kabdib

60 ms·

661.
by kabdib 7y ago
I've seen lawyers look up from reading a particularly convoluted and confusing passage and say, without a trace of irony, "This part of the claims is teaching that . . ." Teaching , yeah right. "Teaching" is what t
662.
by kabdib 7y ago
Nintendo licensed DK to various markets. Coleco got the 2600 rights (anyone could make a 2600 cartridge, there was no copy protection system on the console). Atari bought the rights to make a DK cartridge for the 400/800 computers (I w
663.
by kabdib 7y ago
There was a similar bug in the Robotron 2084 arcade game; rather than rushing you, an arithmetic overflow would send some enemies to the far side of the screen, where they would continue to fire at you (and were much harder to hit). It was
664.
by kabdib 7y ago
Fry's looks essentially done in Renton, WA. Little to no new inventory in months, many bare shelves, lots of shelf space filled-in with cheap goods (I saw 30 linear feet of crepe paper, I guess it was cheap or they found a supplier who
665.
by kabdib 7y ago
Yeah, paying thirty cents for a capacitor to coddle a ten-cent MCU doesn't make a bunch of sense. Much cheaper to teach your software folks how to write transactional updates to that flash. Typically you pay a small speed penalty to ge
666.
by kabdib 7y ago
The word "block" is extremely generic and the semantics and sizes of "blocks" vary widely across different storage technologies, platforms and specific parts. It's like saying "packet" -- there are a gazil
667.
by kabdib 7y ago
Might be different depending on the market. For us it was "we can reset, but we have to recover within a few seconds". I never questioned the wisdom of our hardware cert engineers. (My experience at three different companies sprea
668.
by kabdib 7y ago
Not intended as a correction, it's just how I english.
669.
by kabdib 7y ago
Brownout detection isn't sufficient. There are many other sources of "instant stop", from simple hard-crash bugs to bit-flips in RAM that either cause a crash or multiple-bit ECC fault, take your pick because they will all tu
670.
by kabdib 7y ago
No SSDs here, this is raw flash. This is the wear leveling layer.
671.
by kabdib 7y ago
> RISC-V simplicity simply means less bugs Fewer bugs in your code, or fewer bugs to encounter in the platform? I've found that my bugs are usually processor-independent, and that most of the bugs in SOCs are not with the CPU cores,
672.
by kabdib 7y ago
I used an Apple "ergo" keyboard in the early 90s. Had several of them, they all failed with dead keys and unintended multiple keystrokes within six months. The more things change . . . The Microsoft Ergo Keyboard, the first one re
673.
by kabdib 7y ago
Getting a decent frame buffer in those days was a significant challenge, though. It was like "Hey, the University of Qwghlm just got a 512x512x24 display, let's go apply to grad school there!" About 20 years ago I was helping
674.
by kabdib 7y ago
Wear and tear is generally not an issue with network equipment. You buy it, you run it until it depreciates or breaks or becomes too much trouble, you replace it. I've never heard an argument of "don't run that thing too hard
675.
by kabdib 7y ago
Why have a cap at all? It doesn't cost any more to have equipment sending packets as it does to have the equipment idle. The real world of data is generally billed at the 95th percentile of traffic consumption, usually with a commit to
676.
by kabdib 7y ago
My first commercial game would fit in the icon of one of my current company's games . . .
677.
by kabdib 7y ago
I wrote code for a MCU that did power sequencing on a consumer product. 4K of code, 2K of RAM, some EEPROM, a 16Mhz clock . . . 18 cents. It was a fun little project: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1911
678.
by kabdib 7y ago
X-class flares from our sun are 10E32 or so ergs. The black hole flares were roughly 10E35 ergs, about a thousand times more energetic but they are about a billion times farther away than our sun. Apply N^2 law and . . . The amount of radia
679.
by kabdib 7y ago
It is politically more feasible to ban encryption in the US than it is to ban guns (or even significantly restrict them). Wait, I'm wrong. Even essentially insignificant changes to gun laws at the federal level are harder than bannin
680.
by kabdib 7y ago
Perhaps "open minded" is not the right phrase. "Acceptance of appalling and disgusting behavior" is closer. It's definitely a value judgement on my part, I'm more conservative than I thought. Eat all the booger
681.
by kabdib 7y ago
I've re-re-re-read most of his earlier works ( Nova , Dhalgren , Driftglass and so on). I would recommend them to anyone, though Dhalgren and Triton are probably inappropriate and maybe incomprehensible for younger readers. I go
682.
by kabdib 7y ago
Oh, I agree with you. It's just not how the patent industry actually works. I'm not entirely sure why, but there appear to be perverse or at least badly aligned incentives for patent examiners, and it would appear they only look f
683.
by kabdib 7y ago
> and they do not cover inventions whose implementation is obvious to most experts in the field This is (ahem) patently not true; there are plenty of patents whose implementation is incredibly obvious. Insultingly obvious. As in, &quot
684.
by kabdib 7y ago
Hint: Just read the claims. Skip right to them, and ignore everything else. The claims are effectively the legal part, the pretty pictures and verbiage that usually precede them are essentially useless (and sometimes have little to do with
685.
by kabdib 7y ago
Nope.
686.
by kabdib 7y ago
The multi-million line makefile is real. I wish it hadn't been. That was a terrible time. I guess my point is that make doesn't scale, and unavoidably gets messy over time as each project solves the same problems over and over in
687.
by kabdib 7y ago
Go's build system is pragmatic and simple and hasn't let me down yet, but I'm still working on projects at fairly small scale, and the Go build system doesn't do much for other languages, so I didn't mention it. I t
688.
by kabdib 7y ago
Common make fail #1 The project you landed on has been using some souped-up supermake with a ton of features (which were used with wild abandon) and some subtly different semantics for (say) macro expansion and variable assignment (and the
689.
by kabdib 7y ago
Yup, you're right. I feel stupid now :-) edit: apparently you have to use apple devices? oh heck no, what were they thinking ?
690.
by kabdib 7y ago
Based on some experience on non-X86 systems, lock-free is where you start finding bugs in compilers and runtime libraries, and also hardware. How much do you trust random ARM-based SOCs to get this right at all of the necessary levels of ca

More ›