MrTonyD

22 ms·

151.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
The Intel guys offered not only to fully fund the development, but to fully staff it and pay Microsoft for all the bother. Intel would have gotten their money back in chip sales. Bill didn't care. And early Intel 486 chips allowed both
152.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
It could be anyplace. You might try calling the vendor and asking to speak with one of their Application Engineers. Their job is to encourage chip adoption, so they will usually take such calls if you tell them you are doing a new implement
153.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
What we are arguing about is whether there were any options other than those chosen by Apple (abandon developers with Motorola 68K) and Microsoft (don't support anything other than segmented architecture). Since I worked with the Micro
154.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I was doing OS coding in those days - and writing both drivers and apps on top of Windows. People forget what was happening back then. Hardware had removed the 640K memory limit - but Windows stuck with it for years afterward. Not for any t
155.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
A couple of times I wrote bootloaders for new chips. I relied heavily on the chip vendors documentation. It was usually almost non-existent, and no more than text saying what things I had to do in what sequence. But taking that info, then l
156.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
Thought I'd do a quick read...but the site starts with a pitch for the web site itself, then a bunch of author background, then what looks like a marketing pitch of some sort, then a big download button. Not my kind of site.
157.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I think that a lot of people misunderstand Oracle. As a former Product Manager there, I can safely say that Oracle only cares about development tools to the extent that it furthers their business interests (based on Executive Meetings I att
158.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
You know, extraordinary claims don't require proof or elaboration. This isn't a court of law. I'm sharing my experiences on a public board. The insistence on legal-style proof seems to be a personality-trait of some people. I
159.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I worked for a direct report of Steve Jobs and later a direct report of Bill Gates. They routinely met in secret to divide up the market and agreed kill each others competitors - as well as divide up the market so they could all get rich. (
160.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
Exactly. I was working on some machine learning code when I realized that there were implicit moral choices in all machine learning results. Every dataset has implicitly made choices about data to include or not include. Every "weighin
161.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I was reading that it is up to the discretion of companies like Facebook as to how they compute the median. So Facebook can decide to include stock options and projections of their future value when computing the median. I suspect that they
162.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
You know, I actually changed it from regardless to irregardless. I like the fact that irregardless seems to have a connotation of wanton disregard. So my use of the "double negative" was intentional and supported my point.
163.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I was writing production code over 30 years ago (C, OS, database). It is much worse to be a software developer now. It used to be a very high autonomy job - where you were trusted to figure out your work process and usually given lots of fr
164.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I think about how we could continuously offer services to the bottom portions of society. We would know who might benefit from education, and who might benefit from immediate cash, and even who might be extracting wealth from our society in
165.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
Agree completely. I usually use YAML just so I can document my work using comments. If they added "heredoc" and comments, I think that I would be happy with JSON forever.
166.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I keep reading about quantum entanglement - and how it has been used in practice to transmit secure messages. Seems like it is a technology that might somehow be used to induce frequencies without leaving any evidence. A lot of that works i
167.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
This seems like a pretty convincing refutation of the effectiveness of the "tiger mom" philosophy: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
168.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I'm old enough to remember the POSIX meetings (I was sitting a few feet away from one of the conference rooms while the executives were meeting - and had some input into the spec.) One of the goals was to figure out what functionality
169.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
Well, I'm sorry that you feel that way. Really. I have spent an entire career in Silicon Valley, and I have held a lot of different positions and worked with many executive teams. It reminds me of when I worked at NeXT, and told someon
170.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
Isn't that an antiquated view of the way that the economy works? I can name a lot of counter-examples - but even the current articles in the press about bank assets vs outstanding loans is inconsistent with the view of credit being som
171.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
I've spent my entire life in high-tech in Silicon Valley. The techniques being discussed to hide cash are integral to Silicon Valley companies - and they definitely impact decisions at every level of the organization. It is naive to be
172.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
Just to throw another rock at WalMart - they also arranged to own offshore companies which provided loans to themselves to run WalMart - turning profits into loan payments and avoiding taxes. Estimates are that they hid double digit billion
173.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
You know, there are marketing studies contradicting that. It is possible to take people who don't want things, but present things to them as having other characteristics which they do want. The end effect is people buying things they r
174.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
I was amazed when I heard that Copenhagen had a government department focused on Quality of Life. And that the bike culture of Denmark was created when they decided that cars were harming their quality of life (it was a 30 year project.) An
175.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
I work with Big Data, and some buddies were working with WalMart on their secret facial recognition software for all their stores. They told my buddies that it was to catch shoplifters, but the news stories about WalMart at the time were ab
176.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
I wonder if functional programming might be something to implement with a "flock" of unikernels? I'm not even sure what I mean, but it seems like decomposing into unikernels might allow entirely new architectures. (Perhaps an
177.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
I think he meant to say that we need unikernels - a lot of people (including me) sometimes make that same mistake.
178.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
It isn't barbaric to break up a company - at all. Companies operate in our society, and they impact the citizens of our society. It is reasonable to directly stop a company when it is working against the shared values of our society. R
179.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
I'm the only person I know who doesn't like solar power. The lifespan of panels and batteries are both too limited - they will require complete replacement at too high a frequency for a society. In contrast, I'd like to see
180.
by MrTonyD 9y ago
I happened to be watching a PBS show that mentioned Caldwell Esselstyn and the diet he recommends (he is a heart surgeon.) I was blown away by how much I misunderstood about a good diet. Lots of the standard "good diet" advice now

More ›