I wonder what percentage of even frequent shell users are even aware of !! or ^subst^ - an informal polling of 5 workmates here (engineers, command line git users, people I would have thought would know) shows no takers.
To be fair, I'm old and was thrilled to go from 300 to 1200 baud at one point.
I was puzzling about Hydra- vs Hydro- the diagrams don't claim that water is involved, but I wondered if there was some sort of ingenious multi linkage gearing involved that might merit Hydra. Still really neat.
I had never trusted the automatic “reheat” options that a lot of microwaves have had for years, until just recently I tried it out for reheating some chicken and pasta - and it really did a decent job. They’ve obviously iterated. (I don’t even know the model, but it’s a larger one probably two years old that I bought at goodwill for $30)
I've got an iPhone Xs Max (how old? no clue) Despite the camera bump if I have it on a flat surface playing audio it will scoot off and take a dive. (I ended up putting a case on it for that reason alone)
macOS is absolutely and infuriatingly the same as the examples here. I’ve yet to find anyone that actively defends this style - just like I have yet to find people to actively defend open office workspaces. (In apples case, both were designed by the same people.)
Back in the mists of time when writing cross platform software for any platform (Mac, Win < 95, SunOS + xview) each platform had bugs and we’d have to take pains to workaround them. Our customers didn’t care whose fault it was.
It used to be that a single tech support call cost us any profit from 3 copies of the product.
Things are different now though - the frameworks on platforms have orders of magnitude more surface and complexity. And most small companies don’t offer 1-1 support anymore.
It was from a study of how to mark a nuclear waste disposal site so that it would be understandable in 10k years. That was one of the sentiments they were trying to express - through symbols, earthworks, multiple languages.
On the other hand, I despise the mock playfulness exhibited by, eg, Slack. It’s such a frustrating environment for me - I feel like it’s not-so-subtle attempts at promoting engagement over presenting the content fill me with rage. I want my tools to fade into the background.
There was a huge push around that time for Apple to make a thin client style thing. Sun was doing it with java stations and it seemed to be “the buzz” and obvious direction. I don’t think anyone expected a consumer push in response.
But as a leader, if you don't know - then it's an opportunity for you and the team members to learn it together, the real point of which is teaching the team members how to adapt. Half the crap people ask me, I don't know, but I'm happy to find out with them. And maybe next time they'll be able to figure it out on their own.
Maybe he should try the the Naughton defence: Arrested for various "related to chatting up a child online and crossing state lines to meet up", his defence was that he was involved in role playing the life of a successful high flying executive, in other words, himself. It was at least persuasive enough to get him a hung jury, which is often as good as getting off entirely.
I find the latter - with all the conditions much less clear. I have to pause and reason about each condition and it’s relation to the others, the order of the comparisons and the effect of short circuits.
The first example makes it very clear that condition A means do it again and condition B means exit this loop while condition C establishes the boundaries of the loop.
Interesting to me - the NYC area (I’m from Connecticut nearby) seems like it’s been on solid ground for most of the timescale represented. And Florida didn’t exist 20mm years ago.
I’m not a “sportsball” person myself - but you’d be surprised at the number of extreme tech geeks that live and breathe the statistics of sports (particularly baseball). For them it’s about the mechanics and statistics and not the personalities.
Best dev flow for me is coworkers that don’t ask to ask, closed door office as necessary, and mid 70s prog rock (mostly, in 2003 I did a bluegrass rotation that seemed to coordinate well with Oh Brother Where Art Though)
Point being, what works for me may not work for you, but what works for you sounds like a hellscape to me.
Had to be about a year ago - I pulled down the latest sources for gnu emacs and built them on my next slab running OpenStep 4.2 (I think? 3.3?) - I think I had to tweak one source file and I joked about how long it took to build ("this really feels like I'm getting something done!") but it worked. Not Firefox, obviously, but an impressive amount of backwards compatibility in that codebase.
I don't know if it qualifies or not, but I recently discovered Hawkwind (circa 1970) and while it's not as lyrical as favoured prog bands, it has that "Oh, I really like this and it's only halfway through the 15 minute track".
I find it really hard to maintain a mental model of all the settings now - I wish there was a “save as text” (that had better structure than the direct output of “defaults read”) that would show all the Boolean switches. Maybe have a comment for “or one of these” for something that had an enumerated value (like scaling). Hmm. (Starting to sound like a “I should just damn well go write that and quit complaining”)
Not in nearly the same league, but Jim Al-Khalili is a physicist and science communicator for the bbc that I’ve really enjoyed. Far more on the “popular” end than Feynman, but his enthusiasm is infectious.
Our unix (Gould GLX or something?) with dozens of terminals lacked appropriate permissions on /dev/ttyNN - so we just piped rain directly to the neighbors terminal.
I don't think I've ever seen ungetc() used in production code.
I appreciate the "do it yourself" thing - but in 2023 unless you're building a product for a known ascii system, you're setting yourself up for pain when your code is run in San José,
You joke, but this is almost reasonable. When refactoring a large codebase riddled with strncpy, strcpy and strcmp, understanding unambiguously what code does shouldn't come down to my middle aged eyes being able to parse better than a compiler. I did a global search and replace with a #define, verified the object code diff'd against the original version, and never looked back.
I still see dot matrix printers around, usually in auto workshops where they’re printing through multi-ply copy paper and covered with decades of grease.
Classic Mac was like this (as were other systems) - the toolbox started in rom, but the OS would patch out it's jump table (effectively) as needed to add new functionality or fix bugs - but since the interface and data structures were basically what was defined in 1984 for much of it, it was really easy to insert yourself as a third party up and down the system. It was a lot of fun - and completely fell apart because of memory safety issues.