Annatar
Annatar on Hacker News
We all have our delusions.
One could pipe that output directly to nroff or groff:
| soelim | tbl | eqn | nroff -man - | $PAGER
| soelim | tbl | eqn | nroff -man -Tpost - | /usr/lib/postscript/bin/dpost | ps2pdf - > ~/Desktop/blog.PDF
| soelim | tbl | eqn | groff -Tps -man - | ps2pdf - > ~/Desktop/blog.PDF
ZFS was made by Sun Microsystems, which was a dear, awesome company that educated, fed, clothed and put bread on the table for an entire generation of computer professionals outside of Sun Microsystems, not to mention paid millions out of their own coffers to open source a reference implementation of a System V Release 4.0 UNIX. And to top it all off, Sun Microsystems made awesome hardware.
Sun kicked butt
had fun
didn't cheat
loved their customers
changed computing forever.
"How would a mirrored boot work in practice?"
The same way it has worked for the past 30+ years: the firmware boots from first designated boot device; if that device isn't bootable, it moves on to the next one. The next one boots since it's part of a mirror and has all the necessary data to do so, and in the rare case where the device is "half bootable" one would simply intervene and select the next good bootable device manually.
It's not a shallow dismissal, it's the scourge of our industry; I can't wait to retire so that I would never have to look at it again. Give it a rest with virtue signalling.
How is inventing yet another complicated machinery to churn out some HTML and JavaScript innovation?
Utter nonsense. People are laughing their asses off at the amount of idiocy on this web site.
Who exactly is being influenced?
You've heard of this thing called "Twitter"?
Actually “Hacker” “News” has been a point of ridicule for quite a while now outside of the bubble here, so arguing that it’s an opinion forge plays right into its notoriety.
286 was a very shitty system: it had only a beeper, practically no DMA, no graphics hardware acceleration of any kind (not even hardware scrolling; sprites were science fiction). Almost everything in that shitty PC bucket was driven by the processor, and that processor was dog slow.
It takes a month to set up a Kickstart infrastructure (DHCP, TFTP, NFS, Kickstart profile(s)),
a day to three days for an experienced system engineer to package the components,
and a week to three weeks to test and package the configuration (by automating in %pre and %post of the RPM's).
That's far less than one year, and far less than it takes to set up Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker and a complete CI / CD pipeline.
Except that a JIT is still not a compiler in the conventional sense. I am specifically referring to a program capable of generating and permanently storing machine code on stable storage.
I don't understand how anyone could leave the job half-finished and compromise in this way: in these scenarios, almost all the legwork is done to also build a compiler, for those times when the interpreted code runs just right and is ready for production. Why are such interpreters never finished into a compiler?
It does not benefit me: you mistake niceness for kindness. There is little I can learn from you and your guideliness when you yourself cannot tell which is which.
You are not supposed to "identify" anything on UNIX-like operating systems; that is what the file(1) command is for, specifically, especially so since the entire concept of UNIX is that everything is
a stream of bytes.
Attempting to manually manage files in this way defeats the purpose of the OS abstracting it away for the user; and the users of your executable should not have to care what your executable is written in because you grew up on a PC-bucket whose operating system stems from CP/M -> MS-DOS!
This was a good article, and more such articles with examples are needed because understanding how pointer aliasing works can yield significant performance gains, since the compiler can be directed to make optimizations it would otherwise not make.
Maybe before starting to teach others, you should teach yourself how to cleanly package your software into OS packages, instead of peddling around MS-DOS style shell scripts with a .sh extension. Didn't anybody teach you that UNIX-like operating systems
purposely do not use extensions, in order to abstract the implementation language of the executable from the user?
How the hell are you going to properly teach others, if you have such knowledge gaps yourselves?
It's blind leading the blind again; boy does this make me mad.
Dedicated controllers were absolutely out of the question because nobody could afford them, which is why Amigas were so popular: a fully multitasking, multimedia computer for 450 DM. That's 225 EUR! Somebody that cost sensitive won't even consider a dedicated controller; back then wasn't like it's today.
This was at a time when 3.5" floppy disks were expensive (and hard to come by), and hard drives were between 40 - 60 MB, so 130 MB was quite practical. The floppy drive in the Amiga read and wrote at 11 KB / s.
And yes, this was a DAC and an ADC in software, with added Reed-Solomon error correction encoding and CRC32. The goal was to be economical. The end price was everything; it had to be as cheap as possible.
This works on the same principle as the video backup system (VBS) which we used in the 1980's and the early 1990's on our Commodore Amigas: if I remember correctly, one three hour PAL/SECAM VHS tape had a capacity of 130 MB. The entire hardware fit into a DB 25 parallel port connector and was easily made by oneself with a soldering iron and a few cheap parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcBY6PMH0Kg
SGI IRIX also had something conceptually similar to this "YouTubeDrive" called HFS, the hierarchical filesystem, whose storage was backed by tape rather than disk, but to the OS it was just a regular filesystem like any other: applications like ls(1), cp(1), rm(1) or any other saw no difference, but the latency was high of course.
With over 15,000 packages at CRAN, R has evolved from a wonderful language for statistics to a wonderful general-purpose language. I came in contact with R by accident because a colleague of mine took a day off and the client approached me instead, and it's a love affair with R that has lasted since. I haven't been excited about a programming language since I was last learning the MC68000 family's assembler. I just cannot sing R enough praises. R of course has packages for connecting to a PostgreSQL database, and Vertica is a PostgreSQL database with R as the scripting language. Such a wonderful combination. I'd gladly use and administer Vertica again without a second thought, given the opportunity,
PostgreSQL still doesn't have nowhere near the features of Oracle: for example, it still cannot do synchronous multimaster replication, unless one buys Vertica.
2. is what pushed most people over to PostgreSQL. That was the main impetus. Fortunate that, as MySQL is utter garbage, having silently corrupted data for a very long time, not being ANSI SQL compliant for a very long time, and the developers being unable to come up with one unified storage engine to handle many different loads efficiently, like Oracle can.
I was not one of those people though, but lucky enough to have had PostgreSQL running on DEC Alpha and GNU/Linux (Red Hat) as the core tool for the relational database course while I was getting my degree in computer science / information technology. A whole semester spent at the psql prompt doing SQL and programming the web application talking to it in PHP. That was back in the 20th century.
Thomas Dickey is also the maintainer of the ncurses library.
Good system administration is not having a zoo of different software management subsystems on any given system, so system administration is consistent and simple.
Everything must always be delivered in the native format of the OS software management subsystem; anything else is amateurism, not to mention a system administration AND a system engineering nightmare.
GNU stands for "GNU is Not UNIX", which means that I both hate and despise it. The command line is all I use. I work with Git every day and use it heavily.
I refuse to hack. I'm an IT professional, not an amateur, and am actually capable of building my own OS packages.
Why would I use Docker when I know how to make nice, clean OS packages?
It's like every fashion fad in IT: stuff hits, everybody goes gaga over the toy examples until it's time to put it in production. Then they finally find out what kind of a dumpster trash fire the newfangled fashion fad is, and start looking at tried and true technologies. It's always the same.
Of course they are MC68000 family assembler instructions, but the principle is exactly the same.