Viewing profile — mprovost

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 compan…

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 spa…

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 tra…

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…

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…

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 soc…

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 di…

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. T…

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 ba…

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.