buescher

41 ms·

211.
by buescher 2y ago
>I think it's best to think of this as an overextended metaphor It may be best, I agree, but it's not what people do. I've seen enough people with advanced degrees take things like FMEA risk priority numbers or adding up
212.
by buescher 2y ago
REI in the US is sort of like that.
213.
by buescher 2y ago
Language snobs and 1990s OO snobs really love to hate on tcl - yeah everything is a string or a command, and the OO extensions were kind of kludgy - but there's a design ethos to the ecosystem that is really special. Ditch tkinter, wh
214.
by buescher 2y ago
Tk was pretty usable for tcl/tk use cases on Mac by later 7.x releases, say 1996 or so. Still hard to get a really native UX on Windows or Mac though. HyperCard was already on its way out. 30 years ago is maybe closer than you think
215.
by buescher 2y ago
That would be fun. Give Iris Explorer a spin - the demos make any SGI seem like a supercomputer. (Better on an Indigo2 or Octane, but hey) I did real work in Octave + gnuplot on SGI machines of the era but I'd be surprised if recent
216.
by buescher 2y ago
Well, Amazon did Amazon, right? So it's not impossible to be Amazon. They had had a catalog operation and by some accounts class-leading (for the time) information systems. They had Prodigy and more or less successfully pivoted into
217.
by buescher 2y ago
If you click through to the github, it's the same guy from X11-Basic. Looks like he wrote it for the ONE-V3.
218.
by buescher 2y ago
Now I want to know what the most hackable US model was.
219.
by buescher 2y ago
>part of the department store experience is the relative expertise of staff in each department That's been unusual in the United States for at least a generation. Nordstrom is a notable exception. Department stores have shed depar
220.
by buescher 2y ago
Well, Amazon was a venture-funded startup, so sure, but Home Depot and Lowes? Other companies managed under similar constraints. Sears, on the other hand, introduced and successfully marketed the Discover card during that era, which is sti
221.
by buescher 2y ago
Sears managed to miss both the opportunity to be Amazon and the opportunity to be Home Depot. At some point you have to wonder how much luck was really involved.
222.
by buescher 2y ago
Walmart and Target are discount department stores, which is a different niche. K-mart is closing their last store, incidentally. There used to be more of them, too, and more regional ones.
223.
by buescher 2y ago
For the displays? Rarely. But as salespeople, well, that too. There's probably a whole lot to unpack in the why of that, but there just aren't as many young people, more of them are fat, and on the whole people don't dres
224.
by buescher 2y ago
Suburban malls were really disruptive to the dry goods industry - in the sixties. Well-run stores adapted fast to needing have anchor stores at malls. I wonder how things would have played out differently if the generation that computeriz
225.
by buescher 2y ago
Big box stores are really qualitatively different from what a department store was - although the department store's brilliant marketing innovation of letting customers handle the merchandise as if it was already theirs led to big box
226.
by buescher 2y ago
Interesting to know. These were so commonplace but it's been a while since I've seen one. I was struck by the design while reading the article. I almost want one, but I so rarely use scotch tape...
227.
by buescher 2y ago
Thank Knuth for TeX or good scientific typesetting would be a nice thing the Victorians had.
228.
by buescher 2y ago
People still win Nobel prizes (LIGO, for example) using interferometers. It’s arguably the single greatest invention in experimental physics.
229.
by buescher 2y ago
Atari missed the 1982 Christmas season with their cost-reduced XL models that were potentially competitive with the C64. The 8-bit line never recovered from that.
230.
by buescher 2y ago
That’s funny. The flip side is that the plc folks have an equally hard time understanding the cost, time, and expertise involved in custom embedded designs for volume production.
231.
by buescher 2y ago
I'm not the GP but my guess is "if all I have is a hammer" - i.e. the same reasons you might prototype something with Arduino that you would make permanent with a timer relay. Why not prototype with a timer relay ffs? Well,
232.
by buescher 2y ago
Somewhere along the way I picked up that it wasn't very long ago that a whole lot of the jobs out there for mechanical engineers were designing cam-and-gear mechanisms for timing/sequencing in industrial automation.
233.
by buescher 2y ago
The PLC developer experience makes it possible for average technicians to do some things (like, things people typically use PLCs for) in days that would take average embedded C programmers weeks. It's worth taking a look at.
234.
by buescher 2y ago
I remember the bragging point on the RTX2000 in the very late eighties was "a MIP per megahertz".
235.
by buescher 2y ago
What I'd really like to see is the curve! There's usually two "sweet spots", right? The minimum you should spend, and what you should expect at that point, and the point of diminishing returns, and what you should expe
236.
by buescher 2y ago
"Beta Code was developed by David W. Packard" (not that David Packard, but his son). Neat.
237.
by buescher 2y ago
>That's because I worked with the actual lift controllers. They have TONS of additional states, like "door jammed". Or "elevator takes too long to move between floors", or "failed to transition to high speed
238.
by buescher 2y ago
Of course, there are plenty of things that are useful in practice that cannot model quicksort, or that would require you to implement stacks and recursion in awkward Turing-tarpit ways. There's nothing inherently "unsafe" abo
239.
by buescher 2y ago
I've enjoyed your critique of Drakon and its proponents so far, but it's very typical for real-time safety-critical systems to have coding standards in place that prohibit recursion; one example is MISRA.
240.
by buescher 2y ago
I really like two things about the Drakon docs I've perused: 1) They show how to draw a really clean flowchart, which is a bit of a lost art. I'm not a big fan of flowcharts - IME it seems like the biggest fans are, weirdly, mech

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