pm215

76 ms·

871.
by pm215 10y ago
The queue at Starbucks has a natural curb on its length, though -- if I walk up and see the queue is pretty long then I'm likely to decide I didn't need a coffee that much, and walk away. Nobody approaching a TSA queue is going
872.
by pm215 10y ago
I think the 'value' house brand's plainness also helps to nudge less price-conscious customers up to the next level up of own-brand stuff. Tesco used to have three levels of own-brand: the blue-and-white-stripe "Tesco va
873.
by pm215 10y ago
Yeah, Rust is pretty high on the list of candidates, but for instance there is no rust compiler shipped by default in Debian stable, so I don't think it meets "widespread distro support" yet. Also https://doc.rust-
874.
by pm215 10y ago
I'd love QEMU to move to some safer language. Unfortunately I don't know any which meet the necessary criteria: - support linux, osx, windows - mature enough for widespread support in distros - support at least half a dozen dif
875.
by pm215 10y ago
On BSD on the VAX, address 0 used to happen to hold 0, so dereferencing NULL got you zero. That was at the time a sufficiently popular platform that some programs assumed the behaviour (eg, that a null pointer could be used as an empty stri
876.
by pm215 11y ago
One major motivation for inline asm is wanting to use an insn which your toolchain doesn't know about (because it is too new, for instance). Inline also has to be able to handle cases like inline system call instructions -- in that cas
877.
by pm215 11y ago
Modern ARM has load halfword insns too, so you can use those or the 8-bit imm encoding depending on the constant. For a full 32 bit value prior to movw/movt you'd most likely load it from a constant pool rather than do a 4 insn se
878.
by pm215 11y ago
This was only in the early versions of the MIPS architecture though (MIPS I, I think?). Later versions required the interlocks, so the add would stall rather than misbehaving, and you didn't need to actually put a nop in the load delay
879.
by pm215 11y ago
My rough view of emulating userspace and the syscall ABI is that the three main tricky parts are (1) signals (2) threads (3) mmap and generally handling the guest address space; most of the rest is just a big pile of fiddly details. How doe
880.
by pm215 11y ago
This is (as Laszlo says) critically important for free software virtual machines that want to boot a UEFI BIOS, like ARM architecture ones. Previously even if your VM was free software (like QEMU/KVM), you couldn't ship the BIOS b
881.
by pm215 11y ago
Overcommit doesn't mean that malloc never fails. malloc will fail if you ask for an allocation that won't fit in the virtual address space (for instance because of your rlimit settings, or if you asked for a 3G chunk on a 32-bit s
882.
by pm215 11y ago
99 year (or longer) leases are still very common in the UK for apartments ["leasehold property"]. There are issues with leasehold, but "I can only sell my landlord's interest to somebody else willing to be a landlord&quo
883.
by pm215 11y ago
The classic reason for that fault in an old 3-speed SA is minor misadjustment of the gear change cable. The gear lever basically pulls a chain further and further out of the hub, going from 3 at minimum pull to 2 to 1. Unfortunately there&#
884.
by pm215 11y ago
If you're in a position to insist on them doing that, you're probably in a position to just insist they use version control in the first place...
885.
by pm215 11y ago
I think this would fall under the 'Ancient Unix' license that Caldera set up many years back: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf (unless you want to be picky about the definition of 'version
886.
by pm215 11y ago
For me, when I say I "hear a voice" when I read, I mean that it's the same 'mental voice' as when I'm thinking, stream-of-consciousness stuff. It's definitely not like hearing an out-in-the-world audio thi
887.
by pm215 11y ago
Some of that will be glibc's coverage of a much wider range of architectures and host OSes than musl (a very back-of-the-envelope wc -l suggests that somewhere between 20 and 25% of glibc code is in sysdeps/ or ports/sysdeps&
888.
by pm215 11y ago
At a previous gig "strategic" was a euphemism for "we don't have a paying customer for this work" :-)
889.
by pm215 11y ago
C preprocessor macros can also be a great tool for making things ungreppable -- building families of functions using preprocessor token pasting to put together the function names certainly avoids repetition in all those function bodies but
890.
by pm215 11y ago
The legal definition of personal information for DPA purposes ( https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... ) specifically includes "any expression of opinion about the individual and any indicat
891.
by pm215 11y ago
The 610 faulting on NV condition codes is part of a journey of that bit of the instruction space from the original "really never executed, ie NOP" in the ARM1 (which just falls out of the implementation) through "this is unpr
892.
by pm215 11y ago
A kettle wants as many watts as it can reasonably be provided with -- you're heating a fixed volume of water by a fixed temperature rise (from cold to boiling), so the more power the faster the kettle boils (and if you have a lower-pow
893.
by pm215 11y ago
Why do you think it is important that the use of the tax be ringfenced? My view would be that the aim of the tax would be to nudge people into changing their behaviours, and it will do this whether the resulting income goes into funding obe
894.
by pm215 11y ago
Yes, I think bottom left is the register bank -- you can see it is 25 elements horizontally by 32 vertically, and there are 25 total registers listed on the right (r0..r15 plus the svc/irq/fiq mode-banked copies of some of r10 thr
895.
by pm215 11y ago
If you need the absolute most recent release of a language to write code in it, that in my opinion is a bad sign -- maybe it's still a bit new and evolving rapidly, if there's a runtime component it might be awkward to distribute
896.
by pm215 11y ago
The SPARC call instruction beats that with a 30 bit immediate, sacrificing a huge chunk of the encoding space for being able to reach any target in a 32 bit address space with a single instruction.
897.
by pm215 11y ago
I think that last one isn't a modern standard email address -- the domain part is reversed. It's a JANET NRS path ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS ). The modern equivalent would be miw@ux.cs.man.ac.u
898.
by pm215 11y ago
I would say it is not so much shortcuts as the fact that the 32-bit SoCs are generally designed for mobile. The only way to get a cheap devboard is to use an SoC which is being produced in high volume, so it doesn't have a prohibitive
899.
by pm215 11y ago
Conversely, there's an easy-to-fall-into bad habit of googling up an answer every time somebody on IRC asks a question, rather than waiting to see if somebody else is actually knowledgeable about the area, or doing the questioner the c
900.
by pm215 11y ago
The approach I'm trying to take with the community I'm involved in is to keep the effort required spread out -- so for instance I manage mainline releases but somebody else deals with stable branches and point releases, and a thir

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