[CentralOH] 2016-08-11 Aladdin's Plush Paper Napkin Scribbles: Virginia Compromise RAM, restrictor plates, lists, and generators set and list membership sysadmin skills printf lost backdoor key

[jep200404 at columbus.rr.com]

Lunch is highly non-linear.
The one person who signed up, did not appear.
Five others who did not sign up, had lunch together.

wp:Virginia Plan
wp:Connecticut Compromise

Modern computers are like NASCAR race cars.

    Restrictor plates limit what the engine can do.
    So-called RAM limits what CPUs can do.

    wp:restrictor plate racing

RAM ain't random access memory anymore

    It used to be that all accesses to RAM took the same time regardless of
    which location was being accessed and
    that RAM was about as fast as CPUs.

    That has not been the case for a long time.
    Now, it is more sequential access memory than random access memory.
    When accessed sequentially, it is fast.
    When accessed randomly, it is slow.

    wp:RAM#Memory_wall

    Caches become more important.
    Building big lists in Python, blows ones cache.
    Nested generators in Python, play nicer with cache.
    Raymond Hettinger talked about this in some presentation. pyvideo.org

wp:Hybrid Memory Cube

Motorola 6800s used a square wave clock (E?) for external accesses.
One could connect a pair of 6800s to shared memory,
without slowing anything down,
by having the CPUs staggered in time,
so that their (E?) clocks were interleaved.

http://visual6502.org/wiki/index.php?title=Motorola_6800

wp:Datapoint_2200#The_seed_of_the_x86_architecture

Someone thought that writing zeroes to the memory allocated by some *alloc()
call (in libc?) was unnecessary. Which call was it? Who was the proponent?

What percentage of sysadmins:

    are not touch typists?
    access previous commands in history only by using up arrow?

speed of searching for something in a set versus list

    http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/james-prior/cohpy/blob/master/20160523-cohpy-speed-of-searching-sets-and-lists.ipynb

Secure Boot snafu: Microsoft leaks backdoor key, firmware flung wide open
http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/microsoft-secure-boot-firmware-snafu-leaks-golden-key/

How FOSS Influences All Aspects of Our Culture
http://fossforce.com/2016/08/foss-influences-our-culture/

All about printf
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/all-about-printf
Python's print formatting was based on this.