Viewing profile — thequux

Itanium has well over a kilobyte of general-purpose registers. That's lovely for single-process performance, but it absolutely slaughtered context switch time given the available m…

Don't underestimate the importance of a pen, ink, and paper you like. I found my pen a decade ago: Lamy Studio, in British Racing Green, with a medium nib. I found my ink not long …

I can't judge the veracity of the history of hash functions, but the moment it starts talking about cryptography it goes completely off the rails: it seems to indicate that finite …

It's been a long time since I've touched any of this, so the details have slipped my mind. However, the general idea was that there were two different exit calls in DOS: terminate …

How do you feel about ADD 5 TO X GIVING X? I kid, of course, but "X is x + 5" brings Prolog to mind with all the unification and bidirectionality that implies.

> So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion: > > "Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive dom…

NixOS using https://github.com/thequux/nix-zone-firewall/ worked well for me for many years. I only stopped using it because my poor embedded Linux machine started having issues an…

$227k just to apply, and another few hundred thousand in legal, compliance, and contracting to reach delegation. Source: I'm on the board of dotMeow and wrote the financial plan

Hi! I'm one of the founders of dotMeow, and it's been a long road to get to the point that we're willing to stake our reputations on a crowdfunding campaign. From applying to the a…

Do catgirls count? We've got one or two on staff. We'd have a cat, too, if it weren't for the fact that I'm allergic.

The sad thing is, this is one of the rhetorical flourishes that gets drilled into you in debate and comms education. ChatGPT picked it up because it's extremely common.

A few people have called us on this, but it's simply not true. The copy was all written by hand; the only machine assistance here is XCompose (you, too, can type an em-dash!). It t…

As much as I dislike mandatory certification, I can understand the need for it in wireless battery powered devices: a malfunctioning decide can talk the battery life if everything …

Ehh, not really. OSI layer 5 was responsible for managing multiple non-overlapping sessions within a single transport stream, and routing those sessions to specific applications. T…

In that case, you don't want cloud; you want an MSP, whose core competence is running those IT services. They, in turn, have the skills to colo a rack at a DC or to manage rented s…

I recall reading somewhere that the entire point of solitaire (at least the original implementation that came with windows 3) was to teach users how to click and drag, so I'm not s…

OSI's session layer did very little more than TCP/UDP port numbers; in the OSI model you would open a connection to a machine, then use that connection to open a session to a parti…

Alas, the market can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent.

Years ago, I had a CD marked "Windows 2000 for Alpha RC1", which suggests that it was cancelled quite late in the release cycle.

I think that this can change the semantics though; with the preceding check you can miss the shared variable being decremented from another thread. In some cases, such as if the sh…

If you actually read ITU T-REC X.200, which specifies the OSI model, you'll find that it doesn't match the modern internet at all. E.g., we don't have an OSI-style transport protoc…

There was an ISA I saw a while back that featured an "enhanced multiply and accumulate signed" instruction, which of course got the mnemonic "EMACS"

I second your recommendation for trying fountain pens. I suffer from some form of arthritis, and fountain pens let me write again. There are a variety of cheap ones available; I'm …

Many barcode scanners these days can scan QR codes. I have a NetumScan NSL5 that I got for €30 or so that can handle QR, DataMatrix, and even Aztec codes.