mprovost

It's not a VAX that you're physically plugging a terminal into. The remote machine is totally capable of communicating with a newer terminal, it just needs to know how. You're being nice by giving it that information. You can also just install it locally in your home directory (~/.terminfo). (You used to be able to stuff the entire entry into the TERMCAP environment variable and not install anything.)

Every terminfo is custom, to the terminal it applies to. It's just that most entries are 20+ years old and even glacial distros have converged on some version of the database that mostly worked, until the recent resurgence of interest in actually writing new terminal software.

Wuff, Wuff!!

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 flours, and my bread has never been as nice.

Most of Uber's "platform" seemed like pet projects that engineers used to justify promotions, and then were quietly abandoned.

The bowline is great because you can tie it one handed.

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.

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 forced to migrate. The past 30 years have shown that not to be the case.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1385

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.

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.

> 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.

The latest terminfo contains a fix for a bug in the VT220 entry from ESR's 1995 version.

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.

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 that the receiving end is capable of reconstructing any missing bits. This is basically how all storage systems work, not just Weka. You calculate enough parity bits to be able to reconstruct the missing data when a drive fails. The more disks you have, the smaller the parity overhead is. Object storage like S3 does this on a massive scale. With a network transfer you typically only need a few percent, unless it's really lossy like Wifi, in which case standards like 802.11n are doing FEC for you to reduce retransmissions at the TCP layer.

I suspect mostly Aspera because there are still no good alternatives.

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.

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 retransmission). You could configure it to use a specific amount of bandwidth and it would just push everything else off the network to achieve it.

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.

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.

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 having never deployed a single resource using v6.

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/

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/

I don't think either SCCS or RCS tracked merges, so everything looks like a new revision.

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.

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.

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".

It's the bean soup theory ("what if I don't like beans") in action.

Ed is the standard text editor.

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 first thing you would do is download a package of GNU coreutils. Now those utils are "standard", unless of course you're using a Mac. And newer tools are appearing (again, finally) and the folk saying to just stick with the GNU tools because they're everywhere ignore all of the effort that went into making that (mostly) the case. So yes, let's not let the history of the GNU tools dictate how we live in the present.