myrmi's comments

myrmi | 2 years ago | on: WhatsApp could disappear from UK over privacy concerns, ministers told

> Oh no, political parties moving in response to the expressed will of the general public in a democracy.

Consider a very simple model of a two party system, expressing views on one left/right axis. Members of the population vote for the political party that is closest to their views on that axis. Political parties want to win as many votes as possible.

Under that model and those assumptions, if one party moves in a particular direction, the 'correct' behaviour for the other party is to move in that direction also to capture more votes, regardless of what the underlying 'will' of the general voting public is.

myrmi | 3 years ago | on: Dusting off Dreamcast Linux

It's a nice story, but you're right to say it's not true. If easy-piracy was the cause, you'd expect the attach rate (games-sold-per-console-sold) to be much lower than other contemporary consoles, because pirated games still needed legitimate Dreamcasts to be sold. But it just wasn't [1]. They simply didn't sell enough Dreamcasts for the reasons you say, and others.

[1] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio

myrmi | 3 years ago | on: Refurb Weekend: The Sega Dreamcast

'Piracy killed the Dreamcast' is very commonly put around, and it was incredibly easy for a contemporary console (literally just burn a CDR, no hardware modifications required), but if you look at the attach rates [1] for the console, they are comparable to successful consoles. Pirated games still needed consoles to be played, so we would expect a much lower attach rate than normal if this was a primary factor.

Ultimately, it was almost everything else going against the console. [2]

[1] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d2xuRwYUt4

myrmi | 6 years ago | on: Color Emulation

The first time I found this page, I lost the rest of my afternoon reading it through. Highly recommend.

myrmi | 7 years ago | on: The mathematics of Magic: the Gathering (1999)

> The complete language is a superset of the strings on existing cards. To prove the game as Turing complete, one needs to prove this language is Turing complete- not a subset of its strings.

It is not clear to me how a subset of a language could be Turing complete but not the whole language. Can you elaborate?

myrmi | 8 years ago | on: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel

My attempt, assuming that the books only contain one character each:

The librarian has a list of books you're not allowed to take out. You request one of those books (book X), but it takes a while for search to run to see whether you're allowed to or not. While you're waiting, you say "actually, I'm not really interested in taking out book X, but if the content of that book is 'a', I'd like to take out book Y. If the content of that book is 'b', I'd like to take out book Y+1, and so on".

The librarian is still waiting for the search to complete to see if you can take out book X, but doesn't have anything better to do, so looks inside it, sees that the letter is 'b', and goes and gets book Y+1 so she can hand it over to you.

Now, the original check to see if you can take the first book out completes, and the librarian says "I'm sorry, I can't let you have book X, and I can't give you the book I fetched that you are allowed to take out, otherwise you'd know the content of the forbidden book."

Now, you request book 'Y', which you are allowed. The librarian goes away for a few minutes, and returns with book 'Y', and hands it over to you. You request book 'Y+1', and she hands it over immediately. You request book 'Y+2', and she goes away for a few minutes again, and hands it over.

You now know that Y+1 was (probably) the book she fetched when you made the forbidden request, and therefore that the letter inside the forbidden book was 'b'.

myrmi | 9 years ago | on: Electron 1.0 is here

I live in zone 2 in London, and the fastest broadband I can get is ~2Mbit. Even in major cities, good - or I would argue, even acceptable - broadband is not ubiquitous.

myrmi | 10 years ago | on: New Chromecast 2015

So with this new form factor, I plug it into my TV, and then it just... hangs there?

myrmi | 11 years ago | on: Sir Terry Pratchett has died

25th of May is also the Glorious Twenty-fifth on the Discworld, where those involved in the People's Revolution wear lilacs to memorialise those they've lost.

Seems obvious what should happen at this point.

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