Q: Where does data written to /dev/null go?

A: It goes into a special data sink in the CPU where it is converted to heat which is vented through the heatsink / fan assembly. This is why CPU cooling is increasingly important; as people get used to faster processors, they become careless with their data and more and more of it ends up in /dev/null, overheating their CPUs. If you delete /dev/null (which effectively disables the CPU data sink) your CPU may run cooler but your system will quickly become constipated with all that excess data and start to behave erratically. If you have a fast network connection you can cool down your CPU by reading data out of /dev/random and sending it off somewhere; however you run the risk of overheating your network connection and / or angering your ISP, as most of the data will end up getting converted to heat by their equipment, but they generally have good cooling, so if you do not overdo it you should be OK.

Paul Robinson adds:

There are other methods. As every good sysadmin knows, it is part of standard practice to send data to the screen of interesting variety to keep all the pixies that make up your picture happy. Screen pixies (commonly mis-typed or re-named as “pixels”) are categorized by the type of hat they wear (red, green or blue) and will hide or appear (thereby showing the color of their hat) whenever they receive a little piece of food. Video cards turn data into pixie-food, and then send them to the pixies — the more expensive the card, the better the food, so the better behaved the pixies are. They also need constant stimulation — this is why screen savers exist.

To take your suggestions further, you could just throw the random data to console, thereby letting the pixies consume it. This causes no heat to be produced at all, keeps the pixies happy and gets rid of your data quite quickly, even if it does make things look a bit messy on your screen.

Incidentally, as an ex-admin of a large ISP who experienced many problems attempting to maintain a stable temperature in a server room, I would strongly discourage people sending the data they do not want out to the network. The fairies who do the packet switching and routing get annoyed by it as well.

// https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/funnies.html

<Damerell>
I am hoping the Internet of Incompatible Things mitigates the bad effects of the Internet of Insecure Things.

Sadly, I ain't even joking.


https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/40397.html?thread=1592269#cmt1592269

<q> is email case sensitive?
<google>Yes, according to RFC 2821, the local mailbox (the portion before @) is considered case-sensitive...
<q>is gmail case sensitive?
<google>No, e-mail addresses are not case sensitive, so Gmail addresses are not either. Those would all get to the same recipient. Because all e-mail is transmitted with a protocol called SMTP, and because SMTP is not case sensitive, you will find that no e-mail address in the world is case sensitive.

#define sizeof(x) 0

You can't have overflows if you never actually allocate anything :^)

Not every website needs to have a minimalist 3-word-on-every-page layout with big-ass pictures in the background and useless javascript all over the place. Put a fucking sidebar or some shit.

Most web deign these days seems to just copy whatever Apply/MS/whoever is cool right now is doing. Remember the shiny table Apple had? Bam, every one had to have shiny table. Selling software? Put it in a box on a shiny table. Have icons? You know what would make those like 2 million times better? If they were on a fucking shiny table.

Then flat tiles. Man, shiny tables are like totally awful. Make everything flat and square and in tiles. Preferably ones that jiggle like titties when you mouse over them. Can we have them shiny? No? Ok, then put the most garish color scheme you have all up in that bitch.

Holy shit! Guys. Guys! What if we had a giant mother fucking image as a background? And then it does all this weird shit when you scroll like some parallax fuckery that I read about? Even better, lets make it animated, because people with slow connections are just the worst. And besides, what kind of plebeian wouldn't want the same bullshit irrelevant hipster image with an instagram filter looping endlessly? That way you can see the parallax effects even better.

I swear, sometimes I think there's 3 web designers that are in a dungeon somewhere and every 4 years they come forth like Moses with the "next big design fad" that everyone follows for the next 4 years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4ahj6w/every_fucking_bootstrap_website_ever/d10fnkh

"(...) Application name and version. For historical reasons, Internet Explorer identifies itself as a Mozilla browser".

Źródło: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537503%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

- I'm trying to understand the difference, and benefits of using System.out.println() vs. return blah in a method.
- You're comparing potatoes with solar beams, and you're getting purple unicorns flying around stonehenge waiting for a meteor bringing back dinosaurs.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25456472/differences-between-system-out-printlin-and-return-in-java

$ fortune -m 'Them bats'

(computers)
%
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings:

(10) Sorry, but that's too useful.
(9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent!
(8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell
#pragma is for.
(7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too
hard to write.
(6) Them bats is smart; they use radar.
(5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in
here?
(4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!"
(3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this
sucker.
(2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth.
(1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.
%

In reality there's little practical need for this as hopefully people aren't going to be setting array.length to 0.5, -1, 1e21 or 'LEMONS'. But this is JavaScript authors we're talking about, so you never know...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1822350/what-is-the-javascript-operator-and-how-do-you-use-it

Once upon a time there was a programming language called C. And it had 2 memory management functions: malloc() and free(). But it was too complicated.
Bjarne Stroustrup decided that C memory management should be easier. So he invented C++. In addition tomalloc() and free(), C++ had new, delete, destructors, RAII, auto and shared pointers.
Guido van Rossum found that C++ was also not simple enough. He chose another way and invented Python - a language which doesn't have even malloc() or free().
Meanwhile Norwegian trolls created the C++ GUI library Qt. It simplifies memory management by deleting objects automatically when it thinks the objects are not needed.
A man called Phil Thompson was upset that a cool library like Qt doesn't exist in the excellent Python language. He combined them in the PyQt project. But it is not so easy to combine different memory management paradigms. Let's see what the pitfalls are.
(Text above is a fairy tale. Text below contains code and technical information)

http://enki-editor.org/2014/08/23/Pyqt_mem_mgmt.html

cat /etc/sudoers.d/README
#
# If you use #includedir /etc/sudoers.d, the directory must contain at
# least one file. This file is that file

Spam these days... It's like they're not even trying.

"Our records show that your account has a debt of $497.{rand(10,99)}}."

ahes: The best software standards.
ahes: # ssh-keygen --help
ahes: Generating public/private rsa key pair.

What If I Find a Bug in Perl?
The first thing to do when you find a bug is to check the documentation again. Perl has so many special features and exceptions to rules that you may have discovered a feature, not a bug.

Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy, and Tom Phoenix. „Learning Perl, 6th Edition”.

"This code is so ugly, it looks like Java."
http://isbullsh.it/2012/06/Rest-api-in-python/