machinecoffee

> which suggests that you are here simply because you are here. There is no grand goal, no epic mission to fulfill, no gods to please. You are here because your parents were optimized for reproduction and raising children, who existed because their parents were etc.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins also outlines the same idea, and tries to explain how we got that way. Read it when I was a lot younger, but the concept has stayed with me.

>If Firefox does not die by himself, expect Google to slowly stop paying them

If the web is going towards a Chrome monoculture, then perhaps Microsoft would step in to keep some competition in the marketplace.

Stranger things have happened!

I've often thought the exact same thing!

There's an amusing video on youtube where Steve Jobs is demoing remote Objects on NextStep and (I think) Openstep on Windows, and having a laugh at MS since Next managed to get remote Objects working before MS got their Remote OLE (aka DCOM) working. Steve calls it Doh'LE.

The only different thing that COM had was support for scripting the objects via IDispatch, but that was such a pain (VARIANTS !) that only those really needing it bothered.

MS were also very proud of their MTS where an on the fly proxy object was created, but even that was inspired by Remote objects.

However they really jumped the shark when they made it possible to create COM objects from Visual Basic - the endless grief caused whenever a VB developer decided to change any parameters on the interface and caused all GUIDs to be regenerated and a big fat binary with all revisions of the code. They then created a tool to strip that all down to just the last version, thereby totally removing any backward compatibility - which then caused other random components to fail.

Well, they did invent (and patent!) One Click purchase - so they at least did care about UX at one point.

Ah Motif, XBill and Afterstep! My nostalgia bit just got set.

My first experiences of GUI programming on Unix (HPUX on a Motorola 68040 machine) was with Motif, which was a pretty good toolkit after you got used to the very long function names.

Which is great, except that ctx_new() requires a malloc, which then can fail, and now you can't even explain why the thing failed, as you have no context info.

You also have to worry about all of the ctx objects you've created along the way, to free them up as you recover from the low memory error.

Really excellent article on real world experience with Postgres at scale, thanks.

It is quite long though, so I guess people are still reading it :)

And worth every penny IMHO. For me it hits the sweet spot between a massive feature filled Adobe product and struggling with e.g. Gimp for simple creation of icons.

What is this G3 Cube? G4 Cube (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube)

Alas the speakers that came with it have a custom USB wiring, so they can't be used on any other computer.

Otherwise it was an excellent machine - just a bit under powered. But really easy to upgrade - just lift it out of the enclosure via the click-out handle and the whole machine was available to upgrade RAM and install a wireless card (when that was a novel thing...). Design was nice, fits on a desktop and was mostly silent except for the HD.

Jobs' love of the Cube shape can probably be traced back to NeXT : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube

It does help that the process is pretty painless. And at least for me, a good excuse to do a reboot - which I really do as seldom as possible on my laptop and iphone.

I would also argue that even after an object has been moved (out of?), that object should still be a valid object. So that even if somebody makes a call to it, it shouldn't 'blow up' , but do add asserts to indicate you're now talking to an object that is no longer initialized to a useful state. E.g. if moving a class that wraps a file descriptor, then calling write() would do nothing, but a debug build could also assert() that the file descriptor is not valid.

That way you get runtime stability if you screw up, but no weird side-effects.

To be fair, Postgres did come out of Ingres, an older database. So its ancestry goes back a fair bit longer than MySQL.

>Were you alive when Microsoft reigned as the dark lord?

Yes I was. I worked in that stifling environment when anything not MS related was dismissed out of hand. Where MS's own marketing exhorted everybody to replace their 'legacy' unix systems with e.g. the wonderful system of Biztalk, Exchange and IIS.

Yes, constant vigilance so that they never regain that position again, as I'm pretty sure they desperately want to.

> so "there is no reason to switch until we KNOW for sure"

Oh the painful memories that phrase evokes.. VB6

> assistant Editor of the Telegraph https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-...

Max Hastings, his boss at the time doesn't have such a great opinion of Boris.

I would suggest as well that in more ordinary times, when the country has some decent leaders and is not so bitterly divided, he would have absolutely no chance of rising to the position he looks now likely to hold.

But these are very strange times, and "chaos is a ladder".

>and there's a huge Chinese population in Siberia which might be used as an excuse to incite unrest

Russia is also quite good at making 're-education' camps, and can be quite prickly when prodded.

When my bank sends a login token via SMS, Safari can also copy the token out from iMessage and autofill the value - which is quite convenient, but also a little too much for my preference.

(Macintosh Toolbox Essentials)

This brings a big smile of nostalgia to me - I remember reading this massive book and trying out all the system calls on my Metrowerks c++ compiler (system 7).

I probably still have a copy of it lying about somewhere...

Why not small (ish) self-driving buses that run very regularly (you shouldn't wait more than 10 mins for one) that people can hop-on hop-off. Networked so that you can get from one side of the city to the next in no more than 3 hops.

Big enough also to takes prams/buggies/bicycles/luggage/large shopping items, so that people can also get to do many of the normal things they would do with their day and still use public transport.

I guess the OP's point is that if you're storing everything on a db anyway i.e. 1 row per user,per email and a sent/not sent status flag against each row - then why do you need a messaging system? The email sending system could just poll the db for emails to be sent (by status=not sent), and then update the status after sending, as well as a timestamp for later cleanup. A more robust system is then achieved completely without messaging.

Of course polling is never a great design, but I guess that's the crux of his question.

There's also libkqueue for Linux - I would imagine they will also adopt io_uring when it's stable and ubiquitous enough, bringing the two APIs closer together.

I find kqueue to be a great and well designed API, so that can only be a good thing IMHO.

>Well except you're not allowed to run MacOS on a laptop with a real keyboard.

I use the keyboard that came with my 2001 Mac Cube. You can't get a more real keyboard than that.

Also important will be quality of life in the later years.

If you're unhealthy, lonely and constantly in pain then why bother?

I've read that having a good network of friends & family into old age can keep you feeling better, having hobbies and keeping active are also very beneficial.

It's something I'm actively thinking about now I'm approaching 50 myself. Swimming and yoga beckon :)

From what I can see, the whole point of C++ is to wrap existing C libraries and call them OO :-)

I love the old NeXT stuff, and all that they've bequeathed us, but I always wondered why they put the scrollbar on the left side of the window?

I thought this was well understood, and even expected by the models, since a warming planet brings more precipitation in the air which then falls as snow on the poles.

So the Antarctic is actually gaining mass on the higher ground, and the Arctic during the winter months also.

The contrast is that during the warmer summer months, the Arctic is losing a lot more than it gains over the year, so the global balance is negative - which adds to sea level rises.

The other odd thing I never considered, but was (I think here?) mentioned, is that as the mass of the Arctic decreases, it also presses down less on the mantle, and so lifts higher out of the ocean, also displacing more sea.

I'm pretty sure there's a good explanation of this by Potholer54 on Youtube.

As an end user, what difference does the size of the source tree make?

So long as the OS is stable, performant and has a pleasant GUI that you can interact with (or cmdline if that's your thing), was does it matter?

I'm pretty sure no user in the history of users ever cared about such a thing.

MFC I'm not so sure about, but ATL or even better WTL would probably do the job.

The sudden need to have war games near the Philippine has more to do with this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/05/south-china-se...

IOCP in Windows is a good API (although a bit non-obvious), but to be fair, they did have a few tries and missteps before they got there.