kabdib

100 ms·

931.
by kabdib 9y ago
I bought the Clockwork Orange soundtrack when I was a teenager, and it took quite some time for me to appreciate _Timesteps_. (IIRC there are at least two versions of the soundtrack, with various tracks added or missing. Caveat emptor . . .
932.
by kabdib 9y ago
Imagine that you are the person leading the team that's making an embedded system on an ARM SOC. It's not Linux, so you have your own boot code, drivers and so forth. It's not just a matter of "welp, get another kernel i
933.
by kabdib 9y ago
Start a Science Fiction bookstore. [... completely ignoring the "possible income decrease" here... :-/]
934.
by kabdib 9y ago
Man, you should see the errata for some ARM-based SOCs. It's amazing that they work at all. Vendor, in conversation: "We're pretty sure we can make the next version do cache coherency correctly." Me (paraphrased): "
935.
by kabdib 9y ago
I did this at Microsoft for years (go underneath the desk in my cubical and take a 20-30 minute nap). It helps if you tell your cow-orkers "I take naps occasionally, if you see me under my desk I'm not dead, so don't panic&qu
936.
by kabdib 9y ago
> If there are 1,000 cases of such fraud a year, then I don't think it's worthwhile. Well, it's probably not really for safety or security, and they clearly don't give a hoot if you're inconvenienced or not. Cons
937.
by kabdib 9y ago
One common interview question I've run across is to write the code for a simple four-function calculator, the kind that you can find for a dollar or two in nearly any convenience store, right next to the pencils and erasers. Hey, it&#x
938.
by kabdib 9y ago
It was a "CPU throttle" register that controlled the ARM's clock, with four or eight bits of divisor from the base 20Mhz clock. It's been a long time and it's hard to remember h/w register layouts from several
939.
by kabdib 9y ago
When we were doing the Apple Newton, one of my cow-orkers noted that the CPU had a divisor register that let you choose pretty much any clock frequency you could want, down to kilohertz. His half-serious proposal to guarantee users "a
940.
by kabdib 9y ago
This works both ways. When I was at Apple, we had a consultant who insisted on coming into work dressed like a professional consultant. The rest of us were in T-shirts, shorts and jeans, sandals or tennis shoes or hiking boots, a typical ha
941.
by kabdib 9y ago
> "The CEO has said that one unidentified channel owner had 30,000 simultaneous streams from a single account." This is more about bad implementation (and possibly design) than anything else, then. ALL of the other online servi
942.
by kabdib 9y ago
If you're not a resident of California, you can still "vote" by sending campaign contributions to her opponents. I figure [without much supporting evidence or data] that one vote equals $50, so you can "vote" as muc
943.
by kabdib 9y ago
Don't trust electronic locks. Years ago I got a safe that wasn't one of the top-end models of its line. In particular, the manual said that it only had one combination slot. But other models had more premium features, such as mult
944.
by kabdib 9y ago
The data seems really low for senior engineers, given the numbers I know from Microsoft/Google/Facebook in the Seattle area. The startups are almost certainly skewing your ranges.
945.
by kabdib 9y ago
Definitely true at Microsoft (in the Seattle area).
946.
by kabdib 9y ago
Memory tests are a big part of it, but definitely not the only really slow component. (The 10+ minute boot time on our bigger servers already is the fast version of the memory test. I've never turned on the more exhaustive one).
947.
by kabdib 9y ago
I hate FORTH as a general purpose environment, and I've seen a lot of FORTH-based train wrecks written by FORTH fanatics. But FORTH really, really shines in the boot environment, it's a fantastic tool for setting up hardware and g
948.
by kabdib 9y ago
Yeah, Draper tried to have me go to his place and give him a backrub once, some time in the mid 80s. I was maybe 22 at the time. I declined, and avoided being in close proximity to him after that. No idea what would have happened, it just f
949.
by kabdib 9y ago
They already tried, with the Clipper chip. It was clearly a very bad idea, and flawed, but that won't stop more attempts (and with software, the costs are much more hidden, and the flaws are probably more hidden as well). It's qui
950.
by kabdib 9y ago
... and overestimates legislators' attachment to principles.
951.
by kabdib 9y ago
Hmmm. A few years ago I was talking with a guy who worked on a system that pointed IR cameras at hands and did gesture recognition on them. They were doing user testing, and one of the folks they tried it out with happened to be a wiring co
952.
by kabdib 9y ago
Always followed by wild laughter, when I've seen people get the light.
953.
by kabdib 9y ago
Yeah, the old name + a new version number does indeed convey information; there's going to be some common ancestry, anyway. It also means that the users of the library aren't forced to deal with a sea of cutesy names, we've a
954.
by kabdib 9y ago
Valve has 8+ floors and things work pretty well. If you've got multiple floors, you should have muscle with the building and be able to use the freight elevator. I don't have a solution for multiple buildings, you're right ab
955.
by kabdib 9y ago
Desks with wheels; each desk with an ethernet switch and a power strip so you're down to two wires when you move the desk. Moving is really simple. Additionally, teams may want to rearrange desks (e.g., in a circle, or back-to-back, or
956.
by kabdib 9y ago
I guess you can have a key-per-row, or key-per-partition, and throttle and monitor access to that key. This isn't going to make operations like database indexing or joins very happy, so you're probably limited to payload-level dat
957.
by kabdib 9y ago
How does this help if you've got an API that decrypts for you? It's possible that you've protected the data at rest, but if some 'get' operation is just going to serve it up, what is the effective difference?
958.
by kabdib 9y ago
I've since built systems based on flash that boot in tenths of a second, with over a thousand times the memory of that ST. I'll point out that the PC BIOS the ST was competing with was also in ROM, and only spent the last couple s
959.
by kabdib 9y ago
The day I sold my Atari ST, I pulled it out of the stack of old computers, connected it to a monitor, hooked up a disk drive and turned it on. Poof: Desktop with a working mouse cursor in under one second. I booted a nearby PC, and then hit
960.
by kabdib 9y ago
Sounds awful. On the other hand, I'd love to see Ken Burns do _The Silmarillion_, a-la his treatment of _The Civil War_. It'd cut down on production costs, too :-)

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