jloughry

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181.
by jloughry 12y ago
It's not an unreasonable solution. Back in the days of Word 1.0 (pre-GUI), it was common to have a bitmap font containing the company logo (perhaps in a few variations) in a few sizes for insertion as letterhead by laser printers. The
182.
by jloughry 12y ago
If you're at all interested in this topic, I can't recommend highly enough a little book by Tony Kordyban, Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks: Everything You Know About Cooling Electronics Is Wrong . (The sequel, More Hot Air , is goo
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by jloughry 12y ago
There are lots of syntactically valid addresses at the bottom of Lake Washington in Seattle: useful if you want to avoid spamming random people with postal mail in case that contact information later gets sold on.
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by jloughry 12y ago
I had to look up "blind rivet" because I've always heard them called "pop rivets". I agree, though: it's my new favourite tool. Be sure to buy a box of different size rivets at the same time; having the right l
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by jloughry 12y ago
This could have applications outside the narrow use case you've outlined. I encourage you to think about security in both directions: (1) protecting storage devices from computers, and (2) protecting computers from storage devices. Thi
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by jloughry 12y ago
It's debatable whether all Bitcoin miners are doing it for the reward, or whether some are doing it for an idea. On the one hand, I think I'm doing it to help the network, but on the other hand I kept the pitiful few coins I&#
187.
by jloughry 12y ago
Aside from helping the network, there is no incentive to run a full Bitcoin node. But it doesn't take much in the way of resources: a few tens of gigabytes of disk space and a few tens of kilobits/sec of bandwidth. (Don't for
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by jloughry 12y ago
I didn't like it. But I think it's important, so I'll upvote it. A lot of things on HN are like that.
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by jloughry 12y ago
Three (two of them about fifteen years old). I would be more interested to know about the distribution of interest in all the new TLDs my registrar keeps trying to sell me.
190.
by jloughry 12y ago
Some people talk about "dropping it into the sun", but the energy required is approximately more like "lifting it all the way up there". It takes a lot of kW to push a dump truck full of nuclear waste up to six or seven
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by jloughry 12y ago
OK, I look forward to seeing your methodology.
192.
by jloughry 12y ago
After thinking about it more, I realised you're absolutely right. It doesn't matter if the laser designator beam takes a knuckleball path through the intervening air; if the laser dot is on target---classical optics are time-rev
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by jloughry 12y ago
A laser is affected by temperature differences in the air (think about the mirage seen over a hot road surface) and even by gravity; a laser beam drops over distance like a bullet or a baseball, only it travels so fast that the effect is
194.
by jloughry 12y ago
Unicode support is common in recent languages but only for identifiers. I was encouraged by Fortress, which used generally accepted mathematical symbols throughout, but it's gone now.
195.
by jloughry 12y ago
Graphic designers: please don't make charts difficult to read. This is useful data, but obscured by too much "non-data ink" as Edward Tufte said [1]. [1] Edward R. Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . Ches
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by jloughry 12y ago
It would be interesting to repeat the comparison for many specific locations, then plot the measured variance geographically as a "heat map" or landscape of error [1]. Are there patterns visible that could be attributed to local g
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by jloughry 12y ago
Anecdotally, I can corroborate the observation: weather.gov slightly underpredicts rain; a "30% chance" is associated with rain more than half the time.
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by jloughry 12y ago
One of the best features of IBM mainframes used to be the documentation: every possible message that could appear on the console was indexed in the run manuals.
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by jloughry 12y ago
What if we find the point where the Big Bang happened? You're already there. Since all of space expanded from one point, by definition the Big Bang actually happened right here (and also over there) [1]. [1] http://en.wi
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by jloughry 12y ago
DO-178/C permits virtual machine separation of function on shared computer hardware; this ("Special Conditions") is the first time all three networks have been allowed to share a single network bus. Previously, networks wer
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Interconnection of previously separated networks in Boeing 737 airplanes(federalregister.gov)
1 points by jloughry 12y ago|1 comments
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by jloughry 12y ago
Ammonia was the working fluid in household refrigerators throughout the early 20th century, where it killed lots of people. Freon was invented as a safe replacement for ammonia, and Thomas Midgely was hailed for saving thousands of lives
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by jloughry 12y ago
New application of an old technique: spoofing the "trusted path"; in the old days by means of a fake login prompt to harvest passwords, today with a fake "slide to power off" that blanks the screen and makes the phone pl
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by jloughry 12y ago
Postel's law is a good principle when your threat model is nature; it leads to robustness in the presence of random failures. But it is not a good design principle in an environment of intelligently malicious failures, i.e., the inte
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by jloughry 12y ago
Is it an allowed solution to have instantaneous information transfer between distantly separated points if there was a slower-than-light bulk transfer phase beforehand? This is the idea of physically carrying a supply of entangled photons t
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by jloughry 12y ago
The URL should be: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=45809
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by jloughry 12y ago
This is a surprisingly in-depth article. Lots of detail about the sky-survey systems that spotted it, the quick-response slewing space telescope that swivels to look at discovered events, an untimely thunderstorm that interrupted alerting f
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by jloughry 12y ago
British strategic nuclear weapon designs used mechanical safeguards, including thousands of steel ball bearings poured in through a hole in the casing, which made the bomb safe to carry but had to be drained out before use [1]. BLUE PEACOCK
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by jloughry 12y ago
Ben Rich's book [1] about the development of the SR-71 explains the reason behind the hammer story. Cadmium plated tools were traced to embrittlement of titanium panels; they spent quite a bit of time tracking down the source of that p
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by jloughry 12y ago
"Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years o

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