WallWextra

The article mentions Honda's efforts to track down owners of cars with defective airbags. Why can't state motor vehicle registries cooperate in recalls like this?

How did the swastika one even leave the designer's sketch pad?

The correctness proof of the seL4 microkernel supposedly makes no assumptions of the compiler and verifies the binary output. I don't know the details.

Yeah, it's not like twitter runs https to keep your tweets secret.

Infineon owns IR.

Of course. I'm saying the important part is not that the class is bigger, the important part is that it's a Banach space.

The main advantage of the Lebesgue integral isn't its generality, but the convergence theorems which give you L^p spaces. The gauge integral, despite being more general, doesn't have these properties and nobody uses it.

And he was a kid.

Can you imagine a physics department where the chair is on administrative leave?

You can already have userspace ethernet drivers on Linux.

Talking to weirdos on the internet is one of my primary forms of recreation. I find IRC is a good place to do it.

Just to be clear, this is a compiler optimization. Do you mean the readability of the generated assembly code?

Apparently they switched because VLIW wasn't good for GPGPU workloads, which is in keeping with the general theme, that VLIW works very well on certain highly-specific DSP-ish workloads.

Parallel, speculative execution is what's unavoidable. The VLIW idea of statically compiler-scheduled parallelism and speculation has not been successful for general-purpose code. The last generation of Itanium abandoned explicit, statically-scheduled parallelism and switched to out of order execution, like every fast general-purpose CPU uses.

What are some examples besides Mill? To be honest, I am totally ignorant of what new ISAs are out there. The only things I can think of are AArch64 and RISC-V (not commercially relevant, but well-publicised) and they are both pretty standard.

Last I heard, the Mill guys don't even have a compiler working, but do have a simulator. Not sure what they're simulating.

ctrl+f "FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM" to find his writeup of the actual difficulties of fast VAX implementations, including ways that x86 is easier than VAX. The big whammy is string ops where the length operand can be indirectly-addressed.

x86 string ops, which are a lot simpler, were slow until pretty recently.

If syscalls are slow, it seems weird to put your GUI code in the kernel, requiring a syscall to access it.

Does it execute in ring 0? I don't really understand how Windows works.

Does anybody know the precise (more precise than given in the slides) reason Windows had to put a font renderer in the kernel? That's absolutely insane.

EDIT: holy jeez, this isn't even the whole thing. MS has their own first-party ttf renderer in the kernel too, what the heck?

I wonder how suitable commercially available discrete MOSFETs are for building logic? They're all made for power applications. Of course, it's not like discrete BJTs are "suitable" either.

There are a lot of things about working in an office that are unhealthy, but you have to do what you have to do.

It was very DJB of him to use the gauge integral, which nobody else does.

There are now chip-scale atomic clocks: http://www.microsemi.com/products/timing-synchronization-sys...

You probably can't afford them to do a science experiment with your kids. Hopefully they'll start putting them in everything so hobbyists can pull them out of eBay finds, like they currently do with time references from cellular base stations.

So, what have they got so far? Do they even have Newtonian physics expressed in their new language?

To be fair, keeping advanced browser features out of the hands of restaurant websites sounds like a good thing.

It's very tractable if you don't insist on the diff reconstructing the target file byte-for-byte. But this would require pretty invasive changes in the version control system, no?

If you change the top-left pixel of a PNG, for example, between the intra prediction and the DEFLATE compression, the new file can be totally different, and to reconstruct it you either hope the destination is using the exact same libpng with the exact same settings, or you have to find a space-efficient way to write down all the arbitrary encoding decisions the format allows.

What about compressing the same image with two different encoders? Or with different zlib settings? Even if the diff after lossless decompression is small, you have to somehow reconstruct the decisions that the compressor made on the target file.

A bit-exact differ for, say, jpegs, probably wouldn't work all that well. Even for losslessly compressed formats, it's very complex and I'm not sure how small the diffs would be.

NEC is still making their weird vector computers. I have no idea who buys them, but there's a hotchips about it.