Viewing profile — bodyfour

The "if !" syntax isn't available on old enough shells. Probably not an issue for most people in 2026 -- you have to back pretty far for it to be missing. Technically, though, "if …

It's really easy to run for yourself: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/pdp7-unix/ Don't expect it to do much, but it's fascinating if you're interested in OS history.

The one exception I'd make to this is Sodium-ion which does seem to have some chance of reaching manufacturing scale: https://www.batterytechonline.com/materials/5-key-takeaways-..…

Indeed, that was the way it originally worked in all UNIXes: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... It was a then-important optimization to do the most com…

> The creator of MINIX, Andrew Tanenbaum, asked the community to choose between Stevie and Elvis to be adopted as the main text editor for their OS. Elvis was chosen and it's the d…

Waterloo&City seems to be missing too

The issue is that "const" didn't exist in the earliest forms of C... and even when it became available not everybody started using it. So you might have a function that doesn't hav…

A few months ago I happened to install Debian/unstable on a G4 mini. ppc32 is no longer a supported architecture -- purely "what you get is what you get". Still, the process was mo…

What is annoying to me is that in this internet-connected age, the storage units I see still don't have better per-unit security. Just a phone alert to say "door to unit #xyz has b…

> in that case, a compiler still must set something up to fulfil the main `noexcept` promise - call `std::terminate()` This is actually something that has been more of a problem in…

> not sure about other *nixes Should be available on any UNIX, it was added to V7 UNIX back in the 1970s: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc... Even befor…

Surely you mean Ultrix, not OSF/1? Unless you're misremembering the hardware model...

After seeing how term limits work in the California state legislature, I stopped being a fan of them. The first (small) problem is that it caused unneeded intra-party drama. Effect…

IFUNC is supported on several architectures, including ARM64. The malicious code that the xz backdoor inserts into the library is a compiled x86_64 object file so it only is target…

> I've long since said that if you want to hide something nefarious you'd do that in the GNU autoconf soup (and not in "curl | sh" scripts). Yeah, I've been banging on that same dr…

Probably the person you're replying to is just confused because before it was standardized some snprintf() implementations returned -1 on overflow. If you were trying to be portabl…

I can understand reasons they won't (re-)enter the server space themselves. However it is a shame they don't sell bare boards for specialist integrators to build these sorts of pro…

A great point, but even over a teletype you'd use "ex", not "ed".

It remained a valuable skill into the 1990s when many UNIX machines still had a separate /usr partition. Many times I'd have to fix a server with a configuration issue causing /usr…

That much is true -- the difference between 6 and 7 registers is much larger than the benefit of going from 14 to 15. However, even under zero register pressure having a frame poin…

> when I had two or more files of the same size, and the size was larger than a few MB, they likely had the same content. Yes, if the number of files is small enough, then "notice …

"The math" only matters for random collisions, which are effectively impossible (less likely than the CPU malfunctioning). However that tells you nothing about maliciously construc…

(Warning: rambling ahead, since in the past I've spent a decent amount of time on the same problem) > using blake3 for hashing the content Using any hash algorithm isn't a good des…

and/or add overhead power delivery to major motorways, allowing trucks to have (relatively) small batteries for the non-motorway parts of their journeys: https://www.youtube.com/wa…

> If you don't consider compute cost [...] Yes, but what if you do? Imagine your hyper-specialzied API-heavy model takes 10x less resources to answer a question (or at least a ques…