Autotools was a perfectly reasonable way of solving 1993 problems with 1993 tools. Whether it still makes any sense in 2023 a different matter... Having said that, given the choice between a non-working autoconf build scheme, and a non-working cmake build scheme, I prefer the former, but that may just be me getting old and lazy. Obviously, a working setup of anything would be much preferrable, but that seems like hopeless case if one is using anything other than the most popular Linux distro at the moment...
It’s funny how paper patterns vary with geography. Across the Baltic Sea, in Sweden, you can certainly find "millimeterpapper", as we call it, but it’s a bit of a speciality item, and I have rarely, if ever, seen anyone actually use it. Especially now, that all graphs are done on a computer anyway.
On that subject, I’m fascinated by the many special-purpose more-or-less-grid papers there are out there. Yet, whenever I see photos of these papers in use, the user does not seem to have used it for its intended purpose, but simply as a random piece of paper. For example, what is the motivation for the "engineer" paper on this site?
Sometimes they "control" the problem with trickery that occasionally blows up. For example, there was talk some time ago about how some Casio models sometimes invent a factor pi in something that should obviously be a rational number: https://twitter.com/standupmaths/status/1284117779025727494 . (Ok, admittedly this is a much nastier trick than just using a few extra hidden digits for floating point numbers.)
looks at title This just has to be a TechMoan video! clicks link Checks out!
Anyway, isn’t this the reverse of how these things usually ended up? Usually, the system spec and the actual hardware would offer various nice features, but no actual software/media/whatever used it. Here, it seems to be the other way around — the software (cassettes) has these features that noone ever got to see, as the hardware didn’t support it? Then again, I suppose there wasn’t that much stuff published on dcc...
I have seen this argument before, but I'm not sure that I buy it. Even if you count every footfall, you are not magically going to somehow use, say, only your left foot. At the end of a km, you will have 600 double paces or 1199, 1200 or 1201 single paces. Well within the margin of error.
My hypothesis is this: Actually try to count every foot when you’re out. If you count only every second footfall, you can mentally go "a-one-a-two-a-three" and so on, but counting every foot, there are just too many of them. At least I get brain overload from it.
Sweden had bicycle-mounted infantry into the 1980:s (towards the end, mostly local defence units). However, the soldiers were not supposed to pedal for any significant distance (and certainly not to fight mounted!). They would be towed by tractors, and leave their steel steeds to fight on foot. I think the concept was introduced during the first half of the 20th century because it allowed increased mobility at a much lower cost than having everyone in a motor vehicle. It has also been noted that, in case of suddenly appearing aerial threats, a bicycle unit could melt away into the forest with remarkable effectiveness.
I played that a lot, too! Usually with the simplest block set, which was just 3D versions of the usual Tetris blocks. After that, playing “normal” 2D tetris suddenly became harder, because there are some rotations that cannot be done when you have only one axis! In 3D, you can flip an S into a Z, but in 2D, you can’t!
EXIF... If I remember correctly, EXIF uses the TIFF file structure. Am I right? Does this mean that a PNG file, with its relatively simple format, would have inside it an EXIF chunk with a potentially different byte order and absolute offsets all over the place?
I am fairly sure that I have read (probably in a 1950:s edition of the Swedish navy soldier’s handbook "Örlogsboken"), that "tap morse", for example for communication with persons trapped inside a damaged ship, is done by tapping once for a dit, and twice in rapid succession for a "dah".
I’ll stick my chin out, and claim that nobody who knows anything about math would ever write the expression like that. Either use parentheses or a long, horizontal division bar making it obvious what groups with what. As given, it looks like some small-minded school teacher (I’m not saying all teachers are small-minded, just a few of them!) who has taught a set of rules, with little regard for actual practice outside the classroom, and then tests to exactly those rules.
Are you sure about the lambda scope bit? It seems to me there will still be only one loop variable, which gets re-used throughout the loop (unlike, for example, the 'do' loop in Scheme, where each turn through the loop explicitly gets new locations for all variables).
It is sometimes said, that nostalgia is not the yearning for the past as it actually was, but for the past as it exists in our rosiest memories. I seem to have taken this one step further — I yearn for a world which I never experienced, and which possibly never existed except in my fantasy at the time. I was born in 1971. By the time I was aware of computers, but still a child, in the late 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, my image of computers — real computers, the sort that flew you to the moon or ran large companies or research labs, not the Z80 basic-in-ROM “home computer” we actually had at home — was formed by whatever reading matter was around, most of it outdated even at the time. This was Apollo-era spaceflight. It was 9-track open-reel tape stations and chain printers. It was Frutiger and Univers.
