sllabres

Microsoft Xenix (never knew more about it than the name).

For small to medium sized businesses Netware had the advantage that with IPX networking there was nearly no configuration necessary. No subnetting, assigning of IP addresses to clients or running DHCP services.

The availability of software on the server was limited (i remember backup services, licensing software). But for central file service and printing it was rock solid, even in a bit larger (for the time, around 1995) environments without any issues. (IRC >200 clients on a single 486 CPU and 4 MB RAM)

I found this page [1] interesting in regard to cash supply in Sweden, as it is a country always reported with a high affinity to online payment and statistics [2] (from 2019) seems to support that statement.

[1] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/payments-in-swe...

[2] https://www.statista.com/chart/17307/paying-with-cash-europe...

That is sad, especially because I think that it is not a service that would take that much effort to keep up.

've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...

[1] "The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth" (22 min) is a nice introduction to the competition and its technical history.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw

When Powershell was first released I was primarily working with Unices and was very curious what would work better: The Unix way in cutting, changing and grepping some part of stdout (in some OS a bit simplified b with options for automated pricessing which commands the programm to output colon delimited or otherwise formatted)

Or the Powershell way where on can access data members directly.

I thought I would prefer the second method more, because the access looked much cleaner/structured.

But after all these years (still mostly Unix scripting but Powershell and some other environments too) my mind has changed.

Would like to hear what others would prefer' Unix method with some scripting language or windows method with Powershell)

If you think about 'implementing then algorithm in a product' it seems so: (From the article) "We are really excited about what we have accomplished in just the last two years—from developing a new codec to successfully shipping it to billions of users around the globe"

If I think about time an American nowadays the first thing that comes into my mind is GPS. What WWVB or DCF77 (and JJY) was back then is now GPS timing capabilities. Much higher precision but of course a higher complexity for the receiver. [1]

I don't know about WWVB and JJY but the German DFC77 is not only AM modulated but FM too allowing for a better accuracy.

[1] https://www.hopf.com/dcf77-gps_en.php#chapter3

I am looking at the foto webcam images too and haven't seen the aurora myself, but the photos show a much longer timespan: For Wildhaus the first image with a pink/greenish glow is at 22:22

https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/wildhaus/2024/05/10/2220

and this continues through the entire night https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/wildhaus/2024/05/10/2230

till shortly before sunset, where the exposure time probably shortens too much to capture the color of the the aurora https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/wildhaus/2024/05/11/0420

Other locations:

https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/ewa/2024/05/11/0330

https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/glecksteinhuette/2024/05/1...

https://www.foto-webcam.eu/webcam/hochleckenhaus/2024/05/11/...

Yes, this is why I always liked 'planet walks' like this [1] If you see Images the planets in the solar system, the solar system itself etc. are mostly not to scale. If you walk such path one get a bit of a feel how large everything is, I think especially if the plantes on the walk are to scale too. Even our solar system is mostly empty. And the distances to moon a microscopic.

Walking such a path is is not the same, but a bit like [3] if one is patient (which is difficult on the internet) and doesn't scroll manually but only via the little "c" in the lower right corner, wich scrolls with light speed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk (there are several other listed at the bottom of the page)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model

[3] https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....

There where several topics around centering (horizontal and vertical) and of course much more detailed than a simple "center" But this [1] looks as something one would archive with a "center" back in the day.

[1] https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/apple_sign_in_business@2x.w...

Yes and this was just on HN:

https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/

Reminded me a bit about the use of satellite internet for anonymity

https://securelist.com/satellite-turla-apt-command-and-contr...

Very interesting, i've just yesterday wrote about the successor of EVA, the TravelPilot IDS [1] which was commercially available. But I didn't knew that there was another system 5 years ahead.

Both (Etak and TravelPilot IDS) seems to use kind of a vector display. Does someone know if this is for better resolution or better contrast, or both or if there is another reason?

https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/navigation-sys...

As example the TravelPilot IDS/1989 first prototype from 1983 (see [1] if you want a picture) IIRC the system used a compass, a shunt for the heating wire from the rear window (it would alter the compass because of its magnetic field) and two wheel sensors measuring the rotation of the wheels.

[1] https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/navigation-sys...

I think what you see is CIVIL AIR PATROL and CIVIL AIR PATROL INC

Types: GLID (SGS 2-33A)

Flights: N7589, N2037T

Registration: N7589, N2037T

When you select the dottet square button in the lower left and select a rectangle the planes within this rectangle are listed

Very interesting project!

