Viewing profile — jloughry

That exists: look for 'trusted path'. It was a feature of compartmented mode workstation (CMW) operating systems like Trusted Solaris and lives on in the requirement to use Ctrl-Al…

Also, you don't want to breathe it; xenon is an anesthetic gas and will put you to sleep.

This is one global-scale geoengineering project I can rally get behind. It has the smallest chance of catastrophic second-order effects of any of the several methods I've heard of.…

Mother's maiden name is documented to have been in use for authentication at least as far back as 1882, and even then it was known to be a weakness [1, §3]. [1] Stephen M. Bellovin…

It could be a 12V AC adapter. Not too common, but they do exist. Four of the myriad diodes would be connected in a bridge rectifier to convert the AC to DC. (I don't see any smooth…

Build one near the Equator.

Yes: Interestingly, the audio chipsets in modern motherboards and sound cards include an option to change the function of an audio port at the software level, a type of audio port …

Lightsail. You carry a laser and a lightsail. You shoot the laser at the black hole and the laser light gravitationally slingshots around the black hole, returning to you with more…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-36 It was an experiment to test radiation effects; the In-flight Radiation Dose Distribution (IDRD) experiment: This joint NASA/DoD experiment was…

Here's the most recent article I've seen: https://www.designworldonline.com/energy-efficient-lighting-... Near the end of the article is a diagram of the new SDL (Dr. Shuji Nakamur…

From The Martian by Andy Weir: "They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially 'colonized' it. So technically, I colonized Mars."

The laser doesn't illuminate the road directly; it excites a phosphor puck that lights up white and is then focused and aimed like a regular incandescent filament or gas discharge …

TIL tetrode has a special meaning in biology: a four-conductor microelectrode for probing neurons that gives essentially a direction reading along with amplitudes from each of the …

This seems to be relevant: https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/docs/DDG51_04-97.htm

That hardware capability is exploited in the following paper, if you want to know the details: Mordechai Guri et al. (2016) 'SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Pr…

You're right. Those people weren't working on a software project; they were in a fight for their lives—literally—with an enemy they just barely won against. It's not the same thing…

Twelve O'Clock High is a masterclass on running a software project. The higher-ups can see that something is wrong with the team; it's not performing as well as it ought to. The ou…

George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories from 1942–1945 are wonderful—if you like the idea of vacuum tube technology taken to extreme lengths. Lots of fun in those stories for e…

This company sells new S-100 boards! http://www.s100computers.com/Cards%20For%20Sale.htm They have a Z-80 board. Lots of information about it here: http://www.s100computers.com/My%…

From chaper 3 of Marketing That Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing Can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company by Lodish et al. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Educat…

The paper is open-access at ACM: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3192369 That's really appreciated; thanks.

Computer science. I worked for Lockheed for fifteen years---long enough to see some programming projects succeed and others fail. I wondered why the difference. I had access to all…

I was doing a full-time PhD and working. One day my advisor asked, `Are you working for me or Lockheed?' I chose the PhD.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire "One distinctive feature of the bus is the possibility of using only two wires: data and ground. To accomplish this, 1-Wire devices include…