kabdib

74 ms·

691.
by kabdib 7y ago
My household still gets a physical paper (the Seattle Times), and a digital version of the same. We subscribe to the NYT and The Economist. That's about our limit for news subscriptions. I'm not going to fork over $10/month
692.
by kabdib 7y ago
40 years writing software for a living, dropped out of college after 3 years. I'd taken all the CS that I could, and took graduate level courses my last year because I had run out of other interesting classes. That final year of school
693.
by kabdib 7y ago
Server 2012 had touch screen support. I can think of many things I'd rather have than touch screen support. How about decent support for two-factor domain login? Priorities, guys. (Please don't get me started about the special cir
694.
by kabdib 7y ago
The biggest WTF was Cortana . . . running by default on Windows Server. I have no idea what they were thinking. Yes, you can disable it with a policy editing. For a server product, you shouldn't have to.
695.
by kabdib 7y ago
Maybe -- but you'd have a lot of people trying to listen in on radio communications (voice, telemetry) and those signals had better come from a plausible direction. That's for starters. I also wonder how common privately held tele
696.
by kabdib 7y ago
I've seen C++ based systems that regularly harbor hundreds of thousands of stacks using quite minimal heap, 2M+ stacks when things get really busy (this, on a machine with 64GB of RAM). The primitives are a few hundred lines of pretty
697.
by kabdib 7y ago
I think there's a recipe for becoming one of the dreaded "code monkeys": - "Hey, I could make a bunch of easy money writing code!" So, off to school for a degree, not bothering to learn anything other than VM-based
698.
by kabdib 7y ago
This is terrible advice.
699.
by kabdib 7y ago
Do an internship. I found getting experience working with real cow-orkers and (hopefully) dealing with issues that affect real flesh-and-blood customers was incredibly valuable. Make sure you are paid, by the way . . . Read a ton of code. Y
700.
by kabdib 7y ago
Spend a ton of money lobbying for alternate power (nuclear plants, renewables). Push legislation that cuts down on carbon footprints (e.g., better networks for remote work, encourage building mixes that reduce commuting). Ten billion isn&#x
701.
by kabdib 7y ago
There's supposed to be a delay in the Hayes protocol to prevent this kind of thing, but many "Hayes compatible" implementations didn't implement that part (through ignorance? working around a patent?), so this trick woul
702.
by kabdib 7y ago
Microsoft's Games for Windows Live DRM servers had a close call a few years ago as well.
703.
by kabdib 7y ago
I was more levels from the CEO at Microsoft (up to Ballmer) than I was as a lowly intern working for the US government at NIST (up to . . . well, Reagan at the time). I could see value up to about three levels above me, and maybe a couple a
704.
by kabdib 7y ago
My understanding was that the second cartridge slot was not a very well thought out thing. I think there was one cartridge made for it (some debugging tool?) That port cost a lot of money per unit; Atari's early efforts were not very w
705.
by kabdib 7y ago
I wrote a few game cartridges for the Atari 400/800 computers when I was there in the early 80s. We were told to include a specific bit pattern, I think it was 5 or 8 bytes long, somewhere in our code. The idea was that the presence of
706.
by kabdib 7y ago
Ironic that the first paragraph or so of that article was unreadable because of overlying ads.
707.
by kabdib 7y ago
"volatile" is really insufficient to work with modern memory systems. Is there total ordering, or is it another episode of Bus Master Wild West? Are writes combined? Do reads bypass the write queue, stall, or dig out as-yet-uncomm
708.
by kabdib 7y ago
You have your data backed up, yes? Just curious.
709.
by kabdib 7y ago
The wide range of extremophiles here on earth makes me think that this paper is parochial, at best. Carbon is versatile and oxygen is a great source of energy, but that doesn't preclude other biochemical systems. Given the amount of re
710.
by kabdib 7y ago
Borders did the same re-arrangement about a year before they went under. There used to be a half-bookshelf or so of "released this week" titles where any regular customer could walk in and immediately see and grab a new book by a
711.
by kabdib 7y ago
They stopped having a "new releases" part of their main sections, so if I want to find a new release in SF/Fantasy it means having to look at all the books in that section. Granted, that section is a lot smaller now, with b
712.
by kabdib 7y ago
You can define this behavior if you want to. I did that on an embedded system where location zero was mapped and it was a complete pain in the fundament to arrange things so it would generate a fault. So I put on my wizard hat, intoned &quo
713.
by kabdib 7y ago
It's a common technique in SAN controllers, where writes go to a battery-backed cache, and are then written to the actual storage devices (using variations of RAID) at the controller's leisure. The limited space in the immortal DR
714.
by kabdib 7y ago
In this case, that stability is a promise from a SAN, a commercial product that has a very good reliability track record. We're pretty confident that the data we write is going to be stable, unless there's a physical disaster like
715.
by kabdib 7y ago
Er, no. I'm using a storage system right now that makes this guarantee; when the store responds to a block write, it's going to be stable. The implementation in question uses battery-backed RAM for performance, but that's j
716.
by kabdib 7y ago
Note that the SQL Server team at Microsoft had the Windows folks add write-through and cache control to NTFS so that the database could have stability guarantees. It's mind boggling that this is still an issue, given the number of dec
717.
by kabdib 7y ago
> The second part — what computers can do — is a well understood domain that can be modeled beautifully, and tasks involving it can be automated trivially I have a chipset that I'd like modeled, and can I have some trivial drivers b
718.
by kabdib 7y ago
Similar experience with a Q/A team using LabView. They had a tool they were comfortable with, and had inevitably created a fragile, horrid monster that looked like a plate of spaghetti. Their test framework was probably nice and intuit
719.
by kabdib 7y ago
One of my hobbies in the 1980s was writing assemblers, because most of the existing commercial offerings were pretty bad. I started out writing my own utterly terrible (though fast) assemblers, and after several years and my fifth or sixth
720.
by kabdib 7y ago
About 20 years ago my dad was doing research (at the U of Georgia) that traced how a peptide was metabolized by grasshoppers. They used an isotope of carbon with a 20 minute half-life (C11), but also needed to ensure that the radiation from

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