Okay, I'm happy with daylight savings for the six months around summer here, but for 2/3rds of the year in the USA??? What earthly justification was given for making DST last so long?

Yes. I was overjoyed when Spring DST was changed to more or less mirror Autumn DST (1st Sunday in October, here in the south-eastern part of Australia (35 degrees south). It used to come in almost a month later, and I used to get pretty tired of waking up at 5am for weeks on end.

That said, having slept in a room with no curtains in Stockholm a week before midsummer (when it never gets *totally* dark), I'd guess that DST for Swedes is, to be plain, like pissing into the wind. Wake up at 5am or 4am, what's the difference?

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" - Seymour Cray.

The devil is in the details. SPARC has lots of registers, very true. But it needs more user-accessible registers, because its address modes are simpler, and you need to do more address computations in registers. Register windows were like a fully associative cache for a few levels of your call stack... but then you have to save more stuff when you do a context switch, and I suspect they were part of why Sun was late to doing full out-of-order execution in their SPARC implementations.

I was a big fan of the early RISC chips, because that architectural style was bringing forth implementations which got much better bang per CPU transistor than other commercial chips at the time. That lead was eroded seriously by Intel with the Pentium Pro - certainly in terms of bang per buck - which was embarrassing for people who wanted to point out some inherent "elegance" or other timeless quality of RISC that was its great advantage. Whatever that counted for, Intel's designs and better process technology could more or less match with ugly old x86.

The time when you could play Top Trumps with computer architecture specs is really over. Decisions that were clear winners at a particular time, in terms of process technology, memory bandwidths, and compiler quality, can turn out not to be as optimal when the market, or what is cost-effective to produce, changes over time.

The T series SPARC chips came out of work done by Kunle Olukotun at Afara Websystems and then brought in-house by Sun. They represented a great point-in-time improvement for high parallelism, cache-unfriendly, integer server loads over what was under development inside Sun at the same time, especially when cost and power were taken into account. Some of those decisions in the T1 got revised for the T2 - one FPU for the whole chip turned into one FPU per core, for instance - but the per-die core count got halved for the T4, so again the Top Trumps viewpoint doesn't really illustrate whether one processor is better than another.

Bottom line is, does it run the stuff you want to run, for a good TCO?

Yeah, do not buy old Sun hardware thinking that you can get any useful support from third parties, or pick up a cheap support contract suitable for a sysadmin's home box or a dev workstation... or even download firmware for a device that is not covered by your current support contract. That sort of thing went away by or shortly after the time that Oracle bought Sun.

Oracle doesn't really care about ISV support for SPARC, and they probably like it if their big Oracle/SPARC sales included a hefty dose of high margin professional services to cover the customer's inexperience with the hardware platform, so why do they need ordinary people using SPARC anyway?

"You actually don't need to be open-minded about Oracle. You are wasting the openness of your mind..." - Bryan Cantrill, Fork Yeah!

The funny thing being that the complainer apparently wanted to spend their life writing assembly code. :-)

It's like big-endian versus little-endian memory organisation: on the one hand, you have a data format that makes it a bit easier to read raw hex dumps of main memory, but does your head in whenever you want actually write something useful (like, picking out the nth significant byte from a multibyte data type), while little-endian looks ugly on paper, but makes writing code to do multiple precision stuff simpler - the bit with significance 2^n is in the byte at [baseaddr + (n>>3)], no matter *what* length the full data type is... and the debugger will helpfully display that ugly little-endian piece of memory properly for you should you need to see it.

John Mashey, one of the MIPS architecture designers among many other things, has written a really good essay on RISC architectural choices.

He posted it to the comp.arch USENET group a few times; here's a copy of that post that renders in a monospace font so you can read the ASCII tables easily. [Google Groups' version makes the tables unreadable.]

The best rule of thumb I like to remember from that essay is that RISC architectures try to make exception handling simple; for example, they don't tend to use the MMU for data access more than once per instruction, because then you have multiple ways that the instruction can generate an exception. Other RISC choices can be seen as stemming from this rule, such as:
- no variable-length string comparison/move instructions
- accesses to multibyte data are aligned so they can't cross page boundaries
- load/store architectures; this keeps MMU exceptions and ALU exceptions from ever being generated by the same instruction.

The more complex the exception handling requirements, the more you pay to implement those, either with more hardware, [which can imply more cost, or more power, or longer cycle time], or by giving up opportunities for parallelism because the exceptions get too hard to handle with many operations in flight. Even if an exception is rare compared to the common case, the implementation has to be able to handle it correctly...

It would be interesting to know how long each of these colliding files was... funny how we all *know* that for nontrivial hash inputs there are many many possible colliding inputs, but over time we tend to slide into "let's just compare hashes to find identical data; collisions are so rare - after all, we haven't seen any!"

Part of BMW's response FTFA:
"A vital point to acknowledge here is that there is no such thing as the ‘unstealable’ car, as Ron Cliff knows well. If a criminal decides they want your car, they will find a way to take it. Our job is to make it as difficult as possible."

Apparently, that means making it take three minutes, instead of, say, two and a half. Dare we dream one day of the car that can resist theft for... four minutes?

Anyone who thinks that tinnitus adds anything to life is kidding themselves. Constant ringing in your ears, worse with stress or fatigue.

