Taniwha

5 ms·

31.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
Pretty sure it's "But I LOVE what he did for the Australian flag." - he is a kiwi but that's arguably the Aussie flag with the colonial bit replaced with the local one
32.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
Like Greenland,the Faroe Islands are a self-governing, autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. I'm sure this is highway funding from the mainland.
33.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
In context, around 1980 we bought 1.5MB of memory (core, real core, hand threaded core) for our Burroughs mainframe, we paid more than $1M (1980s) dollars for it. With 3MB our 1MHz mainframe supported 40 users. You make do with the memory a
34.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
You don't really fetch 66 bytes instead of 64, what real implementations do is read cache lines (of whatever size) and hold on to 2 bytes from the previous cache line if there was 1/2 a 32-bit instruction at the end of the previou
35.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
It's possible that later A/UXs required booting MacOS - but when we started we got 1/2 the initial prototype production run of Mac 2s (no cases, bugs in pals, probably no standard ROMs yet) Our standard agreement for porting
36.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
I'm pretty sure the ROMs loaded a boot sector booter and jumped into that, it's been a long time but I'm pretty sure that's what we handed over to Apple
37.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
Not really (I wrote the mouse/display drivers and kernel event queue driver for A/UX 1.x) - A/UX has it's own kernel ADB (and mouse/kbd on top of that) and display drivers, it will happily boot from hard drive, and
38.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
These are NiMH cells (7V) wired in series (not parallel so matching is less of an issue) - one bad cell and the series resistance of the whole string is shot
39.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
The original Prius batteries can easily have individual cells replaced (mine is 20 years old, we've replaced 2 cells) - of course Toyota want to sell you an entire battery, the wrecker will sell you a whole bunch of spares (do this wit
40.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
It's not really so much a book on how to get electronics done, more sort of an electronics specific phrase book, full of the names of things you can point at when looking for stuff in the markets. The original was written by Bunnie Hua
41.
by Taniwha 3mo ago
Viruses do not "fester" on flat surfaces, if they fester in anything it is cells
42.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
This is a vaccine that does contribute to herd immunity, if enough people get it then transmission goes to 0 and it dies out, even unvaccinated people wont get it, because of the vaccine. The article says "0 cases" in the entire p
43.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
.... and people died, lots of people died
44.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
Yup, as mentioned above the famous: x: mov -(pc), -(pc) reads an instruction from x, increments the PC to x+2, then decrements the PC back to x and reads the same instruction, then decrements it again to x-2 and writes it, then it executes
45.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
there were no GPUs at that time. What we were building in the late 80s/early 90s were the first generation of Mac graphics accelerators, really just glorified blit engines, a class of things that eventually grew into what we now call G
46.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
Yeah those low core global system variables (including a readable/writeable 0) at fixed addresses were very much a thing, they were a bad design decision made for the original Macs with almost no memory, and made running more than one
47.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
Yes, they were bugs, I think programmers (and their marketing people) were more focused on new features than performance
48.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
Well all they needed to do was erase the screen with white and draw on it, but their app's internal logic meant that they erased it more than once. I was capturing QuickDraw library calls - the low level graphics primitives, to figure
49.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
I was probably not the first to have to do that, we knew what apps our customers used, making them better was the whole point of the operation I did the architectural design for the SuperMac cards. I figured out what needed to be accelerate
50.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
To be fair this was Excell 25 years ago, may no longer be true. One of the other bugs (the Quark/ATM one) was also because of the programmers were worried about writing over stuff that hadn't been completely erased, the Quark guys
51.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
I used to be a graphics card/chip architect for macs in the early/mid 90s - our chips were the fastest, but some programs were resistant because they did stupid stuff: pagemaker invalidated the font cache every time it went thru i
52.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
Yup, they really wanted to hunt down that guy, he was involved with all the anti-scientology mailing lists
53.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
There is also the true story from the first Scientology vs. Internet clash, someone trolled them that their files were being hosted on 127.0.0.1, under a court ordered deposition they tried to find out who was running this server with their
54.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
(My guess is that it dates from the introduction of fsck which from memory was V7 or later)
55.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
I used to port Unix for a living (V6 thru SysVr3) I know it was in Vr2, and I have a man page that says "(last mod. 1/15/87)" which would likely make it SysVr1 or earlier
56.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
From memory mklost+found did exactly this
57.
by Taniwha 4mo ago
The cache coherency protocols that sit between the CPUs and DRAM always essentially "use a mutex": when a cpu wants to write it broadcasts to all the other CPUs and either gets the latest copy from whoever wrote it last and shoot
58.
by Taniwha 5mo ago
When I first started doing chip design my boss paid more for tools per year than he paid me ... now days open source tool chains are leaping ahead ... I don't need a boss (or VCs) in order to design chips
59.
by Taniwha 5mo ago
Well Gowin here I come I guess
60.
by Taniwha 5mo ago
I'm not sure they're all that simpler, the basic plumbing probably hasn't changed much, it's just that modern fabrication tech means you can hide all the complexity inside

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