kabdib

73 ms·

781.
by kabdib 8y ago
$15/hr now . . . and $150/hr to fix it later.
782.
by kabdib 8y ago
Many papers are just badly written. I've lost count of the number of times I've been reading formula when the author suddenly starts using terms that are not defined in the paper. Okay, if you're reading a physics paper and y
783.
by kabdib 8y ago
Hmmm . . . some bright spark in marketing will realize there's an opportunity in "secure DRAM" now . . . :-/
784.
by kabdib 8y ago
I wrote a transactional object store for an early PDA that could use both vanilla battery-backed RAM and flash media. Took about six back-to-back hundred hour weeks (and had a surprisingly short tail of bugs). http://www.dadhacke
785.
by kabdib 8y ago
There are other measures, such as a prefix or suffix ("PIN") that you can supply, so the physical key doesn't have the entire password. Otherwise, you're right. It's also useful to be able to leave the physical key
786.
by kabdib 8y ago
You can shut up any time; there's no "Oh, you were talking, now you can't stop talking." Of course you cannot take back what escaped your mouth prior to asserting for right to remain silent.
787.
by kabdib 8y ago
You are correct.
788.
by kabdib 8y ago
I use a very long, static password baked into a YubiKey (with some other measures), and I honestly don't know what the password is. Q: What's your password? A: I have no idea. Q: How do you log into computers then? A: I'm goi
789.
by kabdib 8y ago
There was a recent successful challenge to the "foregone conclusion" bit (in Florida?) I'd be surprised if that decision survives another level of appeals court.
790.
by kabdib 8y ago
A defense lawyer would have a ton of fun poking holes in the accuracy of speech-to-text, especially on a small device. (You could easily determine if the device is doing this kind of processing by looking at power draw or thermals. This stu
791.
by kabdib 8y ago
I was an L66 at Microsoft six years ago; the numbers there line up pretty well with my own, and the other numbers I'm aware of there.
792.
by kabdib 8y ago
Sure, but the chipset and motherboard need to support ECC. You can't just add a DIMM with ECC and have it work.
793.
by kabdib 8y ago
Hmmm... no separate management network, no OOB management firmware, no ECC memory. It's not much of a general purpose blade. You're not going to run a farm of these without significant operational headaches.
794.
by kabdib 8y ago
Henry S F Cooper's book _The Evening Star_ describes similar solar-system-scale distance debugging of a race condition on the Magellan Venus orbiter. Pretty tense stuff; the stakes are high, the tools and insight to the actual problems
795.
by kabdib 8y ago
I tried using parser generators; it's been quite a while, and the state of the art is almost certainly improved over lex+yacc and bison. But I got sick of diagnostics no more specific than "Error in line 15", and sticking int
796.
by kabdib 8y ago
> As a US citizen, you can't report attacks carried out by US intelligence agencies. Sure you can. Short of a gag order (and maybe not even then) you can report intrusions all you like. In any event, how does one determine the natio
797.
by kabdib 8y ago
Yeah, in consumer electronics the hardware engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors. Well, not that bad. Probably. "Can't you do that in software?" 50M units later you understand the reason why that hardware
798.
by kabdib 8y ago
Don't worry, the bootstrap code is muscle memory after a week or two of booting the system.
799.
by kabdib 8y ago
Five out of seven startups were zero. One was $17K, another was $2K. At all but one place the salaries were not great. I have done far, far better at larger companies in terms of salary and stock programs. If I'd stayed one of the big
800.
by kabdib 8y ago
In this case the police did tell him he didn't have to say anything until he'd talked to a lawyer. Then the guy basically broke down, said "I was stupid, I don't know why I did it" and proceeded to tell his tale. St
801.
by kabdib 8y ago
I've served on two juries, on trials 20 years apart and in different states, that involved child molestation. We acquitted one defendant after a day's deliberation. We sent the other to jail for a LONG time after spending half an
802.
by kabdib 8y ago
Depended on the assembler. Some let you have 8 characters, internally uppercased and silently truncated. Others let you have 16 chars, others were effectively unlimited. I wrote a bunch of assemblers, each one better than the last, ending i
803.
by kabdib 8y ago
Comments in games varied a lot. The coin-op folks did pretty well, and most of the systems code for the computers was well commented. Lots of game cartridges had very few comments. While this was in an era where comments would slow down y
804.
by kabdib 8y ago
IIRC a sphere of neutronium about 150M in diameter is equivalent to the mass of the Earth. Of course, if you had one of those spheres it'd blow up in your face and ruin your day. Probably wreck a bunch of the solar system, too.
805.
by kabdib 8y ago
Nearly 40 years of muscle memory with Emacs. I often use ALT for meta, but sometimes forget, and it's jarring.
806.
by kabdib 8y ago
Yeah, I had high hopes for the keyboard.io, but it turned out to be an ergonomic disaster. After a couple of weeks trying to transition, I just gave up. It's a shame. I'd buy a keyboard from keyboard.io with a less radically diffe
807.
by kabdib 8y ago
I bought one of these when they came out, and my first weekend with it I just couldn't stop typing, it was so much fun. The only misdesign I can think of is that the DEL key should be bigger. (The ESC key is huge and hard to miss, wh
808.
by kabdib 8y ago
I ordered a couple of these a couple of years ago. Still waiting. Hadn't internalized the lack of an ESC key, so they are probably going into a closet. I'm really happy with my Kinesis Gaming keyboards. Half a dozen of my cow-or
809.
by kabdib 8y ago
Problem is, a star is curved, with the limb being over two light-seconds farther away from an observer than the center. Sure, you can switch the whole surface of the star as fast as you like, with bandwidth limited by how accurately you can
810.
by kabdib 8y ago
The world is full of interesting projects, and you have to do triage or go crazy with too many things to work on. While I have a fair amount of experience with build systems (starting with a public domain version of make that I wrote in the

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