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murphyslaw

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I don't know if the one you're talking about is one of these, but in the many years I worked at Cisco they seemed to buy a company every few weeks. Many of them had decent products which Cisco then meticulously destroyed. Luckily there was always kit to preserve for future generations, which I dutifully stacked in my attic.

The AirPods Effect 1 month ago

I never take public transport because the noises drive me crazy. Earbuds help, but not enough to make it bearable.

I believe that the biggest problem in the US is the constitution. It's next to impossible to change so the only way to fix it is replacing it entirely with a new one. But good luck with that...

It always exists on any Unix system. Even a busybox root environment. Why do you want to save a few bytes to compromise portability?

You can use /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, /dev/stderr in most cases

Never ever write code that assumes this. These dev shorthands are Linux specific, and you'll even need a certain minimum Linux version.

I cringe at the amount of shell scripts that assume bash is the system interpreter, and not sh or ksh.

Always assume sh, it's the most portable.

Linux != Unix.

All of it is built from source, it's just that the current build process is not easy to audit. The build by definition needs to happen on multiple platforms or cross compiled, a root cert needs to be setup in the windows installer at boot time, and so on.

I agree that this is not an ideal way to boot an ISO, but the general public is unlikely to ever need a multiboot USB stick. I like this project enough to perhaps contribute.

The End of Finale 2 years ago

I "own" Finale and the Garritan instrument package, which cost me around $600 on a student license. I remember having to guide my music composition teacher through installing his MIDI interface which connects his keyboard to Finale when he upgraded his computer.

He is the conductor of a local musical group and rewrites the scores for different instruments depending on the orchestra he can find/pay.

This guy has spent thousands of dollars over the years, and now he is faced with.... what? Relearning the interface? Can he still open his old scores, and (rather importantly), will the score "work" in its entirety, with all the accidentals in the right place, the lyrics in the right position and split to the correct notes to be sung, the trumpets in the right key, the timpani using the correct symbols, the repeats and coda correctly defined, the personal additions still working? What about linking each instrument to the correct MIDI output or instrument package?

This goes way beyond just cost, even if for a musician who doesn't make tons of money. The intellectual investment over decades is hard to express to someone who doesn't write music for a living.

About the job offers: at Cisco they have (or had) only 6 months to fill a "req", i.e. the permission to hire someone. If not filled by then the req got taken away.

So what you do is, you find someone, then open the req, then wait a while and hire the person you already selected.

Internal hiring websites are for show only.

I was part of a conspiracy to commit massive credit card fraud as a minor (thankfully all no longer relevant). I was given AT&T calling card numbers which were pilfered right from the USPS to use to connect to US BBSes to download hacked software.

The Belgian guy I was in with got raided by the police. His hard disks had been hidden behind a brick wall with only the cables visible. They didn't find the hard disks so he got away with it, and I never got arrested or charged.

Good times.

Everyone I know in Belgium/The Netherlands/... uses Whatsapp. It's even got into the language: "to app someone", i.e. "iemand appen".

What I found really strange when I went there for a few weeks, was that the entire network ground to a halt before midnight. And this for a city of 25 million people.

Which I guess is why I found people sleeping in their suits near Shinjuku station. I still wonder where all the bar staff and their customers went to after closing up for the night. I asked the hotel staff and they said they could sleep on-site.

Milk bag 3 years ago

In Europe it's fairly common to find wine in 3L boxes. The quality varies, but the same is true for the ones you find in bottles.

Supermarkets also buy and bottle their own wines so you often find the same wine in both bottles and boxes.

df just uses C library calls which use system calls.

If you're going to implement something like this then ffs do it right. I don't know the "easy" way to fix this, but in any case if something is supposed to be transparently free and available then standard tools using standard calls should see it as free and available, with specialized user space tools that can look behind the screens when needed.