pjdesno

20 ms·

211.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Um, no. Looking at NASA's climate graph: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/pag... the most rapid upswing rose almost 10C in 1850 or so years, or about 0.5C per century. (the total chang
212.
by pjdesno 3y ago
1) Ironically, just before COVID a decent number of companies decided to transition to "hot-desking" policies where employees aren't in the office 5 days a week, and rather than having an office or cube, you have to sign up f
213.
by pjdesno 3y ago
I still have a copy I was given when I was a kid. What's kind of amazing is that it's from when there were still a few commercial sailing ships around.
214.
by pjdesno 3y ago
It's really simple - the early Unix kernel had so few lines of code because the machine had so few bytes of memory (180KB I think), and a bigger kernel wouldn't have fit. It's actually worse than that, because the PDP-11 addr
215.
by pjdesno 3y ago
We've got a 9-drive system with a table robot between two aisles of tapes, the whole thing is maybe 8" by 20". It definitely makes sense at that scale.
216.
by pjdesno 3y ago
I don't think you can set aside universities when you talk about open source - they were the original drivers in this field, and continue to be heavily involved. The biggest difference is probably that most of the software written at a
217.
by pjdesno 3y ago
The entire plot of The Bad Sisters is based on the idea that a small family insurance brokerage would be financially liable for paying out a life insurance claim, rather than the actual insurance company whose products the brokerage sold. T
218.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Note that Intel machines had been shipping with USB ports for two years before the iMac came out, but there weren't any devices available to plug into them. (plus Microsoft didn't support it in their consumer OSes until Windows 98
219.
by pjdesno 3y ago
To understand the bogus funding acknowledgement, it helps to remember that this was written during the era of Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards, which picked random government-funded academic researchers and held them up for public ridic
220.
by pjdesno 3y ago
I've had half a dozen or more SSDs die in my lab. Without access to vendor tools (like a JTAG debugger and source for the controller) I'm not sure it's possible to tell whether the controller itself failed, or it just decided
221.
by pjdesno 3y ago
We've got a 100PB tape robot. It's not dead, although it's close enough that almost no one noticed when a patent dispute meant that you couldn't buy the highest density tapes for a year or so.
222.
by pjdesno 3y ago
The price of a single HDD is (very roughly) constant, regardless of capacity; the price of an SSD is mostly determined by the amount of flash. In other words, you can cut an SSD in half, but you can't do that to a hard drive. Flash rep
223.
by pjdesno 3y ago
HDDs have limits, too - look at http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-772003.pdf Modern hard drives have warrantee limits on how many bits you can read/write during their service lifetime, sin
224.
by pjdesno 3y ago
SSDs had vast improvements in cost over the past decade due to (a) the switch from 2-bit MLC planar NAND to 3-bit (TLC) 3D NAND, and probably (b) the growth of the SSD market - 10 years ago most flash went into iPods, phones, etc., so prett
225.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Simple multithreaded read/write. On a 20-core 40-thread machine with a couple of fast NVMe drives it was way faster.
226.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Not just databases - we ran into the same issues when we needed a high-performance caching HTTP reverse proxy for a research project. We were just going to drop in Varnish, which is mmap-based, but performance sucked and we had to write our
227.
by pjdesno 3y ago
Note that the "C committee" was actually the X3J11 committee of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. In other words, it was just one committee within an organization with a long history of developing cross-industry sta
228.
by pjdesno 3y ago
It's called professional typesetting. The manuscript sent to BSTJ would have been typed, probably double-spaced, and I assume with hand-drawn equations. Once editing was finished, it would go to the typesetter. Answers on this Stackexc
229.
by pjdesno 3y ago
I remember reading all about it in my dad's issues of Spectrum.
230.
by pjdesno 3y ago
The amortization change was a deliberate part of the 2017 tax cut. One of the express purposes of the tax changes was to raise taxes on liberals, and I guess they figured that companies that take the R&D credit are run by liberals.
231.
by pjdesno 3y ago
They hold to the best traditions of British tabloid journalism. My favorite is Every! Single! Headline! About! Yahoo!
232.
by pjdesno 4y ago
A couple of other resources about writing: John Swartzwelder on writing scripts: https://www.thewrap.com/simpsons-writer-john-swartzwelder-su... Revision Strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers: https:&
233.
by pjdesno 4y ago
By 2012, the banking industry had spent two or three decades educating customers to teach them that banking is an impersonal transaction which takes place via ATM machines and the internet, and never, ever, ever involves talking to a bank t
234.
by pjdesno 4y ago
IANAL, but it seems that would require the equivalent of a warrant to search your house. (among other things, they would need to actually get physical possession of your SSDs for the key to be useful, so they'd need a warrant for an ac
235.
by pjdesno 4y ago
Being able to automatically run your old tests to find regressions is super-super useful. I would argue that every bug you fix should turn into a test, since you're probably going to encounter it again.
236.
by pjdesno 4y ago
I'm not sure the opposite of "configuration" should be called "convention" - the worst abuses I've seen of punting to user configuration have been ones where the best solution was only determinable at runtime.
237.
by pjdesno 4y ago
Someone I know works on catastrophe modeling for the insurance industry. It seems like a fascinating area, especially since there's a strong link with climate science - a large part of the business seems to be modeling hurricane risk i
238.
by pjdesno 4y ago
If you're a baseball player, you don't want to work for a football team. You'll be undervalued and hate your job. Less metaphorically, I've always looked for jobs where my skills are aligned with the "company missio
239.
by pjdesno 4y ago
Even if you assume replacement parts are marked up 5-10x over cost, wiring harnesses are expensive. Here's the one for my car: https://www.hondapartsonline.net/v-2012-honda-fit--base--1-5...
240.
by pjdesno 4y ago
The best and most memorable advice I've seen on this, unfortunately more memorable than the name of the author: Entomologists write "bees carry pollen". Botanists write "pollen is carried by bees".

More ›