287 karma · joined September 15, 2019
Anyhow, OP doesn't sound like someone who's into CS for all the wrong reasons. I personally wouldn't get focused on FAANG as the next step, but if they're already going to an elite university, resume building with FAANG seems reasonable enough.
Above all, having a real interest in what you're doing is one of the greatest multipliers to your efforts... and your enjoyment.
Sure, we might not get to geek out over the best and latest software and standards, but we're not going to bleed over the leading edge when it fails. I'm happy to give it more time to demonstrate its various modes of failure.
In a year or two, I'll revisit turning javascript.options.wasm back on in FireFox. And if by that time it proves that it is trustworthy and necessary? Yes, I'm quite happy to enable it!
For real business reasons, there are things that I either needed to know, or I needed to be confident that the other person either had the answer to or were were putting some serious thought to. I wasn't asking sensitive questions just to embarrass them. I expected them to give me an honest answer (and I helped make that easier if an honest answer wasn't forthcoming on its own). I learned that I could trust my team not to take any of my questions out of context, and they learned that I would never try to take their answers out of context either.
Here are the big takeaways as best as I've been able to pin them down: it is all about trust, personal motivation, and intention. These complications are multiplied by the number of participants (even in situations where one person is asking a question and one person is answering the question, but multiple people may be listening). The process is quick and painless when the trust between the participants is high, the personal motivation (at the cost of others) is low, the level of trust between everyone is high, and there are just the two people. (Can it get better than that? Surprisingly, yes. Consider when one of the participants is a benevolent all-seeing and all-powerful diety.)
I have to admit, I haven't read the full article. I'd be curious what dimensions of trust they recorded and how well it coordinated with their results.
If you've developed all those factors between all the participants, you can ask just about anything with the minimum of time wasted. As one or more of these factors break down, the more complicated the conversation becomes. Or the more process you need to introduce to smooth over the wrinkles. "Hey, I don't mean to embarrass you, but on the Johnson account it is more important to get an accurate documentation than to show any kind of regular process. See? Here is where we've been capturing this for everyone, and this is what's done with the information." (So then you see how something like transparency comes into play.)
I think it makes sense when you look at it in those terms. You also need to be asking questions work asking, and sometimes you're going to be asking questions that you don't want or need the answer to yourself. You might be asking to build up trust within a group of people, or you might be asking because you know that several people really would benefit from knowing something that they're too conditioned to do on their own. (This is where I started. And the key is that even if a question is confrontational, you must never ask in a confrontational tone. The tone of your voice and the content of your words have to reflect that you're asking because you need to know. Nothing personal, just business.)
Even still, I hardly consider myself the master. I've never written anything down on this, but this is the 10,000ft view of what I picked up up over the years. If you've spotted something along these lines in a book or an article somewhere, let me know. I'd like to compare notes.
I thought ICANN was supposed to be the good guys? You know, the responsible managers of the Internet and providing solid governance which serves as the best argument against any kind of government intrusion? I'm hoping they didn't just grow bored with it and decide to get rid of it. As though it was some sort of dearly loved Google service with mild profitability and little-to-no opportunity for internal career development. ;)
I owe it to Paleo, in part, to have resolved some long-standing medical issues that were attributed (at the end of a very long process) to a bad gut flora population. (I had the help of a wicked-smart new doctor who supported my own self-directed lab tests and self-experimentation where conventional medicine had already failed). This was all very much off the beaten path, and while they could look at my gut flora by ordering a stool stool analysis, he said they had very little measure to look at most samples and proclaim one as superior to another based on population). He could say some of these high-level metrics "changed". I really wish I hadn't missed HN's recent discussion on a gut microbiome article.
Paleo got me 90% of the way back to normal health. Yet when it failed, I was left without any explation why. Based on that, I looked for similar diets. I found and experimented with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. The dietary choices turned out to be very close to Paleo, but the rationale was entirely different. And for me, the minor differences were everything.
With strict compliance, it got me over the fence on a consistent basis, but it demanded nothing less than 100% compliance to see those benefits. Setbacks were brutal at first, but eased over time. After half a year, I altered by microbiomd enough to handle a regular diet for days at a time. Yes, your mileage may and will vary.
