Stuart Marks

@emilymbender@dair-community.social The one-way nature of this process reminds me of “Schopenhauer’s Law of Entropy”: If you add a teaspoon of wine to a barrel of sewage, you get a barrel of sewage. If you add a teaspoon of sewage to a barrel of wine, you get a barrel of sewage. (Probably not actually from Schopenhauer)

@datarama@hachyderm.io @Guillotine_Jones@beige.party Well done, sir.

@Jam123@mstdn.ca @controlc@mstdn.ca @jef@mastodon.social @effinbirds@mastodon.social In case @effinbirds@mastodon.social doesn’t reply to this… At a con I asked Aaron about swear_trek and he was quite doubtful it would return. Star Trek owned by Paramount so nobody can make any money without a license. And since swear_trek is decidedly family unfriendly it’s unlikely a license could be negotiated. So, it had a good run, but it was time to move on. Looks like many are still there at https://xcancel.com/swear_trek “You stuck your dick in the warp core?”

There’s a picture of this on Ken Shirriff’s @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space site, along with the consoles of the other 360 models. In the 360/44 pic, the knob is the bottom one of the trio of knobs at the center left. https://www.righto.com/2019/04/iconic-consoles-of-ibm-system360.html There is a general description of this feature on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_44 and fortunately it has a link to original source material on bitsavers: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/functional_characteristics/A22-6875-5_360-44_funcChar.pdf (2/4)

With the room example, the "floor" member indicates the floor of the building. But does «"floor": 1» indicate the ground floor (US style) or the first floor above ground level (EU style)? A new version might add «"groundFloor": 0» to indicate which convention is used. A strict implementation would give an error if "groundFloor" isn’t expected. This certainly can be inconvenient but it might be better than silently processing the record incorrectly. (2/2) @john@social.ahlroos.me @mehmandarov@mastodon.social

@john@social.ahlroos.me Hi, I’m not sure if you saw @mehmandarov@mastodon.social’s article posted just a little while before your question: https://mastodon.social/@mehmandarov/116792525382514461# He describes Jackson as “strict” and other JSON libraries as “lenient”. Why is Jackson strict? I don’t know the actual reason but I have a plausible guess: an “extra” but unknown property might change the interpretation of one of the known properties. #Java #Jackson (1/2)

@mattblaze@federate.social I did a small bit of digging on PGN’s contribution to the naming of Unix. https://mastodon.social/@stuartmarks/116596803964572033

@Jam123@mstdn.ca @controlc@mstdn.ca @jef@mastodon.social @effinbirds@mastodon.social Also: https://giphy.com/Swear_Trek

@TheDonRaab Those $ names are all intended to be non-public, but the fact that they’re visible in the class file represents a “leakage” of information. These names also leak into concrete forms such as serialized data, which I hear that some people 😇 depend upon. There are probably other things that depend these names too, inadvertently or not. If javac were to change its naming policy, I bet a bunch of stuff would break.

Finally, the Collections$2 name is just the convention chosen by javac when it generates the class. It could put more information about the location of the anonymous class, say, including the method name in the class name, something like: Collections$singletonSpliterator$2 That might provide more meaningful names without burdening programmers with the need to name things that don’t need names. (3/3) @TheDonRaab

@Daojoan@mastodon.social I guess the void is no longer asking you to join its professional network on LinkedIn.

@rl_dane @claudius @synec GrossBSD implies the existence of DozenBSD

@tagir_valeev As 90% of fire alarms are drills, it makes perfect sense to respond with the most likely scenario. ( /s in case it wasn’t obvious. Rather startling that people are arguing with you.)

@JohnMashey@mstdn.social @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @markd@hachyderm.io @aka_pugs@mastodon.social Speaking of the 360/44 and (previously) of IBM’s hex floating point, I went down a little rabbit hole I thought I’d share here. The 360/44 had variable-precision FP. Using a knob on the front panel, you could select long precision to have 8, 10, 12, or 14 hex digits, allowing you to trade precision for speed. (1/4)

@aka_pugs@mastodon.social @JohnMashey@mstdn.social @markd@hachyderm.io @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange Huh, interesting comment on hex floating point. I’ve long thought that a controversial choice. I remember hearing an IBM numerical analyst claim that the hex floating point was “cleaner” than competing formats (this predated IEEE 754) but much literature today echoes the criticism given here that the hex format effectively shortens the significand.

@norootcause@hachyderm.io Ah yes, the good old “You should have known”.

javap -v ‘Collections$2’ Amidst the voluminous output there will be some lines of the form: LineNumberTable: line 5169: 0 line 5170: 9 line 5169: 14 These map from certain locations in a method’s bytecodes back to the source lines. Each method should have a line number table. The relevant line number in the source code is here: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/jdk-25-ga/src/java.base/share/classes/java/util/Collections.java#L5169 which points directly at the anonymous inner class within singleSpliterator(). (2/3) @TheDonRaab

@igb Yeah the Eastern Sierras are fabulous. In winter when all the passes are closed — I guess most are still closed now — it’s really isolated too. Bridgeport has the feel of the town in the “It’s A Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone. Well not really, but that’s the feeling I had when we passed through there. 😅

