I always insist on a clean compile with the warning level turned up as high as it will go. If the compiler is cool with my code, I have a better chance it will do the right thing with it.

Once I have an application that works I see if it meets performance goals (if any). If it does, I'm done. If it doesn't, profile, find the hot spots, optimize as needed. Compiling an entire application with -O3 is idiotic, and misses the point.

...laura

I get in to the office nominally at 8, but usually get in a bit earlier, like 0740.

Since I'm on Pacific time and almost everybody I deal with is on Central and Eastern time, I consider it a courtesy to them to be in the office promptly. At one time I had a job that got me over to Paris and Brussels quite a bit, but the "engineering" folks were the sort who rarely showed up in the office before 1000. This is getting kinda late in western Europe when you need to work with somebody to solve a problem. Since I was in the office earliest I took most of the calls from Europe, and, oddly enough, was the one invited to fly over and help them figure things out.

...laura

...and Andrew/bunnie doesn't answer them, I can. I'm very briefly mentioned in the book under a different Internet name that I'd rather not say here.

I was the person who figured out how to dump the second version of the MCPX's secret boot ROM without having to repeat the HyperTransport bus tap craziness that Andrew did in the first place. Namely, the A20M# attack, which was much easier to do. (If Andrew hadn't done his original attack, though, we wouldn't have had the knowledge necessary to pull off my attack. <3 Andrew)

We kept the A20M# attack secret until the 360 was released, in case another MCPX silicon revision was released. It turned out that Microsoft had, in fact, coded a new MCPX ROM to defeat many of the exploits used to hack Xboxes - they just never released it, probably because it would've cost a fortune for what was then a console in its late stages. We didn't find out about this MCPX ROM update until some people looked into how the Chihiro arcade boards worked in 2014, which showed the new MCPX code in the debug ROMs. The A20M# attack still would have worked on this design - it was an attack on entire secret boot ROM design, not the MCPX ROM's code =)

Myria

22.7 is 2*10^1+2*10^0+7*10^-1.
If you express the same quantity in a bar other than ten, the .7 is no longer going to be a 7 after the decimal point, 7*10^-1. Note that you multiply it by TEN to get the 7 in the denominator of 22/7. In another base, you'd be multiplying by something other than 10, so you wouldn't get 7.

I'll probably sound crazy for asking this, or get modded off-topic, but... My understanding is that the scenario in the movie Waterworld can't happen by melting the polar ice caps because there isn't enough water frozen in them to rise enough enough to cover the continents. Goodbye to Florida and similar areas, but most of the continents would remain. (And thanks to global warming, we'll likely see that scenario... >.<)

But it seems to me as though one way in which it could happen is if we greatly expanded our use of geothermal power, to the point that we exhausted the energy driving plate tectonics. (Hopefully most of the leftover heat would escape into space, or we'd really be screwed.) Then the continents would gradually erode until the solid surface of Earth was at an even level, at which point the existing ocean would completely cover Earth.

To use that much geothermal energy seems pretty ridiculous, though. Just some random Myria musings...

The Surface Pro, like any other x86 PC that comes preinstalled with an OEM version of Windows 8/8.1, is locked down with Secure Boot UEFI. However, Microsoft follows its own rules--the Surface Pro also meets their own requirement that the BIOS allows you to disable Secure Boot given physical access.

Also, I believe that the Surface Pro's preconfigured UEFI Secure Boot NVRAM contains the Microsoft "Third Party Marketplace" UEFI certificate, which if true would mean that the Surface Pro would out-of-the-box recognize, as an example, the Secure Boot-compatible GRUB2 on the 14.x x86-64 Ubuntu disks as legitimate. I don't have a Surface Pro to check this, however.

My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems and build cool new stuff. Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems, or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.

We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP... :-}

...laura

It's on the wall, for all to see. Inscrutable display, mysterious controls, the works. When the weather changes it tends to lag a day. So the first warm day we cook with the heat on. The first cold day we freeze with the heat off.

I prefer opening the door out on to the balcony. Fresh air is so much nicer than anything the HVAC can do.

At home I leave my bedroom window open - even if only a crack - all year.

...laura

Oh, my favorite pesticide to use is ricin, a natural component of the castor bean plant! ;)

My fave is still the original Star Wars. It was fresh, it was new, yes, it was hokey, but it worked. Check your sophistication at the door and enjoy the ride!

I find the prequel movies unwatchable.

Some things never change: when The Empire Strikes Back was imminent, they re-released Star Wars in the theatres to get some buzz going. It was accompanied by a short, a trip to the Moon, assembled from NASA footage. Some younger members of the audience expressed loud displeasure at the "fake" movie. They didn't read the credits where it said "Filmed on location by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration".

...laura

I did my first year Computer Science in Algol W with punched cards.

The system required a blue "ticket card" to do anything other than list your card deck. We were issued a supply of ticket cards, and could (and did) buy more at the campus bookstore. We punched our cards ourselves. We were very careful to write everything out, to walk through our programs to make sure the program was syntactically correct and might have a chance of doing what it was supposed to do before spending a ticket card to find out what the compiler thought of it. We had immediate turnaround, which meant you could go through ticket cards that much faster.

I now program mainly in C on Linux boxes. The programs I create are orders of magnitude more complicated than what I created then. My interactive productivity is much higher too. I'm not sure I'd even attempt much of what I do now if I didn't have much more powerful computing and debugging facilities available.

...laura

I am reminded of a TOS episode where two warring planets had made their war so clean and clinical that they had no real reason to stop it. Until Captain Kirk came in and showed them what war really was, something horrifying, to be avoided. Even if it meant talking peace with your enemy.

Capital punishment is such an atrocity. Maybe if it was shown to be that atrocity, there would be less support for it. Public hanging, firing squad, maybe even dust off the electric chair. Show that it's gross and disgusting, and that civilized people have better ways to keep their societies working.

...laura

My current ADSL serves me well. I can stream all the usual video services (YouTube, Netflix, Acorn, etc.) in decent (near-HD) quality. The only time I could use more bandwidth is when I want to download something big, like an OS upgrade.

With that said, I'm sure if I had gigabit internet I'd find something to do with it. :-)

...laura

6.1.6 was only released for devices that cannot run iOS 7. If you have a device that can run iOS 7, you had to upgrade to iOS 7 in order to get the important security fix, even if the device had iOS 6.x at the time. There was never an iOS 6.1.6 released for iPad 2 or 3, for example.

If they had released an iOS 6.1.6 for iPad 2/3, it would've allowed downgrading from iOS 7.x to iOS 6.x then jailbreaking, something Apple hates with a passion.