summa_tech

It feels like the concept faded with the advent of large VRAM and fast fill rate graphics accelerators. I remember old X Window System workstations supporting multiple concurrent windows with different color depths and modes. The hardware would compose windows from memory during display scan-out, all to save VRAM.

I think that's what "STABLE ONLY" clickable text filters by.

Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.

Then you take an illegal instruction exception, and you have a choice to request a rebuild, patch it, or emulate it. (Yeah, sometimes the vendors just don't cooperate.)

Incidentally, emulating opcodes is quite often practical (unless the performance must not be affected), and is greatly helped by having the plainest, cleanest instruction encoding possible, and a well designed system register & exception architecture.

One hopes that a hypervisor would not expose hardware control registers directly in the first place, except ones deliberately designed for virtualization support.

Otherwise, the guest is running effectively at the same privilege level as the hypervisor (that's useful sometimes, but probably not intended in most applications).

I, too, had wondered; this seems particularly common in the US. My best theory is that in rough handwriting, n and u/μ can look pretty similar, and everyone sort of agreed to only use u to reduce ambiguity.

Laminated wood veneer for legs, plywood for seat. Not as disposable as the eternal LACK, but also not bent wood.

It certainly tarnishes the shine to have a per-OS-version table of offsets to patch ;(

It always feels a bit like lost magic. But at the same time, it's also something that was only enabled by the very high determinism of these old home systems. The design relies on having fixed RAM locations, no multiprocessing, etc.

Incredible to find out that typing the paper program would not have worked, though. And in such a disappointing way no less.

Excellent explanation.

I'd like to add that no light source can lie outside the horseshoe of the CIE xyz diagram: pure wavelengths are points on the curved line, everything that mixes them moves towards the inside of the space. So you're stuck with triangles that fit within it.

Well, it's complicated. As I understand, one of the polio vaccines - the oral one - has an unusual quirk.

The live virus used in it can reproduce and spread in low-vaccination communities. While the vaccine version of it will not cause paralysis, it can and occasionally does mutate back into a pathogenic variant.

So we're sort of maintaining a reservoir of polio, really.

Imagine a power splitter + phase shifter that produces a correct phase shift for each element in a phased array to produce a directional beam from one radio transceiver.

Now this clever arrangement, instead of having only one radio transceiver port, has multiple. And each of those ports corresponds to a different set of phase shifts, producing a directional beam at a different azimuth angle.

And because this is an entirely passive device, it's linear, and all ports can be active at the same time (principle of superposition essentially). So you can use a single phased antenna array to serve multiple directional beams at the same time.

Right! I think a lot of people, who have not done a lot of "things you can kick" engineering, have a very romantic view of it. Especially the relationship with whoever is nominally setting the goals of the project.

The physics works perfectly, of course. But physics is only a third of the constraint in engineering. The other two thirds are project goals and convention.

Project goals are horribly underspecified, every time. It's incredibly rare to be given a project that is completely constrained on that side, and if you do get one, most of the time it's physically impossible to achieve. This is because the people who write those specifications not doing engineering, they're doing marketing or sales or just had a cool idea. Sometimes that can even be the engineer themselves :-) So it's up to the engineer to fill in the gap, and they do it with experience and a sense of aesthetics, of sorts.

Convention is what constrains the physical possibilities of engineering to the practical. Yes, you can build anything and make it work, possibly even better than what everyone else builds. But you will have to invent and construct a lot of new technologies before you can build your perfect mousetrap. So, you settle on standard components and build a decent one instead. But this introduces a gap between physics and engineering, too. A bit of no-man's land that you can reach into to produce truly great results. But it's up to the engineer to know when it's worth it.