Obviously, many of the things my parents used were from the 1960’s or 1970’s, so that is what serious stuff for grown-ups looked like. (This condition could be hereditary. I have no children, but if I had, they would be exposed to things like my DSLR and stereo amp, both older than they would have been.)
I think this is what makes me like the aesthetics of this typeface so much. It is not what computers used to look like, what they look like today, or what they will look like tomorrow. It is what they were supposed to look like!
I think you mean 28, not 42 — the 42 is also "classic" 4-register RPN. And I’m writing this mostly to push for the excellent Free42 emulator, which runs on just about everything (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS), and also powers the DM42 hardware emulator mentioned above. Only problem with it is that emulated buttons on a touchscreen are nothing like the real thing; I keep missing keystrokes.
I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but here’s how it usually plays out in Sweden: 1. Company needs to save money. 2. Company decides to shut branch office X and cancel project Y. 3. Company now has more employees than it has positions. 4. Employees get reshuffled across remaining positions according to complex rules (but basically last-in-first-out). 5. Employees that end up being "left over" are laid off. So the official reason is not "lack of money", but "lack of work". I’ve seen it happen several times, and ended up on both sides of the rope, so to speak. It’s a matter of Following The Procedures, but that’s all there is to it.
I don’t know the details, but it seems they also provide web shop owners with some sort of service that is better than other payment processors. In Sweden, it seems like every web shop there is uses Klarna for payment processing, even if you pay up front.
Swedish damages are usually very small compared to the astronomical sums you see from the US, but I agree that suing for a million SEK seems barely worth the trouble...
CSV looks deceptively simple. It is far too easy to just write(','.join(whatever)), which sort of works, until it doesn’t, and then someone, sometimes I, has to sort out the resulting mess. PLEASE use a proper CSV library (Python comes with a CSV module in the standard library), or at least implement the entire format according to the RFC from the outset, even if you think you won’t need it!
Only tangentially related, but: Some years ago, there was a flurry of reports of "gas smell" in places around the English Channel, and gas works engineers all over south-eastern England and north-western France scurried about their networks looking for leaks, finding none. Eventually, the leak was found — in the factory that produces the smelling agent!
To be clear: It was not just metadata, it was actual PDF:s — I tried opening several of them — named d<digits>-<digits>. But, as I said, after an OS update (to 11.7.1) (including a reboot, obviously), they were gone, and only metadata files (named c<digits>) remain.
I noticed that there was an update to Big Sur — the newest OS that this machine can run — which I had missed, so I installed it, and the files went away!
I also noticed that there has been issues, like https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5538, related to spool file clean-up. (The fix to that one leaves some decidedly fishy-looking parentheses, but they were fixed in a later commit.)
I just checked my /var/spool/cups, and it contains PDF:s of prints going back to about February 2022.
This computer is about eight years old and has been through I-don't-know-how-many OS updates. This, and the fact that not everyone has these files, makes me suspect that there is supposed to be some mechanism cleaning these files up, but that the details have changed over time, and some OS update got it wrong.
It only takes a quick glance at sites like Stack Overflow to see that things like character encodings, the difference between the external representation of a string and its actual content, different quoting rules in different contexts (CSV versus XML versus JSON versus ...) is a complete mystery to many people trying to work as developers.
In print, code is often represented in a monospace font, materials intended for beginners sometimes indicate stuff that you are actually supposed to type with little keycap symbols, etc. Have there been any programming languages (with associated IDE:s) where strings were represented by typography (or colour, or whatever) rather than by surrounding them with some sort of quotation marks?
The text mentions troff and PIC. I wonder whether the author still has the source code... Even if re-rendering with modern tools ("modern" meaning "actually runs on platforms readily available today, e.g. groff and gpic") is more work than he’s willing to put in (which I quite understand), there ought to be someone on the Internet who is enough of a compsci/typography nerd to do it...
Googling around for answers to Mac related problems, I can easily see that about half the people "answering" questions are completely clueless, just cargo-culting various voodoo stuff. I suspect that among the other half, half of those are equally clueless, but I can't tell which ones because I'm myself not mac-savvy enough!
And Xcode itself does not help. I install Xcode. Well, actually, I didn't, because you need to actually start Xcode for it to completely install itself. It seems to come with a complete set of command-line tools; I can compile and run plain Unix stuff from the command line. Great. Except when you try to run Homebrew, that complains that you don’t have the True Command Line Tools; you need to run xcode-select --install to install what appears to be a completely different copy of the same things. Wtf?
Isn’t there an entire Unicode block for the symbols on the Phaistos disc? Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_(Unicode_block) . I suppose those occur in quite a few documents about the disc, even though the disc itself is the only known document written in those symbols.