Viewing profile — spauldo

The term "PLC" is a lot more specific than "computer with some GPIO ports." No one that works with PLCs would consider a Raspberry Pi to be one. These things are walled gardens. Yo…

A microcontroller based solution is rarely a good replacement for a PLC. You can find integrators willing to come out and troubleshoot your device in the field a lot more easily th…

The first line of text on their homepage? But I don't see anything wrong with OpenBSD saying they focus on security when it's well documented that they do, in fact, focus heavily o…

I ran it diskless for years with read-only NFS mounts. Set up syslog and a pflog daemon to send logs elsewhere, and you don't need write access most of the time.

I'll add another recommendation for Scheme. The concepts in SICP map very well into Scheme, whereas I can only imagine them being awkward and non-idiomatic in JS. There's lots of p…

Because a lot of people aren't libertarians?

I agree that the characterization was uncalled for in the post you replied to. But I don't agree with your statement that most people who generally oppose regulation have good reas…

I swear if Sun Microsystems was still around, their machines would still ship with 8-bit pseudocolor and you'd have to pay an extra $3k for 24-bit.

Yep. I can do basic plumbing, but I haven't touched it since I started making enough money to pay a plumber to do it for me. Plumbers are worth every dollar they charge if it means…

It's really no different than every other BSD utility (and SysV utility, if you're running one of those) being different than the GNU ones. We've coped with it for fifty years at t…

I don't have much to disagree with there, only that any survey answer is the difference between complex things is going to be simplified. I'm thumb typing here and no one's paying …

Well it 40 below and I don't give a...

FreeBSD is a heavier, more capable system, suitable for large servers. It's got its own virtualization platform (bhyve), an LXC-ish container system (jails), native ZFS, dtrace, Li…

I had the opposite food experience in the EU, but I'll admit my experience is mostly Spain. In the US there's usually a good variety of food from all different cultures available. …

I seem to remember Iceland was looking hard into hydrogen for their fishing fleets. They have to import Diesel fuel but they've got geothermal running out of their ears. I haven't …

I pay DigitalOcean $6/mo for a VM that started out as just that - a bare repo and ssh. If it was available at the time, I'd probably have paid $10 for the same if I didn't have to …

Only certain types of contractors, and likely only in the short term. Military contractors do well when the military has widespread support from the voters. Congresscritters will h…

The carriage return and linefeed combo are the commands to move to the next line of a teletype. Other commands might (in theory) be used for this purpose on other devices. These ar…

The American suburbs are full of houses with attached garages, so I'm hardly alone in this.

He's got that Venezuelan woman's Nobel too, doesn't he?

Unless you travel a lot and live in hotels for months at a time, like I do. Granted, that's not horribly common but there are still legitimate reasons to want an ICE.

I would. Why wouldn't I? I park my car in an attached garage. If I had an EV or PHEV, I'd walk right past the charger on my way to the door into the house. I don't like standing ar…

Whether he believed in it or not, he passed rigorous physical tests for the Navy and NASA. They don't let just any slob be a fighter pilot, much less a test pilot or astronaut. If …

There were effectively no free compilers in the 80s. If you had an expensive UNIX workstation it might come with one, but everyone in the micro world had to pay. Or they wrote in A…

I dunno, given the reputation we Americans have as tourists, it'd be nice to point out good ol' Alex and say, "hey, it could be worse!"