pdw

45 ms·

481.
by pdw 14y ago
In traditional Unix you can delete a file if you have write access to the containing directory . The permission bits of the file don't matter. On all (?) modern Unix variants, you can set the sticky bit on a directory to also require write
482.
by pdw 14y ago
But that was in response to some "Joseph", presumably one of "dozens of troll comments" that got deleted shortly after.
483.
by pdw 14y ago
There were the WWII Armed Service Editions: "Over the life of the program, over 123 million copies of 1,322 titles were printed. This makes the ASE program one of the largest wide-scale distributions of free books in history."
484.
by pdw 15y ago
Novell and the Unix API...
485.
by pdw 15y ago
It's valid in all versions of C++, I believe. It's usually motivated with a chained ternary operator: return a == ALPHA ? x : a == BETA ? y : a == GAMMA ? z : throw ...; Although that's not a style I'd reco
486.
by pdw 15y ago
The official Nintendo cartridges never used more than 4 megabit of ROM. But many unofficial "backup solutions" integrated a microSD reader and had quite a bit more space available.
487.
by pdw 15y ago
The shortest HTML4 (and earlier) document is <title//x This uses the never-implemented but legal shorttag syntax for the required title element, and the "x" character serves as the body content.
488.
by pdw 15y ago
If I ever made a tool with a command interface (like gdb or ftp), I would probably use Tcl as the command language. The only alternative seems to be a homebrew design. None of the other scripting languages I can think of have a sufficiently
489.
by pdw 15y ago
Because you can echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches but sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches won't work.
490.
by pdw 15y ago
Freeglut is still maintained (with the latest release a few weeks ago), but I don't know how good it is. I've used GLFW for all my OpenGL experiments.
491.
by pdw 15y ago
This is quite surprising to me, this problem was solved long ago in Perl: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsec.html#Algorithmic-Complexity-...
492.
by pdw 15y ago
I believe all those are versions of Oberon-the-operating-system. For playing with the language, I'd rather have a stand-alone compiler...
493.
by pdw 15y ago
I guess SmartOS reserves /usr for the Solaris base install and puts additions in /opt/local. If you look at http://wiki.joyent.com/display/jpc2/SmartOS+Smartmachine+Dat... and click "to see list of installed software", it includes grep 2.
494.
by pdw 15y ago
FWIW, more recent GNU grep releases (2.6 and later) run fine in UTF-8 mode. Actually, why is SmartOS, "the Completely Modern Operating System", shipping with a five year old grep?
495.
by pdw 15y ago
The official GNU grep used to be absurdly slow at UTF-8. Linux distributors very quickly noticed this and fixed it when they switched to UTF-8 by default. But GNU grep maintenance was essentially dormant for years and these patches were onl
496.
by pdw 15y ago
The new Tetris versions also use a friendlier and not-so-random number generator. Basically, it generates a random permutation of the seven different pieces, deals those, and then generates a new permutation. This makes the game much more p
497.
by pdw 15y ago
Are those advanced packages needed for ebooks? Consider Knuth's TeXbook, written in plain TeX (the source is available on CTAN) and which looks good enough for me: $ time tex texbook.tex Output written on texbook.dvi (494 pages,
498.
by pdw 15y ago
The core of TeX is fast enough for any modern hardware, even tablets. For example, my laptop can compile the 494 page TeXbook ( http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbook ) in about half a second. What slows TeX down is that many packages use extremel
499.
by pdw 15y ago
So this article is trying to say that cheap Android phones have high hardware failure rates because of software diversity?
500.
by pdw 15y ago
I think you can blame the GNU `--date` option. It supports many, many possible input formats ( http://www.gnu.org/s/coreutils/manual/html_node/Date-input-f... ) and the implementation has to be quite complex.
501.
by pdw 15y ago
Try plugging in 22808277332 and 42028050 for "hacker news".
502.
by pdw 15y ago
C++ has lambdas.
503.
by pdw 15y ago
Europe gets the ad-free version, which costs $109 in the US. Add 20% UK VAT and that becomes $131 or £84. Amazon's price is pretty reasonable.
504.
by pdw 16y ago
There are a few latex-to-html converters and you can import the html in Word. You'll have to redo all your layout though.
505.
by pdw 16y ago
TeXmacs aims to be such a tool.
506.
by pdw 16y ago
I do that sometimes (obviously not in JavaScript), to split up long lines in situations such as this: bool is_foo_possible() { return test_first_condition() && test_second_contition() && test_third_
507.
by pdw 16y ago
But they place Common Lisp in 1984, probably because of the publication of the first edition of Common Lisp: The Language. CLOS came much later. And as the Common Lisp standard never included a full meta-object protocol, I think it's fair t
508.
by pdw 16y ago
You might want to read aboout how web infrastructure works at the BBC: http://iamseb.com/seb/2007/12/perl-on-rails-why-the-bbc-fail...