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We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

devblogs.microsoft.com

121–128 of 128 posts

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#121
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quick and dirty Perl deployment system I built at reddit lasted nine years. Five years after I left. I definitely never intend it to last that long.

My father wrote a dBase application forty years ago that, to his amazement, is still in use in some places today. Inertia is a hell of a force.

It probably has more digits for the primary key than the MS bug tracker originally mentioned. Sigh.

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#122
Is it just me, or does this seem terrible? Lack of a stable business key & limiting key size to 4.5 digits just seems terribly lacking in any competent database practice.

I was building ISAM database applications for small business in the early nineties, and we used 6 digit keys.. and an index to access records by.

I'm sure Raymond Chen is a nice guy, but this just makes me think of a retard stabbing his cheek when trying to eat with a fork. (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels movie.)

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#123
post #53

The one thing all long-lived systems have in common: nobody ever intended them to be long-lived systems.

The quick and dirty Perl deployment system I built at reddit lasted nine years. Five years after I left. I definitely never intend it to last that long.

so reddit used a perl script for deployment until 2017?

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#124
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all my comments, this is oddest thing to downvote! Is RAID bad now?

seek not to comprehend the downvoters, for it is written: it is simpler to predict each gust of wind in a storm, than to explain even a single downvote or something

Thanks marvy, this made me smile.

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#125
post #59

The bug puns were everywhere! When I started working at Industrial Light and Magic in 1998, there was no bug tracker in regular use. I ended up building a bug tracker in Python called "Roundup" (inspired by a program by Alan Trombla, who came up with the name). To create the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability in case the bug spray lawyers came after us, the icon was a little spinning GIF animation of a cowboy o…

CBB reminds me of the pieces of hardware I've labeled as "maybe bad". Only to run across 2 years later, and find myself wondering "who was this 'future me' that I envisioned might be interested in an ethernet card that exhibits flaky behavior under high load when bonded?"

Well, if it just corrupts packets and doesn't (make the (driver|kernel) crash|bring the link down completely|confuse PCIe so badly the PCH hard-resets) you could use it to build a resilient UDP (or even TCP) packet retransmission algorithm.

Not kidding, the results would probably be drop-in usable for cellular/satellite/microwave/etc links, and spotty WAN in general.

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had the developers stopped to plan they would have built something with over 16 bits of primary key While true, this was in the 16-bit, Windows 1.x era. Also the ~640kb of RAM era (disks also werent that big either, DOS (v3.x) around that time only supported 32 MB partitions). Not sure which version of DOS Windows 1.0 ran on, I didnt use windows until v3.11 for Workgroups. A 32-bit primary key would likely have bee…

He didn’t say which platform it ran on. Was Microsoft still using Xenix internally at the time?

Yes, for a time Xenix was used for some proportion of internal development, IIRC for DOS.

I think I read that on here somewhere. I unfortunately don't have a citation. Need to get a time machine to take me to whatever point in the future I sort out my bookmarks ._.

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#127

Is it just me, or does this seem terrible? Lack of a stable business key & limiting key size to 4.5 digits just seems terribly lacking in any competent database practice. I was building ISAM database applications for small business in the early nineties, and we used 6 digit keys.. and an index to access records by. I'm sure Raymond Chen is a nice guy, but this just makes me think of a retard stabbing his cheek when t…

Yikes, please don't post like that last bit here. I get that you probably meant it lightheartedly, but it does not come across well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead

#128
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seek not to comprehend the downvoters, for it is written: it is simpler to predict each gust of wind in a storm, than to explain even a single downvote or something

Thanks marvy, this made me smile.

:)
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