Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
Then you take an illegal instruction exception, and you have a choice to request a rebuild, patch it, or emulate it. (Yeah, sometimes the vendors just don't cooperate.) Incidentally, emulating opcodes is quite often…
One hopes that a hypervisor would not expose hardware control registers directly in the first place, except ones deliberately designed for virtualization support. Otherwise, the guest is running effectively at the same…
I, too, had wondered; this seems particularly common in the US. My best theory is that in rough handwriting, n and u/μ can look pretty similar, and everyone sort of agreed to only use u to reduce ambiguity.
Laminated wood veneer for legs, plywood for seat. Not as disposable as the eternal LACK, but also not bent wood.
It certainly tarnishes the shine to have a per-OS-version table of offsets to patch ;(
It always feels a bit like lost magic. But at the same time, it's also something that was only enabled by the very high determinism of these old home systems. The design relies on having fixed RAM locations, no…
Excellent explanation. I'd like to add that no light source can lie outside the horseshoe of the CIE xyz diagram: pure wavelengths are points on the curved line, everything that mixes them moves towards the inside of…
Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk. The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of…
Imagine a power splitter + phase shifter that produces a correct phase shift for each element in a phased array to produce a directional beam from one radio transceiver. Now this clever arrangement, instead of having…
Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally setting the goals of the project. The…
As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z Scientists…
If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.
On most modern Apple SoCs, including these two, there's an IOMMU dedicated to the USB complex (called the USB DART, perhaps DMA Address Remapping Table). However, Boot ROM on these two chips does not program it; Apple…
Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more…
Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can…
He's basically repeating his mistake - underestimating the relevance of technological progress - from 28 years ago, except now it's explicitly in service of his political bias. For your information: Paul Krugman is a…
It's difficult to consider Krugman's takes seriously after his very flawed 1998 predictions. Perhaps he's uniquely poorly suited to understanding the role of technology in economic development, and is best described as…
It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person. This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia…
Neat! What do you think about adding a "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2" agreement scale to each quote and showing the average instead of votes? I think many of those are pretty subjective, and maybe not always right for everyone or…
Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.
I don't think I've seen anything sufficiently RAM-like. The classic sense amplifier architecture tends to make this impractical. I guess modern Flash can store a few levels but that's a far cry from actual analog…
Tubes can also just be very _clever_ in a way that transistors generally are not. For instance, counting tubes that would contain a decimal counter in a single glass bubble (that's quite a few transistors even in TTL,…
Pretty good detail in this article! But what really surprises me is how some ideas just keep coming back. When I wrote a binary translator, I ended up having to keep a translated return stack to optimize RET opcodes.…
That was a fun site to browse. I really enjoy fixing / hacking on non-disposable equipment (lab, test, optics, etc.) and there are some well-done write-ups in there.
Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
Then you take an illegal instruction exception, and you have a choice to request a rebuild, patch it, or emulate it. (Yeah, sometimes the vendors just don't cooperate.) Incidentally, emulating opcodes is quite often…
One hopes that a hypervisor would not expose hardware control registers directly in the first place, except ones deliberately designed for virtualization support. Otherwise, the guest is running effectively at the same…
I, too, had wondered; this seems particularly common in the US. My best theory is that in rough handwriting, n and u/μ can look pretty similar, and everyone sort of agreed to only use u to reduce ambiguity.
Laminated wood veneer for legs, plywood for seat. Not as disposable as the eternal LACK, but also not bent wood.
It certainly tarnishes the shine to have a per-OS-version table of offsets to patch ;(
It always feels a bit like lost magic. But at the same time, it's also something that was only enabled by the very high determinism of these old home systems. The design relies on having fixed RAM locations, no…
Excellent explanation. I'd like to add that no light source can lie outside the horseshoe of the CIE xyz diagram: pure wavelengths are points on the curved line, everything that mixes them moves towards the inside of…
Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk. The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of…
Imagine a power splitter + phase shifter that produces a correct phase shift for each element in a phased array to produce a directional beam from one radio transceiver. Now this clever arrangement, instead of having…
Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally setting the goals of the project. The…
As a matter of fact, Nature does regularly publish papers about wetting properties of water. In fact, it just published one last week, from Nature Physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-026-03299-z Scientists…
If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.
On most modern Apple SoCs, including these two, there's an IOMMU dedicated to the USB complex (called the USB DART, perhaps DMA Address Remapping Table). However, Boot ROM on these two chips does not program it; Apple…
Sure, StarCraft is kind of a hybrid when you think about it. The guaranteed-hit model, the extremely simplified low vs high ground approach to determine if a shot is possible, etc. are pretty deterministic. But in more…
Chess presents a comparatively small and, importantly, discrete set of choices at any moment. So it feels like it's a solvable logic puzzle: like it should be possible, at any moment, to make an optimal move. You can…
He's basically repeating his mistake - underestimating the relevance of technological progress - from 28 years ago, except now it's explicitly in service of his political bias. For your information: Paul Krugman is a…
It's difficult to consider Krugman's takes seriously after his very flawed 1998 predictions. Perhaps he's uniquely poorly suited to understanding the role of technology in economic development, and is best described as…
It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person. This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia…
Neat! What do you think about adding a "-2, -1, 0, +1, +2" agreement scale to each quote and showing the average instead of votes? I think many of those are pretty subjective, and maybe not always right for everyone or…
Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.
I don't think I've seen anything sufficiently RAM-like. The classic sense amplifier architecture tends to make this impractical. I guess modern Flash can store a few levels but that's a far cry from actual analog…
Tubes can also just be very _clever_ in a way that transistors generally are not. For instance, counting tubes that would contain a decimal counter in a single glass bubble (that's quite a few transistors even in TTL,…
Pretty good detail in this article! But what really surprises me is how some ideas just keep coming back. When I wrote a binary translator, I ended up having to keep a translated return stack to optimize RET opcodes.…
That was a fun site to browse. I really enjoy fixing / hacking on non-disposable equipment (lab, test, optics, etc.) and there are some well-done write-ups in there.