kiwidrew

13 ms·

91.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
It looks to me like this design concept is meant as a browser for consuming the web of documents , i.e. pages meant primarily for reading . A news article or a blog post has very few legitimate reasons for using Javascript. (Perhaps som
92.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> The result is the write-only mess that is CSS today, unusable without CSS debuggers, inaccessible to most devs and traditional graphic designers let alone laymen, yet always insufficient for innovators, seemingly perpetuated only by f
93.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Is "the Internet" really a platform, though? I see it as more like the telephone: customers that want to receive calls (i.e. TCP connections) sign up for the service and receive a number (i.e. an IP address) that others can then
94.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yeah, to me this is the key point in the whole debate: to what extent are the private internet "giants" providing infrastructure and/or operating as a public utility? I was concerned when Twitter and Facebook and other socia
95.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
It's still perfectly possible (for now) to use an alternative app store like F-Droid on Android phones. It requires sideloading an .apk (literally "install an app from a file") and jumping through a couple hoops (basically:
96.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> there was a monopoly on phone service in the 70s that exceeds the monopoly on cloud hosting today Yes, and as part of that _regulated_ monopoly, they were required to provide "universal" service: it didn't matter how
97.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> companies should reassess the risk of using these cloud services Absolutely! If the horror stories of companies losing access to their accounts due to automated processes going haywire haven't convinced us that "cloud risk
98.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yeah, me too. AWS is a whole lot closer to "essential public infrastructure" than, say, Twitter or Facebook. (Or Zendesk or Twilio or any of the myriad service providers that Parler happened to use.) Where does it end? Can the l
99.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yes, this exact issue frustrates me to no end. Another related issue: when saving something from Firefox, the file picker opens into _a random directory_ each time. Like maybe 50% of the time, it will be the most-recently-used directory,
100.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yeah, "was the 8088 an 8-bit or a 16-bit processor?" doesn't have a straightforward answer... The main speedups from 8088 -> 80286 were moving from an 8-bit to a 16-bit external data bus and also the 80286's dedicated
101.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
This is very cool! The IBM PC (and clone) hardware was progressing rapidly at the time: from an 8-bit 8088 @ 4.77Mhz with 64-256K RAM to much much faster 16-bit 80286/80386 systems @ 16Mhz+ with 2-4MB RAM in just a few short years. As
102.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> Why put all of this work into running a daemon 24/7 on your phone that will end up sucking battery to run an app with bad usability in peer to peer mode? What's the end goal? I just want to rid myself of Whatsapp and Telegra
103.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> Apparently New Zealand still has single digit cases most days. NZ hasn't had any new cases in the general population for quite some time. The cases that NZ has been reporting are all recent arrivals undergoing the mandatory 14-
104.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
I read the title of this link and thought "Hmm, Radicale... not quite sure how a CalDAV server can be a Github alternative".
105.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
How can a prohibition on "text-based browsers" have anything to do with MitM attacks? The browser's chosen rendering method (text or GUI) is irrelevant.
106.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
An upside-down PLCC socket? I'm having trouble picturing what exactly that would look like or how it would even work... can you link to a photo?
107.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
I'm pleased to see that this compiler is designed to bootstrap itself. Until now I wasn't aware of any open-source C compilers that support 16-bit DOS real mode and can also run in 16-bit DOS real mode. (OpenWatcom is far too lar
108.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
It's possible to squeeze more data on to a 3.5" floppy while still remaining readable in a standard PC floppy drive. Two examples of this are Microsoft's DMF format [1] (with 1680KB capacity) and IBM's XDF format [2] (w
109.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> If your testing capability is low, and if people are not being tested, then everything else is a waste of time. Then you add in societal failures like not getting sick pay, or paid time off if you've got the virus, or incentives
110.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Hmm... I thought that would be the case, but when I tested it [on an AMD 80C88], LDS/LES with mod=11 just skipped the EA calculation subroutine and then proceeds as normal, loading a doubleword from whichever memory address happens to
111.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
I don't really think there is a need for an "alternative" NOP, because the XCHG side effect (of clobbering the TMP register) is of little practical concern. In fact, as far as I have been able to determine, the malformed JMP
112.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> LEA with a register operand ("LEA AX, AX") Yep, reading about this (from a post that I can't find at the moment) was one of the things that inspired me to try illegal/undefined mod-rm byte encodings.
113.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
I was inspired by a post from Raúl Gutiérrez Sanz [1] that described some of the undocumented 8086 opcodes, and was tantalizingly titled "Part I". Unfortunately it seems that Parts II and III were never posted. I had also seen a
114.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
The 8086/88 does in fact execute 90h (the NOP opcode) as XCHG AX, AX. It does not generate any change in the user-visible architectural state, however, and so it appears to be a NOP. [Internally the CPU uses the "TMP" regist
115.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yes, the (recently released) source code for MS-DOS 2.0 is liberally sprinkled with comments that indicate Microsoft fully intended for the path separator character to be '/' and the command-line option designation character
116.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> I stress tested our IO level shifter chips for short circuit robustness. Leaving the outputs shorted hard to the opposite rail overnight did no apparent harm (bypassing the protection resistors), other than getting the chip nice and t
117.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Really? So a CMOS driver that's driving a high logic level which is connected to a CMOS driver that's driving a low logic level won't get destroyed by the resultant short circuit? As far as I understand (and I admit that I m
118.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Most of the "modern" embedded stuff comes as a complete system-on-chip these days, i.e. all the peripherals and memory are integrated into the CPU on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It's also rare for chips to offer an external
119.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yes but how long is Microchip going to continue producing the 16V8? They're the only remaining manufacturer. At least with 74xx138 decoders you have several suppliers available -- not to mention the choice of multiple logic families
120.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> So, from the software's perspective, you go from, "Don't use these addresses, unpredictable things will happen." to "Don't use these addresses, nothing will happen." If the address decoder allows ce

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