What was your magazine's stance on piracy, before it affected you?

The NSA doesn't care about them

Yeah, carry on and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Better than most of their furniture.

And its "NEAR" operator allowed me to fine-tune the results in ways unmatched even by today's search engines.

Parentheses, boolean operators, the NEAR operator... Altavista was the true hacker's choice for powerful web search. We don't lose it today, though: We lost it when it was turned into a rebranded Yahoo.

Anyway, the "running gag" comment just goes to show how low this place has sunk.

6 tabs AND I'm reading /. on a terminal.

w3m browser, and BTW this post was written with nvi.

Demand for bitcoins displaces demand for gold; lower demand drives the price of gold down; lower prices means lower profit margins and thus less gold mining.

That's an hypothesis, not a fact. Until that happens, bitcoin mining doesn't replace gold mining.

Bitcoin mining does not replace traditional mining. So, the fact that bitcoin mining has a smaller impact on the environment is irrelevant. It still counts as added impact.

I've been wondering the same thing about older news stories, on how the FBI was unable to crack PGP encryption. That too might be disinformacija.

Okay, that is fucked up. It's clearly the wrong behavior - BUT, why are you passing the incorrect filename and depending on the OS to match it as case-insensitive?

In my example, both filenames are correct and exist. The point is that the lowercase filename will replace the uppercase filename.

You have it wrong. The file system is not really case-insensitive as per the traditional sense. If you have a file named "SomeFile.pdf" and try to open "SomeFile.Pdf" it will fail. The case is sensitive just as with the other Unix based operating systems. Where it differs is that it will not allow you have files named "Readme" and "readme" in the same location.

> ls dir2
README
> mv dir1/readme dir2/
> ls dir2
readme

Bye-bye README! Because of this nonstandard behaviour, I once lost a bunch of files. Thankfully, I realized soon enough and I had backups; but - since then - I know I can't trust shell scripts known to work on other Unixes.

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

It's not that. I've updated the db (and I let update it periodically, via launchd) but it still won't find everything (not even regular user-owned stuff).

man CpMac

Yeah, I had come across that one. Then again, you first have to know it exists. Apple won't warn you nor inform you. And when you investigate and find out, it's usually because the regular Unix tools have already wrought havoc.

It's a case-preserving filesystem by default. Because it's a Mac and needs backward-compatibility.

Whatever. Have fun developing on a case-insensitive file system and not noticing case mismatches that will suddenly stop the show when you run your stuff on a proper Unix.

http://menphix.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/how-to-use-cron-in-mac-os-x/

That won't work, from at least 10.6 onwards. No cron by default. If you want it, you must use it in addition to launchd. If you want to start cron at boot, you have to tell launchd, by writing freaking XML!

Sounds to me like you don't like it because it's different from what you're used to and you don't know what you're doing because you didn't RTFM.

I don't like because it's a bastardized Unix that's not nearly Unix-like enough.

Correction to the above: it does have /dev, come to think of it, you just don't get to use it much, since you can't choose the mountpoint because mounting is automated!

OS X is more than FreeBSD it's UNIX(tm).

OSX may have been certified as Unix, but it has been diverging from its ancestor so much that it no longer feels Unix-like in the least.

Some examples:

- no /dev (bye-bye Unix philosophy cornerstone "everything is a file");
- unusable "locate" that doesn't find all the stuff it should (because Apple wants you to use Spotlight, the command line is bad, you silly!);
- much of the userland isn't aware of the HFS+ filesystem extensions (have fun cp'ing files, discovering months later that - oops! - the stuff had a resource fork and is now unusable -- verrry dependable!);
- case insensitive filesystem by default, you could switch to case sensitive for compatibility with any other Unix in the universe (have fun reformatting and reinstalling) but - alas! - important application software won't support it (photoshop & others);
- no cron! If you want to get it to do things periodically, you either gotta write freaking XML for launchd, or run Vixie Cron in addition to launchd. No thanks!

If OSX is Unix, it's the worst Unix I've ever seen. No serious command line nerd could ever like it (OTOH, it's perfect for know-nothings who like to click on pretty pictures). Using it is a totally different (as in "worse") experience than using any BSD (or Linux!), so spare me the old "OSX is BSD" hearsay!

Obvious practical joke. Not even close to being believable.