I have much accumulated damage to my body, but my highest priority for improvement would be my hearing. I don't mind wearing a splint for the rest of my life to save my teeth from finally wearing to the point of mechanical failure, but I hate having tinnitus and high frequency hearing loss.

Look after your diet, people - your small blood vessels in your middle ear can get constricted with fatty crap just like your big arteries around your heart can. Reduced blood supply => increased oxidative stress => less robust neurons in your ears => increased risk of hearing loss after noise exposure.

...holding patents on:
- FM Synthesis (John Chowning at CCRMA)
- PageRank (a certain Larry Page and Sergei Brin)

Yamaha licensed the FM synthesis patents, and later waveguide synthesis patents, that stemmed from work at CCRMA, part of Stanford.
Google holds an exclusive license to the PageRank patent.

Stanford certainly doesn't sell musical instruments or search engine services, so does that make them patent trolls? Maybe Stanford hasn't ever had to sue any other companies to enforce their rights on these patents, but that could simply be down to people knowing not to mess with an institution backed by that kind of intellectual and financial firepower. Having made considerable profit from these patents, do you think it likely that Stanford would lie down and let some company use these patents without licensing them?

Thanks very much for this quote! I have been saying basically the same thing, albeit less eloquently, for years, but never came across this quote.

Maybe advanced magic prevents MPEG-4 compression artifacts from being just as annoying as MPEG-2 compression artifacts, but it would seem shortsighted to devalue what is supposed to be the premium movie viewing experience (digital projectors, in a cinema) by using consumer grade compression. I see enough melty faces on standard definition DVB-T broadcasts that I remain skeptical about the invisibility of MPEG-4 compression, especially when the result is blown up to huge proportions and the film has lots of special effects. I am not going to a cinema to look at blocky crap where the compression algorithm ran out of bits for the breaking waves or rushing water or full-on special effects.

Anyway, all of that P- and B-frame stuff is just to get the bit rate down to the point where a movie fits on a nice, cheap-to-produce piece of optical media sold to individual households. The economic equation is totally different for the media that is used to exhibit a film to (hopefully!) many people, and it's not like making a physical print and shipping it around was very cheap either.

Flicker depends a lot on the shutter angle (proportion of frame time that the film is exposed for) as well, for traditional film cameras.

Small shutter angle => short exposure => more flicker on fast action. Think "Saving Private Ryan" beach landing scene - little bits of dirt from explosions caught in mid-air for a single frame by the short per-frame exposure. A flow-on is that such shots often have more grain and less colour saturation, because the film needs to be of a faster type to get properly exposed at these shorter exposure times using practical amounts of light -- especially for outdoor scenes.

"Bully" should only be used as a verb - "bullying". The noun should instead be "vicious shithead". People who enjoy inflicting pain on people should not be called bullies, but vicious shitheads.

It is of course possible to stop being a vicious shithead. I was one too - I bullied my brother, because I was so angry at the breakdown of my parents' marriage and being bullied myself; I was an Asperger's space cadet bully magnet. I bullied another pupil at my school, until the day he fought back and I realised that right then there was nothing separating me from the shitheads who called me a faggot so often I ended up questioning my own sexuality by the end of high school and were always threatening me with violence... sometimes more than just threats. I never bullied again after that day.

Later I apologised to my brother. I should have apologised to that pupil too, but I was too much of a coward then. What I have learned since that day, in adult life, is that almost nobody wants to admit that their shit stinks as much as anyone else's, let alone that their actions and attitudes are especially toxic and fucked. Doesn't change the fact that if someone enjoys inflicting pain on someone else (who doesn't consent, please insert obligatory "BDSM is a valid lifestyle" whalesong here) they aren't a mere "bully", they are a vicious shithead.

As for the premature aging signs that are mentioned in the original post - I can believe it. Due to some stupid life choices, I ended up living on a farm with my alpha male father-in-law, who felt no great restraint against venting his toxic temper whenever things didn't go his way - and I ended up with crippling osteoarthritic pain in my knees and wrists so bad that I could not walk up stairs without bracing my knees with my hands. Thankfully I eventually managed these symptoms with concentrated fish oil extracts and glucosamine, both of which have been reported to moderate inflammation responses. But I am under no illusion that my body is in anything other than "fuck off and die young" mode because of the social situation that I find myself in. My continued ability to do the manual work this lifestyle requires is as far as I can tell dependent on my luck in finding some appropriate dietary supplements. Before I started taking those, I could hardly get out of my car to open the farm gates on my daily commute. Chronic oxidative stress fucks you up good and proper.

When I was at home during the day over the Christmas holiday period, a number of the "hello, this is the technical support centre, your Microsoft Windows computer has a virus [so please install our trojan software to remove the bogus virus, you chump]" scam callers had an accent that sounded Filipino to me, and spoke pretty clearly compared to the Indian accented callers I had heard before. Perhaps I was experiencing the benefits of US-funded English training in the Phillipines.

NB: This is not any racist remark, just my experience of a number of phone calls (1 or 2 per day) that I received when I happened to be home for a week. It got to the point where I was interrupting them with "Oh, you're calling about the computer, aren't you?" within a second of them starting their patter. It was a small consolation to hear the pause and uncertain "..yes?" before I hung up on them.

When the labour of humans with Internet access is so plentiful and cheap, you can try all the same "works one in a hundred times" scams that used only to be economical to automate, but now your scam mechanism can talk, interpret speech, pass a Turing test and solve CAPTCHAs...