drfuchs

18 ms·

181.
by drfuchs 5y ago
The annual US death toll alone is dozens of thousands; the global number is well over a million.
182.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Alphatype shared their proprietary firmware and hardware specs with Knuth, and he did even discuss a few questions about it with some of their engineers, I believe. It was all under a non-disclosure agreement, carefully adhered to; I neve
183.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Sure. Knuth's original Sail version of TeX just directly wrote output in XGP format, since the only type of usable device anybody had was the experimental XGP printer (which Xerox had bestowed on a few CS departments, years before elec
184.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Hey, on the Sail machine, user names were 3 letters, and you only got one level of subdirectory, also 3 letters long. So, in the syntax of the time, “[ACP,DEK]” was it! (Six bits for each upper-case alphanumeric character means a 6-characte
185.
by drfuchs 5y ago
This and more. The Sail version of TeX is mentioned, but everything else had a usable prototype, too: An early version of Metafont in Sail, an early version of Web (called Doc, though I don’t recall what the names of the Tangle and Weave e
186.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Hey, minus the $16 wire-transfer fee. Fair is fair; that’s what I pay, too.
187.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Look up “Knob And Tube Wiring” on Wikipedia for details (which claim that the wires should have been insulated, but I believe I’ve seen the same as you report, in a California house built in the 1950s).
188.
by drfuchs 5y ago
And all the implicit conversion rules between pairs of types couldn’t fit on a single-page chart; the official IBM manual included an honest-to-goodness fold-out bound right in. Fun times.
189.
by drfuchs 5y ago
It is curious that on this page, Apple says "Watch the film to learn more" and "Watch the announcement film" whereas they always use the term "video" (or "movie" where appropriate) everywhere else in
190.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Evidently, my dry-cleaner lied to me.
191.
by drfuchs 5y ago
The card issuer doesn’t pay the merchant for a while, so it’s the merchant who is essentially paying the actual debt interest for a few months. Ask the owner of any small business where you use your card how long it takes for them to actua
192.
by drfuchs 5y ago
What's the motivation for changing the visually appealing C syntax "ptr->field" to the whack "ptr.*.field"?
193.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Or at least corrected to $C^3$, though downloading the source file shows: \def\CCC{C$^{3}$~}
194.
by drfuchs 5y ago
But what if I'm not the owner anymore? Specifically, I buy a house and purchase title insurance on it. Later, I sell the house to you. You trust me completely, so figure you don't need to buy title insurance. Later, unexpected
195.
by drfuchs 5y ago
But what if something fishy happened before they sold it to you, but it isn't discovered until after? Does their title insurance still cover it? For instance, if their original purchase turns out to not have been legitimate to begin w
196.
by drfuchs 5y ago
For the geographically illiterate, NSW refers to the Australian state of New South Wales (vs. Not Safe for Work, Naval Strike Wing, Newman–Shanks–Williams prime number, Nintendo Switch, or U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command).
197.
by drfuchs 5y ago
The shell was superior to any *nix shell, because the interface with programs was sane. Rather than the shell expanding *.foo into a zillion individual strings, the shell and the program agree that there's a file(s) parameter, and the
198.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Home addresses were absolutely shown in Bell Telephone White Pages phone books delivered to just about every domicile in the USA each year; you could not opt out of receiving the White and Yellow pages, though for a fee you could be “unlist
199.
by drfuchs 5y ago
In the battery compartment.
200.
by drfuchs 5y ago
If you make it to the 8th paragraph, you may learn that "BI" stands for "business intelligence".
201.
by drfuchs 5y ago
From the CDC: "Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19 because: * Research has not yet shown how long you are protected from getting COVID-19 again after you recover from COVID-19. * Vaccination hel
202.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Huh. I thought I'd heard the story in an interview with Peter Falk, or one of the producers. Oh, well.
203.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Fun fact: In the first few seasons, Colombo had continuing problems with his car, which was always an excuse for being late or showing up unexpectedly. But, like his wife, the car never showed up on screen. By the later seasons, they want
204.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Wouldn’t CORDIC have done the trick faster? There’s no mention that they even considered it, even though it’s been around for half a century or so.
205.
by drfuchs 5y ago
At least the channel changed instantly. And even by the 70’s, tubes were typically pre-warmed (not very eco-friendly, it’s true) so they turned on pretty quickly, especially compared with boot-up time.
206.
by drfuchs 5y ago
The post is about C, not C++. My comment stands, as the original post has two structs in a union, and they start the same way, so it’s exactly the case covered in the C11 Standard.
207.
by drfuchs 5y ago
I believe you are mistaken. The C11 standard, section 6.5.2.3 "Structure and union members" pgf 6, says "One special guarantee is made in order to simplify the use of unions: if a union contains several structures that share
208.
by drfuchs 5y ago
It’s on the “Don’t” list.
209.
by drfuchs 5y ago
End of 2nd paragraph: “@tennessee“
210.
by drfuchs 5y ago
Where do I enter the intangible value of owning: "Don't have to worry about getting priced out if the neighborhood becomes popular; can do any improvements I want, when I want, how I want, and they become an asset; don't have

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