Viewing profile — spc476

It's probably easier for the marketing department to get a new domain up and running that it is for a new subdomain within their own company. Battling Business Units and all that.

The two major distinctions in computer languages (in my opinion) are declarative and imperative. For declarative, where you describe what you want, not how to get it, you have Prol…

TCC did several years ago. It could boot Linux from source in under 10 seconds. It's wasn't that big of a C compiler. It's in the 50,000 lines of code range.

Microsoft never removed it for MS-DOS. It just undocumented the calls required for this for years.

In general, yes, the linker (if there is one) would have less to do. Position independent code (PIC) on the 6809 is pretty easy [1], but it does increase the code side a bit, but t…

I suspect the shadow registers were there to improve interrupt handling, reserve their use exclusively to an interrupt handler, and you could save time in not having to store regis…

At a previous job, the team I was on [1] had a dedicated QA engineer (unofficially---he was the only QA engineer that ever worked with our team). Before we got bought, we worked cl…

I went through the lists. In 1985, of the top 10 movies, you had two direct sequels, two adaptations, leaving six original movies. In 2025, of the top 10 movies, you had two direct…

Survivalship bias. Here's a list of movies released in 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_1985 >. How many of those are good? How many have you heard of?…

I've already done that---ANS Forth for the 6809 ( https://github.com/spc476/ANS-Forth ).

When in the past you learned that the recommended value for the TTL was 64 and you didn't think any operating system would pick a value much larger than that.

I'm checking the TTL of IP packets, which is only 8-bits in size, and in practice, are decremented per hop (the early IPv4 RFCs state it is in seconds; I doubt it was ever used tha…

Yes. Yes. No, it's always port 443. But yes, the destination doesn't ACK the connection. No, the TTL just means it can make more hops; it doesn't mean the connection is kept open f…

The destination IP address is my server, the one being attacked. I don't see the significant of the high-value octets.

Yes.

Unless you whitelist the notification email, which I've has to do a few times.

In my 19 years of greylisting, I have yet to have legitimate email fail due to it. And it was one of the easiest ways to significantly decrease the amount of spam. It's been worth …

You forgot difficult. How do you test a system call failure? How do you test a system call failure when the first N calls need to pass? Be careful how you answer, some answers tech…

There was (and still is to a degree) a group of people critical of TLS. One half of the group (which I think you belong to) bitch about it being mandatory. The other half bitched a…

Old Soviet joke: government pretends to pay us, we pretend to work.

William Gibson got a lifetime ban for calling it "Disney with the death penalty" in a Wired article.

And OpenAI was a non-profit. "Was" being the operative word.

If I didn't want opinions, I'd join a cult.

Changing a radio tower light bulb is not for the weak of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9LahaBJIk