Yeah, those durn data size fields. At first you’re like “why would you do this? It’s specified in the spec, right?” Then you start consuming the data stream and go “oh, yeah need this”.
I was doing some driver work for a real time location tracking board. The serial stream protocol was very well documented and designed. Plenty of byte length count fields, though.
This approach is so much nicer than the threading/queuing approaches we used to have. One async showed up, a ton of the work go pulled out of protocol handing and distributed subsystem sync efforts.
Long lived the multi threaded C++ server buffer! Today, async beging to rule the roost.
Aw darn it. Now I’m reading your posts with an Australian accent in my head.
I’ve been accused of being a bot in online games due to my robust vocabulary, resistance to abbreviation and slang, as well as pedantic punctuation use. It has been happening for decades.
Note: rarely have I been accused of a being a bot for my skill at gameplay. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.
Now, if you wish to truly delve the depths of linguistic proclivities, one should peruse the works of Terry Pratchett, especially the Discworld novels. Any and all of his works are wonderful prose and deep storytelling.
At one point my 1GB disk was the “big one” in the dorm. It was the windows share of some random media. I had room for the whole 40MB videos “Jesus vs Frosty” (The Spirit of Christmas) and “Jesus vs Santa Claus”. It was before South Park became an actual show, but people watched those 100’s of times off my hard drive.
When I bought a 3GB from Fry’s it was an open question how we’d fill it. Of course, that was just as the mp3 codec started to gain traction… Problem solved.
I have it on the shelf, but haven’t gotten to it. I’ll put it in the reading queue.
There was also a competition (long ago) to see who could build a computer that would successfully boot Windows 95. The goal was to boot the slowest possible time (no arbitrary delays allowed).
The winner wrote a shim that emulated a floating point unit of the i486 so it would boot on a i386 (no floating point). The result was… booting after many weeks. They won big time.
I did some similar stuff on a Raspberry Pi. I had to NFS mount my desktop and make a swapdisk on the NFS mount to have enough RAM to build. It wasn’t fast, but it did eventually work.
We used a RPi 4 for a Plex server for a while. It was fine except it couldn’t do any live transcoding or handle h265 worth beans.
I upgraded to an OrangePi 5. I’m on a sata drive for the OS and a external USB disk for media. The thing is amazing!
No, it’s not a $50 computer. Yes, it works great.
I love RPi boards, but their hardware limitations are quick to be found as you move past simple hobbyist projects.
I use Intel NUC boards for desktop systems. The form factor is nice and compact. The only limiting factor would be the volume limits the GPU, but that’s not a requirement for me.
Do you remember the article about some university that accidentally walled in a Network server? It ran for years until they needed to put hands on it for something. They had to do the “follow the Ethernet cable” game until it went through the sheetrock into a dead space.
The Register still has the article from 2001: https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
VAX/VMS was such a beast! The hardware wasn’t readily available to the public, though.
Oh, the wireless chipsets in the 90’s into about 2005? or so…that was a bad time for anyone trying to run wireless. Hell, MS Windows didn’t even have network drivers baked in until what, WinXP? Wiring computer together in the 90’s was such a a trial, both for hardware and software fronts.
I was lucky to score a 3Com 3c905b fast 10/100 Ethernet card from a bussy in 1996. That was well supported across the board (Linux and Windows), and the IRQ settings for the PCI bus memory mapped I/O and IRQs was well documented.
Edit: buddy, not a hussy, though he kinda was… Your call in how you want to read it.
I’m a Cryptonomicon person. The modern timeline is dated now, but the overall information warfare themes are delicious.
I was there Gandalf…
In comparison to the alternatives we had at the time, Linux was a fucking tank. Once it was up, you could expect to get 6 months to years of uptime unless you were installing new tools or changing hardware (no real USB/SATA yet, so hardware was a reboot situation).
If you got a Win98 machine up, it would eventually just hang. Yes, some could got a whole, but if you used it for general use it would crash the kernel out eventually. Same for MacOS (the OG MacOS).
The only real completion for stability was other UNIX systems, and few of those were available to the general public at a reasonable price point.
Way back in the day we’d download Britney Spears and My Little Pony™ distros. Times change, I guess.
The important thing to me here is that he has a master’s degree and it took on tough subject matter with a larger perspective of how humanity needs to learn to no repeat this horrible actions of its past. He just keeps getting more awesome.
Harris/Walz 2024!
You’re spot on.
With about 10% overhead on the travel time, a pretty mainline high speed rail line would take about 15 hours to go from DC to San Fransisco. Each train (assuming Japanese trains like Amtrak is buying for Texas) can carry about 1323 seats, plus standing room. They can run 16 trains per line per hour. So, that’s 21,168 people per hour passing on the rail.
Assuming the 15 hour lead time (and no loading time of note because Sergents are really good at yelling people onto trains), within 24 hours, the Pentagon could move about 211,680 soldiers coast to cost from time t=0 to t=24 hours. That’s coast to coast, mind. If you do it from say the middle of the country to SF, it’s only a 4.7 hour trip, so now you can get 19.3 hours of soldiers moving (and arrived) around 408,542 people delivered by t=24hrs. Then, it’s another 508,032 every 24 hours after that.
Now, while it’s not particularly feasible to have commercially driving HSR across the empty center of the US, the military has a whole different set of priorities, and damn, that’s a lot of equipment & people that could be moved really fast. Yes, planes are faster, but there’s no way they’ll keep up with HSR once the train pipeline fills. This is a latency vs carrying throughput load equation and trains will win it big time. Always have, always will.
The US way way way behind on building infrastructure. Our infrastructure deficit is trillions of dollars, and our transit modality is decades behind Europe, China, India, japan, and even starting to slip behind sections of Africa. We’re failing as a developed nation because we refuse to invest in modern transit (and many other issues like healthcare, usurious education costs, and losing our democracy to dictator thinking). We’re flailing hard right now. HSR should be a massive investment for our country, along with regional/city rail (trams, metros, heavy regional), but since our population mostly has never ever seen a modern city like Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo, or Rome so they have no idea what it can even be like to live somewhere well designed for people instead for for cars.
Though, watching the military test the rails by moving a half million people in 24 hours would be hilarious for those of us not trying to coordinate it.
I use Google Docs for anything simple (1-3 pages), and if it has no citations or more than 2 figures. After that I upgrade to LaTeX.
I had a conference demand a docx file for the paper submission. I figured “fine it can’t be that bad to use word for a simple 8 page publication” but boy was I wrong! It was torture trying to get it formatted and arranged properly. Every part of the word tool is weird and clumsy.
Oh, and they’ve completely broken the original GUI WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) premise of a GUI style editor. The PDF it creates often doesn’t look anything like what the document looks like on the screen.
I dropped a note on the conference organizers about the docx requirement. I don’t have that many hours to fuck around with bad tools so I can attend your venue. I’ll just go to a conference that doesn’t torture us to participate.
Video games. I used to play 4-6 hours per day (or often more), every day. It was kind of my default activity when I wasn’t forced to do something else. If I ran out of steam trying to focus on work or family I would drift into playing a video game. The result was a MASSIVE sink of time into something that left me with little afterwards. I didn’t learn new things, I drifted away from my kids, and I didn’t take care of my home.
Video games are fine. They’re entertaining, but they’re also potentially life consuming. I watch people who want to do more with their lives, but instead they just put more time into some game or another.
I managed to kick the habit and it’s been a great 10 years since then where I play very little and only in very short, controlled bursts when I can play with my kids for a bit (they usually destroy me these days). With all of that saved time, my career started flying, my home is in better shape, and I actually don’t drift away from family events like I used to.