palordrolap

There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was SWITCHAR=- in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.

It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn’t know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being “wrong”. The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn’t use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.

Here’s an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character

Given the engineer’s amendment to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” is usually “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”, I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.

And it may yet swing back the other way.

Twenty or so years ago, there was a brief period when going full AMD (or AMD+ATI as it was back then; AMD hadn’t bought ATI yet) made sense, and then the better part of a decade later, Intel+NVIDIA was the better choice.

And now I have a full AMD PC again.

Intel are really going to have to turn things around in my eyes if they want it to swing back, though. I really do not like the idea of a CPU hypervisor being a fully fledged OS that I have no access to.

If you like a bit of pop pseudoscience, you might like* the idea that today (or this time last week), is Blue Monday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Monday_(date)

* Take this word as you see fit.

Me: “Oh no, that wtf means it’s gonna be a LiveLeak site isn’t it?”

platform for general use

Me: “Ah, so maybe not so bad then.”

Every topic is welcome.

Me: “… and yet…”

Seriously though, I’m all for the Fediverse in all its many forms, and without people like you it wouldn’t exist. Thank you.

Urge to analyse… rising…

My first guess would be to take out that semicolon on line 264. JavaScript will often happily take a new line as end of statement if it makes sense to do that, so in theory, that semicolon is not needed. And it might be a Greek question mark your prankster colleague put in your code when you weren’t looking.

And then I’d be tracing parentheses, curlies, quotes and so on, because that error could be the point the parser gave up trying to make sense of the code rather than where the error actually is.

And if that didn’t find it, I’d put in a deliberate error at an earlier, known line to see where the parser thinks that error is. If it’s offset by 20 lines, then I know the original error is probably offset by a similar amount.

This isn’t strictly true. Most houses built between WWII and the '90s were built with sockets that didn’t have switches on them. It was only later safety regulations / suggestions that made the switches preferable.

Where I live was built in the late '80s right before switched sockets became more common. All the original sockets have no switch. Some in the kitchen have switches, but it’s clear these were added at a later date.

I’m not sure of the exact rulings and where and when a socket must have a switch, but you can still find switchless sockets for sale at the sorts of retailers who sell those sorts of things, so there are definitely places where those sockets are still allowed.

Ah, misleading use of terminology that indicates one thing, but will win in court even if it actually means, or can later be said to mean, another.

I hope those involved in helping companies win these lawsuits choke on bones from food sold as boneless. Because that won a court case after “boneless” was redefined as a cooking method.

I don’t want them to choke to death. Just a little lesson, you know?

“Instagram” is, at least in my opinion, about as awkward as “Friendica” to say, and has millions of users. It wins marginally on spelling, but how often does the average user write or type the full name of a site anyway?

Sometimes, programs that need to start up an editor will honour the $EDITOR environment variable, which should contain the name of, or full path to, a user’s preferred editor.

It’s not set by default though, and a lot of things will naturally default to vi or even ed. Something to be set in a .profile, .bashrc or similar.

$VISUAL is another variable that is used for similar purposes.

The resemblance to certain two letter commands is not entirely a coincidence.

If there was ever a time to replace this Drake format with the Geordi LaForge alternative, this was it.

Aa ay luv mi sum daownvoats fer tryin tu help with spellinz

May ay sujest that we all comprumize on “braik” insted? :p

While the word for a thing used for slowing and stopping a vehicle probably came from the word meaning “to destroy or cause to not work”, they are spelled differently, and may even have been pronounced differently at one point (assuming there aren’t any places which maintain a difference even now). The thing in a car is a brake.

See also: “then” and “than” which have a similar kind of relationship, and “steak” and “stake” which don’t.

Elvis and I were alive at the same time.

Someone sharper than I am came up with the suggestion of categorising people in a similar way to how it’s done by disability in the Paralympics. As to what those categories should be and whether it’s practical, let alone possible is another thing entirely.

Basically turn the “categorisation by disability” on its head and make it “categorisation by ability”.

Thought experiment: Would you expect a programming language variable name to be case insensitive?

That is, if you set foo = 1 and then print FOO, what should happen? Most programming languages throw an error.

Is this even comparable with filenames, which are, after all, basically variable names that hold large quantities of data?

If there is a difference, is it the fact it’s a file, or - for a mad idea - should files with only a few bytes of data retain case insensitivity? And if that idea is followed through, where’s the cutoff? 256 bytes? 7?

(Anyway, Windows filenames are case sensitive, in a sense. If you save “Letter to Grandma.txt” it will retain those two capital letters and all the lower case letters exactly as they are. It won’t suddenly change to “LETTER to Grandma.txt”, despite the fact that if you try to open a file by that name, you’ll get the same file.)

The video’s suggestion of /dev/null makes that super easy.

Yes. It is an instrument used in the consumption of drugs.

Or do you mean musical instrument? TL;DR: It can be.

It comes down to how wide you want the definition of “musical instrument” to be. Is a drumstick a musical instrument? Is it what makes a drum designed to be played with sticks an instrument? What is such a drum without at least one stick?

“Well I could hit the drum with something else.” Sure, but does that make the “something else” the instrument?

What is a woodwind (musical) instrument without the player’s breath? A saxophone without a reed?

“I could smack it on something.”

Well, yes, that’s the crux of it.

In the loosest sense, anything that can be used to make a noise is a musical instrument. Take the popular joke of mayonnaise: if you put a straw in it and blow, I’m willing to bet some sort of noise can be had.

This then brings in the other argument: what counts as musical?

I strongly suspect that many of these things have already, uh, been tried.

As for those that clearly made it through at least one round of testing, a self-styled “Weird Explorer” has a YouTube series called “That’s not coffee” where he - and occasionally a friend or two - reviews some of them.

Not sure if there’s anyone on there who has tried roasting and grinding other sorts of beans for science though. The closest I can think of is the various creators making tofu alternatives from beans that aren’t soy, which kind of turns the whole thing on its head: Could you make a tofu from coffee beans? (I’m guessing not, but that’s another for-science idea.)

Time for a law to be passed that kills off this bad idea permanently.

With governments (of all alignments) in the pockets of, or otherwise under the influence of, the very large corporations whose advertising would stand to benefit from this, I have only the following to say: Good luck with that.