aexaey

...care to give an example for sqlite being "temperamental"?

Never heard before about the "flashrom" tool. Looks nice, especially the long list of supported HW. Thanks!

Small nit: $3 != $100+

That said, using native SPI bus on a closest laying around (embedded) Linux board is an awesome idea hardware-wise. What about software though? Will dd if=file.bin of=/dev/spidev0.0 fail to write to an SPI NOR chip?

In case you need to dump/re-flash an SPI memory chip, but don't happen to have an FTDI programmer handy (be that as a protest to their despicable actions with Windows drivers some time ago, or for any other reason), another (much cheaper) alternative is Chinese CH341A, which are available on eBay and other usual places for around $3 (complete assembled programmer board, shipped). CH341A is well supported on both Linux [1] and Windows [2].

[1] https://github.com/setarcos/ch341prog

[2] https://tosiek.pl/ch341-eeprom-and-spi-flash-programmer/

Primates apart, the reason for exceptionally fast "boot" for ZX-Spectrum (and most of hobby/home/game-console computers from that time) was that software was stored in the ROM that CPU was able to execute directly from. Also hardware was much simpler and did not require arcane initialization for SDRAM [1] and such. So power-on initialization was literally something like "set stack pointer and few global variables; clear the screen; print prompt; done"

Nowadays, everything is on external media (external as in "outside of CPU's memory address space"), so executable code should be loaded into the RAM first (and likely assembled from 100s of DLLs or .so's in that process). And before that, you need to initialize at least 3 hardware components (SDRAM, mass storage controller and mass storage device itself; often this list is much longer).

That said, embedded systems booting in under 1 second were available 6 years ago [2]. Not many seem to be interested.

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/96831/sdram-i...

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/andrewmurraympc/elce-the

Yep. Same here.

He wasn't nearly as judgmental in The Bugle, while being as funny as ever. [1] [2]

[1] http://podcast.timesonline.co.uk/rss/thebuglemp3.rss

[2] https://soundcloud.com/the-bugle

First option (ground floating) is actually quite common:

A Class II or double insulated electrical appliance is one which has been designed in such a way that it does not require a safety connection to electrical earth (ground). [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appliance_classes#Class_II

Two small nits about second part of this passage:

  electrovibration — the rapid attraction and
  repulsion of the skin to an insulated ground
  plane (such as brushed aluminum)

- Metal in unibody MBPs is sandblasted [1] rather than brushed [2] to give it its texture;

- Neither sandblasting nor brushing aluminum gives it thick enough oxide layer (Al2O3), and it is that layer that makes actual insulation. Instead this layer is formed by the way of anodizing [3], complementary and separate process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrasive_blasting

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushed_metal

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anodizing

Fair number of commenters here justifiably laments over Micro:bit not resembling a "real" computers despite matching and exceeding specs of ZX-Spectum and other late 70s - early 80s microcomputers. Fair enough, good point.

But consider this: we have quite a lot of those "not quite computers" a.k.a. microcontrollers around us nowadays - there is one in a washing machine, several in a car, complete with a network to talk to each other [1], etc... Many are to be found in quite unexpected places: inside an SD card [2], in every PC keyboard, in a bluetooth headset, inside your phone's touchscreen controller [3], or same phone's wifi/bluetooth chip, etc..

Would it maybe be a good thing to expose kids (and adults alike) to a general idea of having deeply embedded turing-complete devices, together with giving some hands-on experience with them?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

[2] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

[3] http://www.atmel.com/products/touchsolutions/touchscreens/

> what power density would it take to get self-focusing in a vacuum by gravitational lensing?

Not this is a question I'd look forward to be answered by Randall Munroe in his http://what-if.xkcd.com/

~600 rps is an very low bar to set.

Not to mention that database is the bottleneck in this benchmark.

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770463

That was a suprisingly accurate summary. The whole thing, including the incoherent rant about material design

SCTP is alive and vell in very niche applications. SIGTRAN [1] for example is an adaptation of middle layers of SS7 network stack that runs on top of SCTP/IP.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGTRAN

"Robot rebellion" in fast-food industry has already quietly happened. Those robots are called "vending machine".

