rootbear

38 ms·

391.
by rootbear 9y ago
My Hungarian friend finds the link to Finnish hard to hear or see, but some Finns I spoke to said that when they visit Hungary, they hear it, more in the rhythms than in actual words.
392.
by rootbear 9y ago
When I visited Finland for this year's Worldcon (SF convention) I learned that all Finns learn Finnish and Swedish, the two official languages of Finland. Knowing some German, I found the Swedish street signs more helpful than the Finn
393.
by rootbear 9y ago
The real problem here is that keywords are in the same namespace as identifiers. If keywords were marked syntactically in some way and in their own namespace, there would be less reason to avoid introducing new ones. This is why we end up w
394.
by rootbear 9y ago
I don't, but it's at least three, as I recall. Beyond that and you tend to lose your place and forget how many to sing.
395.
by rootbear 9y ago
The escape sequence for Telnet, however, was exponential. This lead to the Telnet Song, by Guy Steele, a link to which was once posted on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060597 Note that the "up arrow" r
396.
by rootbear 9y ago
I was there in August and found it beautiful. De gustibus non disputandum est.
397.
by rootbear 9y ago
I was in Iceland recently and was told that if you see a tree over 3m tall, it was planted. And we heard this Icelandic joke: "If you are lost in a forest in Iceland, don't forget to stand up."
398.
by rootbear 9y ago
Yes, I wish Nvidia was a bit more generous with the open source community, but for some situations, they are the best choice, if not the only choice.
399.
by rootbear 9y ago
I use nothing but Nvidia on Linux. Their performance and stability is greatly superior to AMD on high-end 3D applications such as Maya. I'll admit, I have not revisited AMD cards in a while, so perhaps I'm out of touch with the cu
400.
by rootbear 9y ago
The first structured programming language I learned was a home grown language called Simpl-T, at the University of Maryland. It did not have floating point, but one could still do an awful lot with it. Other members of the Simpl-X family di
401.
by rootbear 9y ago
I think an important open question is how much gravity is enough. Will Mars's 0.38g be enough for colonists? How about the Moon's 0.165g? These are critical questions we need to answer to know how practical it will be to have colo
402.
by rootbear 9y ago
As others have stated, we tend to overuse superlatives in American English. I try to avoid that, and have picked up a phrase for restaurants from a friend. He will sometimes describe a restaurant that is good, not great, but one he would go
403.
by rootbear 9y ago
She isn't active now, but up until a few years ago, she was the primary caregiver for my father, who had Alzheimer's. It kept her busy. She also spent a lot of time on fixing healthy food.
404.
by rootbear 9y ago
My mother, who turns 97 today, is utterly astonished that she's still alive.
405.
by rootbear 9y ago
Yes. I'm especially annoyed at Google. I WILL NOT use a device that requires me to be an unpaid brand promoter. At least "Alexa" and "Siri" are actual names, or sound like names. A customizable activation word would
406.
by rootbear 9y ago
I don't think I knew that there even was a cursive form of Chinese. That does complicate things, especially the "off-line" case where all one has is a static image.
407.
by rootbear 9y ago
Over twenty years ago, I was in a conversation with a developer who was working on Japanese handwriting recognition for the Go PenPoint OS. He told me that stroke order, which is supposed to be consistent in Japanese writing, was a big help
408.
by rootbear 9y ago
Agreed. I think IBM would have fixed the licensing issues that kept ZFS off Linux and would have kept Solaris Open Source, perhaps with a better license. It's tragic that Sun went to Oracle and not IBM.
409.
by rootbear 9y ago
Without getting into the whole Puppies controversy, I'll say that last night's Hugo Awards ceremony was one of the nicest and classiest presentations I've seen in many years of attending Worldcons. I was delighted to see such
410.
by rootbear 9y ago
I love the Voyagers and I'm very happy that there are people dedicated to keeping us in contact with them as long as they last. These Engineers are splendid examples of taking the long view, something we could use more of these days.
411.
by rootbear 9y ago
A lot of what has been said here about software documentation and process is true of NASA flight projects, especially manned. Outside of flight, not so much. In some cases, it's a bit more like grad-school-project-that-escaped. An exce
412.
by rootbear 9y ago
I have the same laptop and I'm happy with it, but I'm not happy with the dongle madness that universal adoption of USB C is foisting on us. I also want a reliable travel dongle for external HDMI for this laptop but the reviews of
413.
by rootbear 9y ago
I've recently gotten back into electronics, a hobby from my teens, thanks to the Maker movement, the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, etc. I'm interested in doing some home automation projects. I like to read science fiction, science po
414.
by rootbear 9y ago
My sister's school bought a bunch of TI99/4As and I got to play with hers once when visiting. She said it was a little flakey, as I recall. One interesting feature of the 99/4A was the speech synthesizer module, which used th
415.
by rootbear 9y ago
To the best of my knowledge, it was animated in Maya and rendered with Pixar's Renderman. When I was in that group, we used IDL to do any elaborate calculations needed, and then imported the data into Maya/Renderman. This is exact
416.
by rootbear 9y ago
I used to work in the group that produced that animation and I can tell you that the TIFF format is alive and well in the 3D graphics world. It is supported by most high-end graphics software, has an open, extensible spec, and can be lossle
417.
by rootbear 9y ago
Bonus points if he had used þe for the in a few places...
418.
by rootbear 9y ago
I work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and I can tell you that Fortran is indispensable. It is the primary language used in numerical simulations, such as climate, stellar dynamics, cosmology, etc. This is partly due to inertia; scienti
419.
by rootbear 9y ago
Before he was at PARC, Mark Weiser was a professor at the University of Maryland. I took one of his classes and I always found him brilliant. I'm very sad that he did not live to see the arrival of the Internet of Things and the Maker
420.
by rootbear 9y ago
I thought Restore-L was one of the missions who's funding was cut in the budget proposal. I'm partly funded by PACE, which is toast.

More ›