The large Origin servers and the nice indigo workstations at trade fairs with their cool real time visualizations comes into my mind. Also applications like Softimage, the 4Dwm desktop ...

Later the large Altix NUMA systems with core counts in unprecedented sizes (and problems booting due to lock contention ;)

And of course their donation of the XFS filesystem to the linux world!

"I'm never sure what -ffast-math does exactly."

Me too when I am away from C for a while. The topic has been on HN [3]

* Enable the use of SIMD instructions

* alter the behavior regarding NaN (you can't even check for NaN afterwards with isnan(f))

* alter the associativity of expression a+(b+c) might become (a+b)+c which seems inconspicuous at first, but there are exceptions (as example see [1] under -fassociative-math)

* change subnormals to zero (even if your program isn't compiled with this option, but a library you link to your program).

A nice overview from which I summarize is in [1] which contains a link to [2] with this nice text:

"If a sufficiently advanced compiler is indistinguishable from an adversary, then giving the compiler access to -ffast-math is gifting that enemy nukes. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it! You just have to test enough to gain confidence that no bombs go off with your compiler on your system"

[1] https://simonbyrne.github.io/notes/fastmath/

[2] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/when-if-a-b-x-1-a-b-divide...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201473 (107)

I loved the Bell Labs Technical Journal (then AT&T Technical Journal) for as long as it was freely available in the 90s. A lot of the content revolved around technologies like SS7 or the large AT&T ESS switches, which were not relevant to me. But there were always very interesting ideas in the papers which let me think a bit outside the box.

I remember reports like "The AT&T Switching Evolution Challenge", "Software in Large", "Improving on the Best: Like a 1A, Only Better", "Components for Software Fault Tolerance and Rejuvenation", or scientific reports like " Studies of Large-Scale Earth Potentials Across Oceanic Distances".

After more than thirty years, I still have many of them in a thick folder. Thanks to everyone who inspired me back then and gave me an peek into a different IT world!

If they are only short dead end streets they won't be at risk sending cars through

For everyone interested in this:

https://geodienst.github.io/lighthousemap/

Good reply, you are right. I have even written ("Be aware that output from ls without options differ, if redirected") that it is so but was somewhat fooled by my experiment and the different timings for "ls" and "ls -1" when using XFS.

Of course I was not able to reproduce this difference and assume that I did work on the system and it was not idle.

I have repeated the the tests, on another mostly idle system. (Therefor the timing is not comparable to the first test). This time both filesystems live in a loop device and the benchmarks were run with hyperfine (3 warmup loops, 3 measurements each).

  XFS
  ls -l >/dev/null   Time (mean ± σ):   5.890 s ±  0.394 s  [User: 1.096 s,  System: 3.491 s]
  ls -lU >/dev/null  Time (mean ± σ):   2.254 s ±  0.386 s  [User: 0.648 s,  System: 1.602 s]
  ls >/dev/null      Time (mean ± σ):  542.7 ms ±   4.4 ms  [User: 443.8 ms, System: 98.7 ms]
  ls -1 >/dev/null   Time (mean ± σ):  534.4 ms ±   2.3 ms  [User: 450.1 ms, System: 84.1 ms]
  ls -1U >/dev/null  Time (mean ± σ):  115.8 ms ±   1.8 ms  [User: 80.9 ms,  System: 34.6 ms]
  ls -U >/dev/null   Time (mean ± σ):  121.0 ms ±  14.6 ms  [User: 80.9 ms,  System: 40.0 ms]
  find >/dev/null    Time (mean ± σ):  225.0 ms ±  16.2 ms  [User: 150.1 ms, System: 74.7 ms]

  EXT4 
  ls -l >/dev/null   Time (mean ± σ):  10.493 s ±  0.392 s  [User: 2.495 s,  System: 5.032 s]
  ls -lU >/dev/null  Time (mean ± σ):   8.395 s ±  0.157 s  [User: 0.735 s,  System: 5.049 s]
  ls >/dev/null      Time (mean ± σ):   1.966 s ±  0.010 s  [User: 1.760 s,  System: 0.202 s]
  ls -1 >/dev/null   Time (mean ± σ):   2.014 s ±  0.032 s  [User: 1.798 s,  System: 0.216 s]
  ls -1U >/dev/null  Time (mean ± σ):  221.4 ms ±   1.3 ms  [User: 83.7 ms,  System: 137.6 ms]
  ls -U >/dev/null   Time (mean ± σ):  222.5 ms ±   2.0 ms  [User: 78.9 ms,  System: 143.6 ms]
  find >/dev/null    Time (mean ± σ):  531.0 ms ±   4.0 ms  [User: 377.3 ms, System: 153.7 ms]

