kmm

50 ms·

451.
by kmm 15y ago
This is hardly the place to discuss General Relativity but I can give a small explanation. Do you know the metaphor for gravity with a rubber sheet? Masses make dimples in the sheet and when particles pass, they get deflected. Similarly, wh
452.
by kmm 15y ago
A brilliant decision. Now if we could only get rid of our 1 euro cent here. According to some inflation figures I quickly found on the internet, a (US dollar) penny had a hundred years ago 23 times as much buying power as a penny nowadays.
453.
by kmm 15y ago
Indeed, phase symmetry provides conservation of charge. In fact and this is one of the most amazing things in physics, if you demand the system to be invariant under a change of phase everywhere, a symmetry called U(1), you will automatical
454.
by kmm 15y ago
I assumed the point was that it doesn't matter. Kids get interested in computers regardless of their gender. But you're right, it probably isn't the most descriptive title.
455.
by kmm 15y ago
What I mean is that while the proof for the Halting Problem is completely valid, I find it rather "weak" as it uses self-reference. That doesn't tell you anything about how it would work for other programs. The only thing you know is that t
456.
by kmm 15y ago
>For example, ask the user for a boolean, and do a while loop based on this value. You can't say whether this will halt or not, but it does contain unspecified variables. I don't think that's an issue. The Halting Problem ask the questi
457.
by kmm 15y ago
> the UTM must run itself, essentially describing an infinite loop over the finite program, Exactly. I came up with this counterargument not so long ago. It's why neither Gödel's theorems nor the Halting problem ever really impressed m
458.
by kmm 15y ago
It always amazes me every time I find someone or something on the internet that resonates perfectly with me. I can't stand being alone, it makes me really depressed. But social events don't feel right either, they take a lot of energy as th
459.
by kmm 15y ago
Sadly (or happily), hydrogen doesn't explode that easily. The hydrogen autoignition temperature is 500 degrees Celsius. Even if a bullet were to effectively transfer heat, it's still 100 of degrees to cold. Hydrogen got a bad reputation fro
460.
by kmm 15y ago
Because of the behaviour of both male and female participators in this "discussion", I don't know to whom Charles Arthur refers to as sexist. The men act like typical chauvinistic males as one would call them, and the women sounds very enti
461.
by kmm 15y ago
Thank you! I've been looking for a condensed yet thorough overview of bash for quite some time. I use bash only sporadically and I am never successful when googling easy things like how to test for equality of numbers.
462.
by kmm 15y ago
dm-crypt does this. I don't know the internals of the algorithms used, so I don't know whether that is just a feature of the userspace software or it is impossible to verify the decryption was succesful. I presume it depends on whether a ha
463.
by kmm 15y ago
I don't understand. Why would your ISP block your IP for bogus DNS requests? And why are they monitoring your traffic to public DNS servers? I presume this means they have to look at all traffic that goes over port 53. Is there a security c
464.
by kmm 15y ago
I've often wondered how a garbage collector can scan the entire memory in a reasonable time. The article doesn't explain that particular operation. With a quick look at the source code I couldn't figure it out either. Can anyone enlighten m
465.
by kmm 15y ago
You really shouldn't be using a XOR linked list anyway. It has a lot of disadvantages and none of them weigh up to the only advantage of a lower memory footprint per list item.
466.
by kmm 15y ago
I don't know what I want in this life. Yet even if I did, I would still need to remember some things. Right now I need to remind myself to make a blogpost about isospin, make an appointment, look into a trip abroad and settle a money issue.
467.
by kmm 15y ago
With GCC specifics, you can define MAX as a macro without calling the function twice. #define max(a,b) \ ({ typeof (a) _a = (a); \ typeof (b) _b = (b); \ _a > _b ? _a : _b; })
468.
by kmm 15y ago
In the source of sudo-1.8.3p1, the error is in src/sudo.c at line 1219. Relevant code snippet: easprintf(&fmt2, "%s: %s\n", getprogname(), fmt); va_start(ap, fmt); vfprintf(stderr, fmt2, ap); va_end(ap); efree(fmt2); Obvi
469.
by kmm 15y ago
I've considered it, but I wonder whether I don't better buy a whole new laptop instead of cobbling this one up, but that's a lot of money and this one works fine, so I keep postponing it. But really, buying more RAM is only a temporary solu
470.
by kmm 15y ago
Neither, as I am only looking at private memory, which is by definition not shared. Interestingly, most of my extensions have 0K shared memory, which implies they're all keeping their own version of JavaScript libraries in their own memory
471.
by kmm 15y ago
I had uncompressed data in mind, but it was only a rough guess. I'll do a more in depth calculation. 2 seconds of uncompressed sound, at 44.1 kHz, in stereo and 8 bits per sample is 170 KiB. 17 images of on average 24 by 24 pixels at 32 bit
472.
by kmm 15y ago
Because I used to think I didn't need it and it's a bit of hassle. I also thought swap was almost useless because of the comparatively slow speed of hard drives and that I'd rather have the memory hogging process killed than my computer loc
473.
by kmm 15y ago
"Idle" memory is used by the operating system as cache. On my computer, 800 MiB of my RAM is in use by programs, but 1.7 GiB of my 2 GiB RAM is used in total, by programs, buffers and cache. The problem is that an extension like "1-Up for G
474.
by kmm 15y ago
I agree that this is completely getting out of hand. Memory was (and still is) very cheap but we are reaching a limit. The problem is that there is little we can do about it. I doubt that both Mozilla and Google don't know that their browse
475.
by kmm 15y ago
I compiled it myself, so that is not an option.
476.
by kmm 15y ago
On my system, all SUID binaries are executable yet not readable, e.g. $ ls -l /bin/su -rws--x--x 1 root root 52144 Mar 5 2011 /bin/su Doesn't this effectively stop the exploit? It still works when I insert the <exit@plt>
477.
by kmm 15y ago
Similar: Einstein's report card for his seconday school examinations http://bobwise.tumblr.com/post/5894827109/albert-einsteins-r... For those who cannot read German, the subjects are German speech and literature - 5, French - 3, English
478.
by kmm 15y ago
I remapped Caps Lock to Escape too and it interestingly one of the best hacks I ever did. On my keyboard at least, Esc is far away from the home row, and the smallest button on my keyboard (1x1.6 cm^2). Caps Lock is the fourth largest butto
479.
by kmm 15y ago
I'm sorry, I should have been clearer. What I try to say is that you can't judge both piracy and slavery from your present point of view. I feel that because in the past slavery was commonly accepted, that it was morally justified then. In
480.
by kmm 15y ago
Read again, I didn't say you couldn't call the pirate an asshole. But in this article, and in many others, this is presented as an argument and not as the insult/opinion it is. Besides, more often than not these terms are not set by the aut

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