rsecora

Hacker news is becoming a nostalgia site. That direction is neither good, nor bad. Just a comment.

Being there, price move me out.

The selling point was easy and reproducible deployment. But there are must cheaper alternatives, and dynos productivity didn't have enough benefits for the cost.

Rigth, ms office apps are big COM application that can be instantiated by other programs.

Excel, Word, PowerPoint are COM objects that can be scripted by any language (python, delphi, c++...).

It's a pleasure seeing a template word document being managed and compose by python and then sent to a printer to fill report.

   import win32com.client as win32 
   excel = win32.gencache.EnsureDispatch('Excel.Application') 
   excel.Visible = True

For the uninitiated. YS and SU were two highly distributed magazines from the 80s.

YS: Your Sinclair https://archive.org/details/your-sinclair-magazine.

SU: Sinclair User https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine

Underrated parent comment.

Requirements are living entities and subject to Darwin rules. Only the fittest survives.

No. Check the concept of Deep packet inspection.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

Parent comment was jokingly paraphrasing General Bradley words: “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics."

OSINT

;)

Soviet computer:

https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/project-sphinx-when-t...

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth.

Around 1991

It was the first time the computer was not slowing my workflow. AutoCAD and Turbo Pascal running on a 80286 with a floating point coprocessor and a 50MB HDD.

Previous hardware/software stacks in 8086/Tandy/Osborne/PCjR... were not fast enough.

Done, thank you

It still amazes me how the PDP-11 has the NUXI [1] problem at nibble level and how the PDP-11 was bytesexual [2].

[1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/NUXI-problem.html

[2] http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bytesexual.html

Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic.

The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.

The now has been always preponderous over the past.

There are different ways to look at the issue.

* general assumption: the future is synonim of progress, so now is more relevant.

* general assumption: we know the past, so focus on the unknown aka the now

* fact: maintain the memories needs energy, and energy is a scarce resource. So societies forget its past to focus in the current issues to preserve themselves.

BTW, Same vibes looking to twitter timelines

Either there is a code contributor pushing for functionality (Example sendfile/nginx) or a donor suggesting a path forward or a volunteer given free time.

Every foundation goals can be driven via sponsorship. At the end everything is simplify as who pays the bills at the end of the month?

This raises the old question: Who pays for the free in free software?

https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...

Possible window of opportunity for a company focused on backporting fixes for FreeBSD.

But in reality there is a big risk of nobody putting money on the table for that maintenance. Am I right?

MONIAC in action at the Reserve Bank Museum & Education Centre, Wellington, New Zealand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZavOcEnLg

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711231

Underrated comment

Its not really a 70s problem, its a solution to a problem if the 1970s. RISC machines raised bus error if not properly aligned to avoid "double" access to the same value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_error#Unaligned_access

Its not only due to cache misses. If the memory access is not aligned a bus fault will be raised in a lot of CPU architectures.

Thats the 70s problem described in the documentation

This post shows how knowledge is lost with the past of time.

>> Modern CPU hardware performs reads and writes to memory most efficiently when the data is naturally aligned.

Is not only "modern" CPUs, every RISC (80s, 40 years ago) mandate word alignment. In fact, the program will receive a bus fault if not aligned. The compilers pad between fields to ensure alignment is right. That’s also why "packed" structures can be defined in some languages.

>> This was is a weird quirk

Not really, a lot of code has been programed that way since I remember (80s).

Poe's law. As Mr Poe says 16 years ago.

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody XXXXXXX in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.

Poe's law in motion.

Selling shovels during a gold rush is the surest way to stay wealthy.

Some satellite broadcasting platforms still use VMS for mixing the data carrousel with the mpeg transport streams.

One of those services, millions use it everyday without knowing it.

Parent comment ask about the OS descendant from VAX/VMS, that is being ported to x86. The subject of this thread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS

First step check if the external wan IP address has changed.

Second Check the logs of the pppoe daemon in your router. (If the router provides such logs).