pmjordan

29 ms·

181.
by pmjordan 13y ago
At university, one of the exercises in the HPC class was to optimise a piece of Fortran code. I managed to beat the TA's code by other means, but missed one of his significant optimisations: manually unrolling a dot product. This was o
182.
by pmjordan 13y ago
One of the oldest examples of this phenomenon I can think of is how halitosis wasn't considered nearly as much of a problem before the promotion of Listerine as a cure for it in the 1920s.
183.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Or the returned location could be user-specified. The UI for dropping a pin or entering a searchable location by name is well-understood by users.
184.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Yeah, I haven't been following the NFC stuff - ubiquitous NFC tags have been "just around the corner" for a few years now. The thing is, if you're going to require an internet connection to make the little tabs work at a
185.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Easier said than done for most kinds of work.
186.
by pmjordan 13y ago
It seems that they're all stuck on an "optical data transfer surface", whatever that's supposed to be. I'm guessing this is just a visual design study, not an end-to-end product design. (Seems to me a workable solut
187.
by pmjordan 13y ago
A fascinating article on this type of optimisation: http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2010-04-08-inline-cach...
188.
by pmjordan 13y ago
The calls into jump tables are generally static, so the jump table itself can be prefetched. The jump table code is then a regular function pointer call, which is also monomorphic and so can be reliably predicted. I'd expect the impact
189.
by pmjordan 13y ago
You may be thinking of this: IIRC the standard recommends that compilers omit dynamic dispatch when the dynamic type is known at compile time - this essentially boils down to the case where a virtual method call follows creation of the obje
190.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Presumably this needs to be done at link-time? (And you'd have to disable it if you're planning to load code dynamically)
191.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Oh, definitely. But then there are plenty of other ways of increasing programmer productivity which don't look like busywork so non-programmer managers won't have them. I guess try to get out of employment situations like that...
192.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Hah, yes, sorry - I'm not encouraging cannabis growing in the office. Pretty sure that's a standard name for a houseplant in UK English, didn't make the connection with the US term at all when I was typing it.
193.
by pmjordan 13y ago
I'm the same. Can you put some pot plants to the left and right behind your screen? (more socially acceptable than other barriers) Request a second or larger monitor for your work? You can argue that it'll improve your productivit
194.
by pmjordan 13y ago
The thing is, Facebook already proved that hateful people will happily spout bigotry and threats next to their real name and a photo of themselves. I can't believe Google isn't aware of this.
195.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Yeah, stateless datagram protocols are pretty much the optimal problem for unadorned async I/O.
196.
by pmjordan 13y ago
I do assume using goroutines is slower than multiplexing though, but still plenty fast. Surely, the goroutine model is just an abstraction built on multiplexing? As in, it uses the exact same syscalls that a multiplexing server written
197.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Are you implying that the far side of the moon receives no sunlight? It does, just as much as anywhere else on the moon. Note also that communication with earth would be tricky (aside from the 3 second ping time you'd already get due t
198.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Sony won the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war with the PS3. That may have been worth it. Microsoft want to wrest control over your living room from the established consumer electronics companies (such as Sony...), much like Apple and Amazon.
199.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Possibly. I couldn't get any conclusive answers when researching this originally. It's complicated enough that you'll almost certainly need to find an expert in the subject to help you or do the filings for you. (in my case i
200.
by pmjordan 13y ago
They do keep adding stuff to the open source portion, but you're right that there's plenty of closed source code running on a stock OS X kernel. This is loaded in as kexts, so the mach_kernel binary itself is open and reproducible
201.
by pmjordan 13y ago
The burden is indeed on the foreign person to fill out the W8-BEN etc. and pay any taxes due. However, as the withholding agent[1], the US company is liable for any unpaid taxes. So in practice, until the contractor proves to the company th
202.
by pmjordan 13y ago
That's a bit of a different beast to what the original commenters were suggesting. Engagements of that caliber usually involve outsourcing whole projects or subprojects (web presence for product X, whatever). Of course, there's ov
203.
by pmjordan 13y ago
If "setting up an offshore subsidiary company for the purposes of employing remote workers" fits your definition of "it's extremely easy", then yes, I can't argue with you.
204.
by pmjordan 13y ago
You'd think so. Read up on W-8BEN if you don't believe me. I've been on the receiving end of this for doing a tech review of a book for a major US tech publisher. The amount of paperwork required on my end to satisfy the IRS
205.
by pmjordan 13y ago
As far as I can tell, the IRS (US tax collecting agency) requires a tax withholding on anything a US company pays an employee/contractor abroad. By default this is 30%, but if the person in question files US tax returns (despite never
206.
by pmjordan 13y ago
That's sort of the definition of abandonware - the publisher has apparently given up trying to make money off the thing but also not explicitly released it for free either.
207.
by pmjordan 13y ago
If you can steal the password hash database, stealing the shared "salt" is usually going to be trivial. Second, lots of hash functions are vulnerable to length extension attacks, so even if extracting the shared secret directly is
208.
by pmjordan 13y ago
Kittens at office parties seems cruel. Cats can't stand crowds of people and will try to hide, not want to play.
209.
by pmjordan 13y ago
If I were to open my dropbox at work, could my employer view private things in the dropbox? If your employer has physical access or the admin password to your work computer (very likely) then anything you store or do on it is potentially
210.
by pmjordan 13y ago
The main problem I see is that it's a nonlinear projection and thus generating one procedurally on the GPU (render to texture) is rather challenging. Hardware support for cube maps places them in a sweet spot between efficiency, accura

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