mprovost

7 ms·

1.
by mprovost 5d ago
During Covid, the local corner shop in London managed to source some amazing Bulgarian white flour. It must have been high protein, and made the best bread. Once supply chains went back to normal, they went back to British and Canadian flou
2.
by mprovost 2mo ago
Most of Uber's "platform" seemed like pet projects that engineers used to justify promotions, and then were quietly abandoned.
3.
by mprovost 2mo ago
The bowline is great because you can tie it one handed.
4.
by mprovost 4mo ago
I think HP sold their calculator business to this company. I bought the iOS version of the 15C emulator directly from HP many years ago, but the app store changed it to this company.
5.
by mprovost 5mo ago
There were backwards-compatible protocols proposed, such as EIP, but the committee chose a backwards-incompatible protocol for v6. Their assumption was that v4 would run out of space in a single-digit number of years and everyone would be f
6.
by mprovost 6mo ago
It looks like almost the same colour of those David Clark headsets which seem to be ubiquitous in airplane cockpits or helicopters. It's even the background of their corporate logo.
7.
by mprovost 6mo ago
The original Mac with 128KB of memory cost $2,495 when Apple released it in 1984. It would be about 3x that in today's money.
8.
by mprovost 7mo ago
> I wonder if, in 20 years, petrol cars will the preserve of the very rich and the very poor. That's certainly the way it's worked out with horses after petrol cars took over.
9.
31-year old VT220 terminfo curses bug(lists.gnu.org)
4 points by mprovost 7mo ago|1 comments
10.
by mprovost 7mo ago
The latest terminfo contains a fix for a bug in the VT220 entry from ESR's 1995 version.
11.
by mprovost 8mo ago
Usually RDMA is over a network that is supposed to be lossless, but it does have checksums to detect corruption and recovers with retransmission. Infiniband NICs handle all of that.
12.
by mprovost 8mo ago
FASP uses forward error correction instead of retransmission. So instead of waiting for something not to show up on the other end and sending it again, it calculates parity and transmits slightly more data up front, with enough redundancy t
13.
by mprovost 8mo ago
I suspect mostly Aspera because there are still no good alternatives.
14.
by mprovost 8mo ago
High performance means transferring files from NZ to a director's yacht in the Mediterranean with a 40Mbps satellite link and getting 40Mbps, to the point that the link is unusable for anyone else.
15.
by mprovost 8mo ago
In general TCP just isn't great for high performance. In the film industry we used to use a commercial product Aspera (now owned by IBM) which emulated ftp or scp but used UDP with forward error correction (instead of TCP retransmissio
16.
by mprovost 8mo ago
Even if they are available on your street, each building and individual flat has to be connected. For blocks of flats that's not always straightforward.
17.
by mprovost 8mo ago
Even if the cable is cat 5, telephone sockets are often daisy-chained from room to room. So it can still be a pain to get a point to point connection if it goes through several sockets.
18.
by mprovost 9mo ago
I was in college when v6 was going through the RFC process. In my networking class we had to learn Netware (IPX) and v6, which have both turned out to be equally irrelevant, for different reasons. At this stage, I fully expect to retire hav
19.
by mprovost 9mo ago
The terminfo database is one of those thankless xkcd dependencies. In this case, it's been thanklessly maintained since forever by Thomas Dickey. https://xkcd.com/2347/
20.
by mprovost 10mo ago
It reminds me of the old OSKit project from the Univ of Utah, which was also developed for research and teaching. https://www-old.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/
21.
by mprovost 10mo ago
I don't think either SCCS or RCS tracked merges, so everything looks like a new revision.
22.
by mprovost 10mo ago
There's a really good emulator for the iPhone! Back when I bought it, it came from HP themselves, but a few years ago they sold it to another company which actually maintains it. They just released a major new version a few weeks ago.
23.
by mprovost 11mo ago
Yes but they're using this fund to prop up their core business (and share price) by artificially creating demand for their own products. Most of the money that they invest comes back to them when these companies buy GPUs.
24.
by mprovost 11mo ago
This is a shorter version of Neal Stephenson's metaphor of Unix as a Hole Hawg drill from "In the Beginning was the Command Line".
25.
by mprovost 11mo ago
It's the bean soup theory ("what if I don't like beans") in action.
26.
by mprovost 11mo ago
Ed is the standard text editor.
27.
by mprovost 11mo ago
The point is that we always exist at a point on a continuum, not at some fixed time when the current standard is set in stone. I remember setting up Solaris machines in the early 2000s with the painful SysV tools that they came with and the
28.
by mprovost 1y ago
While they invented transformers, I'm not convinced that they've figured out a way to monetise them in the same way that they spent decades optimising their search results page into a money printing machine. Kodak invented the dig
29.
by mprovost 1y ago
This reminds me of coding with AI where slightly changing the prompt gives you different code and you don't really understand why but you use it anyway. In this case it's not even the compiler that's adding the incorrect inst
30.
by mprovost 1y ago
At least in the UK the Kia Niro comes in petrol, plug-in hybrid, and full EV versions of the same chassis. It seems like most Uber drivers in London have replaced their hybrid Prius with an EV Niro.

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