mjb

48 ms·

481.
Some Patterns of Engineering Design Meetings(brooker.co.za)
1 points by mjb 13y ago|0 comments
482.
by mjb 13y ago
That's a really cool project. On one hand, I feel like it's wasteful to do stuff like this digitally, with FFTs, rather than with analog filters. That's a whole lot of transistors to do something that could be done with vastly fewer with an
483.
by mjb 14y ago
Their use of a MAC to prevent tampering and encryption to add confidentiality it seems like they have that covered rather well. Their replay attack prevention mechanism ( http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ashieh/trickles/security.php ) seems to be
484.
by mjb 14y ago
That's very cool stuff, and a really clever solution to a highly constrained problem. I'd really love to see one in action - and it looks like I could. > Why do this instead of powering each device individually? One: you save three elec
485.
Exploring TLA+ and two-phase commit(brooker.co.za)
1 points by mjb 14y ago|0 comments
486.
by mjb 14y ago
> Strict separation of code and data contradicts the definition and purpose of "computers." I don't believe that your argument here is correct. Code and data sharing the same memory space is not a necessary condition of being Turing com
487.
by mjb 14y ago
I think you are missing how much the spectrum of the drift matters. Just knowing the range over which the clock varies (say 5%) isn't enough. If the drift is slow - which thermally induced drift usually is, because it's driven by daily heat
488.
by mjb 14y ago
I have such great memories of enjoying Brubeck's music with my late grandparents, delivered off dusty LPs. Take Five is, for all it's over-saturation, still one of my favorite pieces of all time (and Time Out is one of my favorite albums).
489.
by mjb 14y ago
The memory semantics are standard x86, but you are right that the registers are from x86_64 (and 64 bit mode at that). I'll update the article to clarify that point.
490.
by mjb 14y ago
Right, that's true. Perhaps I oversimplified. What I was trying to get across is that, in the trivial implementation, visibility and atomicity are required. There are obviously better ways for threads to correctly count in parallel with muc
491.
by mjb 14y ago
This is a very interesting thought experiment. The consistent nature of Redis cluster has significant advantages and disadvantages, and an eventually-consistent solution might be better for many applications. > * Sets are merged perform
492.
by mjb 14y ago
Right. Although it's hard to know if Firefox was the cause, one of many causes, or just something around at the right time to get caught up in an inevitable change. History is hard, even only 8 years later. Still, it seemed to me at the tim
493.
by mjb 14y ago
I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. In the early 2000s, it was usual for sites to be IE-only, or to be horribly broken in any alternative browser. It seems to me that the rise of popularity of Firefox
494.
by mjb 14y ago
It's not clear what you mean. If we have two components, one of which is 99% available and one of which is 100% available, the second is not 1% better than the first. It is infinitely better than the first. It's well understood in reliabili
495.
by mjb 14y ago
> PowerPC has a weakly ordered memory mode Right, I forgot about PowerPC. > I think most good high-level programmers know that they need to use high-level locks provided by the SDK, while anyone writing code that actually needs to d
496.
by mjb 14y ago
> I would go ever further, and say that 4K is still not yet good enough. It looks great, but still not like reality. Are you sure it doesn't look like reality because of a lack of resolution? The "different from reality" that most peopl
497.
by mjb 14y ago
This is a really interesting article. Multi-core ARM seems to be the first really mainstream processor architecture that behaves this way. There have been others, like Alpha, but none have achieved the ubiquity that mult-core ARM has achiev
498.
by mjb 14y ago
> A classic case where this sort of problem bit Java in the ass I'm not sure what you mean by "bit Java in the ass". Perhaps pre-Java 5 (or pre JSR133 more accurately) the reason this was broken was poorly defined. In modern Java it's q
499.
by mjb 14y ago
> I think that's exactly the right approach, and a real step forward. I disagree. I think, sales issues aside, that open standards like HTML5 offer enough to give a good reading experience on most devices. Where it doesn't, that's typic
500.
by mjb 14y ago
I don't have a problem paying for content, but I do have a problem with IOS-only. Even though I own an iPad, I like to have access to my reading material in multiple places. I spend a bunch more time looking at my Kindle, for example, and p
501.
by mjb 14y ago
It says some similarly smartass remark about every language you choose. I like it, and think it fits in well with the tone of the rest of the site.
502.
by mjb 14y ago
Alexander then goes on to not present any real evidence. I know that the standards of evidence of low in fields like architecture, but it makes me sad to see people engage with important topics like this one using nothing but assertions and
503.
by mjb 14y ago
> was making in that none of them are any better than what is on offer with regards to security In this case, possibly. It is quite clear by now that SHA-1 and MD5 are flawed, so the 'higher version' SHA-2 variants (especially the bigge
504.
by mjb 14y ago
> So in essence any hash that can be run faster in any way will make it weaker in terms of brut forcing Hash functions have many, many uses beyond password storage. For most of those uses they become more, not less, useful with speed. F
505.
Volatile reads are not really free on the JVM(brooker.co.za)
2 points by mjb 14y ago|0 comments
506.
by mjb 14y ago
Musical instruments (especially wind instruments) and motorcycles share a lot of similar design principles. Ever compared a saxophone to a WWII-vintage motorcycle engine?
507.
by mjb 14y ago
That's very cool stuff, and a nice way of demonstrating how B-trees perform in a system with heterogeneous memory access times. It would be interesting to hear about other data structures and common algorithms, too.
508.
by mjb 14y ago
That Greenspun essay makes me angry every time I read it. The kind of clubhouse mentality of "we don't invite girls to our club because they wouldn't be stupid enough to join our dumb club anyway" is nothing but thinly veiled paternalism. H
509.
by mjb 14y ago
I have a PhD, and left grad school directly after graduating because I had no real interest in pursuing a career in either research or teaching. I also joined an industry that is only peripherally related to the field I studied, and don't u
510.
by mjb 14y ago
> as simple as a web browser says more about the inefficiencies inherent in current operating systems and programming methods than they do about the hardware. No. This is simply not true, at least at the extreme you are suggesting. What

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