To my experience (and if only the filename is needed) the "-1" option helps saving some time too. Be aware that output from ls without options differ, if redirected.

time (real user sys) in seconds with 1e6 files in a xfs filesystem. Directory used 27 MB space.

  ls -l > /dev/null     : 49.12 23.90 13.47
  ls -lU > /dev/null    : 46.62 33.11  8.01
  ls > /dev/null        :  6.36  1.97  3.63
  ls -1 > /dev/null     :  2.49  1.83  0.36
  ls -1U > /dev/null    :  0.31  0.18  0.08
  (find)                :  0.77  0.49  0.19

and for 1e6 files in an ext4 filesystem. Directory used 23 MB space. (but as i had no ext4 fs with one million free inodes on a loop device)

  ls -l > /dev/null     : 51.39 34.02 11.39
  ls -lU > /dev/null    : 47.39 30.72 11.09
  ls > /dev/null        :  4.83  3.56  0.65
  ls -1 > /dev/null     :  4.46  3.45  0.50
  ls -1U > /dev/null    :  0.51  0.18  0.26
  (find)                :  1.29  0.76  0.36

At least processing scanned 1D barcodes at resolutions of 200-300 DPI can be surprisingly hard. After deskewing the tolerances of a traditional EAN barcode are always violated due to aliasing in the image.

Probably a HID scanner has the advantage of a better spatial (horizontal) resolution?

Back then we had four primary rate connections 2.048MBit/s each (30 ISDN B channel) to transmit data to several subsidiaries. This was quite a lot of bandwidth at the time. Our litte on demand network started at 02:00 in the night when tariff was lower (paid by connection time, not by volume :D) and used Ascend and Cisco routers Ascend was always much quicker setting up MPPP channel and therefor preferred, but Ciscos where a bit better utilizing larger 30 channel MPPP connections (and some destinations preferred Cisco)

It was quite 'fun', because starting with morning when tariff changed everything had to be transmitted and if something didn't work out right (to slow buildup of the MPPP channel, delay in the batch jobs delivering the data) someone had to monitor the process in the next night to prevent further backlog. For a long time there was only a 64kBit (later 128kBit) connection over the day regular connectivity.

Eight MBit carefully distributed over 120 channel. With all the support equipment a server rack, filled by 2/3. Ridiculously little today, even over air. It sounds as if one talks about the ancient Egyptians, but it is only 25 ago

I find 'rocket science' quite interesting, who not :) But my knowledge is limited to what can grasp from watching the channels discussing the topics every now and then and reading some of the lightweight books. (I find the design and creation of the space suits very interesting).

Nevertheless when I saw the Smarter Every Day video the first time the biggest question mark for me was the number of rockets required to reach the moon _once_ [1] There were some other topics from the talk like the cryogenic refueling never done before [2], the orbit around the moon [3]. But for these I cannot evaluate who much of a problem they are.

But more than eight rockets for one flight sounds a lot, even without expertise.

[1] https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=1746

[2] https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=2609

[3] https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=1385

Two links, to start your rabbit hole for today: [1] [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

Not SunOS, but this was on AIX (V3, so long ago) tar, but thanks for the gnu-tar parameter hint!

Another nice feature I used a long time ago from a shell script: you can send filenames to archive via a pipe (stdin). So you can fork a cpio and send it file for file over a period of time during their creation. That wasn't possible with tar at the time. (I think it's the same today)

Thank you. I've never seen them live, only videos and picture stills. Is the wobbly image a problem if you are 5 meter away from the projected image?

As written i only know models not longer available: Nebra AnyBeam, Sony MP-CL1A, Celluon PicoPro, RIF6 Cube, My assumption was that they are all using the same MEMS unit and that this unit is not longer available for some reason.

PS: If one is interested in a tear down of such unit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuNyQKvx9zc

Does someone know why all these small laser mems projectors are discontinued? Anyview, Sony, ... Is it a reliability issue?

I found them quite interesting for similar applications especially as there is no need to focus and an image on a curved abject is possible.