Viewing profile — Steve_Baker

"she later told me that I was anti-authoritarian and more likely to do what I thought was right rather than what I had been instructed to do. I am still baffled to this day about h…

Liquefaction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_liquefaction

Every time fizzbuzz comes up, someone has to post a solution it seems, but why does everyone write such huge fizzbuzz programs? for(int i=1; i

The virtual size of a program includes all shared objects (shared libraries, shared copy on write memory pages, the read only executable pages and other shared memory) that a proce…

Politicians already make a lot of their wealth from insider information. Even if you somehow stopped all donations, corporations would just trade more knowledge for favors. Politic…

I think you may have missed what I think is the most important point made in the article: "It is also interesting to consider that students in the treatment group spent approximate…

How do you tell a file from a directory without stat()ing it? The d_type field is not portable. Since find and other tools like it need to recursively descend a directory tree, a s…

Yes, you just split the current view (vertically or horizontally) or open a new window. Any change to a file will be immediately updated in the other views/windows.

I think regardless of the reasons why, people who want to be leaders, on the whole, clearly shouldn't be. Since these people comprise a small subset of the total of all people, sim…

Obviously not for me. I finish all my programs in under 5 minutes. :-(

I'd tend to agree, but for myself I think what I enjoyed most about programming was the problem solving aspect. As I've matured as a programmer the problems become easier and thus …

I live in a smallish city in Indiana, pay $56 a month for apple/oranges maybe, but doesn't sound vastly different from North Africa from where I'm standing.

If only the average administrator were so forward thinking. Too often they can think no further than the next quarter. Still, there are always consulting fees for him to look forwa…

I know that a lot of people would think that, but I can tell you from personal experience that that is likely not the case. One offs, impressive or not, rarely, if ever, factor int…

I don't think it follows that polyandry is less advantageous for a woman than polygamy -- more men equals more resources. I think the reason is that most societies are patriarchal …

Anyone who wants to see Avatar (or any western movie) in China can just plunk down the 9-10 yuan ( My inlaws in China probably watch more American movies than I do and I have netfl…

People like to watch train wrecks too, but that doesn't mean they want to be in one.

Why buy the more expensive calculator with feature X when you can add that feature to your cheaper device with a software upgrade? I imagine some of the difference between models m…