Posts by david 136

The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

Re: Oh Yes

There were no vans outside the ASK/Ingres building in Alameda, but there was a ad-hoc party of people outside cheering as people walked out of the building having chosen not to sign the California-not-enforceable non-compete agreements.

Ingres missed the boat for three reasons. (1) SQL; it had to write a new version of that to transition from Quel and it absorbed a massive amount of resource that could better have gone to (2), locking and concurrency strategy. Ingres used exclusive page locks which blocked readers while updates were in flight for everything on the page. It was correct, but slow. There were plans to do row-locks that weren't implemented at the time of the Demise. Eventually CA did it, but way too late. It never had any plans to address the write-blocks-read issue. At the same time, Oracle did a very clever thing with "Consistent Read" which was a way of getting multi-version concurrency at low cost. When you need an old version to satisfy a query, you'd resurrect it by applying UNDO from the logs, and do it on demand. When the rate of reference is low, it doesn't cost much. This was a club with which Oracle beat-up on Ingres at sales opportunities; (3) Oracle used financial clout to strangle Ingres. Once it was profitably extending its lead, Larry made a policy that Oracle would -never- be undersold by Ingres on any deal, and AIUI, would pretty much give Oracle licenses away to win deals, and expect to make it up on support revenue later. This crushed the Ingres sales channel, leading to both the acquisition by ASK and then CA.

Ingres did have ADTs, but a different implementation from Postgres which was developed simultaneously.

Postgre's recovery strategy was not terrible, but they didn't work it out. It was multi-versioned from the start, I think, which solved the write-blocks-read issue. But the snapshot/point-in-time recovery stuff was underthought.

There was an attempt to resuscitate Ingres post-CA by a company that became Actian, but I don't think that went well. It did get open-sourced for a while, but last time I looked it was hard to get. It probably could have competed with Postgres as open source except for the lack of community, and the multi-version update-blocks-reader problem may still be unsolved.

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

fully optimize and put some 'yields' or nanosleeps in.

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

As compared to the BWB, which has very wide aisles and may be impossible to evacuate quickly, others have proposes a "V" body

https://robbreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/6.-Screen-Shot-2023-01-03-at-3.06.33-AM.jpg

I am not sure either of these will have the same high-subsonic speed of current craft with thin wings, but may be more fuel-efficient.

AWS must pay $525M to cloud storage patent holder, says jury

The first of the patents was filed in 2000.

DHTs don't seem to have appeared in the wild until 2001 or so, in Gnutella, Limewire, Azureus, Bittorrent etc, and the applicability to file system block maps has some novelty.

If I were Amazon, I'd be annoyed at the patentability too, but the timeline doesn't look great for them.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

"the most exciting kind of non-volatile memory – a bold attempt to bypass a whole pile of legacy bottlenecks and move non-volatile storage right onto the CPU memory bus – flopped. It was killed by legacy software designs."

No, that wasn't what killed Optane.

What killed it was the shrinking gap between the performance that it offered vs. SSD in improving form factors like M.2 NVME.

There was software being written to exploiit optane, and it would have worked great -- but the number of applications that desperately need it was small compared to the ones that were perfectly happy with mmapped nvme ssd. Intel saw that trend and decided they couldn't afford to keep that ship operating. Now, there's plenty of things that could use mmapped files that don't, but that's another story.

It's sad, because it was interesting, but it wasn't really the legacy designs. It was the lack of clear advantage with other things getting faster.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

The article seemed to suggest the pulses were intentional, but didn't really explain.

That leaves plenty of questions -- like whether the RUDifying pulse at the end was intentional as part of finding limits experimentally.

Who needs sailors? US Navy's latest robo-ship can run itself for 30 days

Unlikely to be operating alone in any event. I could imagine a group with Navy people moving around leaving some "uncrewed" at times.

Tesla Autopilot accounts for 70% of driver assist crashes, says US traffic safety body

Re: Its a nice headline

The Tesla report seems subject to the spin effect of the now-reported "autopilot turns itself off seconds before a collision" information.

If the Autopilot had done that, and it get's reported as a "non autopilot" collision, that's going to significantly skew Tesla's reported numbers.

We'd have to have data that was based on "autopilot engaged for N seconds before the crash". The NHTSA data seems to be using 30 seconds. We don't know what the Tesla report is based on.

C: Everyone's favourite programming language isn't a programming language

Re: I prefer ...

rationed as a reward for the salad.

You just sold a few.

Re: Nothing new...

My god, what feature was that?

Why not encode the instruction as byte constants referring to processor documentation.

"This code can't be expressed properly in the assembler, but per XXX.YYY, this encodes a <whatever> instruction that is supported by the architecture.

Re: Nothing new, kinda pathetic really

I liked D, but it lacked funding.

Zig looks interesting.

The problem is in getting enough support in infancy to become a viable adolescent.

Re: Not like most of C replacements are new

Probably too big for the 70s on most machines. It's on the scale of pl/1, and that did not have traction outside the mainframe world.

80s I'll give you.

IBM looked to reinvigorate its 'dated maternal workforce'

Re: experience

To be fair, the wheel of reincarnation revolves, and old ideas come around again in new forms, with different twists. The balance between this and that changes too.

In general, though, it's better to wait for generic to show up with Moore's law improvements than it is to try to do special hardware, unless the hardware is likely to produce > 10-20x improvements in something critical.

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

The disturbing thing here is that the Prosecutor didn't actually clear him, and said, "There is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law,"

That should bother us all.

