terlisimo

Design Your Own Computer (fpga/vhdl)

https://github.com/MJoergen/nexys4ddr/tree/master/dyoc

See how a cpu gets made from scratch.

I heard a story/statement once, that every time a bunch of smart people got together to think about solving the world problems, they all pretty much came up with the same solution: eugenics and birth control.

Both of these are controversial subjects at best.

Have you seen the TV show Utopia? Basically a group of people decide it's in the humanity's best interest to wipe out 90% of the population with viruses. Rather grim, but understandable in a way.

While in the domain of Sci-Fi, the solution I liked better was the idea from "Forever peace" by John Haldeman, where human evolution is propelled to the next step by increasing mutual empathy through technology. The Internet might be a small step in that direction.

"The planet is fine."

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

So is "stop having more than 2 children".

Another one is "stop buying things you don't really need".

But yeah, good luck convincing people to get behind that.

The main arguments are that a circle is defined by its radius, not its diameter, and that in most cases when you reference Pi in mathematics/engineering you actually use 2Pi.

From the horse's mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hhjsSN-AiU

Hello,

To continue using internet, you need to install our government-provided fork of Firefox that doesn't blacklist our government-provided root cert.

regards, your Tele2

https://github.com/MJoergen/nexys4ddr/tree/master/dyoc 6502 system from scratch in FPGA

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqAMlAbd8sIuiuk_yJeqC... MIT 6.004 Computation Structures

Agreed.

90% of stuff I don't know off the top of my head I do like this:

1) connect to a server/repository which already uses that in some form

2) copy/paste relevant parts.

3) add new parts by using existing parts as a reference

4) fill in holes with man page/docs/internet search engine

If I had to start from scratch I'd probably fail the basic syntax with pretty much anything.

The important thing is to know that you forgot implementation details, but know where to look them up.

https://www.xkcd.com/1168/

"Any other media publication" did not publish an almost identical sensationalist story a few months back, which turned out to be unsubstantiated crap.

Had any website other than bloomberg published this, I might have read past the headline.

Kerbal Space Program on Steam is not DRM-ed. I can launch it without Steam running, and it doesn't automatically launch Steam client or anything, the game just starts up.

A friend of mine started playing around with Hercules and got a job with an IBM partner company. He just took a new job now at 2.5x the money I'm making, and I make good money :)

The companies who do mainframe gigs know the market is small and they would probably accept new talent that has no real world experience. All that's required is some experience (emulator counts), and a job history that says you're not an idiot and can get the job (any job) done. My friend was just a regular linux sysadmin before he got into mainframe gigs.

Mainframe emulator: http://www.hercules-390.org/

Yeah, it's kind of hard to get into the mainframe business. Kind of like getting into piloting a passenger jet. You can't pilot a passenger jet without a few hundred hours of flight time on a jet aircraft.

You can't just buy a used one and fly around on your own. So you hope someone who owns a jet will lug you around until you become competent and certified.

I don't really believe that software developers intentionally write bloated code. It's just that most dev shops only fix performance issues when they become apparent on current-gen hardware.

As hardware gets better and better, the bar for "ok, this is too slow, let's go back to the drawing board optimize it" gets higher and higher.

Skype on my 4-year old phone is laughably slow, but I bet it'd be a lot faster if the devs did not have the latest and greatest in hardware.

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No."

I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point.

What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch.

So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next day I actually get a phone call from one of their support staff.

He says my transaction was flagged as "suspicious" by the fraud prevention system. So I asked, okay... but now a Human has looked at it, can you manually approve the transaction? The answer was "No, I am not allowed to tell you why".

I was incredulous, so I asked "Wait... you acknowledge that I'm not a scammer or a terrorist (since my PP account still worked and does to this day), and the party I'm trying to purchase from is obviously not either since they're still accepting PP, but The Machine thinks there is something fishy about us two specifically and there is no way for someone to manually approve this transaction?"

And he said something to the tune of "Yes. I'm sorry, but there is nothing I or anyone at PP can do about it, and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details."

