jhallenworld

There is a book...

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers...

"It was in response to the concerns coming out of the Virginia ratification convention for the Constitution, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason, that a militia that was controlled solely by the federal government would not be there to protect the slave owners from an enslaved uprising. And ... James Madison crafted that language in order to mollify the concerns coming out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full control over their state militias — and those militias were used in order to quell slave revolts. ... The Second Amendment really provided the cover, the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to be able to put down these uprisings"

Wow crazy, so basically it's an underhanded layoff.

The Dublin office was nice (we were a contracting firm for them, had a meeting there).

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+dublin&oq=google+dubl...

A startup company I worked for was bought by IBM. Some of things that I noticed:

Right after the acquisition you feel like superstars: I mean your shares are now worth real money and you are the shiny new thing in a large organization, but this is also because the number of steps between you and the CEO is pretty low, because the people who did the acquisition are pretty high up, and you probably now work directly for them. But over time, this distance grows as you fall in the hierarchy..

It is way better for your career to be an acquihire than a hire- you would start at higher band for sure.

IBM was different from Google in that there was no mono-culture (like a giant repo for all code). Instead other groups tried to get you to use their products. For example, we used perforce but boy did they try to get us to use ClearCase and then Rational Team Concert. Of course our group would have to pay "blue dollars" to use those tools (vs. green dollars for Perforce licenses).

At least some parts of IBM are driven by trade shows. There is a need to show the latest new product at these shows, which drives internal invention and development. My experience was that few of these succeeded in the marketplace.

IBM, being such an old company had a much more normal distribution of people at it. There was much more age, race and sex diversity than at startup companies. There were many more mid-career people who were in the middle of raising their families, not just trying to change the world.

I'm sure this is the same as in Google: "thought leaders" advanced fast. Actual coding would not advance you- fixing bugs and adding planned features does not change the world.

>If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart too?

Well, yes! A different example: with few exceptions (gun manufacturers), when people die everybody even remotely involved gets sued. Examples: Station Nightclub fire, Surfside condominium collapse..

In the case of a pedo at Walmart I could imagine: "Didn't the staff notice the guy dragging the girl out of the store? Why didn't they get involved?" Walmart has much more money than the pedo.

I was watching for the Maine question 3 result: basically nationalizing its electric grid which is majority owned by foreign companies.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/me/maine/politics/2023/11/08/m...

Maine is ending up being a microcosm for what is required for the clean energy transition- there was a previous fight about a HVDC line between hydro-Quebec and Boston:

https://www.iberdrola.com/about-us/what-we-do/smart-grids/ne...

(In both cases Avangrid is involved..)

We can watch the ballot questions, lawsuits and bribes play out as various interests try to maintain their rent-seeking.

I think his most impactful utility is ImageDisk: used to archive floppy disks from many different types of computers using IBM PCs.

Much of the old software found on bitsavers.org (and archive.org) was recovered using this utility.

The design is not advanced enough, they should be thinking of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

So here is my science fiction theory: fusion will never be possible, but fission already is. So in the galactic civilization, rare uranium is the most valuable resource since it enables interstellar travel. Uranium is only produced in the collisions of neutron stars, so we are lucky to have any.

We should not squander our uranium for power generation when we can use solar for that. It's like not using oil or gasoline for heating.. we need it for transportation.

If you really want to help with eye strain, make a monitor with some kind of pancake optics so that the screen appears to be at infinity. Having to focus at something right in front of you all day strains the focus muscles in your eyes.

Older people will know what I'm talking about here..

It should compare the synthesizable subset of System Verilog with the same for VHDL.

I found the "ACTIVATE-to-PRECHARGE command period" in a Micron DDR3 datasheet, same value: 9 x tREFI

https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/671/4Gb_DDR3L-1283964.pdf

Page 78, speed bin tables.

Refresh basically is an activate/precharge sequence, so keeping a row open long is the same as denying refresh to that bank.

So this is a direct DRAM spec violation: there is a spec in the DRAM datasheet known as tRAS (row address strobe: time from row open (read) to row close (write back)). Min is 33 ns, Max is 9*tREFI. tREFI (average refresh period) depends on temperature: for below 85C, it's 7.8 us. So tRAS max is 70 us. (this is from some random Micron DDR4 datasheet)

Um, so of course they can trigger problems when they violate the spec!

Were they able to find a DRAM controller that violates the spec? If so, that's a simple bug in the DRAM controller. Well I guess so, the paper mentions Intel i5-10400 (Comet Lake). Do AMD processors have this issue?

Try eliminating all background noise, especially white noise sources like fans. Give it a few days.

I have some degree of tinnitus (I'm sure it's damage from that Metallica concert..), but I mostly don't notice it unless triggered. White noise triggers it. One office I worked in had white noise generators which made it worse and worse. New office does not have them, now no problem.

It seems they are considering it for kidney stones, perhaps in addition to lithotripsy:

https://www.fusfoundation.org/diseases-and-conditions/kidney...

Lithotripsy is pretty limited, I think the preference in most cases is to use ureteroscopy (using holmium laser ablation to break up stones).. but as someone who's had this, I can tell you it's no fun- any progress would be welcome.

