bewaretheirs

Another recent case of cargo by sail that may be a bit more practical:

ESA is now sending rocket subassemblies across the Atlantic (to their launch site in French Guyana) in a hybrid ship equipped with both sails and diesel; the linked article claims the sails reduce fuel consumption by 30%.

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ar...

> Have one array grow normally from location#0, and the second array grow backwards from location#End.

The stack in most ISAs and ABIs grows down from a high address, allowing this trick to be used to divide memory flexibly between heap and stack in single-threaded small-memory systems.

it was part of the binary malware payload hidden in a binary blob of "test data".

In a compression/decompression test suite, a subtly broken allegedly compressed binary blob is not out of place.

This suggests we need to audit information flow during builds - the shipping production binary package should be reproduceably buildable without reading test data or test code.

not sure if it was a factor in the API design, but SPARC's fixed-size register windows give you space for 8 parameters. Perhaps it's just coincidence, but vmem_xalloc() takes exactly 8 parameters!

The article in Nature referenced but not named or linked from the article could be either:

"Melting ice solves leap-second problem — for now"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00850-x

"A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07170-0

See Bonwick & Adams, "Magazines and Vmem: extending the slab allocator to many CPUs and arbitrary resources" from 2001: https://www.usenix.org/conference/2001-usenix-annual-technic...

The most general allocator interface described, vmem_xalloc(), includes a "phase" parameter (their name for "align at offset"), as well as a "nocross" parameter (in case you want your oddly-aligned object to not cross a page boundary).

If you can have "long long", why not "short short"?

In that alternate universe, char could be 8 bits, short short 16, short 32, and int 64.

Historically they worked well enough (on 16-bit and 32-bit machines) because sizeof(pointer) == sizeof(int) == sizeof(general register) on the architectures where C flourished in the pre-ANSI C era.

But with the migration to 64-bit machines, typically int stayed put at 32 bits.

I guess nobody wanted to introduce a new integral type between short and int; they had enough trouble dealing with code which assumed sizeof(long) == 4. I recall stumbling across a comment where the word "beint32_t" appeared where "belong" would have made sense in context..

As a NATO member, they'll have to promise to spend 2% of their GDP on defense -- though once they make the promise they will probably be able to get away with spending less!

Paper cartridges packaging one projectile with one shot's worth of powder were in widespread use in the 16h century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_cartridge

> Bullets didn’t exist when the 2nd amendment was created

Uh, what? Wikipedia dates the first bullet to the 13th century:

> Fire lance barrels made of metal appeared by 1276.[30] Earlier in 1259 a pellet wad that filled the barrel was recorded to have been used as a fire lance projectile, making it the first recorded bullet in history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun#Transition_to_true_guns

Gilbert and Sullivan's "Ruddigore" (first performed in 1887) features a chorus of "professional bridesmaids" who are experiencing a bit of a lull in business:

  Hannah: Nay, gentle maidens, you sing well but vainly, for Rose is still heart-free, and looks but coldly upon her many suitors.

  Zorah: It's very disappointing.  Every young man in the village is in love with her, but they are appalled by her beauty and modesty, and won't declare themselves; so, until she makes her own choice, there's no chance for anybody else.

  Ruth: This is, perhaps, the only village in the world that possesses an endowed corps of professional bridesmaids who are bound to be on duty every day from ten to four--and it is at least six months since our services were required.  The pious charity by which we exist is practically wasted!

The message was no doubt a parody of the Hallmark (greeting card company) advertising tagline of "When you care enough to send the very best".

MSS (maximum segment size) is the term at the TCP layer. Each end of a connection can (and usually does) declare its MSS in a TCP option in the first packet it sends.

Advertised MSS, interface MTU, and route MTU can all constrain packet sizing.

Using large-MTU routes for internal destinations can work well.

it's not a blog - it's a DNSSEC validator tool that gives you a pretty diagram of which keys are signing what.

There are others around which I won't link to right now lest they get clobbered too.

ECDSA is available in DNSSEC, and there is a slow migration to ECC in progress; see https://stats.dnssec-tools.org/#/?dnssec_param_tab=0

The .EDU, .NET, and .COM zones were recently migrated from RSA to ECDSA (DNSSEC algorithm 13); see, for instance: https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2023-Dec...

Anyone newly enabling DNSSEC on their zone should probably use ECDSA.

When your programs are running on a VM, the linux that loads and runs your binaries is not at the bottom; that linux image runs inside a virtual machine which is constructed and supervised by a hypervisor which sits underneath it all. That hypervisor may run on the bare machine (or what passes for a bare machine what with all the sub-ring-zero crud out there), or may run on top of another OS which could be linux or something else. And even if there is linux in the middle and linux at the bottom they could be completely different versions of linux from releases made years apart.

As I understand it, there's linux running on the Google Cloud hardware but the virtualized networking and storage stacks in Google Cloud are google proprietary and largely bypass linux -- in the case of networking see the "Snap: a Microkernel Approach to Host Networking" paper.

In contrast, it appears that Oxide is committing to open-source the equivalent pieces of their virtualization platform.

In practice it appears that a suicidal pilot will wait for the other pilot to leave the cockpit to use the lavatory and then lock them out:

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

I would have said that the comma recalls the way that comma is used inside backquoted expressions.

there have been bags of astronaut poop on the moon since the Apollo era.

The damage to the Apollo 13 service module that caused oxygen tank 2 to rupture almost certainly happened well before launch during ground testing.

See https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/ap13acc.html

This was one of the early RFCs from the era when they were issued on paper..

One notable bit about this (and what caused it to appear in the RFC series) was that the conversation happened over the ARPAnet - it was driven over the network from USC, with ELIZA at Stanford and PARRY at BBN.

Yes, some can.

Unbound's "private-address" and "private-domain" directives control this.

Similarly, bind9 has "deny-answer-addresses" (with an "except-from" option so you can specify local domains that are allowed to use them):

https://bind9.readthedocs.io/en/v9.18.20/reference.html#cont...

Not sure about others.

1.1 is gone but I'm still seeing the 1.0 entry.

For Othello, picking the positionally best square (corners very good, adjacent to corners very bad, 2 squares from corner good, etc.) beats lookahead, likely because having unflippable pieces in good positions leads to large swings in score in the endgame that a short lookahead won't see.

I play almost purely positionally with no conscious lookahead and I beat it soundly every time, playing as both black and white, frequently with the AI having to pass because it had no legal moves.

A "don't yield a corner" heuristic to never move in the three squares around a corner unless there are no other legal moves would likely significantly strengthen its play.

And sometimes it can result in DNA test results showing that children are not related to their mother, if when you swab the mother you don't get the same lineage as the one that developed into her ovaries:

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/case-lydia-fairchild-and-her-ch...

I don't know Chinese but Google translate says "贤" means "virtuous", "worthy", or "able".

Is that word plausibly used to refer to devices to mean "it works" or "it passes tests"?

Getting to space (above the Karman line at ~100km altitude) is one thing; staying there is another.

There is a short accessible summary of the difference between "in space" and "in orbit" at https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

I'd worry most about the ones dancing in ghillie suits.