Very Legacy Codecs

Also consider rate-limiting and exponential backoff in retry loops. Otherwise the results can be quite spectacular.

Some Internet folklore from China: In 2009, a random guy paid for DDoS to attack a competing game server and disabled its DNS service. Just a regular day, right? Following that, a popular video player with 1 billion installations, appropriately named Storm, all entered an endless retry loop to phone home, DNS requests flooded China Telecom's backbone and caused a nationwide network outage. The attackers suddenly found themselves to the state's enemies.

@dj3ei @wakame Yep, KoD will never be respected by legacy clients already deployed on millions of zombie-like embedded & networking devices that never receive any update in their lifetimes. We have to deal with them for as long as Internet exists...

DO NOT run scheduled requests to a public server at the top of the hour, pick a random minute. The worst victims of this problem are community NTP servers - at every hour and especially 00:00:00 UTC, the traffic spike is just impressive.

Literally me, except I'm not a cute anime girl. #animeirl

@LovesTha @be Yeah, there can be some technical reasons for non-removable cables. For example, the USB spec requires you to design for the worst-case voltage drop and signal integrity for the worst possible cable allowed by the spec if you're use a USB connector, but these requirements are greatly relaxed with a hard-wired cable. It's also the reason devices that plug directly into the port are so popular...

@chjara Marketing department's forced rebranding after acquisition is evil. All the Linear Technology URLs are broken after the ADI acquisition, same for the Atmel's links after the Microchip purchase. :blobcatknife:
Also, a few years ago, EDN Magazine did a redesign and trashed everything. Useful comments are truncated and unreadable, and many images are lost (some were already lost in the previous redesigns). :blobcatknife:

Q: What do you call when ham radio operators on the shortwave are talking about things to sell for hamfest?

A: High Frequency Trading.

@zwol @alexandra @Jaqueek and to make it worse, the TrueType hinting machine itself is also proprietary, patented by Apple. Before 2010 free software was forced to use the subpar Auto-Hinting workaround.

@alexandra @Jaqueek Subpixel antialiasing and font hinting can have its own book (books?) too. To do that, TrueType uses a virtual machine and embeds bytecode in fonts.

This is the instruction set of the TrueType machine. https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM05/Chap5.html

"What is your favorite CPU architecture?"
"TrueType."

@48kRAM The *real* horror is a system board with a battery-backed NVRAM loaded with irreplaceable firmware or factory calibration data. If you don't know how to extract it from software, accepting the time bomb is the only "safe" option... :oh_no:

Why are so many completely unrelated Python scientific libraries naming themselves "scikit-foo"? Is it a kind of coordinated branding? Who started it?

@nebula_moe It's not just machine learning (which is understandable). This naming style is now being used in unrelated fields as well, like graph theory, RF and microwaves, finite element method, and a bunch of other things.

Sending data over a serial port is slow.

...You have to go bit by bit.

@clacke @averyada @alexandra Fun fact: Hurd was almost a 4.4BSD derivative, project lead Thomas Bushnell strongly suggested this. But RMS turned him down, presumably because of his Not Unix bias.

@vertigo In modern digital systems the bus itself is often not the problem, in point-to-point series links with on-die impedance termination on both sides, it doesn't matter.

The data rate has increased to the point when the PCB vias are the problem, e.g. if you change from layer 1 to layer 4 with a via, the open-ended portion of that via at layer 5 and 6 becomes a short circuit at quarter wavelength, at this frequency the cable is shorted and the loss is infinite, at 20 Gbps+ this is a serious problem... For advanced board, blind vias and backdrilling are almost essential.

Therapist: Complex impedance is not real, it can't hurt you.

Complex impedance: an open circuit with nothing connected automagically becomes a short circuit when the signal line is at quarter wavelength.

Digital designers: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

@cinebox Instead of a throwing a plain NULL pointer, now you can put a custom error code in NaN at the same time!

If the x86 architecture is so good how comes there's no x87?

Oh, wait...

@Neo_Chen @sa2tms Also the audiophiles: plugging modern 50+ MHz non-audio high-speed op-amps for RF and data convertors onto the 8 pin DIP sockets of their amplifiers via the SOIC-8 adapter board and enjoy all that distortions...