@JohnMashey@mstdn.social @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @aka_pugs@mastodon.social @markd@hachyderm.io Ah, the “Motivation” section on that page covers it. Thank you.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Yes in fact Rega is a U.K. company so I’m sure you can do much better than going through a U.S. retailer! There is certainly decent quality analog equipment available to you, Rega or equivalent, at affordable (or “affordable”) prices.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run I’ll echo other respondents and say that you should get a decent analog turntable and external A2D converter. I don’t know what your budget is or what U.K. pricing is, but it’s possible to get a decent turntable in the US$500-1000 range. I’m a belt drive advocate as they typically have lower noise than direct. Well regarded brands in this price range are Rega, Music Hall, and Pro-ject. I have a Pro-ject Debut III which is 33, 45, and 78 capable, and an NAD PP-4 A2D processor. 1/

@davidgerard@circumstances.run A good source, at least of ideas, is Music Direct. I just looked and they have a LP digitization bundle on sale for US$725. I don’t know much about this specific equipment but the brands are well regarded and the price seems to be above the “cheap crap” range but below the “excessive” range (which I consider to be US$5,000 on up). 2/X https://www.musicdirect.com/turntables/rega-planar-1-fono-mini-a2d-mk2-mm-phono-preamplifier-usb-a-d-converter/

@mattblaze@federate.social Kind of funny that Gilligan’s Island was trying to thumb their nose at Minow. I watched that show as a kid, but in retrospect it was one of the “formula comedies about totally unbelievable families” (well, sort of) that Minow said was part of the vast wasteland. I mean c’mon, the premise was completely ridiculous. On the other hand I recommend reading or listening to Minow’s speech. It holds up well, and it shows Carr to be nothing more than a petty tyrant. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm

@kittylyst @mattblaze Thanks. I follow Wil a little bit. I was wondering what he’d say about it. Certainly a refreshing contrast from Trump, though not on the most pleasant topic.

@mattblaze@federate.social Didn’t take me too long to run into it. I took a deep breath before reading. Yes, awful and delusional, and 100 other terrible things that are typical of Trump posts. Thanks again for the warning, it helped.

@mattblaze@federate.social Thanks for the advance warning about Trump’s response. The Reiner murders hit hard. I now have some time to prepare myself for the Trump response when I inevitably run across it.

@regehr@mastodon.social Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Agassiz#/media/File:Agassiz_in_the_Concrete.jpg

@kenshirriff Interesting, thanks, I had heard of a keyset but I never knew how it worked. I can see how five chorded keys would be difficult to learn. Seems like it would be more useful as function keys (as you noted) or as modifier keys, rather like buttons on a Wacom tablet or Emacs control/shift/meta/super/hyper modifiers.

@holly_cummins Mundus sine caesaribus?

@aka_pugs@mastodon.social TECO expert quiz. Quick: what happens when you type your name to TECO?

@iFixit 👏

@mattblaze@federate.social I guess this would be like the Full Ginsburg for computer security?

@cpurdy@mastodon.social @zeldman@front-end.social Really?? Not sure there’s any “I” here at all, whether or not it’s artificial.

@lazarus7@infosec.exchange @SeanCasten@mastodon.social Right, not enough people know that an account logged into X is required to read threads and replies. Posting on an open platform like Mastodon (Fediverse) is preferable. Meanwhile, a workaround to read X posts is to go through the “xcancel” service: https://xcancel.com/SeanCasten/status/2075293839359680777

@mwichary Arrrgh! The tractor-fed paper is misaligned!! 😄 On another note, the Data General stuff is *very* blue.

@alfiekohn They missed the title. The “easy” version should be called The Good Gatsby.

@aka_pugs@mastodon.social Sun was circling the drain in 2008 and was looking for a buyer. If Oracle hadn’t bought Sun, who knows what would have happened — but nothing good was likely. Maybe it would have been bought up and parted out by private equity.

@zeldman@front-end.social @cpurdy@mastodon.social I am shocked — SHOCKED — to discover that people are advocating avoidance of em-dashes.

@mwichary 😮

@SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange @aka_pugs@mastodon.social @JohnMashey@mstdn.social @markd@hachyderm.io Very interesting. I’ve always suspected (or maybe I heard somewhere long ago) that the hex floating point was done for speed. I’m trying to understand why it would be faster. I’m guessing that most FP ops require a lot of shifting, and shifting by 4 bit places at a time would require fewer cycles than shifting 1 bit place at a time, but perhaps the folks here would know more.

Page 13 describes how this works. The value always occupied 64 bits, but digits beyond the selected precision were zeroed. It says “Model 44 always performs long-precision arithmetic with 56 bits.” So how were the lower-precision formats faster? The timing table on p. 15 reveals that only multiplication and division operations changed speed depending on the selected precision. Other operations’ timings were unchanged. (3/4)

The other operations were much faster than multiplication and division, so it was probably deemed unnecessary to speed them up when shorter precisions were selected. Multiplication and division, being much slower than the other operations, probably stood to benefit the most from the variable precision. Using 8 digits could be 2.7-3.8x faster than 14 digits. (4/4)

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange https://mastodon.social/@adhd_coffee/115043327681155140

@ben@werd.social @igb@mastodon.hccp.org If you need access to Palo Alto then one angle might be to find a place near a Caltrain station in a more affordable town. Since Caltrain was electrified last year the service has improved considerably. caltrain.org

@dr2chase@ohai.social Hooray! She’s still afflicted though, tiring after 15 min. But much improved! Glad for her progress.

@mattblaze@federate.social The amount of surveillance video, cell tracking, and license plate scanning detailed in the document is startling. And he made all the purchases on credit cards. Remind me to pay cash next time I buy wire strippers, safety goggles, gloves, a file, and sandpaper. In the future, paying cash and not carrying a powered-on cellphone will be viewed as suspicious activity.

@bondolo Nice! I’ll have to try this.