aka @JWBananas@startrek.website aka @JWBananas@lemmy.world aka @JWBananas@kbin.social

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Moving down the stack, Unix systems have never been big on supporting arbitrary drivers: remember that Unix systems were typically coupled to specific machines and vendors. NT, on the other hand, intended to be an OS for “any” machine and was sold by a software company, so supporting drivers written by others was critical. As a result, NT came with the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS), an abstraction to support network card drivers with ease. To this day, manufacturer-supplied drivers are just not a thing on Linux, which leads to interesting contraptions like the ndiswrapper, a very popular shim in the early 2000s to be able to reuse Windows drivers for WiFi cards on Linux.








  • Hurr durr what if I just multiply the whole thing by 4a for some reason? Oh and then after that I’ll add b² to both sides, just for shits and giggles. And for good measure, I’ll move a few numbers from one side to the other, and that leaves me with 4a²x² + 4abx + b² = b² - 4ac.

    And then golly gee! Wouldn’t you know it? That just happens to let the left side factor neatly into (2ax + b)²! So I’ll just take the square root of both sides…

    No!

    No!

    Bad!

    This is fucking voodoo. I hate this shit. It’s like trigonometric substitution.

    Math is procedural. Math is algorithmic. Math is repeatable.

    “If these numbers looked a little different than they do, I could solve this. Oh, wow! If I just sprinkle these magic values into my problem, everything works out great!”

    Oh yes, I can see how if you just plug in this shit you pulled out of your ass, everything works out great! But when you aren’t around for a fecal transfer, I have no idea how to come up with that.

    I was top of my class in math. But that voodoo shit never made any sense to me.

    And there is absolute value of zero chance I could figure all that out in the heat of the moment if I forgot the quadratic formula. I had to work backwards from the formula to even get all that in the first place.