pm215

47 ms·

571.
by pm215 7y ago
Also driver and other hardware-specific code is more likely to have a smaller population of developers to tend and improve it, and a smaller population of users to care about getting it fixed, so minor issues will linger longer. (I had a lo
572.
by pm215 7y ago
The Computer History Museum has a blog post -- https://computerhistory.org/blog/who-named-silicon-valley/ -- where they try to identify the origin of the nickname, which dates an in-print occurrence back to 1971,
573.
by pm215 7y ago
Oops, my mistake. I did try to check my belief on the IBM website by looking for an 'about the company' section but it was so reader-hostile I gave up and assumed that IBM was the name they were going by these days. Arm is defini
574.
by pm215 7y ago
Right, but I think that 1998 is when it (officially/branding-wise) went from being an acronym with an expansion to being just three letters with no official 'long form'. (Compare the way IBM these days is just IBM, not Intern
575.
by pm215 7y ago
The company and CPU name has always been pronounced 'arm' like the body part.
576.
by pm215 7y ago
Good comments are important too. But comments describe the code as it is at this point in time ("why is the code doing X?"); commit messages describe the change ("why are we making the code do X rather than Y?"). Somet
577.
by pm215 7y ago
QEMU does for its user-mode-only code, but not in JITted code. We have a little shim that directly executes a syscall instruction because we want to be able to wind the PC forward/backward across it to avoid a race condition with a sig
578.
by pm215 7y ago
Yeah, 500 flushes is not really very many. I live alone and I reckon I flush the loo at least three times a day, which would mean the coating needed reapplying every six months. If you're a family then it's probably heading down t
579.
by pm215 7y ago
Yeah, no, I wouldn't. I might at best have a vague idea of what might be motivating. Like I said, I don't do introspection -- I could tell you if I'm happy or not happy at work, but if the answer's not happy that doesn&#
580.
by pm215 7y ago
Yeah, it wasn't a big deal at all; just struck me funny that that was the example you ended up with. It might be interesting to see how qemu-devel looks if/when you do get mirrored-mailing-list support. At the moment we use patche
581.
by pm215 7y ago
Personally I find being asked to engage in introspection like "reflect on a time when you were motivated at your job" pretty demotivating. I'm terrible at it, and it's a huge timesink with negative associations to things
582.
by pm215 7y ago
I'm amused that the example screenshot for lists.sr.ht is an email thread from qemu-devel, because we had to ask the person who'd been gatewaying that list to sr.ht to stop doing so: sr.ht bounces HTML email where qemu-devel does
583.
by pm215 7y ago
I used to work on a (now defunct) RTOS whose C runtime didn't support alloca. Functions were all compiled down to a portable bytecode representation that had to statically declare the stack usage, so there was no way to have a function
584.
by pm215 7y ago
Yes, usually it's because there's maybe 4 documents which match the search query. But if there are only 4 documents which match what I asked for then I want to see a page with those 4 documents! I don't want to see a page wit
585.
by pm215 7y ago
In particular, you can give the intermediate result a useful name (using something more descriptive than 'n' would have helped in the example)...
586.
by pm215 7y ago
You can also find it if you know its full name, "NCSA Mosaic".
587.
by pm215 7y ago
I think the major factors are: * the scheme is not widely known/advertised among the student body, so it's closer to word-of-mouth recommendations than mass anonymous access. (Note that there are over 12,000 undergrads but they on
588.
by pm215 7y ago
Simpler for who? It's not simpler for the vast bulk of people whose only significant income is from their employer. It's not simpler for the tax authorities either, who now have to process a lot more tax returns rather than just d
589.
by pm215 7y ago
Also English in particular has a tendency to shorter nouns (often deriving from its Germanic roots) for simple, everyday words, plus more formal or precise synonyms derived from French or Latin which are longer. So there's a correlatio
590.
by pm215 7y ago
I think the "the compiler is not a static analysis tool" is a viewpoint that is fighting against the in-practice user-experience that reporting of problems in the code is more effective the earlier in the feedback loop it happens
591.
by pm215 7y ago
That's an interesting take, because my experience has generally been that there's an inexhaustible pool of tasks -- bugs that could be fixed, minor but nice-to-have features, little refactorings and code cleanups, closing stale bu
592.
by pm215 7y ago
I suspect most candidates have at least one question because it's pretty widely known that many employers will ask "do you have any questions for us" at the end of an interview, and so will have prepared something that makes
593.
by pm215 7y ago
Coding on a touchscreen keyboard can't be any worse than coding on a ZX81's keyboard, surely? I'm pretty sure it would be much better, in fact, especially if you used the ZX81-style one-keypress-gives-whole-keyword trick.
594.
by pm215 7y ago
My UK experience is that for many people it is dinner, not lunch, that is the main meal of the day. You might have a sandwich or something similar that you can eat in the break room at work, and then go home for a cooked meal with the rest
595.
by pm215 7y ago
I'm British, and I refer to ketchup as ketchup. This may be regional; I'm southern-English. I'd probably by default assume that if you said 'tomato sauce' you meant a generic tomato-based sauce, not the specific con
596.
by pm215 7y ago
Battery systems seem likely to play a greater part in the grid in future, but I think it's worth noting that the problem here was "sudden loss of generation exceeded the amount that the system operating specs require to be covered
597.
by pm215 7y ago
The UK has the 'pay commercial users who are able to voluntarily reduce demand' system too, and that was part of the initial response to the frequency drop, I think. The problem is that the volume of demand you can get rid of this
598.
by pm215 7y ago
Triggering demand disconnection randomly is saying "we should provide consumers a service including deliberate random blackouts". That's OK in contexts like Netflix where the downstream systems are supposed to be able to be r
599.
by pm215 7y ago
https://www.westernpower.co.uk/downloads/4093 is a pdf for one of the local power distribution companies that includes an explanation. The short answer is that they have frequency-sensitive relays that automatically di
600.
by pm215 7y ago
The article says near the bottom "At the time [the GT1A generator tripped] there was 4000MW of unused generation in reserve, and if only a fraction of this reserve was instructed to dispatch within 60 seconds of the initial loss it’s v

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