dewster

9 ms·

31.
by dewster 10y ago
Life is really, really short. Always stand up for what you believe, you'll be a much better person for it. Don't have regrets on your deathbed.
32.
by dewster 10y ago
I wonder why Apple isn't responding to this directly? It would seem like a natural since they've given a lot of lip service to security issues lately.
33.
by dewster 10y ago
If someone came to me and told me one of my inventions/products could get someone killed, I'd move heaven and earth to fix whatever was wrong. That same message, when presented to a large enough group where the responsibility is s
34.
by dewster 10y ago
> The point is that there is such complexity in your average smartphone, that strictly enforcing radio silence with software from within is practically impossible. Change is never impossible for something we ourselves design and manufact
35.
by dewster 10y ago
My reaction is because no one here seems to have any sense of ownership for the products they design, which are a key part of the security issues and abuses we are currently experiencing. If you participate in the design of a phone that bro
36.
by dewster 10y ago
I'm curious as to why Snowden didn't simply recommend everyone go this route instead of bending over backwards trying to fix the iPhone?
37.
by dewster 10y ago
HW & SW engineers (I'm one, I assumed many or most here are as well).
38.
by dewster 10y ago
OK, I agree, we should wash our technical hands and let some poor schmuck in exile clean up all of our technical security messes.
39.
by dewster 10y ago
HW & SW just happens in the middle of the night by elves? Mistakes were made? For a tech board I expect a bit more ownership of the problem here. This is OUR domain and we should act like it.
40.
by dewster 10y ago
Surely the main processor could query the sub processors for relevant info like current state? if this isn't possible then the HW/SW world of phones makes no sense.
41.
by dewster 10y ago
Probably just showing my ignorance, but there is a processor running in the phone, and it is connected to the various chips on the board, and you can run your own apps that could query the chips directly? If the OS disallows this, I'd
42.
by dewster 10y ago
But we don't do this anymore, we don't build processors to cater to the particular needs of a particular high level language because we know now this approach to speeding things up is fundamentally misguided. Hardware is designed
43.
by dewster 10y ago
>You do understand that hardware development has been shaped by C being the defacto standard low-level language? No, I don't understand that, and honestly have no clue what you're talking about. C is about as simple as things
44.
by dewster 10y ago
Forth is maybe one step up from an assembly language for a stack machine. Is Forth difficult to master? Yes, partly because the target hardware is alien, but mostly because you're doing things in glorified assembly posing as a higher
45.
by dewster 10y ago
The true strength of C is being a good fit to the underlying hardware. And hardware still very much matters, even if it's running Unix, because of binary compatibility. I still don't get the VM thing. I mean, I get it from a port
46.
by dewster 10y ago
>Almost every bytecode VM in existence today owes Forth (and Moore) a giant "thank you." Funny, I see bytecode VM as one of the things that's fundamentally wrong with computing. It's one more layer of unnecessary cra
47.
by dewster 10y ago
Is there some level of art in CS and processor design? Yes, because there is no one clearly "right" answer to larger problems. CM speaks eloquently, and presses a lot of my buttons (i.e. I agree with him) regarding what is &quot
48.
by dewster 10y ago
When their art is ready, which might be never. It's art after all, not a product. When I was gainfully employed by a large telecom, very little of what I did found its way anywhere near the market. Most go to the grave with their mast
49.
by dewster 10y ago
>Another reason why Kodak was slow to change was that its executives “suffered from a mentality of perfect products, rather than the high-tech mindset of make it, launch it, fix it...” This is actually my preferred work environment. Fuc
50.
by dewster 10y ago
My feeling is that processor development essentially came to a halt because the fruits of Moore's law were being used to design an ever "better" core that looked for all the world like a single core sequential machine. Was c
51.
by dewster 10y ago
> Does imperative programming force you to micro-manage variables and arguments? I just don't think many programmers fully take into account all the trouble a stack-based language is. You're constantly rearranging the stack to
52.
by dewster 10y ago
IMO, anytime the programmer has to micro-manage anything it's basically assembly (Forth forces you to micro-manage the stack). I dislike syntax which uses the <> symbols, but I'm all for RPN and postfix (in theory anyway).
53.
by dewster 10y ago
Drilling down, past the entire war on drugs nonsense, past the perverse incentives of plea bargaining, the base problem is our old testament focus on meting out punishment rather than on rehabilitation. If I kill someone there's probab
54.
by dewster 10y ago
HW/SW co-design is supposed to go like this: Never do anything in HW if you can do it in SW. Because HW is expensive and dangerously set in stone. Because SW can be as complex as it needs to be and can be easily fixed / updated
55.
by dewster 10y ago
Yes, but even with the most meticulously hand coded assembly, a canonical stack machine will starve the ALU ~1/3 of the time. Better to code however is the most efficient at the top level, implement the HW however is the most efficient
56.
by dewster 10y ago
I've read that ARM Cortex-M0 and M0+ cores do not support it. Why on earth isn't it in all ARM cores?
57.
by dewster 10y ago
> Forth routines are usually short so they don't need local variables. Variables have to go somewhere. In a zero operand machine they go on the stack. Good luck finding them amidst all the confusing rolling, picking, duping, etc.
58.
by dewster 10y ago
SW coming to HW saying "your ALU is broken because it's rounding incorrectly" or "we need feature X to speed up our real-time calculations" I get. SW coming to HW saying "we need feature Y because our own SW pr
59.
by dewster 10y ago
It's hard for me to see that CPUs historically and substantially pander specifically to C. IMO adding hardware crap to fix software crap should be strenuously resisted. Early on there were efforts to build custom Lisp machines, etc. w
60.
by dewster 10y ago
> I'm talking code vs data check, pointer bounds check, pointer write-check to prevent modification, optionally stack overflow, and so on. I'm probably showing my ignorance, but I don't think anyone can convince me that in

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