Posts by John Geek 205 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2015
and, its the global standard for GIS software in science and such. My son is a ****ogist, and they studied ARCgis in undergraduate school, and virtually everything is done in ARCgis. I tried to show him postGIS and what you could do with a little simple python scripting, and he was like 'this is the industry standard'.
sadly, there was a lot of junk in the 286 motherboard market... I had a BUNCH of 286 systems that ran OK with realmode software like DOS and windows 1/2, but crashed with protected mode software like Unix/286, Windows 3, etc. IMHO, WIndows didn't even begin to get stable until WfWG3.11, and Win95 was an order of magnitude better. Win98 another order of magnitude.
Another factor, IMHO, OS/2's GUI insisted on using a differernt API that had no real advantages over the WIndows API, it just added more layers of complexity. The driver layer in OS/2 1.1 was pretty awful too, with lots of very poorly documented complexity in implementing a display card adapter driver.
the entire postgresql database server is written in pure C. It has been upgraded and expanded for 30 years now, and maintained a very high level of stability and security throughout its life. its quite portable and runs natively on most every popular operating system. it can be compiled with gcc, clang/llvm, Sun Solstice C, IBM AIX XLC, Microsoft MSVC, and numerous other compilers.
our brother B&W MFC laser has printed around 40,000 pages, including both of our kids school work from k-12, and my wife's assorted stuff for scouts, and volunteer groups and drafts of her tech writing before she retired. its had maybe 3-4 misfeeds, generally the last page of the stack in it that got a corner bent when it was loaded. it prints double sided, it scans double sided in one pass. I think we're on the 4th extra-life toner cartridge. I think we've gotten our money's worth.
I remember the name Progress, a former employer had used their database server about 30-35 years ago before switching to Oracle... so I look up the company, wow, circa 2012, they divested themselves of almost everything they had to date produced, and went on an acquisitions warpath, buying at least a dozen companies, including the authors of IPswitch who had in turn acquired the authors of MoveIT.
These conglomeration companies rarely seem to integrate well, and generally figure they can just milk what they have for profit and move on to their next victim.
yeah, thats the fun with traditional raid mirroring, you can't tell which instance is the 'good' one. another reason I'm a big fan of ZFS, every block on every device has a timestamp and checksum. conventional RAID assumes disks have only two states, working perfectly, or not working at all, they don't allow for anything in between.
Squirrels are just bushy tail rats.
had the tree squirrels at my place fill up the engine on my ford diesel truck with acorns, I shopvac'd out like about 2 gallons of acorns from the valley in the 7.3L powerstroke V8. I sprayed peppermint oil all over everything, thats kept them out since, but I have to renew it every month or so.
A few years ago I parked my rarish (1 of 775 in the USA) 1993 Mercedes 300CE Cabriolet (Convertible) for the winter due to the top leaking in heavy rains, when I went to start it again in the sunny spring, I had zero electrics. popped the hood, big woodrat nest right on top of the engine, and in the battery compartment, and they had chewed through ALL the main ground wires that go everywhere off the right front spring tower ground point. I never did get that car sorted out again, sigh, it was a sweet ride when it was running. But, it was getting on in years and miles, it had over 260,000 US miles on the clock and things were starting to get tired, it was due for tires, brakes, a new cloth top, and the back seat leather was all dried out and cracking.
the builtin GE dual oven in our house dates from the mid 60s, we bought the house 30 years ago, in the mid 90s.
our Kenmore side-by-side fridge is from the late 80s or early 90s..
When our old Maytag washer wore out a half dozen years ago, we shopped long and hard, and got the last model Speed Queen to have traditional electromechanical timer based controls, the rest of the washer is built at least as well as that Maytag, probably heavier gauge steel as even if its out of balance it hardly complains.
two entirely different concepts. a parameterized query is like, SELECT stuff FROM somettable WHERE id=$1; and the value of $1 is passed with the query as a parameter.
a stored procedure is a subprogram that runs inside the database server, usually written in a PLSQL style language, which is SQL with IF and other control structures as well as variable assignments, etc. stored procedures can also be written in Java or other languages, depending on the database server.
at my last $job, at a $bigcorp, we kept replacing Oracle instances with PostgreSQL, yet somehow our Oracle total corporate bill remained relatively flat. I'm firmly convinced they'd decided via forensic accounting that 'we' were good for $xx million/year, and would adjust our per cpu instance fees to keep up that rate. This was over a 20 year period, although it took about 10 years before the postgresql replacements started ramping up into the larger deployments. The rank and file production operations folks loved it because they didnt have to worry about licensing or server sizes, they could deploy as needed. upper executive management thought they needed service contracts on everything and were less happy, as they didn't want inhouse subject experts.
December 2019 was my last day at my last tech job of 20 years (department was being shut down, and our jobs were being oved to Asia), and when I figured out what all I had in my various retirement accounts, combined with my wife's, and we're both mid 60s, I decided it was a good time to retire. She was made redundant not long after. who wants to hire a 63 year old burned out software engineer, anyways....
then covid hit. about the only major change in our lifestyle was getting curbside takeout instead of going out once or twice a week. My biggest regret has been not being able to go to music festivals and local shows.
I'm *OH* so glad my ivy league liberal arts parents, may they RIP, never EVER touched a computer in their life, so I was never called to do any family support such as this. My dad used a vintage Underwood full sized mechanical office typewriter, probably 1950s vintage, right up until he couldn't write anymore in his 90s.
yes, but of that 25% of total system price spent on RAM, how much cheaper were similar spec 4x512MB non-ECC rams ? if the non-ECC stuff was 12% cheaper than the ECC stuff, and the ram was 25% of the total, then the total system price of the ECC was more like 3%.
oh and the Opteron was AMD's server CPUs, marketed against the Intel Xeon's.
in fact, Intels' Celeron, Pentium, and Core I3 cpu's have ECC enabled, but only when used on a 'server' chipset, like a C2xx, not on a desktop/laptop chipset. and the only reason Core i5 and i7 have it disabled is so they can sell more expensive Xeon chips which are functionally identical.
If 4GB systems have an average of 3 single bit faults a year, then a 16GB system would have 12/year. My desktop and laptop both have 16GB and both are 5+ years old.
and a week ago I'd just dug up my old WNDR3700v3 to use as an extra WAP to provide coverage for the north end of my rather long and linear house...
.... so as of a couple hours ago, its running OpenWrt 19.07.3
Speaking of annoying Netgear features, the same 'model' WNDR3700 could have any of 3 or 4 different chipsets depending on the version. v1, v2 were Atheros, V3 is Broadcom, V4 is a different Atheros, and V5 is a MediaTek. *yuck*.
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