every gas station. The station operator's margin on the gasoline itself is pretty close to zero.
17. 2657.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I do on a daily basis, but I'm a bit of an oddity in that I've strenuously avoided the shift to streaming music. I don't want all the music. To me that's the same as having none of the music. Heck, I don't even wa
18. 2658.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    Rot13 hasn't been a serious encoding scheme for security since the Roman Empire. It's all about making an easy to encode/decode wrapper for hiding spoilers and the like. Back in the olden days, newsreaders had a shortcut key
19. 2659.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    One of the arguments for social media is that it keeps you in touch with friends you've lost touch with. Except, that there's probably a good reason you've lost touch with a lot of those people. What Facebook showed me was ho
20. 2660.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I never understood how anyone under the age of 50 could take up smoking. It's been abundantly clear since I was a kid that smoking would kill you slowly and painfully and we had numerous presentations at my grade school in the 70s to t
21. 2661.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    My first laptop bought way back in 1993, had a scheme where either or both of the two(!) removable batteries could be replaced with a plug-in module. I had one that gave me a SCSI port and another that gave me a 2400 baud(!) modem. It was b
22. 2662.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I'll second the recommendation for LibraryThing. I wanted to be able to shelve books by LoC call number and this has a pretty good (although not always complete) lookup for most call numbers (I have learned how to generate a call numbe
23. 2663.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    It's a little amazing how much 6502 assembler sticks with me 35 years later. But only a little. I didn't have the money to buy an assembler or the skill to write one so I would write out my programs in long-hand on graph paper and
24. 2664.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    6502 assembly has the distinct advantage of having special page-0 instructions for reading/writing from memory, including, if I recall correctly, the ability to take a 2-byte sequence and treat it as a 16-bit value (or was that in the
25. 2665.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I remember being in high school, reading K&R and trying to figure out how I could get a C compiler running on an Apple ][. Never did, but it was a useful intellectual enterprise. My second (and last) assembly language after 6502 was 370
26. 2666.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    "Apocalyptic salt factory" in Sodom creates an image in my mind of a factory whose salt comes from the pillars of salt left behind by all the people leaving Sodom but stopping to look back.
27. 2667.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    While I was in college, I was the device drivers editor for TUGboat and trying to track all the combinations of OS and output device for TeX DVI drivers brought a lot of borderline operating systems into my awareness. As I recall, there w
28. 2668.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    I guess it's ok to read The C Programming Language , then.
29. 2669.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    Although, it doesn't always. For example, calc_formula(1,2,true) would show as calc_formula(a: 1, b: 2, is_gain: true) but calc_formula(1,2,some_var) shows as calc_formula(a: 1, b: 2, some_var) Although on the flip side, it creates an
30. 2670.▲
    by dhosek 5y ago

    D'oh, not integers, reals. Sigh.