duskwuff

Joined 18 years ago

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Wuf.
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Comment · 4 hours ago
Comment · 18 hours ago
Comment · 2 days ago
Comment · 2 days ago
Perl also has "until" as the inverse of "while".

(It'll also let you use "unless ... else ..." - but please don't.)

Comment · 4 days ago
Most of those models were not sold concurrently. The Apple II, II+, and IIe each replaced the previous model; the same was true of the IIc and IIc Plus. "//e" was an alternate textual rendering of IIe, not a separate model.

The most Apple II models that were sold concurrently were the IIe Platinum, IIc Plus, and IIgs. (And this was around 1990, at which point there were far more models of Macintosh computers on the market.)

Comment · 4 days ago
The chatbot sidebar seems to also be the only way of accessing certain Amazon features, like the price history. And it seems to be implemented in a particularly silly way - clicking the "price history" button prompts the chatbot to show you the price history, rather than just showing it.
Comment · 4 days ago
Thank you. Yes - that's where I was going with this. It was certainly possible to use computers for long-form writing in the early 1980s, but it wasn't a particularly economical or practical way of going about it. Some people did, but they were in it more for the novelty than practicality.
Comment · 6 days ago
Not even "most" of Europe - almost all European languages use diacritics to some extent or another. In the context of domain names, some words are comprehensible with the diacritics stripped, but there's some loss of precision. (For instance, an "ñ" is critical if you're trying to say "happy new year" in Spanish...)
Comment · 6 days ago
... might sound like a reasonable solution until you start trying to write about languages. It is unreasonable for a sentence like "In Japanese, the word for 'hello' is こんにちは; in Korean, it's 안녕하세요." to be unrepresentable.
Comment · 6 days ago
Neuromancer was written between 1981 and 1984. The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.

(Consider, for example, that the first chapter of Neuromancer alone would have exceeded the stock memory capacity of many personal computers at the time, at ~46 kB.)

Comment · 6 days ago
Internally, sure. But the application that was (probably) compromised was an FTP client, so it would have received the plain text of those passwords from users as they logged in.
Comment · 6 days ago
Comment · 7 days ago
I don't think the DVI-A connector was ever widely used for analog video input. Devices which supported analog video input almost universally did so using a VGA connector.

The analog pins on the DVI connector were used on many video cards for output, but they were mostly there so that you could use a DVI-to-VGA adapter, not because there were many devices which could use it directly from that pinout.

Comment · 10 days ago
And? Having boatloads of money doesn't make you any smarter or better at making business decisions.
Comment · 10 days ago
And even when a fire truck responds to a house fire (for example), they may still potentially need to treat and/or evacuate people who have been injured in the fire. Cross-training firefighters so that they can do both makes sense.

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