There was no argument to be made, and he should have said so, or said "the argument was made, and it's wrong".

System at the heart of scaled-back £30m Sheffield University project runs on end-of-life Oracle database

RAC, not RAQ predated inclusion of Oracle Clustering.

Oracle licensed some Tru64 clustering, not VMS clustering. Oracle didn't use the kernel clustering part.

Keen to go _ExtInt? LLVM Clang compiler adds support for custom width integers

Re: 33bit time

"Our integers go to 33 bits!"

- Nigel Tuffnel, in a future advertisement

Re: Ugh!

Not buying IoT as a justification. IoT stuff can and does run full kernels with full TCP/IP stacks.

It's only the FPGA-like things that need this, for custom logic at high speed.

Plain IoT devices will be using $0.25 SoCs that don't need this level of tweakage.

Re: Anyone else remember PL/I?

Also MODULA2/3

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Restrictive rules are an anti-corruption approach

One reason for the rules is to eliminate the possibility of corruption by parking officials. If given the discretion to waive fines, then that discretion is likely to be abused. "Fixing" parking tickets has a long history of being a mode of petty corruption.

Adopting a more flexible approach requires auditing of waived tickets.

Intel couldn't shrink to 7nm on time – but it was able to reduce one thing: Its chief engineer's employment

FUD. The competitors are fine.

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

"Torture people with EMACS", ha ha.

You'll pry my emacs from my cold, dead fingers.

There's that phrase again: JP Morgan CIO told Autonomy's first HP boss it was 'a shit show'

Some might suggest that more diligence was due by the purchasers, and they rather failed to do it properly.

Bun fight breaks out after devs, techie jump ship: Bakery biz Panera sues its former IT crowd

Solution: move to California.

GCHQ pushes for 'virtual crocodile clips' on chat apps – the ability to silently slip into private encrypted comms

Re: Virtual crocodile clip?

Bulldog clips have short jaws, used to avoid short circuits on nearby things. Typically sed in large size for jump start/car charging cables.

Alligators have long jaws, for fine things with some risk of shorting nearby. Good for punch down terminal blocks or relay racks.

Re: Somebody is not reading carefully

In the logical sense, that's true, but in a practical sense things designed with N=2, always, are quire different from those that are built for N >= 2. You either have a connection to a multiplexer of some kind, or you don't.

Bloodbath as Broadcom slashes through CA Technologies personnel

Re: As ye sow, so shall ye reap

Couldn't happen to a nicer company.

When they bought ASK, Wang said, "You lost. We bought you cheap."

Data watchdog fines Brit council £120k for identifying 943 owners of vacant property

Re: Alternative solution

You forgot

* FAX to self

* Copy to microfiche, then print

* Copy 4000 times

* Send to monastery for transcription by copyist monks.

* Translate to ancient language for transmission in the oral tradition

* Rely on a stone in a museum to translate back to English

(Order of steps may be varied)

Mystery surrounds fate of secret satellite slung by SpaceX

"Billion" dollar Zuma?

May reports say the payload was a billion dollar expense, with no source for that figure. Anybody heard where that came from?

Boffins use inkjets to print explosives

I'm for this 1000% if they use it to make it easier to open blister packs.

The ultimate vendor lock-in: High school opens on Oracle campus

Helicopters -land- at nearby San Carlos, which coincidentally has the airport code SQL.

80-year-old cyclist killed in prang with Tesla Model S

Re: What's the point of all these anecdotal comments???

SMIDSY! (Sorry mate, I didn't see ya)

Oracle has to pay top sales rep stiffed out of $250,000, US court rules

Re: Wasting the courts time

Can you point to any data suggesting appeals succeed often? My understanding is that overrulings are very rare. The first data I could find does not seem to support your view, see page 33 of http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Report.pdf

where just 4% of all appeals are upheld.

Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email

Re: To speak to someone?

Phone call contents aren't subject to discovery.

Four techies flummoxed for hours by flickering 'E' on monitor

Give the user a medal for moving back with a shield.

Windows 10 networking bug derails Microsoft's own IPv6 rollout

Re: "but Android doesn't support that"

"(Why the F*CK doesn't Windows support open file systems like ZFS, EXT, etc!?!), :

Because they are GPL, not open source in a way that MS can absorb in its ecosystem.

Robo-taxis, what are they good for? Er, the environment and traffic

Re: "shifting to electric, autonomous taxis in 2030 would cut vehicle emissions by 90 per cent"

Nuclear is only the future if it is affordable compared to alternatives, and Hinkley Point isn't giving any indications of being cheap.

Making fission cheaper may involve taking some risks, mitigation of which is a big part of the current cost structure.

What we really need are economical storage mechanisms that can be used to capture excess renewably generated power.

US nuke arsenal runs on 1970s IBM 'puter waving 8-inch floppies

Re: It costs more to write new software than to maintain old hardware

compared to what on a real processor?

Walmart sues Visa for being too lax with protecting chip cards

Re: Zip code for non-US cards

I am still living a nightmare of French toll roads not accepting US cards, two years later.

Russia poised to unleash 'Son of Satan' ICBM

Obsolete 30 years ago

Why in the world would they make new liquid fueled ICBMs? The US phased out Titan IIs ending in 1987, and they were really obsolete and worthless at that point. This is clearly a dick-swinging operation, not a rational response to anything.

Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons

The key reason W95 worked for consumers compared to NT 3.51 was that it played the games you wanted it to play, and NT would not.