SulphurCrested

5 ms·

1.
by SulphurCrested 9mo ago
The Burroughs large system architecture of the 1960s and 1970s (B6500, B6700 etc.) did it. Objects were called “arrays” and there was hardware support for allocating and deallocating them in Algol, the native language. These systems were in
2.
by SulphurCrested 11mo ago
The Photo (v2) app gives you a choice of using Apple’s converters or “Serif” converters. But, when last I looked, lens corrections were not available with the Apple converters.
3.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
Yes, ideally the tool should edit its own preferences. A quick and dirty tool might leave the user to run the macOS "defaults" command line utility themselves. It’s certainly no worse than looking up the dotfile format and firing
4.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
Towards the end TFA claims that Apple’s bundled command line utilities, including zsh and vim, put their dotfiles in ~/.config. They don’t. They put them in the traditional BSD place, the user’s home directory ~/. Looking at mine
5.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
I highly recommend his book with Jeffrey Kluger, “Apollo 13”, originally published as “Lost Moon” in 1994.
6.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
I live in a country where the socket on the wall the fan is plugged into also has a switch, which could be on or off. So to make the fan go around, both switches must be on; the user needs to know about and have a mental model of serial cir
7.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
The article suggests a “simple, well-labeled rotary control ... would accomplish the same function” as a power button and “prevent the user from accidentally activating the control in a way that is no longer hidden”. But a rotary control it
8.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
There’s a little-used alternative to through-running as described in TFA, which is to turn trains around in an underground loop in the city centre and send them out again, usually on the same line they came from. This is done in Sydney (192
9.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
It could also be invoked on VAX/VMS under the name “MUNG”, which was said to stand for “Modify Until No Good”. I think that style of invocation did something slightly different than using the TECO command, like creating a new file.
10.
by SulphurCrested 1y ago
We had TECO on our DEC VAXes running VMS in the early-mid 1980s. It had a ”VT52” mode (as you say, a macro), and at least one of the terminals on my desk supported those escape sequences. Wikipedia says the VT52 terminal was made from 1975
11.
by SulphurCrested 2y ago
The tunnel is signalled only for CBTC. The outer ends of the line have only the old fixed-block signalling. The section from Westall in the south east to (eventually) Sunshine in the north has both. There is a dedicated model of train, the
12.
by SulphurCrested 2y ago
I worked on this system during its development in the 1980s. There were actually two PDP-11s, the one to run the platform displays running locally-written software. The “weird control sequences” sent between the PDP-11 and the plaform displ
13.
by SulphurCrested 2y ago
The console processor was an LSI-11, a PDP-11 on a chip. It hung off the inside of one of the cabinet doors. It was responsible for booting the 780 and also gave VMS access to its own 8″ floppy drive, which had a habit of overheating. The 7
14.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
Phil Harvey’s exiftool [0]. Despite being a command-line tool, it is widely known and used by professional and advanced amateur photographers to extract or repair metadata in images. It does handle more than just still images. It’s written
15.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
The article, especially in its second half, confuses the City of Melbourne municipality with the city of Melbourne. The former is the central business district and surrounding area, the one with 33,000 open air car parks of which the local
16.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
The Multics terminals during its initial development at MIT were also mostly variants of the IBM Selectric typewriter, which rendered lower case text with descenders just fine. [0] [1] [0] https://multicians.org/terminals.ht
17.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
In late 1977/early 1978 I used a Honeywell Level 66 mainframe whose timesharing interface was lower-case. My memory is hazy, but I’m pretty sure I typed in the FORTRAN in lower case, and the printouts were in upper case, including the
18.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
More capable mechanical focal plane shutters with a flash sync speed of 1/200s or faster do not show objectionable rolling shutter effects for most practical stills photography, including wildlife and most sports. Better mirrorless cam
19.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
October used to be the 8th month (and September, November and December the 7th, 9th and 10th) because March was the first month of the year.
20.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
You could call this lots of things, but you shouldn’t call it “metric” because its second is not a metric second. In the SI (metric) system, the second is one of the fundamental units. The world does not need a conflicting definition for th
21.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
Filco Majestouch 2 TKL with Cherry MX Brown switches. I configured macOS to swap the OPTION and COMMAND keys and physically swapped the keycaps using the supplied puller. This is a Japanese keyboard with German switches. I’ve had it for qui
22.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
Ask yourself why it frustrates you. Perhaps you can’t see exactly where the click will be – a high res screen makes a difference. Perhaps you haven’t learned all the mouse shortcuts. Two on macOS are: triple-click to select a whole line; an
23.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
This is going to be controversial, but what saved me was abandoning a keyboard-intense environment (emacs + command line) for Apple’s Xcode. I do still build much of the time at the command line, but editing code and switching between windo
24.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
Preview has already been sandboxed for years.
25.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
Ours was via the network, although I think we didn’t take the alt tree. Unix distributions, on the other hand, arrived on 9-track tape via the “distribution tree”. You would get a copy, then make copies and send those on. Bug reports (at le
26.
by SulphurCrested 3y ago
We certainly had email before 1989. I managed systems at another university and had a working .edu.au email address there, email servers and a usenet feed, and had left that job by late 1986. In fact one of my systems was a beta for 4.2 BSD
27.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
I’ve had astigmatism my whole life, and worn glasses or contacts since age 4. 1. Wear your glasses! Even if you think you can see OK for a while without them. 2. The floaters and light-sensitivity should be checked by a medical professional
28.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
The standard was changed around 20 years ago to require the insulation. Before that, it wasn't required. Those IEC cables are probably just older than that. A couple of other things they also did away with are non-moulded plugs supplie
29.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
The fallacy here is to assume either Adelaide or Melbourne are in the correct time zones with respect to the solar day. Prior to 1895, Adelaide ran at solar time, GMT +9:14. When time zones were introduced, they went for GMT +9:00, but chan
30.
by SulphurCrested 4y ago
I don't believe it's that. On macOS Monterey: $ which pv pv not found I've been using Unixes of various flavours since the 1980s and had never heard of it until I read this article. It's certainly more obscure t

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