Viewing profile — bbanyc

I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right, which is used in many other international contexts. (Including aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Co…

You can't just go by time zone names because there are weird exceptions, like most of Arizona not doing DST. Then there's Indiana, which didn't do DST until 20 years ago, and there…

US Patent #5,662,332 - Trading card game method of play, inventor Richard Garfield, assigned to Wizards of the Coast https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en Obviously there…

You very much can with board and card games. Monopoly was patented and so was Magic: the Gathering. My question is whether this patent only covers specific game mechanics introduce…

The "classic API" would probably be Xaw or Motif. Those haven't changed since practically before there was Linux.

The ISA is only part of the computer platform, and the x86 PC is the only platform that's significantly standardized between vendors. There were several incompatible 6502-based com…

The most significant contribution that DEC BASIC made was the REPL-like "immediate mode" that lets you execute individual statements without having to RUN the whole program. It was…

For all the complaints about our corpus being contaminated by AI slop, there's been plenty of human-generated slop being regurgitated over the years as well. Lazy textbook writers …

That would've been rated well after the fact, since the MPAA didn't introduce film ratings until 1968.

The funny thing is the classic Looney Tunes weren’t made for Saturday morning kids shows, but for movie theaters to be shown between the newsreel and the feature. (And weren’t nece…

When Congress passed the CPB defunding bill, the Republican sponsors paraded around the most deranged takes to air on NPR in the last few years and asked, why should our tax dollar…

The "." to terminate input was used in FTP mail on ARPANET, defined in RFC 385 which was well before anyone outside Bell had heard of Unix.

The revenue cut for use of public streets is known as the "franchise fee." For the legacy cable companies, this was fixed by federal law in the 1980s at 5% of total revenue from ca…

That overblamed decision was (a) specific to Michigan corporate law, and a reason why Ford reincorporated in Delaware shortly afterwards and (b) a finding that Ford had to pay divi…

At one point I stumbled onto a document from circa 1990 laying out a fairly coherent rationale - / was always a filesystem on the local machine while /usr could be a site-wide NFS …

An LTO-9 tape cartridge can store 18 terabytes (they advertise 45 TB but that's with the built-in compression scheme and we want to compare raw bits to raw bits). One of these new …

Yeah I remember as a kid saving a file with Word 97, then opening it on a different computer with Word 95, and there was a box between every pair of characters. Looking back, it's …

A while back I read a piece by, I think, Joel Spolsky on the "design" of the XLS format. It was mostly a dump of Excel's internal memory structures to disk, with some optimizations…

We had a bunch of riots a couple of years ago, don't you remember? The match was lit, the fires (metaphorical and literal) burnt for a while, and then gradually everyone got bored …

We need less of Richard Stallman and more of Matthew Garrett. Free software is good. Monomaniacal obsession with free software at the expense of literally everything else is why St…

Landlines carrying electricity meant that telephones still worked even when the power was out. That's maybe the one thing I'll miss about landlines.

Before the Miller test, standards for "obscenity" were arbitrary and varied greatly from place to place. A magazine that printed an excerpt from James Joyce's Ulysses was banned as…

The USFL exists. It doesn’t really compete with the NFL but that’s more due to NFL teams having much more money with which to buy nearly all the top talent.

This feels like one of the weird no-dialogue segments on the Muppet Show, only with people instead of Muppets.

"It's not cheap, but I'm sure the government will buy it."