讓 Windows 2000/XP/Vista 與 Server 2003/2008 能夠更新的軟體

Hacker News 上看到「Legacy Update」這個網站:

Legacy Update: Fix Windows Update on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008, 2003, and 2000

對於已經沒辦法跑 Windows Update 的作業系統,至少有個工具可以把現有手上的 patch 都裝進去?

不過網站本身最低只支援 TLS 1.0,所以對於新安裝的 IE6 得手動開 TLS 1.0 後才能連上 (預設是關閉的),但看起來至少是個比較方便的工具了。

如果是跑在虛擬機裡面的話可以先用 host OS 下載下來再透過其他方式丟進去,不過我試著下載檔案,點了半天一直被重導到首頁... GitHub 上面看起來是有檔案,但 GitHub 對於老 OS 來說是無法連線的對象...

另外看了一下 WHOIS 資料,是今年七月才成立的網站,不是那種已經出來好幾年的網站,上面的東西的可信度可以自己斟酌...

0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004

看到「http://0.30000000000000004.com/」這個網站對經典的 0.1 + 0.2 問題整理了各語言的結果。這個網址名稱也很機車啊 XD

開頭的說明講述 IEEE 754 二進制表示法的問題:

Your language isn't broken, it's doing floating point math. Computers can only natively store integers, so they need some way of representing decimal numbers. This representation comes with some degree of inaccuracy. That's why, more often than not, .1 + .2 != .3.

It's actually pretty simple. When you have a base 10 system (like ours), it can only express fractions that use a prime factor of the base. The prime factors of 10 are 2 and 5. So 1/2, 1/4, 1/5, 1/8, and 1/10 can all be expressed cleanly because the denominators all use prime factors of 10. In contrast, 1/3, 1/6, and 1/7 are all repeating decimals because their denominators use a prime factor of 3 or 7. In binary (or base 2), the only prime factor is 2. So you can only express fractions cleanly which only contain 2 as a prime factor. In binary, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 would all be expressed cleanly as decimals. While, 1/5 or 1/10 would be repeating decimals. So 0.1 and 0.2 (1/10 and 1/5) while clean decimals in a base 10 system, are repeating decimals in the base 2 system the computer is operating in. When you do math on these repeating decimals, you end up with leftovers which carry over when you convert the computer's base 2 (binary) number into a more human readable base 10 number.

這邊主要是討論 IEEE 754-1985 這個標準,後來在 IEEE 754-2008 提出了新的表示方法,支援十進位的表示法來解這個問題 (雖然還沒普及)。

VM Import:把 VMware Image 直接丟到 AWS EC2 上面跑...

又是一個邪惡的功能,直接把 VMwareVMDK 檔丟上 AWS EC2 上跑:「VM Import - Bring Your VMware Images to The Cloud」。

這個服務不另外收費,僅就 S3EBS 與 data transfer 的費用收費而已,不過公告裡提到目前只支援 Windows Server 2008 SP2:

You can start importing 32 and 64 bit Windows Server 2008 SP2 images right now (we support the Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions).