T-hawk

171 ms·

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by T-hawk 14y ago
This exploit can't be disproved by saying "read the code". The point is that a CPU bug causes the code to run off the rails and do something that it isn't even written to do. Examining the source code shows an infinite loop running along.
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Yes, there are some gems in here, nestled among the chaff of new VAX commands and building operational schedules. I found this bit amazing, from vax84: This brings up one of many problems with games of skill that include monetary pay
663.
by T-hawk 14y ago
Right. It's not that Dropbox doesn't want to offer less than 50 GB, it's that they don't want to be charging anything less than $10/month. Customers that care about the difference between $5 and $10 per month are not going to make a busin
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by T-hawk 14y ago
I hadn't thought through the numbers, but here goes. The Wiki article in my parent post says that the US federal corporate tax rate once beyond the lowest brackets is 34% or 35%. The personal tax rate on capital gains is 15% of the 65% th
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Although technically true, there's a very widespread misconception underneath that. The low tax rates for business-derived income such as capital gains and dividends exist because that income was already taxed at the corporate level. Un
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by T-hawk 14y ago
> Is it not the case that having a Facebook account, even a sparsely populated one, is incompatible with maintaining any semblance of control over your online identity, PII, privacy? > People don't object because providing Facebook
667.
by T-hawk 14y ago
> I would sit there staring at how awesome people's lives were and wonder why I wasn't doing such awesome things myself. I felt this way with Facebook, but then worked out what was going on. It's a multiple-endpoints situation. The st
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by T-hawk 14y ago
The "asteroid belt" is unimaginably sparsely populated. Nothing like you see in Star Wars with spaceships dodging and weaving around dense fields of rocks. Asteroids are separated by a million kilometers. The chance of hitting anything a
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by T-hawk 14y ago
And the Kardashians can even split the cost three ways. But the Baldwin brothers could go four.
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Make your own chunks, and the algorithm easily becomes embarrassingly parallel. Give each of the 100 cores 1 GB, let them run independently, and don't sweat the few bits of compression efficiency you might lose. If Amdahl's Law comes into
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Another variable is the subject matter of the question. Anecdotally, it feels that the audience almost invariably nails the answer by a wide margin on pop culture questions. On questions of a scientific or technical nature, the audience o
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by T-hawk 14y ago
This approach also seems to include a dependency on being in San Francisco or other places like much of California where weather remains rather constant during the year. A New Yorker wouldn't be wearing a hoodie in July or August or a T-sh
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by T-hawk 14y ago
The solution is either to have a PaaS provider who ruthlessly eliminates single points of failure (there isn't one, currently) This isn't possible by definition, right? The PaaS provider itself becomes the single point of failure. Rings
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Modem sounds were totally useful for troubleshooting. You'd know if your modem dialed someone's voice line, or answering machine, or a fax machine, or a busy signal, or "number not in service", or if it just rang with nothing answering, or
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Code can be 5% of a business, while the entire software part is a much higher proportion. The software concern of a business encompasses way more than just coding: testing, environment building and maintenance, source control, backups, sec
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Makes total sense when you remember C's assembly roots. On most architectures including the PDP-11, the program counter just moves to the next instruction. To make it do anything different, you need a jump instruction, and that's what the
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Indeed. I did copper too, in DOS x86 assembly. Some programs used it to practical effect: you can exceed 256 colors in an 8-bit framebuffer by swapping palette values mid-screen or mid-scanline. In fact, every Atari 2600 game is a copper
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by T-hawk 14y ago
You're correct, this particular problem can be handled with sufficiently sophisticated frame buffer logic. I was generalizing from that to other concepts where emulating the television or its signal processing would be required. I'll give
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Or consider Air Strike Patrol, where a shadow is drawn under your aircraft. This is done using mid-scanline raster effects, which are extraordinarily resource intensive to emulate. So what's really going on here is that the emulator must
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by T-hawk 14y ago
You misread the versions. Windows Vista to Windows 7 takes about 5 clicks, yes. But there is no direct upgrade process at all from XP to 7. It's possible to go XP -> Vista -> 7, but no sane person would buy a copy of Vista just to
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by T-hawk 14y ago
> why oh why don't CPU designers put a damned memory-copy instruction into the machine? x86 has had REP MOVSB since forever, complete with a directional flag so you can handle the cases where the source and destination regions overlap.
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by T-hawk 14y ago
C# is fundamentally OO (especially considering the .NET framework that it's tightly bound to in real-world use), but can be used in functional ways. C# has first-class functions and closures. The LINQ stuff introduced in 3.5 is amazing to
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Pricing an e-book higher than the paperback is not ridiculous. That's capitalism. If technology has enabled a new version of a product that is superior for the customer in convenience or capabilities, the customer will be willing to pay m
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by T-hawk 14y ago
Telescopes show that Venus displays phases like the moon while Mars and Jupiter don't, which is important evidence for heliocentrism and the order of the planets relative to Earth. Telescopes also show that Jupiter's satellites experience e
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by T-hawk 15y ago
Deterrence. Motivation for all the other drivers to pay attention and keep control of their cars at all times. Legislation alone can't stop pedestrian deaths, drivers must change their behavior.
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by T-hawk 15y ago
The difference is in creep of functionality and expectations. So much stuff that wasn't even on the table 10 or 20 years ago is now expected so inherently that it's not even set out in the requirements. All those extra classes, complexity
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by T-hawk 15y ago
That runs you into pathological customer territory. People who care about the difference between $20/year and $40/year are not going to be sources of any significant profit, and statistically are the sort that will consume customer service
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by T-hawk 15y ago
A female population of 52.5% explains the effect for dating, but not for founding companies. The difference is because it's the surplus that matters for dating but the entire population for founding. Suppose that 42.5% of the population ar
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by T-hawk 15y ago
Heartily second everything there. I stopped using an alarm clock for workdays many years ago. Waking up naturally is the best ending to sleep. The time is pretty stable, except roughly once a week, I'll remain asleep 30 to 60 minutes lon
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by T-hawk 15y ago
Right. What Groupon did is as if PayPal recorded the entire amount of each transaction as revenue, rather than just PayPal's fee slice. It's kind of technically true since Groupon/PayPal does take possession of the money, but it's not rev

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