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K&R C


Altho idiomatic that is perhaps slightly confusing because K&R 2nd ed uses the modern way of specifying parameters. I would prefer to say "pre ANSI C" or something of that kind.


You would be rewriting history if we changed that now. It has been referred to K&R style C since the ANSI standard. The second edition of the C Programming Language was ANSI. My copy of the second edition has "based on the draft-proposed ANSI C" on the cover, but later ones just have "ANSI C". I think mine is almost identical to the ANSI version.

Every copy of K&R that uses ANSI has ANSI written somewhere on the cover. I've seen the first edition, and the content is pretty similar if not identical, save for the ANSI changes. But it is all in the K&R style.


Nearly twenty years ago I had a little server farm of old PCs. Two or three Pentium-133s, one dual Pentium Pro 200 machine, and my pride and joy, a Pentium 3 running at 600 MHz. I was trying to get familiar with Gentoo and to make recompiling everything all the time more bearable I set up distcc so my P3 could do most of the work. It worked very well!

But after a few weeks every Gentoo box in the house started crashing regularly. It took me a while to figure out what was going on: one of the slower machines had developed a single-bit memory error and was sharing corrupted .so files with all other machines.


Yeah. Everyone I’ve talked to who has run a build cluster has recommended ECC for the build cluster, even if they’ve decided not to use ECC for other systems. Some people would run Hackintosh-like setups for macOS build clusters, just for the ECC.

Reproducible builds are also a big win here.


Absolutely! This was a very educational experience.


I had to break into a laptop for my dad last week. Last used 7 years ago. Running win2k on a pentium 3.

Had to jump through various hoops and find creative ways around problems (laptop too old to boot from USB, all my modern machines lack optical drives. And so on) but I did eventually break in.


I still need to get around to setting up distcc; I only have two Gentoo servers, but one is so much more powerful than the other, and their CPUs are close enough I might be able to use ccache, too ...


> their CPUs are close enough I might be able to use ccache, too

It’s the compiler that needs to line up for that. But my recommendation is to install sccache which will figure it out for you.


This is Moid Moidelhoff's fascinating two hour interview with science fiction author and marine biologist Peter Watts, covering consciousness, intelligence, SF books and authors that influenced him, and many other subjects.


One of my cats loved snoozing on my big 19" CRT as well. When I replaced the CRT with my first LCD monitor, he tried to hop onto the non-existent top of the screen. In a mad scramble to not fall he put all of his front claws in the plastic cover of the screen. The LCD went from zero to hundreds of bad pixels within a day :-(

I still miss that cat too.


I bought the PDF last year for $7 (a very steep discount) during Apress/Springer's Black Friday sale. If you don't need the book right now or are on a budget, it may be worth waiting until next week in case they repeat the offer.


Here's a list of all the bumblebee species that are or have been present in Vermont: https://val.vtecostudies.org/projects/bumble-bee-atlas/speci...


They figured it out on the DC to Orlando route:

https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train


Also off-topic, TIFF files use 42 as a magic number in bytes 2 and 3 of the file header:

"The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance."


Unlikely to be the source as TIFF was first released 1986 and HHGTTG initial "release" was 1978. Although I'm not sure "the answer" was mentioned in the original radio show.


Right, the TIFF creators were obviously inspired by the Hitchhikers Guide.


Hah, obviously, I misunderstood the intent of your comment, makes much more sense the other way around :)


Just another case of causal inversion.

“Not again!”


I believe AT&T was trying to build a "videotex" system based on the NAPLPS protocol which was developed by Telidon in Canada.

BYTE Magazine's July 1983 issue was dedicated to videotex:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-07/mode/2up


I installed Debian Jessie on my 320CDT just a week or two ago. That's the last version of Debian that supports the Pentium MMX CPU. The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore and the screen is pretty dim.

The 320CDT came with Windows 95 but I got a $200 or so Toshiba store credit in a class action settlement because of a floppy drive problem with the 320CDT that I never actually experienced. I used that to buy Windows 2000 which ran reasonably well on the 96MB of RAM I have in the 320CDT.

My next laptop was a Satellite Pro 6100 which was a truly awful piece of hardware... got sent in for repairs multiple times and never worked right.


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