18 ms·
I love how so many behaviors we depend on were mistakes or temporary fixes "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry
by jdlyga 4y ago
I love how so many behaviors we depend on were mistakes or temporary fixes
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move"
- warmwaffles 4y agoNothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
- donarb 4y ago"The fix is temporary, unless it works" -- Red Green
- game-of-throws 4y agoThe Garden of Eden was transitory.
- inopinatus 4y agoEvery omnipotent creator implicitly grasps that initial configuration matters as much as the automaton rules.
- jakear 4y agoMessages from the Unseen World The Universe is the interior of the Light Cone of the Creation Science is a Differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition - Alan Turing
- shrikant 4y agoHTTP "Referer" is the one that makes me sad.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoThe fact that terminals being an emulation of a teletype comes a close second. And the origins of /usr/bin a definite third.
- doctor_eval 4y agoA teleprompter? Is that a typo? Did you mean a teletype?
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoSorry yes teletype.
- mort96 4y agoHonestly, the typewriter interface is pretty useful. A program can make text appear on the screen by just writing ASCII (or these days, UTF-8) bytes. The only sad part is the design of escape sequences, but that's more a consequence of chaotic evolution rather than the fact that it's emulating a typewriter (and most of the evolution happened with the early software terminal emulators). Honest question: How would you design a simple text outputting protocol? Would it be radically different to how it's done today, or would it be the same basic ideas but cleaned up a bit?
- R0b0t1 4y agoHm, I've actually thought about that a lot. I'd probably keep the bytestream format. It is insanely useful. However I might open up multiple streams. Stream one is basic IO. Stream two could be formatting info. Streams above that implementation dependent, but you could probably start defining them for keyboard/mouse/HID IO or audio and video. Then to make it work over the internet just shove it over SSH or TLS. The one downside that has is if you separate the formatting from the data you can not recreate the session without keeping time info somehow. So, might need a fix for that. The only other real alternative I'm aware of is moving the formatting into the API "stream" that communicates using the machine ABI. This is a terrible solution. It's what Windows uses.
- 4y ago
- vikingerik 4y agoAt least that one saves a byte on every request. The cumulative savings are in the terabytes by now.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 4y agoIt saves 2TB/year, just on Google searches! (4e6 requests/minute)
- brians 4y agoThat’s to balance out Traveller.
- victorclf 4y agoLike Quake bunnyhopping and the SID 6581 being able to fake a 4th voice.
- colejohnson66 4y agoAny links about the SID thing? I found Quake bunnyhopping, but “sid 6581 four voices” turns up nothing relevant.
- victorclf 4y ago"Due to imperfect manufacturing technologies of the time and poor separation between the analog and digital parts of the chip, the 6581's output (before the amplifier stage) was always slightly biased from the zero level. Each time the volume register was altered, an audible click was produced. By quickly adjusting the amplifier's gain through the main 4-bit volume register, this bias could be modulated as PCM, resulting in a "virtual" fourth channel allowing 4-bit digital sample playback. The glitch was known and used from an early point on, first by Electronic Speech Systems to produce sampled speech in games such as Impossible Mission (1983, Epyx) and Ghostbusters (1984, Activision). The first instance of samples being used in actual musical compositions was by Martin Galway in Arkanoid (1987, Imagine), although he had copied the idea from an earlier drum synthesizer package called Digidrums. The length of sampled sound playback was limited first by memory and later technique. Kung Fu Fighting (1986), a popular early sample, has a playback length measured in seconds. c64mp3 (2010) and Cubase64 (2010) demonstrate playback lengths measured in minutes. Also, it was hugely CPU intensive - one had to output the samples very fast (in comparison to the speed of the 6510 CPU)." -- from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6581 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6581
- jiggawatts 4y agoThe standard UNIX file system layout exists because hard drives were small at the time and files had to be split across several. The VI keyboard shortcuts only make logical sense on a specific Tektronix 4014 terminal that was popular at the time: 46 years ago. The reason the delete key is broken in like half of all UNIX / Linux systems is because TTY is short for “teletypewriter” — literally a remote type writer banging out text on dead trees. The carriage can go back one character at a time and overwrite an error but it can’t shift printed text on paper. Windows was developed in an era of CRT displays and delete works with it consistently. This is why it cracks me up whenever someone talks a out “Linux being the standard”…
- account42 4y ago> The reason the delete key is broken in like half of all UNIX / Linux systems is because TTY is short for “teletypewriter” — literally a remote type writer banging out text on dead trees. The carriage can go back one character at a time and overwrite an error but it can’t shift printed text on paper. Which Linux system/terminal/editor are you using where insert mode is not the default?
- teddyh 4y ago> The VI keyboard shortcuts only make logical sense on a specific Tektronix 4014 terminal The Lear Siegler ADM-3A, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A#Legacy
- uncletaco 4y agoWhy would you do this to me I'm going to be in a rabbit hole trying to recreate this machine for the next two years. I've been in the hobby long enough that I only get excited about weird things like this keyboard that have historical significance.
- tyingq 4y agoFabGL can emulate an ADM 3A on an ESP32: http://www.fabglib.org/group___enumerations_ga67edd9a04814c247a553dfde047e6f62.html#gga67edd9a04814c247a553dfde047e6f62a14ceba0d771609decce2a2bca361ec20 http://www.fabglib.org/group___enumerations_ga67edd9a04814c2...
- rodgerd 4y agoThe thing that irritates me is that people then venerate these accidents. Yes, some accidents are happy; many are at best neutral or least-worst or what have you. And then *ix culture dies in a ditch that we must keep all of them, forever, as though they were the result of a carefully thought out process that produced the best of all possible worlds.
- wruza 4y agoWhat would you change and how, ignoring the cost of re-standardization?
- throwaway290 4y agoPlan 9.
- ikiris 4y agoplan 9 got the same treatment your username did. Problem solved XD
- throwaway290 4y agoRephrase. As in, no thought went into the name?
- pdimitar 4y agoUNIX pipes. No more plain text, it has to be typed stream of values. And the terminal will by default print details about it e.g "list of records with this or that format".
- colejohnson66 4y agoThat’s PowerShell. Everything is an object, not text. But a lot of people hate it because it’s different.
- smcl 4y agoAnother one that circulated recently was that Qualified Immunity (which means police in the USA can effectively commit civil rights violations without suffering repercussions) partly originated in a clerical error: https://twitter.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/1557178832679014403 https://twitter.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/15571788326790144...