Viewing profile — nitfol

I spent 10 minutes trying to log in using Chromium. It half-way showed that I was logged in, but I couldn't actually sign a petition. Logging in with Iceweasel (Firefox), it worked…

Strangely, the vi(1) linked from that page is not for the editor, but for a MIPS emulator http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/vi

Also note that sorting by price doesn't actually sort correctly. In this search, a $6.99 card comes before a $5.99 card (both with free super-saver shipping). This is so broken (an…

I think this list is greatly erring on the side of caution. Some of the descriptions are incorrect, for example: Aspirin (Bayers) is trademarked in several countries around the wor…

The article confuses "exponentially" and "quadratically": scales roughly quadratically with the issue-width. That is, the dispatch logic of a 5-issue processor is twice as big as a…

Pretty cool, but it assumes that many options are independent when they may not be... If I "reduce military to pre-Iraq war size" and "reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afgha…

_Godel, Escher, Bach_ describes similar phenomena with camera feedback loops. When I read GEB, I wondered if it would be possible to create a Sierpinski triangle using four special…

I was excited to try this service out after reading the article. I called them up, and after a couple minutes on hold, was connected to Michael. I didn't need to enter my account n…

How do they determine the "best layout" at the top? I pasted in a couple hundred lines of code and it claims that Colemak is the best, but Arensito (hadn't heard of it before) has …

http://perldoc.perl.org/pstruct.html takes this a bit further (but less portably), and compiles the code to assembly and parses out the debug records to find the information about …

More information about the errors in the (fixed point) math on the patriot: http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html

In the real world, taking exponential space implies taking exponential time. The fastest you can transmit information is the speed of light, so it will take exponential time to com…

Factoring is not known to be in P. You're thinking of primality testing, specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test

Compare this article to the recent Groklaw article. While my view is closer to Groklaw, both articles seem to offend me. They both worship a leader (Jobs or RMS) and seem to call f…

As the Cosmic AC was not in space, but "in hyperspace and made of something that was neither matter nor energy", there should have been no objections to it taking the role of Maxwe…

Right, this experiment measures the wavelength of the microwaves. Apparently it is possible to independently calculate the frequency of microwaves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spe…

Much better than their Flash interface. But completely broken in Firefox 3.0.x (under Red Hat; can't advance past the first page and there are no pictures) and the fonts are too bi…