Micropost

A breakthrough has been made in SSD technology that could mean drastic performance increases due to the overcoming of one of the major issues in the memory type. Currently, data cannot be directly overwritten onto the NAND chips used in the devices. Files must be written to a clean area of the drive whilst the old area is formatted. This eventually causes fragmented data and lowers the drive’s life and performance over time. ...

On a standard headphone plug, the left channel comes through the outer ”tip” contact, the right channel through the middle ”ring” contact, and the ground connection through the inner ”sleeve” contact. The acronym for these so-called ”tip-ring-sleeve” connectors is where TRS Drawbot gets its name. It has no microchips or circuit boards and uses free software to turn line graphics into sound files that make almost any audio device into an on-the-go robot controller. ...

One comment’s answer was ’marketing’, which in a sense is correct; one reason we call Java a compiled language is that that’s what Sun called it from the start. Another comment noted that Java has an explicit compilation phase that is separate from having the JVM execute your Java program by interpreting the bytecodes. All of this points us towards what I feel is the real answer: In Java, bytecode is a first class object. In Python it’s an internal implementation detail. ...

The inline JavaScript solution has a subtle, but very important (and an often overlooked) performance gotcha: inline scripts block on CSSOM before they are executed. Why? The browser does not know what the inline block is planning to do in the script it is about to execute, and because JavaScript can access and manipulate the CSSOM, it blocks and waits until the CSS is downloaded, parsed, and the CSSOM is constructed and available. ...

This past semester I’ve been working on a directed study at my university with Prof. Wil Robertson reverse engineering embedded devices. After a couple of months looking at a passport scanner, one of my friends jokingly suggested I hack a Furby, the notoriously annoying toy of late 1990s fame. Everyone laughed, and we all moved on with our lives. However, the joke didn’t stop there. Within two weeks, this same friend said they had a present for me. And that’s how I started reverse engineering a Furby. ...

I found that the rollover text, “/bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents.”, is obviously false. After all there are several last names (like “Nixon” and “Bush”) that denote both elected presidents and opponents. So no regular expression could both match and not match “Nixon”. So that got me thinking: if we ignore names that are both winners and losers, what regular expression does cover the winners and not the losers? And let’s try to find a short one, although perhaps not the very shortest. ...

Hubo un tiempo en que sólo había un camino para surcar las redes: la Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España. Y una sola pensamiento profundo de los hackers: engañarla para surcar estas redes sin pagar nada. Entonces cogió gran importancia una especialidad, dentro de las artes del hacking, llamada ’phreaking’ (http://hackstory.net/phreaking), contracción de ’phone’ (teléfono) y ’freak’ (monstruo). Los ’phreakers’ tienen gran conocimiento de las líneas telefónicas y saben, entre otras cosas, como usarlas para llamar gratis. En los años 80 y 90 no había grupo de hackers que no contase entre sus filas con uno o más buenos ’phreakers’. ...

If you’re an Ubuntu user and you’re using the default settings, each time you start typing in Dash (to open an application or search for a file on your computer), your search terms get sent to a variety of third parties, some of which advertise to you. Ubuntu should protect user privacy by default. Since it doesn’t, you can use the code to the left to disable the parts of Ubuntu which are invasive to your privacy. ...

A finales de 1983 la compañía Nintendo sacó al mercado la consola FAMICOM en Japón, a los pocos años se comercializó también por Europa y América bajo el nombre de NES. Para celebrar sus treinta años de existencia algunos entusiastas han decidido no quedarse de brazos cruzados y le han hecho un merecido homenaje, usándola para componer un CD de música que se distribuye de manera gratuita bajo licencia Creative Commons. ...

El cumplimiento de la ecuación de Moore ha sido posible hasta la fecha gracias a la reducción constante del tamaño y el precio de los chips, unido al aumento de su potencia de cálculo. Sin embargo, los límites de la física están comenzando a imponerse sobre los pronósticos de Moore. » David Pérez | elconfidencial.com