watersb

46 ms·

571.
by watersb 4y ago
In my experience, Windows NT (now just Windows) is very fond of its file cache and large copies can blow up into memory paging as well. Early Windows NT was awful with this, pegging the system with a cascade of disk IO at unpredictable time
572.
by watersb 4y ago
On macOS, you can also use the `--nocache` flag for the `ditto` command. Please keep in mind that `ditto` is a file copy and archive utility, not a block copy utility like `dd` (which is also available on macOS). An online man page for di
573.
by watersb 4y ago
Not the poster, but my Hacker News comments are sometimes written on my phone. Small screen. Limited viewport. Primitive text. Wrestling mightily with the autocorrect vs. technical terminology... My brain working set often loses things like
574.
by watersb 4y ago
Sow bugs seemed to be able to turn over some of the caliche soil in my yard. Drip irrigation worked to keep native plants happy enough to break up more dirt. But I never got to the point of trying food crops.
575.
by watersb 4y ago
Even worse: with the loss of early-warning satellite assets, you have to decide how to use (or not!) nuclear weapons with extremely noisy information.
576.
by watersb 4y ago
Maybe the main difference for me, as a 1970s-80s kid, was that I taught myself some small bits of assembly language programming. I feel very fortunate to have come along at a time where home computers were simple enough to understand. The c
577.
by watersb 4y ago
We were all learning the same things as you were, at about the same time, on the job (at work). Many late hours, trying to keep up. You did very well, I think.
578.
by watersb 4y ago
I don't know how to control for other factors, like bus speed and RAM bandwidth, but: - 2007 single-core performance: Geekbench 5 score ~ 500. - 2021 MacBook Air M1 single core: 1750 Ok, only a factor of 3 or so. And only 2x as many co
579.
by watersb 4y ago
I took a similar typing test on a typewriter and managed to get in 65 words per minute for the required text, due to my time with computers. But I barely passed, because there was no error correction allowed. No backspace key. Although busi
580.
by watersb 4y ago
Our high-end Mac IIci setups were $8000 each. So easy to forget these mind-boggling prices, as they were usual and customary (for that level) at the time.
581.
by watersb 4y ago
What?! The Living Computer Museum is unique in that they maintain running instances of the computers in their collection. For instance, the only running CDC 6600 series (a 6500, I think). What's more, they offer free remote logins on
582.
by watersb 4y ago
SSI != SSDI SSI: Supplemental Security Income SSDI: Social Security Disability Insurance SSI is a government subsidy, or payout, for those living in poverty. There are income and asset caps that define the poverty level. SSDI is a "sin
583.
by watersb 4y ago
Production-rule systems can do inference that isn't from unsupervised neural net training. It's just matching up the rules. Probably not considered AI these days.
584.
by watersb 4y ago
This is a great table of control sequences, but the second author cited as maintainer from 1996 to 1999, Thomas Dickey, currently maintains a list at his invisible-island.net site. https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctl
585.
by watersb 4y ago
I'm surprised no one has guessed power and thermal management as a reason for running DOS on top of QEMU/Linux. I have no idea. If the laptop is running FreeDOS on "bare metal", what happens when you close the lid and pu
586.
by watersb 4y ago
I would often listen or check for children breathing, well into their grade school years. You learn when to switch off and honor their privacy. I don't know how to articulate the signals that would tell me they were fast asleep, such a
587.
by watersb 4y ago
SRE = Site Reliablity Engineering
588.
by watersb 4y ago
About seven years ago, I purchased a couple of really inexpensive "1 TB" USB thumb drives via AliExpress. They were well made, externally. And they each reported a capacity of 10^12 bytes. I used `dd` to write an infinite stream o
589.
by watersb 4y ago
IIRC, you are correct. And OpenBSD still sets up distinct partitions for `/bin` and `/lib` etc. The first PC I built had 7 disk drives in a tower case, four distinct hard drives. Yes it was crazy. But the largest of these by far w
590.
by watersb 4y ago
> Wow this is the first time I've ever seen a comment that genuinely made me feel like an old gray beard. Here's a nickel, kid... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQView
591.
by watersb 4y ago
"The Scoutmaster’s wife noted that a typical kid working on this badge goes to a hospital and asks about x-rays. David decided to build a Breeder Reactor." .!!. I'm currently reading through the 1950s "Tom Swift Jr.&quot
592.
by watersb 4y ago
(per Internet tradition, I haven't read the whole article yet.) This article discusses "Age in Place" covenants (sales?): an elder person can sell the property, yet remain in the property until their death. After which, the
593.
by watersb 4y ago
WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!! (Someday. Almost certainly. Most everybody does, at some point.) It's newsworthy, I suppose, that the Fed see the need to change monetary policy. It's not clear to me how much control they have these da
594.
by watersb 4y ago
Why the heck are birthdays still treated like passwords in the US?
595.
by watersb 4y ago
The transducers on my Magnepan speakers are not much thicker, but the driver assemblies are way bigger. https://magnepan.com/products/magnepan-1-7i
596.
by watersb 4y ago
Science is just another religion for many people. [citation needed] That is to say, all of us have to take large chunks of our built environment as a matter of faith. My old iPad, for instance, is indistinguishable from magic. I can explain
597.
by watersb 4y ago
Web 2.0 Gen 2
598.
by watersb 4y ago
[spelling: Arthur C. Clarke ]
599.
by watersb 4y ago
I initially read this as "... the Purely Fictional Deployment Model". Which is probably unfair. :-)
600.
by watersb 4y ago
(2012) Anyone interested in data visualization or UX might find great stuff here, even beyond the astonishing artistry of a damn good map.

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