The plastic of the Roman Empire was perhaps ivory... maybe something like this can be made artificially now?

Just what is ivory anyway? It's teeth in some kind of plywood like structure:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17427...

Some plastic things can be directly replaced with it:

http://www.antiquegamblingchips.com/distinguish_iv_bon_cel.h...

>Looking things up in a multiplication table is harder because it is two-dimensional.

But T2 is pretty large, why not just make T2 have 100 elements and index it by a*10+b (i.e., just concatenate the digits together)? This is faster because you don't have to add or lookup anything in T1.

If the numbers are represented by the length of rods then this concatenation is not so easy, but neither is it in this algorithm:

> you have some thingy that slides up by T1(a) units, and then by T1(b) more, and then wherever it ends up is used to index into T2 to get the answer

So I would replace this with:

you have some thingy that slides up by a large units and then by b small units (where one large unit is 10 times longer than one small unit), and then wherever it ends up is used to index into to get the answer

So at the opposite end of the speed spectrum, you might enjoy my relay computer: it uses a capacitor for the master part of the flip-flop for exactly the same reason- to save on the number of active components. See:

https://relaysbc.sourceforge.net/circuits.html#:~:text=Low%2...

There were a few TTL ones available: 74x378 is one I used back in the day. It was easier to meet timing with parts like this. I used it for my PCI cards: it was part of a circuit that latched the address of PCI configuration writes- the only data that would make it to the board if the transaction times out. Why did I need this? To load the bits into Xilinx 4010E FPGA which held the full PCI interface, thereby avoiding the need for a Xilinx configuration PROM. After the design was loaded, the PCI interface would come alive and start responding to transactions.

This worked until Intel decided to save power by disabling the PCI clock on unused sockets: it means your device had better exist on the bus before the BIOS's PCI enumeration (actually this is not true- with the full bridge documentation I could enable the clock- but I didn't have it, and in any case, then the design would be chipset dependent).

Classic VW bugs famously have an issue with their clutch cable- it will eventually break, causing the clutch to unexpectently engage. If you happened to be waiting at a red light the car could lurch into the intersection if you didn't have your foot strongly on the brake. (this happened to my dad, no injury, just scary).

So the controls have to be reliable and robust. It will be easier to demonstrate this if the system is simple. So I think we would prefer software to not be involved in safety systems, but if it must be done you need to go to extraordinary measures to demonstrate its safety.

How you do this for something like full self driving where there is a trained system involved (i.e., that you don't know how it works) I have no idea.

You need to try a better autorouter.

My experience with PADS/Mentor "blaze router" and "Specctra" (now Allegro PCB router) was very good. Altium on the other hand... no (I mention Altium because I think most people's bad experience is coming from this).

Specctra and blaze worked fine in 1998-era PC hardware. I used them for high speed designs (even then we had ECL and PECL).

I have a 23 year old VW Passat. It's rust-free, but the clearcoat had rotted through, so for the fun of it I repainted the car with $150 of Rustoleum with a roller ("Hunter Green" from Home Depot- it should be sprayed, but I don't have a good place to do it and I'm not willing to pay). It looks good, but like a car that has been painted with a roller :-)

What's interesting is that I also have a 13 year old VW CC. This car has major rust problems, it's as if VW forgot the recipe. I think it's partially a water drainage problem since most of the rust is between the door seals.

But yeah, classic Beetles all seem to have the rusted floor pans. I think newer cars coat the floor with bitumen or something, or just have better drainage.

Interesting, I had no idea (I thought only the fittings would have lead, but it's the hose material):

https://toxicfreefuture.org/press-room/new-study-rates-best-...

Batteries are recycled, check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNGg0P7B5fI

The IBM one for z was level 4 I think..

Yes: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cryptocards?topic=4768-overview

It's not surprising because who wants to make their own FIPS 140-2 level 3 compliant key store device?

Also, the Cavium one was the fastest one on the market the last time I looked at this. Thales, Safenet and IBM also had them..

This is an idiotic USA problem.

For example, China claims:

http://en.people.cn/n3/2022/0106/c90000-9941481.html

So I repair old cars and old electronics. Is there anything better than ABS? The problem with it is that it becomes brittle with age.

Same question for belts that you find in record players and tape recorders- they turn to goo.

Using 8 inch floppies instead of punched cards, but otherwise the same workflow. Also check out the 3742 dual data station: two operators share a CRT- mirrors show half the screen to each operator.

Check out IBM's mainframe Count key data (CKD) format:

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

There were no sectors, just data fields. Also each data field had a text key field. I think IBM only gave this up (really virtualized it) when commodity hardware became better than their own.

So I'm wondering if CKD was ever a thing on floppies?

I've been a bit immersed in pre-Fortran-77 (so FORTRAN-IV and FORTRAN-66). It was an interesting time: FORTRAN was the most standard language, so people used it for things like compilers. An example I have is Motorola's 6800 assembler, which was delivered as a tape for various common machines of the day:

http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/6800/cross-asse...

But this was before FORTRAN had strings.. or even bit-wise operators.. But you could read an input line into an array of integers. Then to read each character from this array, you used integer multiplication and division to perform shifting and masking. Although in this version, I can see calls to assembly language helper functions.

Note the Hollerith constants.. (no strings).