Notices by Aaron Sawdey, Ph.D. (acsawdey@fosstodon.org)

Only cold weather dogs of the resistance today #NoKings #dogsofmastodon

@thomasfuchs @ainmosni iPhone is probably a bad example then, Apple has generally booked their capacity far in advance to protect against these issues. Smaller Android and other niche phone makers will get squeezed, as will makers of cheap commodity windows pcs.

@thomasfuchs @flashesofpanic That’s very cool. Love the bit in the wiki where changing it to miles is “stalled due to local opposition”

@thomasfuchs Sigh. Yeah. 100%. You know what else Reagan canceled? All attempts to educate the US on the metric system. In the late 70's we started to have signs on the interstate highways that gave distances in km as well as miles.

@whitequark @weirdunits which also leads to the question: what is the output impedance of an eel? I vaguely remember a paper that actually investigated this. I don’t remember if they were fresh or saltwater eels though.

@eloy The problem with this quote is that apparently management can no longer be held accountable either.

@futurebird Tall person Julia Child tried to start a trend of kitchen cabinets being on legs so you could adjust them. Sadly, she did not succeed so many kitchens have counters that make tall people’s backs hurt while also being too high for others. The tyranny of the middle of the bell curve must be stopped!

@thomasfuchs Same thing but:

@gregly @dalias @bitsnpieces @futurebird Pardoning Nixon let all his dirty tricks crowd continue to be involved with the GOP and it's funny how those names keep popping up doing problematic things.

@0xabad1dea Wow, that's STILL there? I seem to recall CON, PRN, NUL from MS-DOS days .. after seeing that unix puts these special files in a directory and that they're just files with a major/minor device number and you can call them anything ... that kind of exposed what a really horrid hack this is. I mean, it was kind of OK on CP/M with no directory structure at all, but in 2025?

@whitequark @charlotte @joe @8051enthusiast yes that’s true as far as I know. The hope is always that the hardware can handle most cases, if not yeah why bother.

It seems like a good idea, but often the problem is hardware and software folks don’t talk enough or understand each other. It’s why people who straddle the line are always in great demand of course.

@whitequark @charlotte @joe @8051enthusiast I think the problem with transactional memory is people keep trying it and no performance gains are found in software. And yeah, nobody has taught a compiler to make appropriate use of lwarx/stcwx so it is relegated to libraries.

@charlotte @joe @8051enthusiast @whitequark concepts like ll/sc or lwarx/stcwx allow you to make (within reason) larger operations atomic, and there is also transactional memory but I’m not sure how widely that is implemented in hardware.

@inthehands same in Northfield… one MAGA-mobile kept coming by and harassing people. Constant stream of supportive honking from traffic on MN 3.

@kiwa DUAL!! pentium 2? 😮

Netfinity branding -- that had to be a server when it was sold new. Is this a pentium II xeon? Actual 2 sockets?

@mattblaze @BrianJopek Color film would have been pretty niche in 1934 .. we have some large format color transparencies from a little later than that in my family -- but only because my grandfather was a research chemist at Kodak working on color dyes.

@lanodan @linear I think you’d be better off fixing the toolchain … irix on a little r5000 box back in the day wasn’t great. 30 years of development in Linux or bsd since then.

@lanodan @linear I don’t know if there’s a modern equivalent to this but sgi irix “n32” abi was very nice because you got 32-bit pointers for small data footprint but 64-bit registers. Given the memory size of the N64 … you’ll be wanting as much efficiency as you can find.

@lanodan @niconiconi @whitequark waveguide filled with a wedge of dielectric? If not .. sorcery always an option, it’s RF.

@foone Please don't, somebody will have to build a computer with a floating point format that uses a base-3 mantissa.