1,031 karma · joined December 14, 2015
There are more parts of the computer (again, both hardware and software) that are undocumented. Taken as a whole, the system is more capable, but closed hardware and software makes me wonder about capabilities in my computer that serve someone that isn't me.
In 1989, we'd've also been looking at code running on a single core with a single-task or cooperative-multitasking OS (for most home computers, anyhow), with simpler hardware that an individual could completely understand, and it would run at a speed where analyzing a second of output wouldn't be completely beyond the pale.
I've analyzed CPU logs from DOS-era programs and NES games. I certainly haven't analyzed a full second of the code's execution; I'm usually focused on understanding some particular set of operations.
Niantic's algorithms are sending people around in a pattern that is causing damage. Since they've been made aware of that, and it's difficult to blame the individual players, it's reasonable to ask the company itself to make a change. Niantic's the only one in a position to solve the problem quickly and cheaply.
What you can do with a couple MHz and a few hundred KB of memory is great, given a little ingenuity. Of course, you aren't going to do real-time face recognition on something like that, but 99% of what we need to do is just fine with 0.1% of the performance.
Like me: I could talk about starting with almost nothing in my bank accounts, getting a job, working through the ranks, buying a home, and working toward my first million... conveniently leaving out all the advantages that I've had to get me to this point (cultural expectation that I'd go to college instilled in me from a young age, a family well-off enough to support that financially, uninterrupted time to work on the hobbies that grew into a career, etc).
Quanticle seems to be relating the origins of Donald Trump and Bill Gates. Donald describes his fortune as self-made. Bill Gates has been described as self-made. It's true, if you only consider that their wealth is much greater than any gift they've ever received. It's false from the perspective that anyone could do it with enough hard work.
> Intel didn't force [Intel TXT & UEFI Secure Boot] upon the consumers
is true. Both of those things can be disabled on most hardware. In fact, I disabled them on the laptop the I just bought, because I wanted to install OSes that aren't SecureBoot signed.
I've seen pair teams working correctly, though. Each of them bounces ideas off the other one, and they progress faster than either would've alone. It's like racing two algorithms against each other, each searching a different part of the problem space, and using the first result that's returned. It lets them move on to the next problem quicker.
I don't usually do that very well, but I can't deny that if you've got the right pair of developers, it's a very powerful technique.
It sounds a little like a scratchy cello.
As an aside, and echoed by a few other comments in the thread, what you're calling "dynamic analysis" is what I know as "static analysis", like what I want Coverity to do (watch the build process, and monitor the source that actually goes into each of my build artifacts). "Dynamic analysis" brings to mind something more like Valgrind, or some other tool that monitors and profiles a program during execution.
USB+ethernet both use the same connection to the CPU, and it's a USB-OTG implementation basically hacked to act like a USB host, but it's possible to host the filesystem there.
I haven't really examined it, though. Maybe there's also a binary blob loaded into the GPU itself or something (the Raspberry Pi does that, for example).
Hopefully they don't need to use a closed-source blob for the C2.
Mozilla's done a few other things that I mildly dislike, and they tend to clump together in my mind. Nothing that's a big deal, but enough that I usually keep a copy of Pale Moon on the machines I use most often.
I like reading through disassemblies of DOS games and figuring out how things work. It's fun recognizing C programming patterns in the assembly. There's something a little charming about looking up what writing to some VGA control register is supposed to do...and I haven't found anyone else who actually thought any of that sounded like fun.
Someday, I'll put together a series of blog posts about it, and maybe I'll have some code that I actually want to show off, but right now I'm just having fun.
There's no accounting for taste. Building something like this sounds a lot more fun to me than most programming projects that I hear other people talk about as "fun". What would you have chosen to do instead?
This looks like a cool personal project, built by the author as a learning experience, with a convenient API to manipulate the machine that's being simulated. If that doesn't tell you enough about why it exists, then I don't know what to tell you besides "nothing to see here".
I was proud of being part of the team that got the compile time for the core of our product from about 2 hours down to about 30 minutes (the same amount of code, loaded into a RAMdisk and built on a 16-core machine builds in about 2-3 minutes today, but most of our full builds take from 20 minutes to 2 hours now).
After you build the core, a fairly simple plug-in on a reasonable development machine will compile+link in about 5 seconds, maybe. How long it takes to test the fix depends on how far into the program's operation a failure is expected to occur...anywhere from a couple seconds in, if it can't contact the server, to an unbounded length of time, if there's a rare bug triggered by some weird pattern in the customer's data or use of the system.
I enjoy hearing about what other people expect from their dev environments. I've worked almost exclusively in large C++ systems.
I pull them out every once in a while. The Codebreaker is more interesting to play with now than it was as a kid actually, because I can understand more of its functions.
If someone feels entitled to someone else's time, I don't see any problem in turning the situation around. If there wasn't a good enough ROI on cold-call marketing, it would be rarer, and that sounds like a net benefit to me.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. So: Does their agreement say that the bike company will accurately represent their product on their packaging? If the bike company's holding up their end of whatever agreement they have, then there's nothing the least bit questionable about what they're doing.