retrac

34 ms·

511.
by retrac 3y ago
Thanks, and sure, quote away.
512.
by retrac 3y ago
No, it's most high level languages, in general. Pascal or Standard ML for that matter, would suffer just as C does. Languages like C and Pascal really demand that you have a nice, cheap stack. Classically, a function call means pushi
513.
by retrac 3y ago
Yes. This is already done. It's how almost all submarine communication cables currently work. Most long-distance fibre links do not use electronics to regenerate their signals. They use optical amplifiers, which take light at one wa
514.
by retrac 3y ago
One of the properties of shortwave is extensive multi-path propagation. Much of the signal goes the shortest route - and a small amount of it goes all the way around the world and arrives the long route, tens of milliseconds later. And at
515.
by retrac 3y ago
I assume they're suggesting create a false identity, and pose as a foreign national illegally living in the United States. It's a rather ...unconventional suggestion, that clearly was not thought out. There is a high risk someone
516.
by retrac 3y ago
The Apple II is rather hard to emulate correctly. While most Apple II software is relatively easily supported, some corner cases are absolutely brutal to get right. For example, you can mostly treat the video system as a dumb framebuffer.
517.
by retrac 3y ago
About 5% of men have some kind of colourblindness. It is common enough I would argue it's good engineering and design to avoid using colour to indicate anything important, particularly when avoidable. Red-green rather than light-dark
518.
by retrac 3y ago
Don't discount #2 there. I still make ASCII art when commenting source code. Flow charts! I like to keep documentation as human-readable and editable text. (Version control friendly.) ASCII art diagrams can be automatically rendere
519.
by retrac 3y ago
Some ASIC designs are open source. That won't be down to the transistor level, but they are laid out at gate level. For example: https://tinytapeout.com/runs/tt02/
520.
by retrac 3y ago
C is able to express efficient code for bit-banging. But it's still ugly and hard to use. Ada handles it better than any language I've seen. Types are abstract but can be given concrete realizations. A number can be defined as
521.
by retrac 3y ago
Sparse files make more sense if you see the file system and paging as unified. If you have allocated an array of 1 billion items, accessing the last item doesn't make the OS zero out everything from 0th to the billionth item, allocati
522.
by retrac 3y ago
Another key piece is the discrete cosine transform. Most image and video codecs (JPEG and MPEG and AV1 too) use DCT or a related technique. It's a very simple idea at its core. The algorithm looks for an equation that, when plotted, s
523.
by retrac 3y ago
Brazil has a large and heavily industrialized economy. It is however radically unequal (even by US terms) which may be why you think the country is poor as a whole. With a GDP of $2 trillion USD the Brazilian economy is comparable to Spai
524.
by retrac 3y ago
This is a very common misinterpretation. A major factor behind such misinterpretation is probably the King James Bible. It heavily influences our sense of style even today. God is traditionally addressed with thou due to the intimate rela
525.
by retrac 3y ago
Yes. The tu and thou pronouns are related. So are me and moi, nos and ours. In Hindi me and you are mai and tu. In Russian they are menya and tubya. (Sorry for errors in transliteration.). English I and Fench je are related too. Old En
526.
by retrac 3y ago
Heat is low-density and it's difficult to work with. And fossil fuels are extremely high-density and easy to work with. So when heat is needed, the general approach has been to burn fossil fuels locally and just dump the waste heat.
527.
by retrac 3y ago
Perhaps sufficient dread amounts to worship. I'm reminded of Roko's basilisk, which seems to have genuinely disturbed some people who considered the idea, just as a philosophical proposition. Pascal's wager is perhaps appl
528.
by retrac 3y ago
In some countries, NAT was implemented at the ISP level and you had no public IP at all. I remember it being a consistent practical barrier back in the 90s for stuff like file transfers. I had a public IP but the other person didn't
529.
by retrac 3y ago
A fairly significant % of Christians, at least in the USA but I would imagine the UK too, believe in alien visitation and alien abduction -- and that they're actually demons. One realization I've had recently, is that the simulta
530.
by retrac 3y ago
I think this is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. This excellent article "Visualizing Commodore 1541 Disk Contents" [1] by Michael Steil about the Commodore 64 disk format, includes visualizations of the magnetic
531.
by retrac 3y ago
That is called "double jeopardy". It is explicitly prohibited in most legal systems. Even where it isn't explicitly prohibited, it's generally assumed as a basic principle (like innocent until proven guilty). It's
532.
by retrac 3y ago
We were still taught that in high school in the late 90s. Probably some of the last. You are correct. Here's a good example of drafting from the 1960s: https://i.imgur.com/tXozAMy.png It's not just all caps, bu
533.
by retrac 3y ago
I think paper tape and teletypes predate punchcards for IT applications. Baudot's work started in the 1870s, and fully automatic teleprinter systems were in operation by the 1900s (decade) [1]. IBM may not have been punching alphanume
534.
by retrac 3y ago
What age verification system exists other than government ID? The only way we ever verify someone's age for legal purposes, at least here in Canada, is by checking government ID. Birth certificate, driver's permit, photo ID card,
535.
by retrac 3y ago
An example: vinylon. [1] Briefly popular in the early 20th century, North Korea is about the only place in the world that still makes or uses the stuff. It can be made from coal and limestone which are some of the few resources North Korea
536.
by retrac 3y ago
There's a term for that: linguistic skeuomorph. With a stylus on a tablet was how the ancient Romans and Sumerians wrote. That imagery and history is evoked when those words are used to refer to portable computers. They were chosen
537.
by retrac 3y ago
There are multiple possible causes, but one is a phenomenon known as genetic mosaicism. That is when an organism is made up of multiple distinct genetic lineages, in species where this isn't typical. It can occur from things like twi
538.
by retrac 3y ago
Originally, probably because it was inflexible. You have to use the in-memory layout required by the hardware, and you can't do anything not supported by the hardware. Later, it didn't get updated (probably because no one used i
539.
by retrac 3y ago
As I'm sure most of us know, the x86 lineage goes back nearly 50 years. Many ideas that went nowhere, were taken as design decisions, and are forever etched in silicon. One of my favourite examples is the x86 task switching support.
540.
by retrac 3y ago
That's Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems Design and Implementation . Now, yes, that shows you how to write a Unix-like microkernel OS; just skip everything except the file system chapter. And don't follow the advice abo

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