vmilner's comments

On: Pen pal programs endure in a digital age

[vmilner]

Are there no posted birthday cards in Denmark any more?

[tokai → vmilner]

There are. Its not true what the article states. The national postal operator changed from Postnord to DAO. Letters can still be send and received. Both companies were and are super bad at fulfilling their task though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansk_Avis_Omdeling

On: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

[vmilner]

"Pricematch" is also common in the UK for traditional stores like Sainsburys Tesco competing with Lidl and Aldi 'discounters'.

On: Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

[vmilner]

Isn't it common for state sales taxes to be added at the till? (I don't live in the US but that seemed to be what happened on my visits there)

[antonvs → vmilner]

Sales tax is a government imposed requirement that's not included in prices in the US, so there's no misrepresentation and no fraud. If that's what the commenter above was talking about, they're confused about what's being discussed.

On: Jennifer Aniston and Friends Cost Us 377GB and Broke Ext4 Hardlinks

[vmilner]

It's not as good as ed: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

On: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

[vmilner]

The estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs on the Voyager comms protocols.

https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

On: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

[vmilner]

Edwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive element'

On: JPEG Compression

[vmilner]

The weirdest thing to me is that the quantisation matrix isn’t symmetrical in the top left to bottom right diagonal.

On: Lost Doctor Who episodes found

[vmilner]

“Secret Army” (the “straight” inspiration of the comedy “Allo Allo”) - a dramatised version of the Belgian Comete line that returned allied airmen to Britain still stands up as a superb series from the 70s.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8ae0po

On: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say

[vmilner]

> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.

I wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[Conan_Kudo → vmilner]

RHEL 10 lacks 32-bit x86 packages, so it goes past that date. RHEL 9 support ends before that date.

On: Pike: To Exit or Not to Exit

[vmilner]

I thought this was going to be an article by Rob Pike on control flow in golang...

[jhbadger → vmilner]

Or the (mostly forgotten) scripting language Pike (derived from the internal language of a MUD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language)

[cestith → jhbadger]

I was prepared for a debate on calling _exit() vs exit() vs no explicit exit in Pike. This app is pretty interesting, too though.

[em-bee → cestith]

there is also the use of return from main(), in particular return -1; which doesn't exit.

i was debating whether i should post this discussion on the pike language discord, but now i will. you two made my day!

[cestith → em-bee]

I don’t program regularly in Pike. I’ve played with some of the examples from various benchmark and language comparison sites for the most part, but given additional free time it’s a language I’d like to actually use sometimes.

I therefore wasn’t even aware of returning -1 from main() doing that. It’s an interesting thing. I’d like to read about that, but maybe not enough to join the language discord.