505

I don't know anything about UptimeTrack. Can they be trusted with information about my servers? I know it is a small amount of information, but it is non-zero.

An article well worth revisiting, but should we have (1993) on the title?

Probably just a typing error in your otherwise fine post, but the Morris worm was 1988.

And 'driving it around' is not as simple as it might sound, due to the time taken for commands to travel 4 light-minutes (minimum, and almost always a lot more). Feedback similarly.

Can't perceptions of prestige help actors make market choices?

Are the docks compatible with Soyuz?

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm struggling to understand "ImpBridge". An impedance bridge of some kind? Contract bridge scoring?

I think Taleb's article could have benefited from some better editing. I haven't read him before, though, and I think I'd understand him better if I read more of his articles.

"caring about their products has nothing to with money. It just shows that they really care."

I almost completely agree. But IMHO "really care" includes Apple organising its business so that really caring ends up making them money, without its being zero-sum.

I am open to new opportunities. If I get a request from someone with a lot of connections, my heuristic is I don't add the someone to my network. I don't think a single person with lots of connections is actually helpful to the information represented in 'my' network.

If a recruiter looks interesting, I try and open a conversation without making them part of my network.

And rules are made to be broken, of course.

Worked on my machine with 10.11.6.

Perhaps Incandescence, though it's less about mathematics and more about a society working out the physics of its environment. His website has more maths on it than I recall being in the novels.

Perhaps he's saying vi users should be using ed, and emacsers TECO. Or maybe just magnetised needles.

Perhaps classic McIlroy: calling Emacs and vi "baroque efflorescences totally out of harmony with the spirit of Unix"

Since philosophy was your favourite, you might enjoy the novels of Greg Egan. As far as I can tell, he puts good mathematics in his stories.

I first encountered this word reading Frank Herbert's Dune, so it was a bit odd when I encountered it in other literature. Later I realised one of the great things about Herbert's SF - he uses many real-world cultures as sources for his world building

Yes. I might suggest you give one of the tutorials a try. He as several, depending on which tools you're more comfortable with.

Creating a small project seemed to be quite a bit of work, and I think Peter realised this and put effort into the examples.

You might also like his PDF on recursive Make, http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf.

My child has an instance on another computer, and reports getting a plant.

I waited, and seemed to get a bird bath (in silhouette).

The pen-portrait of the nested computers was fine. I looked around a bit for a photo or a movie, but to no avail. I guess that's not the kind of news that the NYT likes to report. But I'm not a paying subscriber, so I guess I can't complain.

In Crichton's The Andromeda Strain [1], we collect something from (sub?)orbit and it does not end well.

[1] www.michaelcrichton.com/the-andromeda-strain/

I don't think I know enough about subversion or centralised git. Aegis was great for the first few years. For the main project, there was a perception that it was slow and unreliable. But a lot of us loved the transactional features and preservation of the timelines of comments for code review. Its management of test scripts was very very valuable.

I'm not sure about your authorisation checks question. Maybe Aegis did get in the way.

An afterthought about speed and reliability - Aegis is almost too configurable. For instance, it relies on a 'file history tool' per project; that can be SCCS, RCS, FHist, or anything that you can tell Aegis how to use. We used the somewhat obscure FHist. It has the advantage that it was written by the same person as Aegis, and so is extensively tested with it.

Our project had the main repository sitting on an NFS server, and in later years around a dozen working on one or two changes at any one time, with those stored on each engineer's Linux workstation. That was slow and sometimes fragile, but we never really explored other confiration options.

We accumulated hundreds of unit test scripts which had to pass on each integration. In retrospect we should have worked harder to retire or refactor the oldest ones. Having fewer or faster tests would have saved time and angst.

Aegis' implementation is very dependent on the Unix security model. We thought about doing something to make it work on Windows, but quickly got discouraged.

I don't know much about security, but I'd guess you'd be able to discover many.

Sadly, Peter Miller, the originator and I guess owner of Aegis, died a few years ago. User and developer mailing lists were on the web last time I checked.

At one time I was part of a team of around 15 developers working on a PostScript engine, mostly written in C, and included hundreds of test scripts. It shipped on a number of multi-function printers. We started on it around 2002. Today we might have used Git. We used http://aegis.sourceforge.net, sadly stuck at SourceForge for the time being.

Aegis is notable for (by default) recording and enforcing code and test script review before permitting a commit. It has other virtues, and faults, and is no longer widely used, AFAICT. Reviews were treated as transactions, and the reviewer comments went into the project history. Also time spent on development, reviewing, resuming development after 'failed' reviews, and more.

The engine is mentioned in passing on https://www.eid.toshiba.com.au/n_news_detail.asp?news_id=8. It did a number of other page description languages as well.

We also used Aegis on a number of smaller projects.

Not exactly about the electron, but if you want good fiction about singularities and the like, find books by Greg Egan. /Incandescence/ is about a civilisation living near a black hole. When you read it, keep a paper and pencil handy. Egan's web is at http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/.

I didn't realise this book existed. My university was really into Pascal and Modula-2 and had a second or third year course called Compiler Construction. We used the Dragon book (which I really enjoyed), and recursive descent. I'm not sure if we actually used lex or yacc.

Wow, I used the 1541 for backups in one job. I never timed it, but I'm not surprised at your report.

Great to see this again. The description at the time of the video hardware is important. My first computer, purchased around four years later, also had a 6502 and memory mapped video. Unlike the Apple, it did absolutely nothing to interleave the video memory access - if the CPU accessed the video RAM, there would be a momentary black horizontal line on the screen. Many of the Apple II's competitors were the same.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2721993 perhaps?

Don't give up, Jessie.

If you work for Google, and you have a neat idea for an online service, resist the temptation to do it within Google.