kabdib

33 ms·

361.
by kabdib 5y ago
Right, I'm doubtful that the die area consumed by the chip's ECC circuitry would fail often enough to support a "non-ECC" manufacturing bin.
362.
by kabdib 5y ago
It's a fine article if it gets you excited to learn more about PCIe (which is pretty dang cool). The MindShare book on it is quite good, very detailed and comprehensive, and doubles as a doorstop when not in use. But yeah, I spotted th
363.
by kabdib 5y ago
Anyone else remember Larry Niven's "slaver weapon" (a common weapon / digging tool from his Known Space stories)? A hand-held device that can temporarily "suppress the charge on the electron" seems like a reall
364.
by kabdib 5y ago
True. But the exec who bought the "discounted package" from that salesdroid will never know the difference. Just don't tell 'em that you really just installed Apache and replaced the admin login page.
365.
by kabdib 5y ago
I guess they tried it without the ants, and it didn't work?
366.
by kabdib 5y ago
You're only laughing because you're not the one who has to make it work in production :-)
367.
by kabdib 5y ago
We really didn't run GEM that way. And the ROM-based version booted without any commandline, in under a second. I miss 1980s boot times.
368.
by kabdib 5y ago
Whether or not anyone wire-wrapped a board (pretty sure no one did), we didn't write a single line of code for the National parts. There were a number of visits by National sales reps and they dropped a lot of documentation on us, thou
369.
by kabdib 5y ago
I worked on the ST and helped evaluate the NS32032/32016. We started counting clock cycles for various operations and got some bad vibes, and then we started finding out about chip bugs (definitely not pretty, and National was coy abou
370.
by kabdib 5y ago
Consoles have design lifetimes, and thermals are part of the computation that helps you figure out if your components are going to last as long as the warranty. Obviously, if you run a chip hot, its service life will be reduced. So companie
371.
by kabdib 5y ago
He's had years to do this, and didn't. I suspect it'll get dismissed for laches.
372.
by kabdib 5y ago
"For purposes of National Security . . .", a close second.
373.
by kabdib 5y ago
I thought that 300M / day was an off-by-an-order-of-magnitude error. Nope, you're right. Wow. That really puts the expense into perspective.
374.
by kabdib 5y ago
Atari published the listings of the ROMs for their 400/800 line of computers. They also published the BIOS for the Atari ST (which I helped write, and wrote the documentation for). No schematics, though.
375.
by kabdib 5y ago
The technical documentation was really good. Complete BIOS listing (that as fun to read), and IIRC there were circuit diagrams (since there was very little VLSI -- just the processor, memory, and a bunch of gate-level TTL chips). I think th
376.
by kabdib 5y ago
That's today. Next will come scanning of your phone's content. "Hey, if you never send email or chat, the scanner never runs." And keyboard logging. "For the children". Encrypt end-to-end all you want, it doesn
377.
by kabdib 5y ago
Three bucks a month? They just committed suicide.
378.
by kabdib 5y ago
I believe the "sometimes Denuvo impacts performance" problems are related to developers putting DRM checks in places they shouldn't (e.g., checking something every frame). I can't tell you the number of times that titles
379.
by kabdib 5y ago
They could do this with text, too. Look for "insurrection" or other keywords in notes, or emails. Report users with lots of hits to the authorities. It's a slippery slope.
380.
by kabdib 5y ago
In the early 80s I worked at Atari in a small group doing "arcade conversion" cartridges for Atari's line of home computers. I've written about this elsewhere (not going to pimp my blog), but all this really meant was th
381.
by kabdib 5y ago
The Usenix conference proceedings and other publications are usually very good: https://www.usenix.org/publications I was an on-and-off-again ACM member for 40 years, and one of the better publications was ACM Computing Sur
382.
by kabdib 5y ago
Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there's your "Oh wait, I've seen a solution to this problem before..." superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that's easy to acquire.
383.
by kabdib 5y ago
In the absence of a clear and direct conflict of interest (e.g., awarding contracts to vendors, making strategic decisions), what you do on your own time with your own resources shouldn't matter at all. I know games companies that let
384.
by kabdib 5y ago
Patents were supposed to provide enough information so that someone else could build a widget, in exchange for a limited time monopoly on that widget. "You teach the world, we'll let you eat for a while on that." What we got:
385.
by kabdib 5y ago
A while back we replaced the windows in our house with new, more efficient windows. The workers who showed up were the usual contract construction labor folks; generic company truck, not a whole lot of enthusiasm. Every replacement window c
386.
by kabdib 5y ago
IBM's 360 series numbers bits from 0 to 31, with bit 0 being most significant. I know I've seen material where a CPU numbered bits from 1 to 32, with 1 being most significant, but I can't remember the manufacturer. Let us n
387.
by kabdib 5y ago
[Argh, "Based", not "Basic" in the second paragraph] I don't remember. It probably did not have "sold by NewEgg" checked. That my order was going to a third party seller was not obvious to me, the first
388.
by kabdib 5y ago
NewEgg is just fine with scammers on its marketplace. Last year I bought a new mouse. NewEgg redirected my sale to a reseller, who sent me a busted, used mouse in a plastic baggie, with cigarette burns on the buttons. After raising a little
389.
by kabdib 5y ago
Henry S F Cooper Jr.'s book The Evening Star describes some of the remote debugging and other problem solving that was necessary when the Magellan probe experienced computer problems while orbiting Venus. It's been a few decades
390.
by kabdib 5y ago
In the 1980s there was a proposal in the California legislature to license software engineers. They basically took an EE-related test (developed by the IEEE, little surprise) and stirred some software in there. I don't remember what so

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