kabdib

94 ms·

961.
by kabdib 9y ago
An iOT device that dispenses Unicorn Chow. "That's Unicorn food? Looks like Froot Loops to me."
962.
by kabdib 9y ago
It's level 2 of Internet Startup Sock-Puppetry. You enable innovation, hyper-connectivity, distribution, and maybe you even empower interoperation of the iOT phase-space for individuals, companies and dogs. Throw in a coffee machine an
963.
by kabdib 9y ago
PCIe 3.0 actually uses a 128b to 130b encoding (I guess clock recovery got a lot better, but they also use different whitening patterns). Data is distributed across the lanes, bit by bit, and reassembled by the receiver. There's a bun
964.
by kabdib 9y ago
No, one-time pads are really unbreakable. You can't tell if the key you generated, which yielded "ATTACK AT DAWN", decrypted to the real message. It might have been "HN != SLASHDOT" -- all decrypts are equally likel
965.
by kabdib 9y ago
PCIe 3.x supports a power-of-two number of lanes up to 16; it handles all the gory stuff needed to aggregate those lanes. Going to more than 16 lanes means having multiple channels, and you'll have to worry about clock skew, delayed (r
966.
by kabdib 9y ago
If you're not made of meat, just put yourself into a sleep state for a few hundred thousand years. This could just be the Krang looking for a good place to have a summer holiday ("Hmmm, too much oxygen. Let's try the next exi
967.
by kabdib 9y ago
AFAIK, all of the recent consoles have been profit making on just the hardware alone. Not very much money per unit at first, but none of them shipped as a loss leader.
968.
by kabdib 9y ago
We see a lot of SSD errors that turn out to be problems with RAID controllers. The lost drive rate dropped quite a bit when we started using OS-level RAID functionality rather than whatever the heck is in the firmware of Promise / LSI
969.
by kabdib 9y ago
I don't really have a problem with DACs on PCs, but the amount of noise present on most motherboards is terrible. (I can usually tell when my machine is compiling). A few years ago I bought some USB DACs and separate headphone amplifie
970.
by kabdib 9y ago
That's right, I'd forgotten. Still a good read . . . though I have to keep multiplying the numbers the author throws around for capacity (so many megabytes here and there) by about a billion, to keep from giggling. When the book w
971.
by kabdib 9y ago
Fred Saberhagen wrote a short story ( Without a Thought ) in which this little "computer" played a role. Published in 1963; I always wondered where the idea came from.
972.
by kabdib 9y ago
When I wrote Atari 800 Donkey Kong, I used 16-bit precision arithmetic for the motion, with pretty good results. All the jumping was done with a horizontal velocity, a vertical velocity and a vertical acceleration. A jump is just setting Ma
973.
by kabdib 9y ago
Every day, an estimated hundred tons of debris (mostly meteoric dust) hits the earth's atmosphere. A satellite is not a big deal; it burns up, possibly with small chunks hitting the surface. Even if you were directly on the ground trac
974.
by kabdib 9y ago
I thought about moving the work that a flash controller did to an OS, on a game console. Would have saved some money (high tens to low hundreds of millions of dollars over the product lifetime). Just too damned risky and complicated to make
975.
by kabdib 9y ago
You can't really individually address a cell; a single read will drag in a bunch of cells, if only for ECC. Write granularity varies from device to device, but is often on the order of 256 or 512 bytes (though "append only" o
976.
by kabdib 9y ago
Not actually true; SSDs experience "read disturbance" caused by application of read voltages. Essentially, the cells being read, and those nearby, experience a little wear on each read operation. It's a lot less wear than a w
977.
by kabdib 9y ago
One dev I worked with asked the following question at the companies he interviewed at (he got offers from all of them, btw): "What percentage of your co-workers would you like to see fired?" Most interviewers responded in the ten
978.
by kabdib 9y ago
On the other hand, the newt (Senior, anyway) was running Dylan on bare metal; you don't need to have fancy-pants LISP-accelerating hardware to do that. You just need to have the intestinal fortitude to write an OS and runtime in someth
979.
by kabdib 9y ago
The MMU on the ARM 610 had features intended for Dylan, that were designed by one of my ex-cow-orkers; the sub-page protection system (1K granularity) was put there specifically to improve the garbage collection behavior of the system. (The
980.
by kabdib 9y ago
It happened (for a while) with Dylan on early, unshipped versions of the Apple Newton. Dylan was an object-oriented variant of Scheme, and there was an OS that was implemented nearly all the way to the metal in it. At least that's what
981.
by kabdib 9y ago
Nothing wrong with goto, as long as it's clear. Many programmers treat 'goto' the same way that we treat radioactive waste, but they don't know why. Perhaps it is a holdover from courses with teachers who automatically g
982.
by kabdib 9y ago
I don't disagree, either, but whatever data Equifax has collected would be part of the bankruptcy sale. Equifax needs to wipe its data and all extant backups. Then it can be sold (for maybe ten dollars).
983.
by kabdib 9y ago
The early Macs were basically wide open, as I recall. I was working in a group next to the systems software group at Apple when some of the early malware was discovered. After a few days of secrecy, with people being pulled into labs and co
984.
by kabdib 9y ago
Maybe as a debugging cover for memory (but then you'd expect functionality for heap checking, block tracking and leak detection, etc). Forbidding a null pointer on free is a breaking change and a little naive. It's not terribly us
985.
by kabdib 9y ago
The Kinect has a number of hardware interlocks as well, and will shut the laser down (without firmware intervention, because firmware might not be working) based on some hard-wired detections. The unexpanded raw laser in the Kinect, prior t
986.
by kabdib 9y ago
Here's another absolutely classis interaction with PowerShell. Let's make a list of strings; I'm partly interested in what CSV conversion does to values that already have commas. PS> $x = @('a', 'b&#x2
987.
by kabdib 9y ago
If you stay in PowerShell I guess that's okay. But I interop with Python and other things a fair amount, via JSON, and have had to write wrappers and guards against the unwrapping nonsense. But "... quickly get used to" is mo
988.
by kabdib 9y ago
Yow. That's a great answer . . . for some value of "I wish I didn't have to know that, but I do have to, so therefore it is great." :-)
989.
by kabdib 9y ago
Yeah. I learned LISP pretty early in my career, wrote a few LISP interpreters, and those are indeed the kinds of bugs that I was stomping. PowerShell seems to have turned those bugs into language features. Augh.
990.
by kabdib 9y ago
I've recently written a couple thousand lines of PowerShell. It's a miserable language, full of unexpected behaviors and badly designed features. Oh, it's got some interesting stuff going on, but things like: - including the

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