rootbear

67 ms·

721.
by rootbear 14y ago
One side of my family has roots in the Great Smoky Mountains part of Appalachia. The English spoken there has its own rules and vocabulary. I have a book, "The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English", that my sister gave me and it's fascina
722.
by rootbear 14y ago
And we're still using '*' for multiplication in our programming languages instead of '×' because using anything other than ASCII for programming is just too hard, or too weird, or whatever.
723.
by rootbear 14y ago
I used to think the same way until I suffered neurological damage that affects the sensory nerves in my fingers. Holding down the shift key while I type some all-caps text, like "STUPID_SHOUTY_MACRO_NAME", is uncomfortable, so I now find th
724.
by rootbear 14y ago
I agree about the website. They stuff customers into "Home and Office", "Medium Business", and "Enterprise" silos and it's very hard to compare products across those arbitrary boundaries. However, I do like how you can type in a service t
725.
by rootbear 14y ago
Can you elaborate on your first point a bit? How, specifically, does C's machine model not fit current architectures well, aside from multiple cores. How is Fortran's model better?
726.
by rootbear 14y ago
He spoke here at NASA Goddard just recently about his experiences at Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, during the Apollo era. I grew up in Huntsville during that time and my father also worked at Marshall so it was an e
727.
by rootbear 14y ago
Wow, I remember reading that back when it happened. Great story of some amazing engineering.
728.
by rootbear 14y ago
It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use. I know that there is a lot of F77 still around, but the Fortran code I've seen at NASA is at least up to F90/F95. Someone who learned F95 or later an
729.
by rootbear 14y ago
Yeah, the iPhone keyboard is what finally got me to stop using r2d2 or c3p0 as a part of my password. And the fact that they are probably in the cracking dictionaries.
730.
by rootbear 14y ago
I am a big fan of adding digit separators where ever possible. I'm tired of staring at ls listings of terabyte filesystems and trying to figure out what order of magnitude the numbers are. And yes, I know about ls -lh. I would like to see
731.
by rootbear 14y ago
Nice summary, thanks. If Mars never had time for life to develop, that would be a sad thing. We could have had neighbors. In some ways, Venus is even more sad. It's much closer in size to Earth with much higher gravity than Mars, which I
732.
by rootbear 14y ago
I'm glad you brought this up. I got into this same argument on a Star Trek fan site and my opinions on the feasibility of FTL travel were not popular with that crowd. I would like to know what Alcubierre himself thinks about the causality
733.
by rootbear 14y ago
No, I did not know that. I still stand by my observation that Extremetech has gone down hill and I will note that writers must please their editors if they wish to get published.
734.
by rootbear 14y ago
Extremetech has really gone down hill since laying off all of the good people in 2009. They've adopted a more tabloid journalism style, with provocative headlines and overheated articles. I miss Lloyd Case.
735.
by rootbear 14y ago
I completely disagree with the second sentence. There must be a way for power users to get the flexibility they want, while making the product usable by the masses. MacOS does this to an extent, with "Advanced" buttons on some control pan
736.
by rootbear 14y ago
My experience exactly. I read a lot of Asimov and Clark in the 70s, but I read some Bradbury too. I need to get some of his books that I missed and read them now. I suspect I'll appreciate them as literature more now than I would have whe
737.
by rootbear 14y ago
I was there at the time this happened. They were doing backups, but not testing them. The version of tar being used, from IRIX, I think, used 32-bit file offsets and couldn't back up more than 4GB of data to one file. The TS2 models and ani
738.
by rootbear 15y ago
I think the copy at my parents' house is about 1968. I remember when I was young and we got it. I guess I'll have to duke it out with my sister for who gets it!
739.
by rootbear 15y ago
Same here. My Dad is a life-long ham radio operator and if I hear a WWV broadcast now, it takes me back to my childhood in a flash. On a related note, I always liked the British time announcements that used three tones, with the designated
740.
by rootbear 15y ago
Dr. Asimov never liked it when his name was misspelled. My name is common and rarely misspelled, but I think I would feel the same. It's just a matter of respect.
741.
by rootbear 15y ago
This animation was produced at the Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I work in the Studio and the visualizer who created it is in the next office over. All of our work is on the web at http://svs.gsfc.nas