macdice

17 ms·

121.
by macdice 8y ago
Re: pointers, the same problem applies to int, which was always at least 16 bits. The 6809 and 8080/Z80 had 16 bit register (or register pairs) so must have been much better targets for C (among 8 bit machines).
122.
by macdice 8y ago
See also the wonderfully named SIGDANGER signal on AIX. It seems many people have invented this. I've been wondering out loud recently if PostgreSQL should attempt to support these various impending-doom-notification mechanisms, or w
123.
by macdice 8y ago
This is neat. Tiny Scheme is nice... anyone know if there is a maintained fork/successor? Patches posted here go unanswered: https://sourceforge.net/p/tinyscheme/patches/
124.
by macdice 8y ago
This was very nicely done and a really enjoyable time travel video. I learned to program on a ZX81 at a young age. With the manual (shown), the Usborne 1980s programming books that actually taught kids how to do machine code (all now rele
125.
by macdice 8y ago
It looks like someone would need to do the things described in here: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CA%2Bz6ocRFEnThhX... There is an easy level "parallel safe" that would allow scans of diffe
126.
by macdice 8y ago
Yeah, not at all uncommon. More annoying than that, in terms of likelihood of missing a connection and getting stuck overnight at an airport hotel or whatever, is when US airports unload your luggage and make you check it in again. Argh.
127.
by macdice 8y ago
Good question, I can't find any information about that. I just saw the special lane with my own eyes.
128.
by macdice 8y ago
I think most countries would prefer to do it reciprocally as a matter of pride (for example Brazil started fingerprinting US travellers after the US was the first to start doing that to all foreigners), but in some cases they can't aff
129.
by macdice 8y ago
Coming home recently I was somewhat surprised to see that US Global Entry card holders can now skip immigration at New Zealand airports via a fast lane otherwise reserved for diplomats, even though New Zealanders are not eligible for the G
130.
by macdice 8y ago
One thing I noticed: for me (Kiwi/Brit), India is listed as "visa on the border/online" and the USA and Canada are listed as "visa free". But in practice the process is about the same, because the "visa w
131.
by macdice 8y ago
Why do people think that there should be a separate distribution for different classes of user? I never really understood that. The community is thin, fragmentation is bad, setting up a server for workload X should consist of installing p
132.
by macdice 8y ago
Seems to be frozen now. D'oh, I was too late to get my first FreeBSD feature (woohoo!) added to the 11.2 release notes. So I'll just randomly post it here in case anyone cares: The procctl(2) syscall has been updated to support
133.
SERIALIZABLE in PostgreSQL 11 and beyond(write-skew.blogspot.com)
3 points by macdice 8y ago|0 comments
134.
by macdice 8y ago
Usually when I hear people talk about alternatives to Bloomberg, my first though is that that they have no idea how many things Bloomberg actually covers. Sooo many products, so much data, you wouldn't even believe the scale. And yea
135.
by macdice 8y ago
Linux was a Unix clone. SCO was selling actual Unix. But yeah that seems crazy now.
136.
by macdice 8y ago
My first job involved installing SCO (a bit later than Xenix, SCO System V) at customer sites from a huge pile of floppies. You had to pay a few grand extra for the compiler. GCC was a revelation and a life changing discovery just a bit l
137.
by macdice 8y ago
FWIW I have had a positive experience with their super low cost small ARMv8 instances, which help me test PostgreSQL patches-in-development on that architecture. (It'd be even better if they had a FreeBSD image available.)
138.
by macdice 8y ago
PostgreSQL 9.5 manual: "Skipping locked rows provides an inconsistent view of the data, so this is not suitable for general purpose work, but can be used to avoid lock contention with multiple consumers accessing a queue-like table.&qu
139.
by macdice 8y ago
Yes that seems unlikely. Almost all Unix software uses buffered IO, including several other databases or database-like things including package managers, DNS servers, mail servers, ..., and MySQL does too by default. It even uses it when
140.
by macdice 8y ago
I agree, this is in some ways a storm in a teacup and unlikely to cause silent data loss (it requires transient failure, but in reality failure storage probably fails completely and you definitely know about that). But as a matter of princ
141.
by macdice 8y ago
I think it is scary about Linux. They are still wrestling with reliable error reporting for buffered IO after decades, and while the changes in 4.13 are an improvement in some ways they make some highly questionable assumptions that don&#x
142.
by macdice 9y ago
Very interesting, thanks. At 1:22 "Power surges like this are unique to Britain. No other country in the world switches on so many kettles in so short a time." I'm not sure if that's true... I did some work for a pow
143.
by macdice 9y ago
There was an intelligent comment about the extra writes when writing to UNDO and the extra reads when anyone needs to read UNDO and suggesting that it might not always beat the traditional system which just has to write a new tuple. It was
144.
by macdice 9y ago
How does this relate to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754 (2008 edition) which added decimal floating point in a couple of sizes including 64 bit? It's strange to publish something in the same space without
145.
by macdice 9y ago
Almost every RBDMS uses undo logs to implement rollback (they physically roll back/undo the changes). It is the traditional implementation technique for a whole generation of databases -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/w
146.
Parallel Hash for PostgreSQL(write-skew.blogspot.com)
4 points by macdice 9y ago|0 comments
147.
by macdice 9y ago
It will be pretty unfortunate if it turns out that the projects that maintain a kernel (FreeBSD, various others) only received notification at Christmas, while various Linux distros (who have to deal with packaging, release, QA but not deve
148.
by macdice 9y ago
Also known as SKIP LOCKED (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL).
149.
by macdice 9y ago
With synchronous_commit = remote apply there are complications though. You either have to make it wait for ALL your standbys (and then deal with the fact that a failing standby can hold up commits indefinitely), or you can have it wait for
150.
by macdice 9y ago
You might be interested in the AQO project that was presented at PGCon 2017: https://www.pgcon.org/2017/schedule/events/1086.en.html It's using machine learning techniques to improve cardinality estimate

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