bbanyc

6 ms·

1.
by bbanyc 5mo ago
I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right, which is used in many other international contexts. (Including aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Convention are in SDRs.)
2.
by bbanyc 1y ago
You can't just go by time zone names because there are weird exceptions, like most of Arizona not doing DST. Then there's Indiana, which didn't do DST until 20 years ago, and there are some counties that switched time zones w
3.
by bbanyc 1y ago
US Patent #5,662,332 - Trading card game method of play, inventor Richard Garfield, assigned to Wizards of the Coast https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en Obviously there have been lots of other TCGs, bu
4.
by bbanyc 1y ago
You very much can with board and card games. Monopoly was patented and so was Magic: the Gathering. My question is whether this patent only covers specific game mechanics introduced in the most recent Pokemon game or whether it's broad
5.
by bbanyc 1y ago
The "classic API" would probably be Xaw or Motif. Those haven't changed since practically before there was Linux.
6.
by bbanyc 1y ago
The ISA is only part of the computer platform, and the x86 PC is the only platform that's significantly standardized between vendors. There were several incompatible 6502-based computers in the 1970s and likewise for the 68k in the &#x
7.
by bbanyc 1y ago
The most significant contribution that DEC BASIC made was the REPL-like "immediate mode" that lets you execute individual statements without having to RUN the whole program. It was copied by both Microsoft and almost every other B
8.
by bbanyc 1y ago
For all the complaints about our corpus being contaminated by AI slop, there's been plenty of human-generated slop being regurgitated over the years as well. Lazy textbook writers copy and paste from older books, lazy test makers quiz
9.
by bbanyc 1y ago
That would've been rated well after the fact, since the MPAA didn't introduce film ratings until 1968.
10.
by bbanyc 1y ago
The funny thing is the classic Looney Tunes weren’t made for Saturday morning kids shows, but for movie theaters to be shown between the newsreel and the feature. (And weren’t necessarily kid stuff either - they were full of topical referen
11.
by bbanyc 1y ago
When Congress passed the CPB defunding bill, the Republican sponsors paraded around the most deranged takes to air on NPR in the last few years and asked, why should our tax dollars keep going to this? And I'll be the first to admit th
12.
by bbanyc 2y ago
The "." to terminate input was used in FTP mail on ARPANET, defined in RFC 385 which was well before anyone outside Bell had heard of Unix.
13.
by bbanyc 2y ago
The revenue cut for use of public streets is known as the "franchise fee." For the legacy cable companies, this was fixed by federal law in the 1980s at 5% of total revenue from cable television. For legacy phone companies, it var
14.
by bbanyc 3y ago
That overblamed decision was (a) specific to Michigan corporate law, and a reason why Ford reincorporated in Delaware shortly afterwards and (b) a finding that Ford had to pay dividends to its shareholders rather than reinvesting profits in
15.
by bbanyc 3y ago
At one point I stumbled onto a document from circa 1990 laying out a fairly coherent rationale - / was always a filesystem on the local machine while /usr could be a site-wide NFS share across many machines. Thus you got things li
16.
by bbanyc 3y ago
An LTO-9 tape cartridge can store 18 terabytes (they advertise 45 TB but that's with the built-in compression scheme and we want to compare raw bits to raw bits). One of these new 1.6 petabit discs would be just over 11 tapes, well und
17.
by bbanyc 3y ago
Yeah I remember as a kid saving a file with Word 97, then opening it on a different computer with Word 95, and there was a box between every pair of characters. Looking back, it's clear that the internal representation had changed from
18.
by bbanyc 3y ago
A while back I read a piece by, I think, Joel Spolsky on the "design" of the XLS format. It was mostly a dump of Excel's internal memory structures to disk, with some optimizations to speed up saving and loading on the slow d
19.
by bbanyc 3y ago
We had a bunch of riots a couple of years ago, don't you remember? The match was lit, the fires (metaphorical and literal) burnt for a while, and then gradually everyone got bored and things went back to normal.
20.
by bbanyc 3y ago
We need less of Richard Stallman and more of Matthew Garrett. Free software is good. Monomaniacal obsession with free software at the expense of literally everything else is why Stallman's allies are few and far between.
21.
by bbanyc 3y ago
Landlines carrying electricity meant that telephones still worked even when the power was out. That's maybe the one thing I'll miss about landlines.
22.
by bbanyc 3y ago
Before the Miller test, standards for "obscenity" were arbitrary and varied greatly from place to place. A magazine that printed an excerpt from James Joyce's Ulysses was banned as obscene, while a few years later the book as
23.
by bbanyc 4y ago
The USFL exists. It doesn’t really compete with the NFL but that’s more due to NFL teams having much more money with which to buy nearly all the top talent.
24.
by bbanyc 4y ago
This feels like one of the weird no-dialogue segments on the Muppet Show, only with people instead of Muppets.
25.
by bbanyc 4y ago
"It's not cheap, but I'm sure the government will buy it."
26.
by bbanyc 4y ago
Do you look up your stock prices in the WSJ tables? Mako's point isn't that print is obsolete, it's that printed daily snapshots of constantly-updated data are. (Which I 99% agree with, there are some rare cases when you want
27.
by bbanyc 4y ago
This has never been public record in the US, part of how America’s lax reporting requirements for private companies have traditionally made it more “business friendly” than Europe. As of 2024 private entities in the US will need to report o
28.
by bbanyc 4y ago
How about the oldest software in common use? There's probably some parts of the 1973 C rewrite of Unix still around in modern Solaris, idk how common that is. tcsh also dates back to the '70s and is also falling into disuse. Maybe
29.
by bbanyc 4y ago
ISP-hosted Usenet was a cost center. Between the potential liability from illegal content, the heavy bandwidth usage of alt.binaries.* and the lack of interest in anything else, it's no wonder ISPs shut it down. Frankly I'm a litt
30.
by bbanyc 4y ago
I posted a bit on Usenet in the early 2000s. It felt like a vast dying civilization, and I was fascinated by the depths of its history, so I ate up stuff like this. One thing that sticks out is how much technical constraints defined Usenet.

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