maffydub

Interesting that you see the definitive Amiga as being the A1200 - the definitive one for me was definitely the A500/A500+ - it was definitely way more popular!

BTW, I don't think the software in this repository is compatible with PPC-based Amigas, is it? (Unless they have the add-on board that runs a 68000-series processor in parallel?)

It's a bit complicated and it depends on what exactly you're measuring. The 68000 CPU has 32-bit registers internally, the address bus is 24-bit, and the data bus is 16.

Cool hack, but I thought this was actually going to be using phone calls!

A few years back, I built TeleDoom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3-pje0PpfU) for the TADHack hackathon (http://tadhack.com/).

This allowed you to play Doom by calling a phone number, which connected via a VoIP trunk to an Asterisk server, which read your button presses and translated them into actions in Doom, and then streamed the result back over Twitch - trying to recreate the vibe of 80s/90s TV phone-in games! (These were a thing on Saturday morning TV in the UK.)

I never tested whether it would work with pulse-dial (i.e. rotary) phones - I think that would come down to the VoIP trunk provider!

This involved a VoIP trunk connected ot

I think the Technic Lego kits that I grew up with (that were more about how things worked rather than looking exactly like the thing) have been rebranded as "Lego Education": https://education.lego.com/en-gb/shop/secondary/

They're pretty expensive, though!

I have to confess I'm not really up to speed on the situation but, from the article...

> However, last month the watchdog said a revised deal that included selling cloud gaming rights outside Europe to Activision Blizzard’s French rival Ubisoft had addressed its concerns, indicating the tie-up would be approved.

Was this as a result of CMA's pressure, or would it have happened anyway?

(If it wouldn't have happened anyway, it doesn't feel like a climb down to me?)

If the case was subject to reporting restrictions (which seems quite possible given what he says), it might be illegal for him to tell us the names.

In the actual example, I don't think the engineers were trying to patent something obvious - it's just not unusual for engineers to casually throw around the word "obvious" for things that are not, and it's unwise to have that written down.

(I was the person who provided the ancedote.)

Working a 4 day week isn't mentioned in the article - maybe the position you were approached for was special?

...but I would not be at all surprised if the requirement to be in the office was prorated too.

In other words, if you work 5 days a week (and that's probably the vast majority of employees, so generalising for an article like this is reasonable), you need to be in 3 days, but it you work 4 you might only need to be in 2.

...so I don't think the job you were approached for contradicts the position put forward in the article?

In previous employment (as a software engineer), I've been told to do this too - mainly around inventions we were trying to patent. The reason is slightly less nefarious than you might think - for example, someone might casually say that some aspect of their patent is "obvious" but they're saying that as an expert in their field who may have spent months or years thinking about the problem and alternative solutions. However, if it came to court, "even the inventor said this was obvious" is a pretty hard thing to respond to.

Thanks, both! This was used in a static build that decrypted and checksummed its binary before execution, which ruled out naive implementations of the attacks above. I agree there are ways round these too, but I believe it was just intended to discourage amateurs rather than protect against serious hacking.

I've seen this used preemptively - have the process ptrace itself on startup (and then do nothing with it) to make it impossible (or at least far-from-trivial) for other interested parties to ptrace it.

Have you tried floki (https://github.com/Metaswitch/floki) - this is what we use to solve this problem.

Here's the course list for Cambridge for 2019-2020: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1920/cst/

Yes, there are courses on Java and C/C++ (and also LATEX, MATLAB and Prolog!), but these are a few out of 60 courses in total, which include things like algorithms, information theory, distributed systems and optimizing compilers.

...although maybe Cambridge isn't a "standard" CS degree?

Thanks! I agree with your reading that changing the default username and password and re-exporting would count as modification.

However, it seems there are plenty of Ubuntu .deb mirrors out there... and there are even instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Debmirror.

Your previous post said "you can't redistribute Ubuntu binaries or sources as-is, since they contain registered trademarks of Canonical" (emphasis mine), which I think isn't quite true - there has to be some modification involved to fall foul of Ubuntu's IPR.

Do you have any other references on this?

It seems that it all hinges on what a "modified version" of Ubuntu is. Is redistributing their packages outside of a full disk image a modified version?

Interesting thought!

I think the problem is that it's hard to parallelize this effectively across a network with Internet-scale latency - individual matrix multiplications parallelize very well, but there would need to be coordination of each result, which would be much slower than just doing the computation locally.

In the case of Folding@home, evaluating possible folds could be done completely in parallel and only need to be coordinated on discovery of a plausible fold (which is rare), so distributing over a high-latency network is still beneficial.

