cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoThe C Programming Language@lemmy.ml•Are there better alternatives to null-terminated strings?English
    2·
    12 days ago

    CBOR uses variable-sized length prefixes. Strings zero to 23 bytes long require just one byte of overhead, after that it becomes two bytes for strings up to length 255, and 3 bytes of overhead for strings up to 65535. Above that, it requires 5 bytes of overhead, which is probably enough for strings up to at least a few hundred GB, though I didn’t test that far.

    click to see how i empirically determined those numbers

    $ python -c 'import cbor; overhead=0; print({ length:overhead for length in range(65537) if overhead < (overhead:=len(cbor.dumps("a"*length))-length) })'

    {0: 1, 24: 2, 256: 3, 65536: 5}

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltohomelab@lemmy.ml•What is the reason for asymmetrical connections?English
    23·
    13 days ago

    Upload bandwidth doesn’t magically turn into download bandwidth

    Actually, it does. Various Cable and DSL standards involve splitting up a big (eg, measured in MHz) band of the spectrum into many small (eg, around 4 or 8 kHz wide) channels which are each used unidirectionally. By allocating more of these channels to one direction, it is possible to (literally) devote more band width - both the kinds measured in kilohertz and megabits - to one of the directions than is possible in a symmetric configuration.

    Of course, since the combined up and down maximum throughput configured to be allowed for most plans is nowhere near the limit of what is physically available, the cynical answer that it is actually just capitalism doing value-based pricing to maximize revenue is also a correct explanation.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoMemes@lemmy.ml•Costs Less? When That Happened?English
    6·
    14 days ago

    That pin can be found for $30 or $35 on on ebay here and here, where it is described as being from the 80s and as an “employee pin”.

    I was thinking that this might have been something aimed specifically at technology buyers in US schools in the 80s or 90s, to whom Apple offered substantial institutional discounts in a (relatively successful) effort to dominate that sector. However searching the phrase “does more costs less” i found this TV spot advertising the Quadra 605 which at $1000 was the cheapest computer Apple sold when it was introduced in October 1993 (and allegedly cheaper than something else they refer to as “PC Leading Brand” 😂). That system was sold under the LC and Performa brands up to 1996, but it was only sold as a Quadra until October 1994, so, to answer OP’s question: that slogan was in use at least sometime in that year.

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