gchpaco

46 ms·

391.
by gchpaco 17y ago
OpenSSL has a history of major security bugs. I haven't seen any filed against it recently, and it is widely used, but it gives people the heebie-jeebies, sort of like BIND does. If memory serves it also is a little inflexible if you want
392.
by gchpaco 17y ago
One of only a handful of programs I've seen on the iPhone that hyphenate properly. I wish the typeface specimen list was larger and included other, common typefaces (for example, Bembo, or a wider selection of sans serifs); those are some
393.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Mark of the true policeman: if technology melts down, they'll still be able to do their paperwork.
394.
by gchpaco 17y ago
This is actually a very practical question, as IIRC Editline was readline compatible on some levels. What follows is all my hazy recollection. If memory serves, the answer was this, although obviously if you ask RMS you get slightly differe
395.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I was expecting something more MySQL specific, and was pleasantly surprised. It's certainly worth thinking twice before violating any of these.
396.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Considering the number of keys I've bent which didn't have big gaping holes there, I suspect this would need to be hardened to work right, which would make grinding obnoxious. Still, not an inherently terrible idea.
397.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Put another way, if you see sigma in an APL program, you can understand what that is without knowing its context. Single characters in J do not have this property; < is different from <. is different from <: (and sometimes surp
398.
by gchpaco 17y ago
J took one of APL's chief positives, the only thing that made it possible to look at absurdly dense APL code and make sense of it, and destroyed it. APL has a "one character == one primitive" relation, except for user symbols which all hav
399.
by gchpaco 17y ago
The towers are, by design, nowhere close to any of the key positions. No one close enough to be teleported into the towers (the power has a range limit) is in any way threatening the nominal goals of the zone. I'm not sure why they didn't
400.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Having played City of Heroes and knowing what's going on here, you're completely off base. The CoH PvP zones have special drones protecting the base, to give people breathing room. This professor was repeatedly teleporting people into the
401.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Anyway, it seems to me that if my recollection were accurate, a single branch which went the same way virtually every time could have a lower cost in a heavily pipelined system than a more distrubted error checking scheme. That, in a nuts
402.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Extra branches are only a problem if the chip guesses wrong about the direction and has to undo a lot of speculative execution. So the default, fast case should be the one where memory is successfully allocated, in which case your total pen
403.
by gchpaco 17y ago
People who claim that they can't afford the overhead of error checking their instructions are high. There are no realistic situation in which getting the wrong answer fast is better than the right answer one clock cycle slower, especially
404.
by gchpaco 17y ago
PEG is a really fascinating development in parsing--at the cost of some memory (sometimes a lot of memory), parse almost anything in linear time. The fact that it's different from a context free grammar is especially interesting; determini
405.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Reentrancy comes up with recursion and signal handling as well, both of which can come up in nominally single threaded programs (nominal because signals usually but don't always come from out of process).
406.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Who wouldn't be aggressive and defensive about it? Since you speak English, statistically you are extremely likely to live in a society that likes to blame e.g. rising health care costs on "fatties", that fudges health analyses to ignore t
407.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I retain a great deal of affection for environments like Squeak, like Emacs, where you can stand as high up or as low down as you like in the system. Emacs has primitives written in C, of course, and Squeak doesn't cooperate real well with
408.
by gchpaco 17y ago
The noise it makes when you push the keys is repellent but it is very close otherwise to the HPs I remember. I really want a 41CX, tho.
409.
by gchpaco 17y ago
One of the best criticisms of the Scheme philosophy is that making the language so "simple" doesn't actually simplify programs you would want to write in it--it just pushes the complexity somewhere else. It's still Lisp, you can extend the
410.
by gchpaco 17y ago
It must have a different body font, too, because the tracking on page 4 (for example) is atrocious.
411.
by gchpaco 17y ago
For those possibly confused (like me): this is not a new edition of Concrete Mathematics. It's the text of the published book, but typeset astoundingly poorly. The actual book is sublimely set, as one might expect from Knuth. The content
412.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Anecdotally, I have a 17" Powerbook that I think I bought in 2002. Still fine, although kinda slow. I think about upgrading it from time to time. As far as maintenance, the contacts for the screen are starting to delaminate 7 years in, I
413.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Category theory is a way of taking theorems in one area (say, group theory), figuring out the minimum set of assumptions necessary for the theorem to hold, and then translating it into every possible similar structure. It's sort of like in
414.
by gchpaco 17y ago
See, that's wrong in many circumstances. If I want January 12th, 2019 + 1 month, I expect to get Feb 12th, 2019, not Feb 11th. Also days does not convert well into seconds in UTC, because of leap seconds. Historical dates are even more o
415.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Or to deal with administering any of it...
416.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Among the problems that this has, it will shatter PGP and S/MIME signatures silently.
417.
by gchpaco 17y ago
If you don't want to tell me anything about why you want an extension, you have to accept the fact that the probability distribution over "I want an extension" absent any information is heavily weighted toward "I went on a bender and am too
418.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Zapfino is the most immediate counter that comes to mind. Monaco was for decades the best monospaced font going. My Mac has Futura on it (a fantastically influential and important font that I happen to dislike aesthetically a great deal),
419.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Why? I think they would publish good typefaces, which is very different. And by and large they do.
420.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I'm from the old guard, used to be real thrilled with Usenet. Trolls are The Great Enemy, and 4chan is real big on trolling.

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