ucs · HackerTrans

A copy editor might even have employed suspended hyphens:

  "Apple-supplied and -managed hardware"

—only to be quickly overruled by the marketing folks, who’d probably frown upon such a construction.

ucs

7 年前議論

You’ve just described e-commerce circa 1990!

On Usenet newsgroups and BBS conferences, sellers would post forms that looked exactly like that, except for the ads of course. Buyers would then send in their completed order form via either email/netmail or, preferably, via fax for added security.

I remember always choosing to fax in my orders; even way back then, sharing credit card details via email seemed like a very bad idea.

ucs

7 年前議論

Furthermore, the helicopters covering the Tour are not flying for 4-5 hours straight; they make scheduled refueling stops during the race.

ucs

7 年前議論

Fun fact: up until a couple of years ago, whenever you saw a helicopter shot on the Tour de France, a fake chopper noise soundtrack would play faintly in the background. The host broadcaster felt that it added to the ambiance, since the helicopters don’t carry microphones.

Fortunately that practice has been nixed for good. Now the helicopter shots are only mixed with the (real) sounds captured by the motorcycles.

ucs

7 年前議論

>>Sometimes these images have been filmed during spring.

The helicopter shots are always live.¹ There is however some prerecorded drone footage, filmed earlier in the year, that gets shown alongside landmarks of particular interest.

Whether or not you get to see this prerecorded footage depends on which feed your broadcaster is picking up. Domestic audiences watching on France Télévisions get to see all of it, but international broadcasters are given a feed with fewer prerecorded “heritage shots” (as well as a feed with no prerecorded material at all).

¹ The director can cheat once in a while, opting to time-shift a particularly beautiful landmark shot by a couple of minutes, but only if it would otherwise go unseen due to race action taking precedence.

ucs

7 年前議論

>> With regards to the camera helo -> relay helo -> fixed wing -> truck workflow, it's likely based on the ability for the camera helos not being able to 'see' the fixed wing aircraft. For instance, since the tour goes into mountainous areas, the camera helos may go down into a valley or be occluded from the fixed wing air craft at various points in time. Using the relay helo allows the fixed wing to fly a less complex flight plan, reducing potential issues with its link to the trucks.

The two camera helicopters do need to remain within range of a relay airplane at all times. This is often tricky in mountainous areas, as you’ve correctly identified. A camera helicopter losing sight of its airplane relay is the most frequent source of signal dropouts.

The relay helicopters are only used to relay the motorcyles’ signals, not the camera helicopters’ signals. The helicopter relays travel freely up and down the route, depending on where the motorcycles are located.

It goes something like this:

Moto cameras 1-5 -> Helicopter relay -> Plane relay -> Roadside HF/Sat relay -> Finish line compound

Heli cameras 1-2 -> Plane relay -> Roadside HF/Sat relay -> Finish line compound

ucs

7 年前議論

Satellite links are actually used rather sparingly, precisely due to the high latency they introduce. None of the planes, helicopters and motorcycles are equipped with satellite uplinks; they are all using RF links in the HF band.

While there are multiple HF relays, there is only one satellite relay truck per stage, located at a geographically convenient location at roughly mid-point through the route. Its role is to pick up all the HF signals, multiplex them, and uplink them to a satellite for downlink by the Euro Media¹ HF trucks back at the finish line. It also works the other way round, in order to relay signals originating at the finish line, such as the director’s orders, back to the crews covering the race.

This satellite relay stops being used as soon as the riders have passed the midway point; from that point on, the two planes and relay helicopters are linked to the finish line solely via HF and microwave. Shorter routes like the time-trial stages don’t require a satellite relay at all.

Another use of satellite uplinks is the midway sprint location, which is covered by a fixed camera on a crane. It is relayed back to the finish line independently of the HF relays, by a regular SNG truck.

¹ Euro Media is the outfit tasked with coordinating all the HF feeds, for delivery to the (adjacent) France Télévisions production trucks which are, in turn, responsible for producing the international and domestic TV broadcasts.

ucs

9 年前議論

As luck would have it, the very same site under discussion also happens to host a neat online "IDE" for learning all about the 6502-based Atari 2600¹.

It is a companion to the book, "Making Games for the Atari 2600". A wonderfully clear and concise primer that I thoroughly enjoyed, even though I had no interest in the Atari 2600 per se. The NES was my first console -- and naturally the one I'd always wanted to program. Since it shares the same 6502 processor, I used this book as an introductory text before diving into the murkier waters of NES development wikis and forums.

¹ http://8bitworkshop.com

ucs

10 年前議論

Tail employs a large read buffer as well, but it does not matter because you wouldn't use it in the same manner.

Tail is the right tool for the job here. But if you wish to stick with your idiom, read will reliably consume a single line of input, regardless of how it is implemented:

  (read -r; cat) < file

ucs

10 年前議論

I ran TriBBS for years as a kid in the Maryland/DC metro area (301).

My OS of choice was OS/2 Warp. It could handle a full-time, two-node BBS and still allow me to do other tasks without skipping a beat -- all on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM!

I also remember being rather envious of how cool Renegade, WWIV and company looked. Not to mention the more exotic software powering the, er, rather more questionable boards: software with ominous names like ViSiON-X or Oblivion/2... But after trying them all, I eventually switched from TriBBS to PCBoard.

