jloughry

21 ms·

151.
by jloughry 11y ago
1 JAN 1970 was a judicious choice for the UNIX epoch date; it allowed a 32-bit signed integer time_t type (counting seconds) to handle dates almost all the way back to the year 1900 as well as 'way into the future.
152.
by jloughry 11y ago
There's a UK group preparing to launch a small rocket from a high altitude balloon; they've built apparatus to do ground testing of release and ignition and guidance systems under realistic conditions of temperature soak and air p
153.
by jloughry 12y ago
I'm positive that no machine in my home network has ever been part of a botnet; the only explanation that stands up to scrutiny is the Tor relay that was running for a few days as a NAT forwarded service through my router's static
154.
by jloughry 12y ago
I've never run a Tor exit node, only relays. There's very little information available about what's happening. I've tried to get my router's IP address off the blacklist without success; entries don't seem to a
155.
by jloughry 12y ago
Do you run a Tor relay? If your IP address is listed as being such, you'll see that message on lots of web sites. Apple's support site (although not their store, interestingly) and phdcomics.com are other places I've run into
156.
by jloughry 12y ago
There was an attempt made to build an economic simulator (really a special purpose analogue computer using water as the working medium) in the 1940s in New Zealand [1]. Terry Pratchett played with the concept in one of his books [2]. [1] h
157.
by jloughry 12y ago
The link is broken, but http://www.princeton.edu/~aloo/fermat.pdf works.
158.
by jloughry 12y ago
Lithium thionyl chloride batteries can last 40 years, based on a self-discharge rate of 1% per year. They're used for things like sensors buried in concrete where it's a hassle to change the batteries.
159.
by jloughry 12y ago
The smallest virus is 17 nm in diameter, according to Wikipedia. Most are 20 to 300 nm. The bacterium here is about 500 nm across, almost exactly the wavelength of visible light.
160.
by jloughry 12y ago
And that was my impression of the p-System too. The key thing that made Java fast, and wasn't clearly appreciated (except by a few people, not me) at the time was that the JVM was small enough to execute entirely in the CPU's ca
161.
by jloughry 12y ago
It's hacking a different kind of system (the legal system); if I'm reading between the lines of the newspaper article correctly, she's actually trying to sue the insurance company indirectly, because their interpretation is
162.
by jloughry 12y ago
The most striking thing about Randall Munroe's "Up Goer Five" comic [1] was that the word "computer" is on the list, but "thousand" isn't. "(Explained using only the ten hundred words peopl
163.
by jloughry 12y ago
That was beautifully written.
164.
by jloughry 12y ago
I want the Jetsons' car sound. My bother wants a Star Wars TIE fighter and my father in law would like the sound of a B-17, please.
165.
by jloughry 12y ago
Sun Microsystems hardware would halt processing to beep the console speaker for half a second; I worked on a military communications system whose throughout would throttle to nothing whenever a long series of beeps occurred. Wiggling the
166.
by jloughry 12y ago
The power supply on the old Apple II "chirped" when switched off. I always understood it to be the oscillator decaying down from 20 KHz to DC in half a second or so.
167.
by jloughry 12y ago
> a pair of very fast dacs hooked up to the 16 address lines of my computer and another dac hooked up to the databus. Here's an article about it, with photos [1]. I remember reading it in BYTE, years ago. https://archiv
168.
by jloughry 12y ago
So, flippers are more complicated than I thought; they have a microswitch and two coils in the solenoid for quick impulse response with low holding current. That's fascinating!
169.
by jloughry 12y ago
A delay of several seconds every time when connecting via ssh is usually due to the remote host trying to look up your IP address and timing out. Change the remote host's sshd_config file to include the line "UseDNS no" and c
170.
by jloughry 12y ago
X11 security is...weird. There's no reason, in 2015, not to use SSH to access it, and kudos for doing it that way, but the difference between ssh -X (X11 forwarding) and -Y (" trusted X11 forwarding") is not what it seems; r
171.
by jloughry 12y ago
The HTML style of the First Website Ever Made is interesting to read: short lines, careful line breaks, upper-case tags (and a few no-longer-seen) but no indentation. Spacing, as always, is tricky in hand-written HTML.
172.
by jloughry 12y ago
Another problem with the GPS component is that it's extremely sensitive to antenna coupling, and might not work if entirely submerged in (what is essentially) water.
173.
by jloughry 12y ago
You're right, so I sent the Tor Project a donation through paypal. They're a U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
174.
by jloughry 12y ago
How does iodine.com (as a company) handle the problem of FDA regulation? Besides the statement on the web site, I mean: Iodine doesn't provide medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or prescriptions. Read our terms of use for more
175.
by jloughry 12y ago
Has anyone tried to store/diff/share code as ASTs... This is such an interesting idea I had to respond. To point out that it could go well beyond formatting, to variable and function names as well. With an AST-aware editor, I co
176.
by jloughry 12y ago
Because the energy required to carry it there is approximately equal to lift it all the way up there , not "drop it down a hole". You can't drop something into the Sun without first overcoming a huge potential energy barrier
177.
by jloughry 12y ago
Hydrogen is much less expensive than helium, gives slightly better lifting performance, and is not a scarce resource. Why don't more HAB projects use hydrogen? The only good reason I can think of, discounting the fire hazard, is the po
178.
by jloughry 12y ago
Wasn't Murphy's law formulated after a technician plugged sensors into one of these sled pointing the wrong way? The exact same problem occurred in 2004 when the Genesis space probe sample return capsule returned to earth with
179.
by jloughry 12y ago
Maciej Ceglowski put it best: "You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design." [1] [1] http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm#5
180.
by jloughry 12y ago
From the excellent series of books What Went Wrong by Trevor Kletz: ...our first choice should be to see if we can remove the hazard—the inherently safer approach. For example, could we use a nonflammable solvent instead of a flammable o

More ›