So even if the basis for the Paleo diet is factually incorrect, I think it resulted in a better answer for some (and certainly not all). It didn't cure my ills, but it gace me a starting point to hypothesize if my food intake was making things better or worse.
My biggest takeaway way that biological experiments can be slow. It took over a month before I saw a gut biome change that allowed for minor cheating on the diet without apparent penalty.
I believe they ran into problems with their manufacturing partner, and also with some of their batteries bulging. They had very good intentions, but I believe the project became too big for this enthusiastic but novice team to handle. Also: Lots of failed components pre-assembly.
Too bad, really. A flexible e-ink watch embedded into a metal wrist band should have been achievable and quite a fantastic product!
Somewhere was a website which attempted to break those costs down. No question that the engineering team put functionality and features first and cost second. The company needed to sell in volume to survive, but the final cost was just too high for that to happen. They seemed to have been slowly clawing their way back, but I do believe them when they say that new tariffs were the final straw which killed the dream.
I am truly sorry for backers. They were sold on the promise of so many clever features never before jam-packed into in a single cooler. (The only thing I would have added were larger rear wheels.) But it just wasn’t the right product brought to life by the right company and at the right cost. Some backers were strung along for years and really got screwed.
Still, you better believe that I consider myself lucky. I’m going to keep this monster for the rest of my life. Now if I only could have gotten my “World’s Thinnest Watch” from 2013 that raised over $1M on Kickstarter and failed to deliver anything. I know how it feels, and it sucks. Kickstarter isn’t a store, but I swear that some projects do their damndest to blur that line, you know?
Worse, 10%/year isn’t a contractual limitation; it is but a statement of “intent”. It is nothing short of malfeasance to have sold a non-profit’s operations without sufficient safeguards. And to a private equity firm? Outrageous incompetence if not criminal in action.
His article doesn’t justify the transaction or allay reasonable concerns. In fact, he seems to be presenting the case for why this transaction is crooked if not criminal!
Still, I’m sorry to hear of that situation.
But if you’re not being literal when you ask about values beyond profit, then as an easy example: Valve. They believe in promoting PC gaming and moving it forward. I think their service (and products) represents that value fairly well, and sometimes at the expense of profit.
The private agents were armed with the latest available discounts (which you could find for yourself if you tried). But their skills made them particularly more successful than a typical front-line sales employee.
The catch? It wasn’t a scam, and they really were trying to get their targets to switch. It seems that AT&T was more willing to sell consumer data than the general public is aware of. Converting their targets to AT&T granted their agency access to additional data which they then to passed onto their clients. And the target gets a discount, too. Win-Win-Win? :)
They weren't asking for home number, work number, and mobile number. Or as you mentioned: daytime number, evening number. It was more along the lines of: Name, Address, Mobile Number, Company Name, Job Title, etc. They specifically wanted a mobile number and no other type of number.
Were they wanting a mobile number so they could more easily research an applicant using their internal tools? Only they would know. But it drew my attention to the possibilities and the importance of obtaining a mobile number.
Back to OP's question, part of the reason a mobile number is required to create a Facebook account may be to help tie different types of records together. Of course, as mentioned, there are other reasons, such as security. Users will understand and provide a mobile number for that reason alone.
Most companies ask a customer for a telephone number in their forms and in their applications. Actually, just about any context where the customer's mobile device is not the item of attention. This was my first encounter with a company that specifically requested a mobile telephone number in their application. This unusually specific request illuminated some interesting possibilities in my mind.
If you experience circa 2014 has been different, actually, that's great! I'd like to see and compare some similar event applications around that same time period. (Still, it was the possibilities for the uses of a mobile number that really flagged my interest as well as the relevance to this conversation, not the rarity today of companies specifically requesting a mobile number.)
Now, it could be nothing, but I came to a personal realization just how valuable a telephone number could be for such a well-positioned company to do a deep-dive into a person's background just by using their mobile number as the key to tie additional records to the user's identity. Or their activities before, during, and after a company's conference.
