ralferoo

70 ms·

901.
by ralferoo 3y ago
On the PS3 SPU cores, the best "does everything" instruction was the single "rotate and mask" series of instructions which was the underlying implementation of all rotates, shifts, and bitfield extraction instructions. T
902.
by ralferoo 3y ago
The whole point of this system is that the difficulty is set to automatically increase when it detects it's under attack. That's why expected traffic and likely failure traffic are configurable options - when the server is experie
903.
by ralferoo 3y ago
A great example of why you shouldn't manually number lists: > The second-longest-lasting light bulb is ... and was installed ... on September 21, 1908 > Another working light bulb dating from 1908 ... And in the next section: &gt
904.
by ralferoo 3y ago
30 odd years ago, there was a similar book: How to boil an egg - https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Boil-Egg-Jan-Arkless/dp/0716022...
905.
by ralferoo 3y ago
Not especially relevant to the article, but reading it describing 150 baud tape systems made me think that people reading it might like to hear about my efforts at creating a turbo loader about a decade ago for the Amstrad CPC (a British ma
906.
by ralferoo 3y ago
I actually found this pretty confusing myself as the first PlayStation console I had was a PS3 that I bought in Hong Kong that had the Japanese button layout. Some time later, I was using this primarily with Linux under OtherOS and I bought
907.
by ralferoo 3y ago
In the UK ! was (maybe still is) pronounced as "pling". I know I've definitely said hashpling. Actually surprised the American's weren't calling # "pound" then, but maybe that evilness showed up later. But
908.
by ralferoo 3y ago
> In what "example"? The source example, that you yourself reference 2 sentences later: > The code example is just a generic example of a union, change the names to ZQ, for all I care. I'm not sure why you're so up
909.
by ralferoo 3y ago
The last paragraph took me down an interesting rabbit hole reading about Catullus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 (warning: NSFW text) We certainly weren't taught any of that in our Latin classes at sch
910.
by ralferoo 3y ago
Yeah, this weird double or triple counting registers doesn't really do the article any favours, and yet it misses the place where it could actually be genuinely interesting - trying to work out how many shadow registers are used in reg
911.
by ralferoo 3y ago
I experienced an even more extreme version of this with Watchdogs 2. I enjoyed the first game, but the second one had this protracted tutorial. After an hour, I was still having to follow its instructions rather than playing in the open wor
912.
by ralferoo 3y ago
I've never really had any cause to think about this before, but both past tense forms seem natural to me, and I think I use them both. I'm from the UK, if that helps. I was trying to think of examples when I'd use each one, a
913.
by ralferoo 3y ago
No idea, but I think a hairloom is something used to make wigs...
914.
by ralferoo 3y ago
Somehow missing XDaliClock which has around seemingly forever. It's better than most of the clocks they included.
915.
by ralferoo 3y ago
A rummage bin is where they put the discounted items in shops.
916.
by ralferoo 3y ago
Safari books used to be good last time I used them a decade or so ago, but it seems they're not even keen to share their price on their own website nowadays until after you've signed up for a free trial, and googling it now seems
917.
by ralferoo 3y ago
When I was a student, there were several alternatives to just photocopying the entire textbook (back then you couldn't download scanned versions). The university had a library with usually at least 5-10 copies of all the textbooks requ
918.
by ralferoo 3y ago
Given that the costs are in dollars in the quoted passage, it's clear that this article is aimed at a US audience. So when reporting a written quote with sections that a reader might assume was an error but is actually correct because
919.
by ralferoo 3y ago
That linked article also says "Another time vandals were caught with a dozen pots of white paint and were apparently going to paint over it." so it seems like a free solution to the problem is already presenting itself, but they a
920.
by ralferoo 3y ago
After a few reloads it produced "clampless". Seemed to have a pretty well defined meaning and googling it suggests many people use it in the obvious way. The generated definition was a bit odd though: > without a hard surface o
921.
by ralferoo 3y ago
Research Machines made a sizable inroad into UK schools with their range of computers from the late 1970s to early 1990s. One such example is the RM Nimbus: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/41537/RM-Nimbus-P
922.
by ralferoo 3y ago
One example of this is that Brewdog release quantities and precise instructions and notes so that enthusiasts can homebrew their favourite beers. I know because one of my colleagues spent a lot of money on computerised brewing gear and alwa
923.
by ralferoo 3y ago
Maybe bad form to follow up on your own post, but just thinking about this more... At the time, before IPv4 was introduced, IP addressing was 8-bit, and this was mostly a single machine per site. Moving to a 64-bit service address, early im
924.
by ralferoo 3y ago
One thing that might have worked better is if the concept of separate address and port had been scrapped, and there was just a 64-bit "service" instead. Naive early implementations could have been nearly the same, just using the t
925.
by ralferoo 4y ago
> What they should be asking you is to show the most optimal way to reverse the array, which is to find a popular highly optimised library and use that, one that is also likely to be far less buggy. The most optimal way is not to reverse
926.
by ralferoo 4y ago
Interesting that both | and ^ were supported, but | took over and ^ is still unused by the shell. I wonder if ^ was deprecated because of the likelihood it'd be commonly used at the start of a regexp for grep, but | used to provide alt
927.
by ralferoo 4y ago
Hmmm, I think there must be some local influence in this too. Growing up in the UK, I can recall hearing gazillion far more frequently than zillion. Also, younger children would often also say squillion for a number even bigger than (ga)zil
928.
by ralferoo 4y ago
The next sentence after the first part you quoted: "The latest results are in: The electron is rounder than that." Which would be great if the Earth was actually perfectly round, but we've known for over three centuries that
929.
by ralferoo 4y ago
Even easier with C-like languages: a bunch of blank lines above and below something like `xxxxxxxxx;` at the point I planned to continue working. Instant compile fail if I try to run and also very obvious on any "git diff".
930.
by ralferoo 4y ago
I think you have a very narrow view of software development practices. In most companies I've worked at, most tickets are created by the QA team, few of whom have ever seen the source code and there's no reason why they'd eve

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