cpr

172 ms·

1. 1561.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   I just love how the implicit subtext is that anyone with faith is a loony redneck. "How could they possibly believe this stuff?" Well, I'm a Harvard/Columbia-educated old-time hacker (53 now), been through several start-ups, have run my own
2. 1562.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   I always thought someone should clone Seaside in Python. Looks very intriguing.
3. 1563.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   Maybe they could run a VMware appliance with Mac OS X Server (which is legal now)? ;-)
4. 1564.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   Thanks! Yes, the 2d/3d isosurface incremental exploration machinery was all written (exceedingly tight C++) by my whiz-kid development partner. The challenge is to take an arbitrary equation in a given viewport (2d or 3d cube), find all the
5. 1565.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   Yes, they could port most of Cocoa to Windows just so they could run Xcode, but do you think that would be cost-effective for them (dozens and dozens of man-years they don't really have)? The lack of a Windows development environment doesn'
6. 1566.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   Because they don't think it's worth it to port their whole Xcode development environment to Windows? It's a heavy user of Cocoa and much Mac OS-specific technology. Because they want to (as a side effect, which can only help computer hardwa
7. 1567.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   Agreed. All this nonsense is entirely outside daily flow. I found while developing a rather deep app over the past 4-5 months (in review now) that the whole workflow was actually quite good, with little to slow one down. You can test things
8. 1568.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   Sorry, but if you went through all the steps required to actually build and ship a real application on a normal platform (Mac/Win), it'd probably seem a lot more complex, but just not in a bureaucratic way. (He said, having just gone throug
9. 1569.▲
   by cpr 18y ago

   The JS/dom debugger/inspector is from WebKit. Sad that no one really knows what's going on with WebKit.
10. 1570.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    You can do exactly the same thing using Python descriptors. No advantage to Ruby here.
11. 1571.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    "MRC"--I love it. (Those are Mark Crispin's initials/hacker signature, the inventor of the (gag) IMAP protocol, the main email underpinning these days.)
12. 1572.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    And here's a truly nifty application of it for parsing Python: http://effbot.org/zone/simple-top-down-parsing.htm . Funny how these things go in cycles: parser generators were all the rage for a few decades, and now people are rediscoveri
13. 1573.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Maybe, but the Lifestreams people are suing anyone who doesn't pony up for their patents. (E.g., Apple for Time Machine, which is a real stretch.)
14. 1574.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    What's funny is that good is expressed in infinitely diverse ways, while evil is pretty much expressed in a very narrow range. (Something of an obverse to Tolstoy's observation.)
15. 1575.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Actually, we have eight, ranging from 7 to 25. (I'm an old guy, 53.) Our kids are among the best "socialized" (as if that were the ultimate goal of life!) I've run across. Yes, having a single child would be tough on that child in terms of
16. 1576.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Well, if you look on pages 13-14 of the manual you referenced, you'll find instruction codes for PCAR, PCDR, SCDR, SCDDR, NCONS, CONS, LIST (alloc), CxxxR, CxxxXR, GET, GETL, ASSQ, ASSOC, etc. Seems like Lisp primitive instructions to me.
17. 1577.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Well, given that Sun workstations started running commercial Lisps at some "reasonable speed" around this time, that pretty much doomed Symbolics/LMI/TI's efforts. The cost differential between the specialized hardware (ca $100K) and the co
18. 1578.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    The microarchitecture really implemented Lisp primitives like cons, car, cdr, array ref as opcodes, etc. That's about as close to executing Lisp directly as you can get.
19. 1579.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    I know one shouldn't question orthodoxy, but it seems insane to me to have children and then dump them all day, from a young age, with strangers. What's the point of having them if you're not raising them?
20. 1580.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Dang, I knew I should have take up Bob Greenberg (old college buddy) on his invitation to join MS back then... ;-)
21. 1581.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    No, but there are still a lot of opportunities out there which require hardware. One idea struck me the other day: why not use your iPhone (or Android phone) as a home phone handset, when you're home and in Wifi range? That would require a
22. 1582.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    The thing these interviews never really convey is the kindness and "gentlemanliness" of this great man. I didn't know him well (I worked at a start-up (Imagen) in the early 80's that was a spinoff of the TeX project), but saw him around Sta
23. 1583.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Agreed. It's a nice college freshman first project.
24. 1584.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    No, there isn't a huge difference between Obj-C 1.x and 2.0. 2.0 brings you object properties (just syntactic sugar), object iteration (for x in ...), and garbage collection (but not on the iPhone). http://theocacao.com/document.page/510
25. 1585.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    His argument breaks down pretty quickly. It might be fine to get on your neighbor's open wifi network, but as soon as you start sharing his (logically distinct) Internet connection, you're stealing. It's no different than connecting a hose
26. 1586.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    I love the "IBM USB Optical Scroll Travel Wheel Mouse" (search ebay with those terms to see what I mean). $1-2 each (I buy them by the dozen and spread them around liberally to friends and family; when they wear out (scroll wheel gets stick
27. 1587.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    So you're not part of Ars itself but a consultant to them?
28. 1588.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    One of the commenters on his blog hit the nail on the head: The reason you've heard of Google, Amazon, etc., is that they did have these super-hero "seed hackers" as part of their startup, so they thrived. Thus, SteveY's argument about them
29. 1589.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Isn't it nice that no one really cares about running Windows apps any more? But if you need to, for some reason (e.g., testing IE6/7/8), and if you're using a Mac, use VMware Fusion. It's pretty simple.
30. 1590.▲
    by cpr 18y ago

    Another theory is Jeff Dean: http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html .