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Neither does the posted link, that’s the point. It was a reference to a legendary Slashdot post from when the original iPod came out… never mind.

No wireless. Less space than creative.com/nomad. Lame.

FTP is perfectly secure though when run over SSL (FTPS), so why not use the protocol that’s already designed for file transfer with the server that makes it easy?

It’s way more of a hassle than that. Things like per-user chroot, managing permissions, restricting access to port 22… all much more difficult with SFTP. With an FTP server like vsftpd, you can just create virtual users and assign them home directories, then everything is just owned by the user running the ftp daemon process.

SSH requires a system account. FTP access can be granted and revoked via a database, or even a text file.

Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.

FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).

FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.

It seems like over the years Braid has gone through alternating periods of being praised as an absolute masterpiece and being derided as pretentious self-gratification by an arrogant and particularly insufferable developer.

In any case, anyone who like Braid should play Baba is You. Both games present the same sort of enjoyable mindscrew.

It supports WinAmp skins too… Dare I say it?

Running it through the pipe lets you preview the command first and make sure it actually looks correct. Then you just re-run the command and append the bash pipe.

The cool thing about programming languages like Ruby is that they’re very conducive to one-liners. You can use them to generate bash statements that you can then pipe back to bash. `ls | ruby -nle 'puts "mv #{$_} #{$_.gsub(/_/, ".")}"' | bash` is a pattern I use all the time, for example. Easy way of generating complex bash statements without having to bother with the bash man page.

As a primarily FreeBSD user who feels like I have to relearn the idiosyncrasies of practically the entire system every I install a new Linux distro, the mess of configuration options somehow actually seems entirely on-brand to me.

something something XKCD competing standards something something

Not at all. That’s like saying learning how different kinds of engines work is redundant in the age of taxis. You don’t have to know any of this stuff in order to get from A to B. But if you want to understand the processes involved in getting there, or you maybe want to be the one that builds a better self-driving vehicle, this is where you should start.

This is both simultaneously false, and true but largely meaningless. If you mean the Mona Lisa is somehow directly encoded somewhere in pi, then of course it’s not. It’s just a number.

If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.

But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).