Agreed. We compost fruit and vegetable waste in our garden, but it is scary how much other food waste (as well as meat and fish bones goes in our "blue bin" for external composting.

Entocycle (https://entocycle.com/) is one startup looking at this - using black soldier flies to convert food waste into high-protein animal food. (I'm not affiliated, but I think it's a neat idea!)

I live in London and am married with 2 kids, working in tech. Personally, I'm not seeing too much difference.

* Energy prices are higher, and this has had a knock-on effect, but I see it more on childcare (e.g. nursery) than food.

* There have been shortages of some foods - specifically there were shortages of tomatoes and peppers for a week or two a month or two ago, but not recently... and there are shortages of eggs, which I understand from my cousins, who are egg farmers, is primarily due to bird flu (most eggs in the UK are from British hens).

* Regarding NHS, we've not needed to use hospitals recently, but access to GPs has been same as usual.

* I've not seen an increase in crime.

* I hear that poverty is rising, but don't have direct experience.

* The Royal Mail is almost certainly dying, but I think it's been on its way out for years.

Like I say, this is just personal experience - I appreciate that I'm quite lucky at having an OK-paying job, so could well be insulated from problems that others face.

I think we're conflating Kubernetes with containers here.

I definitely agree that databases don't benefit from running under containers - they are pet-like (and so don't benefit from fast spin up or massive horizontal scaling) and tend to require host-level tuning (which breaks the container abstraction).

What Kubernetes brings is a well-principled orchestration framework that can easily be extended with custom operators for workloads such as databases that need it. (In fairness, he does refer to this in passing at the end.)

Yes, I use 1p Mobile too - moved from Three after they abandoned their 123 plan.

Have used it for about 10 months and been very happy with it!

(Like the parent, no links with them, and very light user.)

I don't seem to be able to post on his blog (400 Bad Request), so posting here instead...

Interestingly, it looks like Rust (and C via clang) both generate something like the following as their one-at-a-time main loop:

.LBB5_14: addl (%rcx), %eax addq $4, %rcx cmpq %rdx, %rcx jne .LBB5_14

It's one fewer instruction than the Go version (because it has combined the MOV and the ADD), although I don't know whether that would actually result in higher performance.

I say their "one-at-a-time" main loop, because they actually seem to generate lots of code to try to take advantage of AVX or AVX2 to add 4 or 8 values at a time if available and the array is long enough!

It might be cheating, but summing an iterator over numbers is built-in to Rust, so summing an array is just: v.iter().sum()

The fun thing with this is that it's not just generic over number types, it's also generic over any type of iterator, so I can even use it to sum over the values in a HashMap: hashmap.values().sum()

Even if they're swapped, the maths doesn't work out - the ratio of squares is 1:42 while the ratio of latencies is 1:1500.

Agreed.

I didn't want to spoil at the time, but yesterday you would have been unlucky with both these word choices!

...unless any of those letters appear in the answer - then you're locked into including them in subsequent guesses!

Even worse if your guess had them in the right location!

Is it possible they use io_uring for networking?

My grandmother died about 8 years ago. One of the things I took when helping clear out her house was a white plastic chopping board - it was probably pretty cheap to buy, but I just hadn't got one at the time. I still use it almost every day... and remember her.

I believe that Redis supports CRDTs (https://redis.com/blog/diving-into-crdts/) for its active/active geo-replication, and they're supposed to be pretty fast.

...but it's important to note that CRDTs as used by Redis (and as defined by, for example, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.10254.pdf) really just means that you've defined a way to consistently resolve conflicts - it doesn't necessarily mean the all-singing-all-dancing collaborative text editing that a lot of people seem to be assuming. For example, as defined in the paper above, simple "last write wins" is a CRDT.

Slightly pedantic, but I think you'll actually find that all of these are CRDTs. If you read "Conflict-free Replicated Data Types: An Overview" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.10254.pdf), it refers to both last write wins and "record all versions of the data" as CRDTs in 2.1.1.

My understanding is that "CRDT" really just means that you've defined how you're going to resolve conflicts consistently (see criteria in s2.2 of the paper above).

> if we start digging into the core and allowing energy to escape faster, we would effectively speed it up, right?

I don't think we're even digging through the crust - there'd still be the mantle (~100x thicker) before we got to the core.

In numbers, I believe the deepest borehole is ~12km deep... and the Earth has a radius of >6000km. We're barely scratching the surface.

Interesting - thanks! Yes, I can see how, if the British citizen is on minimum wage (or unemployed) and the spouse is either unemployed or living abroad, that would make it difficult.