macdice

16 ms·

31.
by macdice 5y ago
Yeah, similar stories and timeline in other former dominions. I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_v_Hill fascinating, when a court in Australia was forced to consider whether the UK was a foreign power.
32.
by macdice 5y ago
Those are settler colonies, a completely different kettle of fish. From the point of view of the (majority) settler population, they gradually ceased to consider themselves as British and underwent a multi-step disentanglement of legal and
33.
by macdice 5y ago
Another stupid detail like this that immediately tells you that text is from America is the capitalisation of every word in a title. Compare the front page of the NY Times with the front pages from any other English speaking country and yo
34.
by macdice 5y ago
Some time in the 90s I caught what I was told was Alitalia's last smoking flight from Australia to Italy before it was phased out. Christ, it was horrendous. There was a smoking section up the back of the plane, but try telling that
35.
by macdice 5y ago
Is this also the end of HPUX? Can it run on anything else? It's hard to find information on that.
36.
by macdice 5y ago
Is that situation likely to improve? Got any good pointers for where to read about that?
37.
by macdice 5y ago
Might be a nice OS to run on https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme... (a phone about to ship with a Psion Series 5 style slide-out keyboard).
38.
by macdice 5y ago
Try "ah". This confusion could be caused by the caught-cot merger, possibly in combination with the father-bother merger.
39.
by macdice 5y ago
Some info here: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/20210223100344.ll...
40.
by macdice 5y ago
Peope are working on io_uring for PostgreSQL... watch this space... https://github.com/anarazel/postgres/tree/aio
41.
by macdice 5y ago
We were upset when content "bought" in the UK disappeared after we moved to NZ (specifically, I think it happened when we changed credit card billing address). We complained and they gave some of it back "at their discretion
42.
by macdice 6y ago
True. The question is whether the Linux emulation can be good enough to satisfy Android. There are lots of funny quirks ... I wish something like CloudAPI/Capsicum would take off to be more secure, while also being an open platform,
43.
by macdice 6y ago
Yes, I would like a FreeBSD-powered phone that can run Android or iOS consumer apps totally sealed inside virtual machines.
44.
by macdice 6y ago
I loved this computer as a kid. It didn't have hires graphics, but some clever people figured out how to do fake hires graphics by timing tricks. It blew my 10 year old mind. The timing tricks seem to work in this Javascript emulato
45.
by macdice 6y ago
It's a nice detail from the Wikipedia article that Ruby started life on NEWS OS.
46.
by macdice 6y ago
> Postgres never worked for example natively We (postgres) did fix an ENOSYS (missing syscall) problem at some point so WSL could run Postgres. The surprising thing for me was how long it took for anyone to tell us it was broken/sp
47.
by macdice 6y ago
Rumours say FreeBSD 12. PS4 used 9.
48.
by macdice 6y ago
SCO and Xenix let you drive a large number of text terminals or POS systems from a cheap PC. I worked on a factory automation system that had a huge number of serial cables connecting sensors and terminals up to a machine that could barely
49.
by macdice 6y ago
> Are sector writes atomic? And if so, for what size sectors? As a PostgreSQL hacker I have the same question, and I know the MySQL people do too, and I wrote some more specific questions and backgound, over here: https://wik
50.
by macdice 6y ago
Yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_se...
51.
by macdice 6y ago
Great to see Antonin and others working on this! I did some work on some pieces of this (along with many others), and I gave a talk about an earlier prototype of the undo log machinery and how it fits at PGCon 2019 (which now seems like a
52.
by macdice 6y ago
Nope. Any time you are looking at a tuple in the existing heap, you have to test it for visibility against your snapshot. With zheap, it's much the same, except that, rather than just "yes or no", the answer could be that y
53.
by macdice 6y ago
There are probably some cases where traditional heap would be better that (ideal, finished) zheap. Some ideas: Crash recovery is faster without an UNDO phase. Accessing data that has been modified many times since you took your snapshot
54.
by macdice 6y ago
Well, conceptually it happens atomically. The change is described in a single WAL (write ahead log) record, and data in the buffers representing the table and undo log isn't allowed to touch the disk until the WAL is on disk, so in an
55.
by macdice 6y ago
See man pages for mkfs.xfs, mkfs.ext4. On other Unix systems block size is/was more variable, but on Linux you can't exceed the 4kB memory page size. So it is not possible to match database block size (typically 16kB for InnoDB,
56.
by macdice 6y ago
To use reported AWUPF as a way to turn off MySQL double writes safely, I guess you need to be using direct IO (otherwise Linux's 4096 hardcoded buffer size kicks in) and you need to know that nothing in the IO stack can ever split up y
57.
by macdice 6y ago
If I had space in my life for more retro-junk I'd definitely love to have a working DEC VT100 or Lear Siegler ADM-3A if I could find one with the tube in good sharp condition so you could actually really use it to hack code on... but t
58.
by macdice 6y ago
I don't remember much but I see there are many articles from people who've hooked a Minitel up to a Raspberry Pi or similar in recent times. I think it had a non-standard DIN connector, and you could make up a special cable to ge
59.
by macdice 6y ago
I lived in France for a few years around the turn of the millennium and picked up a Minitel 1 cheap at a local flea market. I set it up in the living room as a GUI for a sound system controller connected to a Linux box, playing MP3s. I do
60.
by macdice 6y ago
> POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. I want it to be improved but I fear it is becoming irrelevant. There are very few OSes left to be compatible with...

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