So yeah. This was just a minor nuisance for me, I purchased similar services elsewhere. But the whole thing was a real eye-opener. That was the day I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine.

I just remembered that I got an "password reset" email from facebook like a month ago?

I didn't log in to my FB account since 2008 or so.

For a minute I was baffled and thought someone might be trying to hack my defunct profile (but why?) and my instinctive reaction was to log in and reset the password but gave up and forgot about it.

But now that people keep mentioning shady "come back, come back, to Mordor we'll take you" tactics, this sure smells fishy.

Anyone else got an unsolicited PW reset email after not using FB for a long time?

Energy efficiency kind of falls under the "performance" category. Just not raw MIPS performance but "performance per watt".

What I wanted to say is that the major selling point of RISC-V would be its open-ness rather than anything performance (or power) related. In that respect it has already captured the attention of interested parties, regardless of that the actual performance will be.

Haproxy would usually be on the same network as your www servers so even without http2 the response time for the backend requests will be tiny compared to the client <-> haproxy roundtrip time.

The promise of http2 is to lower latency on the client side and having H2 on the frontend will help with that.

I don't know about dynamic frontends but regarding your second question, I can confirm that HAProxy has session persistence capabilites.

Look up "stick" functions in HAProxy docs. You can even persist TCP connections.

This would be a bit different. Itanium, Sparc, Crusoe, ARM... all these CPUs were offering is the promise of better performance in some aspect.

Nobody expects RISC-V to beat i7 or Ryzen in any benchmarks.

IMO its purpose is to be the in hardware what GNU/Linux was in software.

edit: GNU/Linux, not just Linux :)

I am surprised at how many people can't see (or mind) the obvious difference in speed. Here's a test:

Create a fresh clean profile for both FF56 (or earlier) and chrome without any extensions.

Then, create/import a bookmark folder with 20 sites and sync them to both browsers.

Fire up each browser and watch the cpu usage with top (or task manager). Choose "open all in tabs" and monitor the cpu usage over time.

For me chromium finishes loading 3-5x faster. By "finishes loading" I mean all spinning circles in tabs are gone and the cpu usage drops to nearly 0%.

Firefox uses only 2 processes/threads, while chromium makes use of all cores. I am guessing the more cores your CPU has, the more obvious the difference. But you don't need an 8-core cpu to see the difference, the difference is as noticeable for me on my i5-6200U laptop.

But page loading speed and JS performance aside, what turned me away from firefox is the sluggish UI. Little things like how fast the dev tools open, or the speed at which right-click menus open. It's like firefox freezes for a millisecond on these operations while chrome feels much more fluid. I don't have a test case for this :)

I never really used Firefox, and I give it a go every year or so. I used Opera 12 for as long as I could precisely because of the FF UI responsiveness. Then Chrome came along. I keep looking back but... FF is not there yet for me.

I'm no fan of Google and I really hope the new FF is as good as people claim to be. Remains to be seen, having high hopes!

EDIT: Obviously if you have a slow internet link then the pipe becomes the bottleneck and both browsers will load sites at same speed. But in that case you could just close all tabs and reopen them and let the browsers load most of the stuff from cache.

You don't have to forsake interesting ads, ABP has "acceptable ads" policy and I think it's enabled by default. You can, of course, customize the list.

YES! Wearing yourself out does wonders for your sleep. I'd bet that 99% of people with sleeping problems have sitting jobs.

Only exhausting your brain without exhausting your body will just make you weary without making you feel sleepy. Your mind needs rest but your body is restless because it wants action :)

I remember when I had to do a mandatory 6-month army service period after college and during that time it took me about 2 minutes after lights-out to fall asleep. Actually, I was sooo sleepy all of the time that I learned how to take short naps whenever and whenever I could (especially after lunch).

The experience made me realize that, for most of the people who have it, insomnia was not a health problem that should be treated with drugs but just an imbalance between body and spirit, if I may say so :)