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rbanffy
194,611karma·63,760submissions·March 12, 2008
about
Seasoned software developer, proficient in Python, Java. Less proficient in Ruby and Lisp. A bit rusty in C and C++. Learning Erlang very slowly. Also a computer collector and restorer, lover of 8-bit computers, mainframes and interesting Unix workstations.
email: username at that google mail thing
http://about.me/rbanffy
https://linkedin.com/in/ricardobanffy
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rbanffy; my proof: https://keybase.io/rbanffy/sigs/HtF1uAf_RNpwIkNP1-YGWP_-3doWV6S5Cc1KywXeLYo ]
recent activity (63,760 total)
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If you want to paint using crayons, that would be correct.
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A tower extending 100 Km up would be a great point for scientific observation. But to be a space elevator replacement you would need a tower that could bear load up to geosynchronous orbit. That's not…
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"A series of towers that could suspend a magnetic accelerator about 300 miles long above the bulk of the atmosphere would be almost equivalent to a Space Elevator." The problem is that during accelera…
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"He calculates the tower could be extended up to low Earth orbit at 200 kilometres." 200 Km standing on top of an inflatable toy is not low Earth orbit! Who writes this stuff?
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Sadly, we use Exchange for corporate calendar and contacts. Evolution sort of works, but I have seen it refusing to connect or update stuff more than once. Had I sufficient memory (machine has 1 GB of…
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The machine I have has one 1 GB of memory. I could run Windows under a VM, but that would consume precious resources for the "good side". There is a lot of "heavy" stuff being done in IE (ActiveX for …
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Depending on what you have to do, it's not, but I have to edit documents that live in a sharepoint server a couple times a week and I never quite figured out how to do that without a Windows box. That…
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More than one accident (the 320 that ran off the airport here in São Paulo a couple years back comes to mind) happened because the computer thought the pilot needs it to do one thing while the pilot w…
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The dull ones, mostly. That said, the company I work for has an IT department that is not happy at all to issue non-windows boxes for employees. You can have one, but then you will have to manage it y…
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It's also interesting he tries to pass the Facebook friend as a typical reason for the fire TC is under... I won't say "not worth it", but TC has to be taken with a lot of salt. More, in fact, than my…
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Care to explain it for the Lisp-impaired?
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"he had worked at Microsoft and had observed them transitioning over to WebDAV in a big way and started pushing for its usage in SVN as well" That's why I am suspicious anyone who ever worked for Micr…
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It seems Bing is still Live Search on most countries. You have to click on your country name and chose United States to get the full interface. Kinda sucks
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gvanrossum, webmink, merlyn, limi are the ones I see the most
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Not only "still useful", but an elegant tool for a more civilized age.
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That's really annoying. All in favor of porting Gnome, KDE, Firefox, Java and OpenOffice to Plan9 and to write device drivers for nasty things like 3D accelerators, wireless network interfaces and so …
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I don't even know where to start. Google spreadsheets does not look like Excel that much. The only thing in common between them is the button bar and a fake menu bar, but all of that was present in Ma…
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Having a shortcut for something like ssh is so Windows...
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Some people have no sense of humor...
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The whole article is flawed - it's based on the false assumption there is such a thing as an advanced Windows user. :-P
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I will buy one if and only if I can install my own software on it.
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Wow! Why no radio beacon?
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On the other hand, you could make the whole plane float and just let the blackbox sink ;-)
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That's why they have radio beacons
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Pretty much doesn't as a COW fs does not need to.
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I will concede that, according to my very limited Rails experience, it generates a lot of database chatter when compared to hand-coded queries. Still, this is mostly a database scaling problem. The be…
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"If a web app is spending most of it's time blocking for I/O, it's poorly designed. There's no reason that it can't be handling other requests while waiting for a DB response or a pipe" If your reques…
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"Your comment adds less to an intelligent discussion than does the article you're calling a troll." Sometimes the truth is very simple. It can be considered a troll because it is in the tone "if you d…
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oops... "many modules"...
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Interesting when a factually correct observation can be construed as an attack.