To answer your question, I believe that Facebook wants the (mobile) telephone number of their users to facilitate any number of additional uses, and "account security" is one actual use that lets it slide under the radar of most people. Clever! (Or depending on your POV on privacy and personal security, unfortunate!)
The problem? Our developer UNIX workstations were never centrally managed (or budgeted) or in great quantity, so IT management wasn't pushing it. Developers didn't want to give up their personal machines. (And they didn't trust any replacement.) Sysadmins didn't want to kick over a hornet's nest of conversion and support issues.
All that said, even if Stadia isn't there today, it has a very clear potential with scenes that would otherwise exceed console capabilities. It could even significantly improve player-to-player latency in massively multiplayer environments. The initial end-user cost of Stadia is quite low, making it easy to try and at least a short-term alternative to purchasing the next generation console. As a PC gamer, I'd be willing to try it out if it granted me access to titles that I couldn't get on my PC.
Despite any number of "could-be" advantages, we'll have to wait and see how it all pans out. Will Google give it five years to blossom before they grow bored and take the knife to it? Unfortunately, I (like many others) have an ISP with a bandwidth cap, so the entire thing is pretty much a non-starter.
Could this end up being a plausible "serving the customer" reason for DJI drones to start collecting and reporting Wi-Fi signal, location, and temporal data back to the parent company on a regular basis? (That's with or without the matching phone app being installed and running.)
You know what? I think I'd like your physical kill so much better. It could cleaner to implement, too. If the manufacturer couldn't offer it, I'd be happy to do business with a modder who could.
An existing exterior button like the iPhone's ring/silent switch seems like an ideal starting point to work a third-party hardware solution around. But given what little free space exists inside these devices, here's hoping that solution is more wiring than components!
I don't think the question should be "if" it is happening, but how far some companies go (behind-the-scenes) to use human voices not only defend but advance their position.
Based on what I see here, you've got a good explanation: https://github.com/FrankBuss/x16-demo/tree/master/assembly
Their original image was 64K. They cut it down to 34K (+ 512 bytes) and then they included it in their binary (rather than loading from a file).
So it seems that David was correct in his explanation. They could only display about half of a 320x2X0 image because they ran out of low memory.
But it also seems that VERA doesn't have enough video memory to hold a 640x480 8bpp bitmapped image ("Mode 7"). 128K of private video memory just isn't enough unless they start playing tricks.
> 8 bit computers always have a lot of limitations. And these limitations have sparked a lot of creativity :)
I really am curious to find out if they plan on adding more memory or if this is going to be one of those quirks we'd have to really work to take advantage of? :)
Perhaps. But in the video, he said mode 7, and the VERA module documentation https://github.com/commanderx16/x16-docs/raw/master/vera-mod... lists that as a bitmapped mode, 8 bits per pixel.
However, I do have some experience creating complex images on an 8-bit machine using tile mode (using interrupts to progressively load new character sets while the image is being rendered by the video chip). There is a place for each. (I believe it might have been used in Super Mario type image they demonstrated?)
> Now, as to why it's done the way it's done? Simplicity.
Yup. Hopefully I've made that design decision clear for those who might have missed it, and I'd certainly like to encourage them to see if they can improve upon this one particular architectural decision.
1. Not enough video memory to contain a full Mode 7 image on the VERA co-processor. 2. All co-processor access (including video memory) has to go through eight registers starting at $9F20.
No problem here with bank switching. I think that's great!
> No, the half image problem showed in the video, is that the available low memory of the X16 is around 38K, only enough for half a vga image...
No, 38K isn't half of a VGA image. 38K is only an eighth of a VGA screen at 640x480 pixels, 1 byte (256 colors) per pixel. So 38K is only 60 lines tall.
Bartreadm the first part of your reply is essentially the same as the one above. But I like this second part a bit more:
> He even mentioned in the video the need to build a custom loader to load the image into low-RAM a piece at a time, with each piece being copied to video RAM after it's been loaded. Their demo doesn't do this yet, hence only half the image displays.
Can I be honest? I don't think that makes sense either. Here's why:
Every pixel of video data needs to be streamed to the video co-processor one byte at a time. (That's a known hardware limitation of their design.) Even a 6502-based GIF decoder works no more than a handful of lines at a time when decoding a static image.
