ThomasBHickey

10 ms·

31.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
When someone says 'in about 5 years' it means they have no idea when.
32.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
I've read that people that deliver mail don't appreciate the bees.
33.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
Yeah, I saw a lot of those. Evidently people still use them with new lenses. I've read that its focal plane shutter made race cars look like they have oval wheels, something that got picked up in cartoons to show speed.
34.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
My father (Roy E. Hickey) worked for Graflex for many years as an engineer and designed several of the audio-visual products mentioned in the article. He said the company never made money after it moved to Pittsford (a Rochester suburb). I
35.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
WASM can be compiled to native code.
36.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
This whole discussion reminds me of work we did in the early 80's trying to convert typesetting tapes into TeX/Metafont for display/printing. One the things we tried was converting scanned images into rectangles which could
37.
by ThomasBHickey 6y ago
Another list: https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n82139094/
38.
by ThomasBHickey 6y ago
Being able to embed assembly instructions directly in the code gave much needed access to all the PDP-10 byte manipulation instruction. I loved BLISS, but some had trouble with the pesky dots needed to indicate value of rather than address
39.
by ThomasBHickey 6y ago
There's an article in Wikipedia about a galaxy and its relative distance that touches on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDF_423
40.
by ThomasBHickey 6y ago
The three day book quarantine cited may have come from this study: https://www.webjunction.org/news/webjunction/test1-results.h... , https://www.webjunction.org/content/dam/WebJunction&#x2
41.
by ThomasBHickey 6y ago
Probably https://ams.nasa.gov/ , a particle detector on the space station
42.
by ThomasBHickey 6y ago
Douglas Hofstadter's work might qualify
43.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
Long ago I was doing some analysis on a Sigma 5/CP-V machine. One of the few high level languages available was Xerox APL. For those without an APL keyboard they provided ASCII replacements (I don't rember what they were, but loo
44.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
Mentioned only in passing as one of the languages that Java sqashed.
45.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
I always thought that was a major miscalculation by the Ada project. All they thought about was defense contractors and their approach of relying on commercial implementions (priced for those contractors) made it unused in academic environ
46.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
Looking back at ALGOL-68, it looks like comparatively small language compared to many of our current languages, e.g. Java, C++ and Python. I loved the definition of it, but never got to use it.
47.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
Yup
48.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6... "500+ years under proper storage conditions"
49.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
With an interesting and functional set of 'byte' instructions where you could specify the number of bits per chunk. IIFRC 6 or 9 bits were typically used for characters, but I think there was a 5 bit character set in use as well.
50.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
640 acres/square mile
51.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
I still have one of the original Apollo/Domain (DN300?) motherboards. It has two Motorola MC68000L8 chips on it. It was explained to me that Apollo found they needed both of them to make virtual memory work. 32 bit data width, 16
52.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
I always thought Java should have just used Tk rather than developing AWT, which never worked very well.
53.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
20% is the energy gain of particles involved in each energy transfer, total energy available is 29% of the black hole's rotational energy according to Wikipedia.
54.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
Metafont supports both stroke-based and outlined fonts.
55.
by ThomasBHickey 7y ago
Not exactly: "Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology." IANAL, but I have no idea what that means.
56.
by ThomasBHickey 8y ago
There is GNAT https://www.gnu.org/software/gnat
57.
by ThomasBHickey 8y ago
I watched the whole Ada process (a series of reports that developed into the language spec). While often criticized at the time of being 'designed by committee' that wasn't really the case, but did have a lot of people criti
58.
by ThomasBHickey 8y ago
APL (or at least J) actually works quite well for string processing.
59.
by ThomasBHickey 8y ago
I started coding for fun while an undergraduate in the late 60's and spent much of my time coding until I recently retired, except for one year when I dedicated my time to directing a project that led to a major system for the company.
60.
by ThomasBHickey 8y ago
I knew Larry Roberts in the mid 1980's when he was on the Board of OCLC (a library network). At the time he was president of a company on the west coast of the US and another on the east coast. He claimed to visit both of them every

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