There is even a moderately successful fast-food chain in the Netherlands that have fully embraced this "rebellion" some 70 years ago, and they are still going strong [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO

Completely agree with your sentiment. Just one small nit-pick: Intel doesn't use SPARC, but a much more obscure, less documented, and very proprietary ARC core [1, 2 & 3]. Ostensibly it was chosen due to having some excellent low-power modes.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_%28processor%29

[2] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1248611

[3] http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/10/27/x86_harmful.html

Thank you for mentioning this. I was really struggling to understand reasons for not dropping SSL3 much, much earlier.

You may want to start lines with (at least) 4 spaces for HN to preserve original formatting.

Thank you for this:

> ...and by early 2004 I had released the final version, v06.

I wish more software had "final version", where possible [0] as opposed to endless churn and inevitable "is this project dead" question after a couple of weeks/months of inactivity. [1]

[0] Obviously some projects can't do this. E.g. there is no way youtube-dl would ever have a final version, etc..

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=is+this+project+dead+site:gi...

Do you mean - just open websites that are displeased with your ad-blocker in your secondary browser? Nice idea.

Or, instead of two different browsers, you can use xraru [1] to ad-hoc launch as many independent ephemeral "incognito" sessions with the same browser as you like. This way, next to enhanced privacy, you also get as a bonus some protection from malicious websites stealing your cookies/local files/etc...

[1] https://github.com/teran-mckinney/raru

Interestingly enough, at the same time, several other countries are experimenting with osmotic power generation [1], which is pretty much exact opposite of electrically-powered desalination.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmotic_power

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned WWW::Mechanize - classic perl library [1] or python port of it [2], which is much closer to RoboBrowser than selenium/phantomjs/horseman.

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~ether/WWW-Mechanize-1.75/lib/WWW/Mec...

[2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mechanize/

It doesn't. To scrape (or fake-API) js-only websites you have to either:

- drive a browser (firefox/chrome) via already mentioned here selenium/webdriver (potentially hiding the actual browser window into a virtual X by wrapping the whole thing with xvfb-run),

- or use one of the webkit-based toolkits: phantomjs [1] or headless horseman [2].

There is also an interesting project that combines the two, i.e. it drives a Firefox (or, more precisely, slightly outdated version of Gecko) to emulate a phantomjs-compatible API. [3]

phantomjs/slimerjs are pretty popular and even have tools that run on top of them, such as casperjs [4], that geared more to automated website testing, but can be quite good at scraping or fake-APIing too.

[1] http://phantomjs.org/

[2] https://github.com/johntitus/node-horseman

[3] https://slimerjs.org/

[4] http://casperjs.org/

And it sounds like UdeM is not exactly pleased with Springer's pricing practices - added emphasis in []:

    “We are trying to best meet the needs of our community
    despite budget cuts in the last few years, the
    [greediness of commercial publishers], and the weak
    Canadian dollar,” said Stéphanie Gagnon, Collections
    Director.

They sure do accumulate, to the point where by the time you go back to some old tab, and that tab just so happen to be replaced with a window.opener trick, [1] there is no chance of you remembering what was there in the first place, and spotting the fake.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631292

What you have described is pretty much an opposite of how F-droid works. One can't just take binary (whether official or compromised) and upload it there. [1]

Instead, to publish an app there, you need to provide source code repository [2], and their build farm would build it, sort-of [3] providing guarantee that source code you can inspect is the same one you got running on your phone.

[1] There are exceptions, i.e. apps uploaded as binary-only (for example Firefox), but those come with big red warning that user sees before installing them.

[2] https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/FAQ_-_App_Developers#Will_my_a...

[3] Sort-of because reproducible builds for Android not here yet, so you can't just rebuilt it yourself and compare sha256, unfortunately.

> Instead of being able to press <Up Arrow>, <C-Backspace>, and type my operation, I'm instead having to position my cursor to the second argument.

Maybe not as neatly, but you can do this in 5 blind keystrokes (instead of 3):

    Up; Alt-<b; b; Backspace>

> like B, mini-B or micro-USB [or C]

Maybe that is exactly the reason to go with type-A, i.e. to make a statement about too many different B types?

Still a recipe for a disaster of course.

Wait, did I read this right - Intel is going to be the last one to get 10nm?

> Samsung, for one, plans to ship its 10nm finFET technology by year’s end.

> TSMC will move into 10nm production in early 2017

> Intel will move into 10nm production by mid-2017

There are plans to fix this next year, i.e. starting from mid-2017 you are going to pay home tariff [1] (i.e. 30 cents per SMS to France) wherever you are in EU.

[1] http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2015/10/27/news/parlamen...