rswail

12 ms·

61.
by rswail 4mo ago
That's the current reality and people are realizing that they are being ripped off in their local communities, which will result in an already beginning backlash against datacenters and particularly AI datacenters. I don't think t
62.
by rswail 4mo ago
Space based data centers make no economic sense compared to land based. The only reason is to remove them from local/regional, and potentially national/international jurisdictions. Oh, and of course, the other reason is to giv
63.
by rswail 4mo ago
> I suppose you could condense the evaporated water somehow by using a chilled umbrella or some other ridiculous contraption above the cooling tower, but why would you do that? Specifically to reduce the ongoing demand for water. DCs nee
64.
by rswail 4mo ago
For those of us that use metric/SI units, 90F is 32.22C/305.37K. Don't the US Military and NASA use metric now?
65.
by rswail 4mo ago
Extract the nth grapheme from a string of Unicode codepoints. Codepoints are 32-bit values. Take into account that some Unicode codepoints work together to combine to form a grapheme which then links to a glyph for display. If you use UTF-8
66.
by rswail 4mo ago
Both Linux and MacOS followed the Unix implementation, both of them are derivatives of Unix, so why would that change? Unix derived from Multics which chose LF. The issue is that none of the print carriage movement ASCII characters shoul
67.
by rswail 4mo ago
For an OS that was being created specifically to process text, having the equivalent of CR being separate to LF to allow for overprinting would/should have been a requirement. I'd say Multics/Unix was technically correct, e
68.
by rswail 4mo ago
Storing them as 32 bits wide in memory means you can at least index by a codepoint (if not a glyph).
69.
by rswail 4mo ago
We're literally talking about two decades before that.
70.
by rswail 4mo ago
If it's purely binary data, then you can't. Otherwise you need to have some sort of escape mechanism, exactly like quoting strings in CSV. In fact, there's an ASCII code "ESC" for entirely that purpose. :) The probl
71.
by rswail 4mo ago
Except that the ISA has a perfectly good ALU there that can detect zero really easily, so no one was going to waste silicon on an instruction that required comparison to yet another value (which essentially would be an additional subtractio
72.
by rswail 4mo ago
Most good ideas never are.
73.
by rswail 4mo ago
My bubble was obviously technically superior to your bubble. :) And maybe it was 5/10 years earlier? Not sure. My uni days were the very early 1980s. Our university literally still made 1st years use marked sense (not even punch) cards
74.
by rswail 4mo ago
Like CP/M, DOS v1, RT-11 etc. VMS used: node::device:[dir1.dir2.dir3]filename.extension;version from memory, you could have up to 15 nested directories. The versioning was cool as long as you remembered to clean them up.
75.
by rswail 4mo ago
CORS relaxes the rules about what requests the browser can make. The server doesn't get to stop the browser making calls that it didn't want, so it's a browser security feature, to stop the browser sending cookies where i
76.
by rswail 4mo ago
I preferred "P" because of the BCPL ancestor. If BCPL begat "B" and "B" begat "C", then "C" should have begatten "P". Not sure if begatten is a word :)
77.
by rswail 4mo ago
People that write standards and work on committees that write standards are working on a thing. SMPTE have chosen github because it has the other stuff to allow them to manage the committee work, handle the issues raised in committees
78.
by rswail 4mo ago
No, it was an Apple, Unix, and Microsoft problem. Unix used LF, Apple used CR, Microsoft used CRLF. They are all ASCII carriage movement codes, which is about driving the paper feed and print head of an ASR-33 or equivalent. So they all mad
79.
by rswail 4mo ago
Except that nearly all ISAs treat zero as a special value, with a Z-flag or equivalent for the last ALU result, and conditional branches around that result. PDP-11s, 68Ks, nearly all ISAs that I know about treat zero as special. It falls na
80.
by rswail 4mo ago
I dunno, I was starting my career around 1980-81, and the choices were 6502/6509/Z80/8088 asm, C, UCSD-Pascal, and BASIC at the micro level, C/asm was the rule for RT-11/RSX-11 and then the VAX OSs at the "mini
81.
by rswail 4mo ago
That's because they're badly written by people that don't understand that REST doesn't mean JSON+POST+GET.
82.
by rswail 4mo ago
> If the hardware had instructions for sentinel values, things would be easier (Like how DOS calls used '$' termination for strings) and safer. A zero is a sentinel value and is catered to by all ISAs. Why would using a "$
83.
by rswail 4mo ago
I've seen a lot of confusion, where people are talking about checking for a NULL at the end of a list of pointers which is very different to a NUL at the end of a string. Yes it was an abbreviation in ASCII, as are all the non-printabl
84.
by rswail 4mo ago
In all the comments in this thread it's interesting how people confuse: * NUL: An ASCII non-printing character with the byte value of 0 * NULL: A pointer that does not point to usable memory with the value that compiles in C to be equa
85.
by rswail 4mo ago
C was specifically developed to allow Unix to be ported. It was a systems programming language and the first well known/successful one. There was BCPL and then B before that, which is why the language is called "C". Pascal w
86.
by rswail 4mo ago
The C code for strcpy is: while (*d++ = *s++) ; On a PDP-11 that is: L: MOV (R1)+, (R2)+ BNE L
87.
by rswail 4mo ago
So what exactly is the NUL/0 in the code below other than a sentinel value? while (*d++ = *s++) ;
88.
by rswail 4mo ago
Things that have bugged me for 40 years... * NUL terminated strings (and now, non UTF-8 encoded strings on input/output) * Using LF or CR or CRLF as line terminators, and pipe/comma-delimited fields when there were other unambiguo
89.
by rswail 4mo ago
The git part of github is a very small part of it, they are using Github issues etc which are not exportable/cross-platform. So yes, you can git clone the repo and get the HTML, but if you want all the other stuff (the "github bas
90.
by rswail 4mo ago
Agreed, just saying that the PDPs were where a lot of the people developing micro computers cut their teeth eg CP/M looks a lot like RT-11. Minicomputers like the PDP-11 begat microcomputers around 8080s, Z80s, 6509s, 6502s. "Home

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