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certainly_not

36 karma · joined November 12, 2013

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certainly_not··on Why the Floppy Disk Is Still Used Today
The systems are time-tested. How many accidental launches have happened so far? Zero. In my opinion that's the most important metric of these systems, as long as they are still credible threats otherwise.

Also, what could a better system improve? Slightly faster launches? Slightly more certain launches? I argue that those are not important -- the enemy won't fear the missiles more if they run off USB. But you might increase the chance of a false launch, and certainly incur large testing costs.

certainly_not··on New Pacman for Atari 2600
The embedded video is not showing up for me. I believe this is the one though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clddb79LQcM
certainly_not··on Questions with Vim’s Creator, Bram Moolenaar
undotree only becomes usable once you install https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim

It's a lifesaver after that.

certainly_not··on Where have you gone, Peter Norton?
Norton Commander was a great concept, but what really perfected that concept was Dos Navigator... It had so many useful features... If you didn't use it in the 90's, you missed out on a legend! It was open-sourced after DOS became history: http://www.dnosp.com/.

And there was also Volkov Commander, which was about feature-equal with NC, but was written by hand in assembly. Tiny resource usage and lightning speed.

certainly_not··on Forensic Ballistics: How Apollo 12 Helped Solve the Skydiver Meteorite Mystery
I'd never heard of "drag catastrophe" before either, but I think you're right that he's referring to the onset of turbulent flow that reduces drag on a bluff body.

That's the sudden drop at the right in all of these graphs: www.google.ro/search?q=drag+reynolds+number (same as his own Figure 9, really).

There are a lot of surprising nonlinearities in those graphs. I wish there was a more detailed article/paper somewhere.

certainly_not··on Bad Password Policies
Passwords don't need to be legible in the first place. There's nothing wrong with correcthorsebatterystaple.

On the other hand, forbidding spaces is absolutely misguided.

certainly_not··on 100 time cheaper dropbox like service
I can't understand how people trust (or even care about) server-provided encryption. There's no guarantee they or their friends can't open it on their servers. Unless you use your own solution, their encryption only provides protection in transit, against unaffiliated third parties.
certainly_not··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
I use this bash function to achieve something similar using the existing (and much larger) database commandlinefu.com:

    howdoi() { curl "http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/$(echo "$@" | sed 's/ /-/g')/$(echo -n $@ | base64)/plaintext"; }