In this architecture (and with any reasonable image decoder), there just isn't a need for the entire image to be decoded into main memory before streaming it into video memory. In fact, back in the day, it was possible to print full-color images to a printer (Okidata Okimate 10 or 20) that far exceeded what you could do on the screen in terms of color and resolution, and for essentially the same reasons.
Their technical specification clearly attributes the VERA module as only having 128K of video memory. 128K is just enough to display 42.5% of a 640x480 image. That's almost exactly what you see happening on his screen. Almost half.
So this goes back to what you said.
In order to display more, they'll need some more complicated tricks. They'll need to load the image, and while the video co-processor is in the middle of outputting the image and just as or before it exhausts the first half of the screen, it needs to overwrite what's currently in video memory with the rest of the image. And that'll need to be repeated for every video frame, or 60 times per second in the US.
So yes, he'll have to load the image into low-RAM a piece at a time. But it is because their video co-processor can't hold the entire image in memory so they're using main system memory and raw CPU power to work around it. They can work around it with more clever code, but it is a hardware restriction.
This does do a good job of demonstrating the kinds of games we had to play in the 80s to get the most out of our early consumer PCs.
There's this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg-6Cjzzg8s&t=2082 from his "Building my Dream Computer - Part 2". I'm kind of wondering if David understands the issue, or if he just had problems communicating it to his audience, or if I'm just plain wrong and this clip is just a coincidence?
His current choice for a video co-processor "Vera" excites and concerns me in equal measure. At the top-end, it outputs to VGA with a 640x480 bitmap mode using an an active palette of 256 colors (out of 4096 colors) per pixel. It supports 128 sprites and interrupts (used to indicate sprite collisions, an active video line, or vsync). All that sounds great, doesn't it?
The majority of what I don't like is that the video processor is essentially off of the main bus. The CPU only has access to video through a set of 8 registers (plus interrupt). So it has 128k of private video memory and an additional 16k for video registers, palette, and sprites.
If I'm reading this correctly, its private video memory won't hold a full 640x480 256 color bitmap image, which would be ~300k. So it seems like you'd have to load video memory with the second half while it is drawing the first half (and vice-versa). I'm also wondering if an old-school technical like page-flipping is really going to be possible here.
EDIT: Or to put it another way, because the video co-processor doesn't have enough memory to hold the entire image all at once time, and because the video co-processor cannot access main memory, just to hold a static photo-realistic image on the screen you're going to have to constantly copy ~300K of pixels from main memory into video memory... each and every frame. If I'm doing my math right, that'd be more than 36 million operations per second just to pump the data into the video co-processor? It reads to me like the co-processor isn't doing a great job of offloading work from the CPU here.
All of these concerns might be dismissed simply by saying "the CPU is much faster than those other 8-bit platforms you're used to". Assuming that isn't the case, I'd probably like to see the video co-processor have enough memory to hold two full pages of bitmapped video. I'd also greatly appreciate it if they could arrange for direct CPU access through one of their pre-existing banked memory regions.
Still, I'm eager to see how David's project progresses.
I think this one sets itself apart from other amateur projects in the area of credibility. I think he and his team are going to be able to pull this off. But the real question is where it goes from there and if it can catch fire with the right audience(s).
This brings me back to the heydays of Sun Microsystems where they controlled both the hardware (SPARC) and the operating system (Solaris). Sun didn't hesitate to use this to their advantage. With Clear Linux, I see Intel doing some very similar things. Yes, this was just a story about boot time, but it led me to take a look at Clear Linux and it looks like it could be a star. I'm interested in how much more performance their distribtuion is able to squeeze out. I'm also wondering how they're dividing their focus here and what high notes they're trying to achieve.
At a strategic level, I'm assuming that they're wanting to distinguish themselves from ARM? Are they looking to create a well-tuned reference for other Linux distributions on Intel to adopt? At a tactical level, I see they're focusing on performance, availability (which boot time would be a function of)... but are they tweaking for other things such as reliability? Fault tolerance?
Until now, Clear Linux wasn't even on my radar. Today, it is. Anyone have some experiences with this distro (for better or worse) that they'd like to share?