It was the right choice: I loved the flexibility of PCBoard's scripting language and C SDK. Adding functionality to my BBS is what prompted me to pony up for Borland's Turbo C++ and get serious about programming.

ucs

10 年前議論

Much like email, finger was a service usually hosted by your ISP/university/workplace. The daemon did not run on your own machine.

ucs

10 年前議論

Funny thing: finger and .plans were what you are doing. Twitter is what you are doing.

Even more apropos was finger's .project file: it was meant to be a single-line status update about your current project.

ucs

10 年前議論

A shame finger died out :-)

To be fair, it never had much of a life to begin with. I bet I can count on one finger (sorry) the number of folks who ever saw the cute ASCII art in my .plan.

Carmack may well have been the only person in history to have put finger to good use. Even back in those days, using your .plan for actual status updates was virtually unheard-of.

ucs

10 年前議論

I use Caps Lock as an extra general-purpose function key (F20), which I can then bind as I please depending on the application.

Mapping it as an extra modifier seems a tad unergonomic. Ideally, each modifier key should be located on either side of the keyboard, so that you can always engage it with the opposite hand. To that end, I also remap the Menu key on my MS Natural Keyboard[1] to act as a second Super modifier.

Furthermore, since I'm multilingual and need an AltGr modifier on both sides as well, I map the combo Ctrl+Super to act as AltGr. See my US+International XKB keymap[2] should you happen to want a similar setup on Linux.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-us/products/keyboar...

[2] https://gist.github.com/ucs1/fe673a3606442911dbd7d016a372646...

ucs

10 年前議論

Indeed. On my bog standard US+International layout I can simply do:

AltGr + e = é

AltGr + p = ö

Adding Shift to the mix produces É and Ö, respectively, as one would expect.

ucs

10 年前議論

>> Why isn't there a Linux distro like this?

Debian stable is that distro in my case.

I agree that you shouldn't have to put up with an annoying bug or missing functionality until the next stable release; that's what the backports[1] system is meant to address. And when you cannot find what you're looking for in the backports repository, making your own is relatively simple[2].

The way I see it, the FreeBSD ethos is perfectly applicable in Linux land. It just requires a little bit of extra discipline on our part.

[1] https://backports.debian.org

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/SimpleBackportCreation

ucs

10 年前議論

Sure enough, my first shot at installing Slackware also resulted in LILO trashing my MBR.

I was attempting a dual-boot setup with Windows 95 at the time and, being too inexperienced to recover from the mishap, lost everything in the process. (Although one could argue that nothing of value was lost; Windows 95 was practically unusable.)

I blame both Slack and LILO for traumatizing an impressionable young mind: some 20 years on, I still hesitate whenever I have to deal with a bootloader.

Thankfully, nowadays we can boot by straight-up running the kernel as a UEFI executable[1]. No more MBR/VBR/bootloader song and dance for me.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/efi-stub.txt

ucs

10 年前議論

That's an interesting tidbit of Minitel lore that I did not know about until today, thanks!

But I'm afraid that even in the DC metro area, among French embassy personnel no less, few people knew about such a thing. We certainly didn't. Most French folks who missed the Minitel just ended up subscribing to one of the major online services of the time, namely CompuServe and Prodigy.

Besides, without the benefit of those giant billboards featuring topless young ladies[1] the Minitel never stood a chance in the US.

[1] Was it 3615 ULLA? ;)

ucs

10 年前議論

Growing up in France in the late eighties, I once read an article in the gaming magazine Joystick that piqued my interest to no end. It was all about the wonderful world of téléchargement -- downloading -- through the Minitel.

Once I finally got my hands on the serial cable needed to connect the family's Minitel to my first computer, an Amstrad CPC6128, I was in business... As if by magic, a new game had teleported through the telephone network, materializing on a previously blank floppy disk. My 9-year old mind was well and truly blown! This was 1989 and I had just downloaded a game.

Never mind that the transfer took an eternity, resulting in a hefty charge to my parents' phone bill. Never mind that I had very little interest in the game itself -- it was only Bubble Bobble, after all. No, the downloading process is what fascinated me. A whole new world of possibilities had just opened up.

But a year later I was crestfallen: we had moved to the United States and there was no Minitel. Perhaps fortuitously, there were no Amstrad computers either. The complete lack of Amstrad software stateside was solid ground for requesting a new computer. Now armed with a brand new 286 PC and a 2400 baud modem, the Minitel was soon forgotten as I discovered the joys of local BBSes, inevitably ending up running a rather popular one of my own.

America may not have had the Minitel, but it more than made up for it with a thriving BBS scene, fostered by those gloriously free local phone calls.

ucs

10 年前議論

Is there a cleaner/more idiomatic way to do this?

I'm afraid this is the C idiom for assigning a void pointer to a function pointer:

  *(void **) &fptr = getvoidptr();

Without the silly cast you'd get the following warning when compiling with -Wpedantic:

  warning: ISO C forbids assignment between function pointer and 'void *'

Once you learn the idiom, and the reason behind it, it makes things (slightly) easier to parse than dealing with a bunch of typedefs, IMHO.

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