91–100 of 134 posts
Very sad story. The guy's initials are immortalized in the magic number of the zip file format, the bytes of which are 0x50 0x4b 0x03 0x04 The values 0x50 0x4b are 'P' 'K' in ASCII. Note also that every Java JAR file is also a ZIP file, so they all begin with the same magic number.
Off topic, but what was so special about the "zip" file over a ".tar.Z" file, especially that it already existed when ZIP came out?
- It had a table of contents. You can list the contents of a ZIP file, or even extract individual files, without having to decompress the whole thing. (Which was a particularly big deal back in the 90s, when extracting a large archive would take a while.) - You could update an archive in place. Not incredibly useful, but certainly nifty. - It had support for multi-disk archives. Again, big deal in the 90s. Finally, l…
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I feel most sorry for Tom Henderson, esp at 20:20 claiming he's over it. Low barriers to entry make software easy to get into... and easy for your replacement to get into. It seems software businesses aren't common any more for that reason (excepting MS).
They are, it's just rather than installing the software locally, you access it as a service. And games, games developers are still software companies, albeit in the entertainment space.
The difficult programming in games seems mostly deferred to engines (which are becoming cheaper and nore commoditized), and the game is mostly "content" - more akin to a movie than software. But you're right, games are software, and are thriving.
For some people conscious existence is too burdensome, uncomfortable, full of anxiety, outright maddening or some combination thereof. You see this in everyday life too, albeit in benign quantities - watch a kid after you tell him he can do nothing for the next hour. I had read Phil Katz's story before and I read it again today - it wasn't any less painful the second time around. I think if we were to debug it - ther…
> For some people conscious existence is too burdensome, uncomfortable, full of anxiety, outright maddening or some combination thereof. Reading this gives me immediate anxiety. I have times during the day where just seeing things and being alive is almost unreal, like I can't deal with, and the thought of doing this for N number of years more is overwhelming. As I'm getting older life is just even more surreal, I so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brit here too. I feel your pain. I'm not a drinker but my parents are. It's getting more and more excessive. I'll find litres of whiskey hone in a sitting. The drink has ruined my relationship with them. When I was a teenager, me and my sister suffered from psychosis. They blamed their drinking on that. When we got better, they continued and found a different scapegoat. My sister is going through children's mental he…
I have no idea whether this will help at all, but after staring at it for a while, I decided I had to try. I think it's VERY likely that a craving for a chemical such as alcohol or various drugs is learned by the brain and shares a property with such things as language learning, which is that early learning plants it deeply and indelibly in a rapidly developing brain--making it essentially native to the brain's struc…
Unfortunately too late. My sister has had her first drink a year or so ago. She was 14 iirc. I had mine at 11 - 12.
We can shun alcohol. I have a bottle of Jaeger in the fridge untouched. I got it last Christmas.
In effect, being stupid with it when I was a kid made me realise I have a point where it isn't pleasant at all. It also made me realise that I hate the idea of me under the influence - I hate feeling like a fucking idiot.
That plus the damage it has done through other means has left me a non-drinker. If alcohol became a class A substance tomorrow and the day after consuming it was punishable by summary death, I would not care (except maybe about a right wing govt). I wouldn't give a shit about losing booze.
I also have young children. If I won't jump in a car after 1 drink, how can I look after my kids? What if one wakes up?
Off topic, but what was so special about the "zip" file over a ".tar.Z" file, especially that it already existed when ZIP came out?
There was for a good while a bit of a "compression arms race" with folks looking to find the most optimal compression to save precious time on BBS dial-up. For a while 'ZIP' won, then 'ARJ' managed to squeeze out a bit more, and so on -- though I think diminishing returns kept things from going too far beyond ZIP/ARJ on many BBSes.
Off topic, but what was so special about the "zip" file over a ".tar.Z" file, especially that it already existed when ZIP came out?
I imagine it was just a product of UNIX/academia being somewhat isolated from the general public/BBS world. Before GNU/Linux basically nobody using PCs had access to UNIX-like systems, and probably wouldn't have known of tar's existence. My older sibling exposed me to tar indirectly by granting me access to their university-provided dialup UNIX account where they ran `elm` for email access, and this happened long aft…
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> For some people conscious existence is too burdensome, uncomfortable, full of anxiety, outright maddening or some combination thereof. Reading this gives me immediate anxiety. I have times during the day where just seeing things and being alive is almost unreal, like I can't deal with, and the thought of doing this for N number of years more is overwhelming. As I'm getting older life is just even more surreal, I so…
Phew, I'm not alone. Word for word, to the letter.
One old saw has it that when a man is starving he forgets even the urgent promptings of a full bladder. A newer old saw claims that religion is the opiate of the masses (with its uncoined analog regarding fetishism & the ruling classes).
The quoted OP railed against wasted time and effort, but his views on the despiritualization of the modern man are not clear. A non contemporary would likely diagnose a 'spiritual crisis' for the existential angst of the uncommon non-aristocratic unbelieving modern man.
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Windows executables start with "MZ", for Mark Zbikowski. Edit: fixed the name
FreeBSD (and other BSD) UFS2 file systems have a magic number that coincides with Kirk McKusick's birthday. #define FS_UFS2_MAGIC 0x19540119