fch42

17 ms·

151.
by fch42 3y ago
late to the fray, but thanks for posting this! "in the old days", books on computer graphics used to be full on "rasterization" techniques - how to convert high-level shapes, whether lines, polygons, circles/ellipse
152.
by fch42 3y ago
What a strange response. When it first got discovered/was first produced, Cocaine was perfectly "legal" (that is, unregulated). Only was made illegal (for general trade and use) around 1920 or so. Remember, the British State
153.
by fch42 3y ago
That would be necessary to make crypto "useful". The "gas fee" for handing a banknote to a vendor is ... nil. The "gas fee" for tapping a card/phone on an NFC payment pad is ... nil (you're probably t
154.
by fch42 3y ago
Even worse, in fact. While one can happily argue (non-)justifications for this till everyone's blue in the face, filesystem interfaces (in UNIX, but with a little magic sprinkle in Windows as well) have always allowed for concurrent ac
155.
by fch42 3y ago
"memory-safe" != "safe". Make a fair assessment what it means to your app / service when you have a, however controlled/contained, reproducible unexpected (by the developer) exit. Or what it means to use a hard
156.
by fch42 3y ago
Herb Sutter makes that point though somewhat hidden amongst all the apologetics... let's not forget there are security vulnerabilities that don't originate in memory access violations. "Easy" config mistakes, bad secrets
157.
by fch42 3y ago
This is true - and also misses one of the points Herb Sutter's article is making. I don't disagree at all with what seems the general sentiment here about the importance of memory safety. I also, though, don't disagree with H
158.
by fch42 3y ago
It'll be about two "hand's width" (20 degrees) to the east (left) of the Sun during the eclipse. While you may not see it bare-eye, binoculars should be enough to show it when totality is on. https://www.astro
159.
by fch42 3y ago
It'd look exactly the same, because been-there-done-that. IBM went that way with the PS/2 systems - microchannel, 8514 graphics, supported my IBM PC-DOS (and OS/2, and IBM-OEM'ed Windows). IBM before that had the BIOS la
160.
by fch42 3y ago
IBM had, if somewhat limited, success in OEM-bundling OS/2 in Germany. That was not the least Microsoft's own fault (the non-US prices for Windows were ... "high"), and pretty much ended once Win95 got there. I had a stu
161.
by fch42 3y ago
I wasn't criticising hwrngs "as such" merely saying that actual evidence exists for some that their entropy pool can be exhausted and that they can degrade. "just use the cpu hwrng" is too-simple advice.
162.
by fch42 3y ago
maybe relevant ... https://lwn.net/Articles/961510/ (CPUs may have hrngs but there are certain observations on their behaviour that create concern)
163.
by fch42 3y ago
"robust" also means robust communication about ongoing behaviour - scheduled maintenance, impact of external issues on Cloudflare and/or their customers where known, state and progress of break/fix work. While it is nice
164.
by fch42 3y ago
Gimp 3.0 deserves to be called "Duke Wilber Forever", with a suitable logo image (hint, hint). Congrats to the team for finally having the finish line in sight !
165.
by fch42 3y ago
I'm amazed by this; call it "PMTUD Broadside" or some such. The idea is really a bit egg-of-columbus. Anyway, it tickles my geek senses.
166.
by fch42 3y ago
Sun Microsystems never had an engineering-career CEO; whether Scott McNealy, Ed Zander, or Ponytail ... all on the sales side. No doubt it had strong "CTO" type people. Though not in the CEO, chairman or president/COO positio
167.
by fch42 3y ago
I'm a little in the realm of speculation here. Part of the issue with Java for embedded devices was "a bad fit". What made Java thrive in the server or even applet spaces wasn't the instruction set but the rich ecosystem
168.
by fch42 3y ago
It executes Java Bytecode. Whether Dalvik VM was/is a "Java" VM is hardly relevant there (not the least because "Java" is so much more than Java Bytecode, and Jazelle does nothing to help with anything on top of the
169.
by fch42 3y ago
My brainfog claims some blurry memories of this ... for one, documentation is lacking so much that an opensource JVM using Jazelle never happened; you wanted to develop a JVM on top of it, you'd pay ARM for docs, professional services,
170.
by fch42 3y ago
That's b*ll, really. Sun's "party culture", if that's what you'd like to call it, is and was "of its time". As were 1000$-a-head New York night club bashes for a "successful" team at Wall St
171.
by fch42 3y ago
The "historical anecdote" is that somewhen around kernel 0.99, C++ was tried. And given up due to both compiler bugs and (worse) abysmal compilation performance. For all I know about Ada, the latter has a reputation for "non-
172.
by fch42 3y ago
It was one of the most stunning finds for me when I moved to England to discover that my tenancy agreement, and later my flat's lease, stipulated to dry my clothing inside . Because using the garden or balcony is "unsightly"
173.
by fch42 3y ago
"Solar vs. Fusion" isn't really important as long as trillions of $/€/£/... are sunk into fossil fuel extraction and use ? There's plenty to reaearch in Solar Panels still as well - Perovskite is hot now,
174.
by fch42 3y ago
As someone who's done the opposite ... gone from physics to coding ... I'd suggest the first thing to do is question your premise. What exactly does "getting into physics" mean for you? What actually comes to your mind i
175.
by fch42 3y ago
Yes, there are certain things in UNIX which _are_ part of the standard (POSIX / IEEE1003) but _aren't_ usually implemented as system calls. Name lookups (whether user identities or network resources) are the biggest chunk of these
176.
by fch42 3y ago
There is nothing to "improve" on the existing interface, really. From a C point of view ... a _hidden_ global lock is worse than no lock at all. Because in the latter case ... you, as the programmer, have a choice what to do. If y
177.
by fch42 3y ago
Leaking memory is not a "solution". Ever. Maybe for a commercial problem. But not for one in systems API design. If you copy, provide a new interface. It's time-honoured and proven in Unix to give *_r() ones in such a case.
178.
by fch42 3y ago
you're right; in addition to that though, I'd like to highlight that the use of some form of locking "inside" set/getenv would gain you nothing at all. That is not because of setenv, but because of getenv. The latte
179.
by fch42 3y ago
Indeed so ... the "structure" (call it bureaucracy of you like) is all of: - an equalizer (entire team treated the same) - a confidence booster (approval of others gives feeling of having done well) - a way of distributing informa
180.
by fch42 3y ago
maybe it can, but why should? Especially if you like "cars s such", you would strongly have felt the Rube-Goldbergization yourself in the last 25 years or so; while "then" everyone could do certain routine maintenance ta

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