pedasmith

11 ms·

61.
by pedasmith 9y ago
In the old days, we knew to either open a file in text mode (where whatever the OS had would be converted to a single \n) or in binary mode (where it wouldn't, and you had to deal with the conversion yourself). IMHO, what SHOULD happen
62.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Certainly not from DEC. DEC had a powerful "RMS" (record management system) later between a program and the disk. That later would take files in a balloon formats and convert them as needed. For example, you could define that your
63.
by pedasmith 9y ago
I've only ever hit one compiler bug that was really a bug: a C compiler for 6805 microcontrollers would only produce a correct function-start if the function took 2 bytes or less of arguments. That particular project includes a surpri
64.
by pedasmith 9y ago
More destructive than, "oil companies can spill oil anywhere" (Nigeria) or "let's kill everyone from the 'wrong' ethnic group" (Rwanda) or "let's exploit orphans" (Ireland)?
65.
by pedasmith 9y ago
I worked for a company in 2006 that was considering writing phone apps (we already had a bunch of Windows apps). At the time, each phone company wanted to "curate" the apps for their own phone stores. At least one company wanted,
66.
by pedasmith 9y ago
"No sampling" is just another way of saying "the queries will be so slow that you will never do any ad-hoc queries. It's also short for "I don't understand statistics".
67.
by pedasmith 9y ago
I'm one of the many people who have designed yet another little language; mine is Best Calculator BASIC and a manual for it is at https://bestcalculator.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/bestcalcu... BC BASIC is de
68.
by pedasmith 9y ago
For example: you could make a cluster-wide lock that you code uses to coordinate access to cluster-wide shared resource. Locks on most OSes have an "outer scope" of a process or the machine.
69.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Try getting a mammogram. The wait time always seems to be in the "months" range even though the demand can be perfectly forecast in advance.
70.
by pedasmith 9y ago
You might find that there are a lot of updates in the queue :-) . I dusted mine off a few months ago, and there were quite a number of them.
71.
by pedasmith 9y ago
Puerto Rico bonds were paying 8.7% when US Treasuries paid about 2%. I'd say that any competent investor knows perfectly well that Puerto Rico might well not honor the bonds.
72.
by pedasmith 10y ago
Because how would an ordinary person every make the right choice? How would any kind of anti-virus every tell the difference between a "good" program that's connecting to an embedded web server in an appropriate way, and a &
73.
by pedasmith 10y ago
Hey! I didn't implement the loopback restriction in WinRT, but I sure was one of the PMs in the network team when it happened. As it turns out, pretty much everyone on the thread is right. Localhost is special on a network: it's
74.
by pedasmith 10y ago
I've read the first three volumes. And recently when paring down my collection, it went out. Sorry, Donald, but you've got too much about multi-phase tape sorts and not enough about current programming. I started volume four but
75.
by pedasmith 10y ago
With a word for word identical comment, including a space before the final period?
76.
by pedasmith 10y ago
Not how it works; that's leading the witness, and just because you are an expert in one field (comparing code) doesn't mean you are an expert in another (assessing the value). I've actually been in this exact situation as an
77.
by pedasmith 10y ago
Is it really that scary? Suppose there was a criminal who claimed that, with a broken leg, they couldn't possibly have committed some act. Isn't it reasonable to get a warrant for the person's XRays in order to get hard evid
78.
by pedasmith 10y ago
It's not cold at all in the winter -- in a typical winter, it hardly ever gets below freezing during the day, and rarely snows "down low". The mountains nearby do get lots of snow. Be aware that we get lots of clouds in the
79.
by pedasmith 10y ago
I get distracted by shiny things, so I made a low-distraction work timer https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/low-distraction-work... It moves pretty much imperceptibly so that it doesn't distract fro
80.
by pedasmith 10y ago
This sounds like a half-closed socket. I helped with WinRT socket API for Windows; we had to decide whether to support that or not. In the end, we couldn't come up with a truly legitimate case where an app really needs to do this. Ev
81.
by pedasmith 10y ago
People aren't fungible and there's no special set of people who have been specially blessed to decide what's important all-up. Each area of Unicode is handled by a different set of people who are experts in different areas. I
82.
by pedasmith 10y ago
And what about email? I have to support POP3 (!); my customers would be seriously unhappy if they can't sent an email with emoji. Heck, I'd be unhappy. I love adding emoticon and emoji and fun things to my emails.
83.
by pedasmith 10y ago
The RS/1 statistical system used a table-based approach; it was wonderful! If I ever spend time to design a language, it's going to have "table" as the main non-primitive type, with some "hints" to sallow supe
84.
by pedasmith 10y ago
Many of the early systems were made in a very short amount of time by a very small number of people who had remarkably bad tools. I wrote code (pre-STL) for linked lists, sorted arrays, array lookups, and everything. And without modern lan
85.
by pedasmith 10y ago
you can also use Excel services architecture: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ms582023.asp...