drfuchs

14 ms·

121.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Less well remembered is the companion device, seen in a few of the pictures, with 5 piano-like keys for your left hand to rest on. The idea was that you could “play” 31 different “chords” instead of typing on a keyboard (with some sort of
122.
by drfuchs 4y ago
The cover of Mad Magazine #198, when they were finally forced to mess up the aesthetics with a UPC barcode, is instructive: https://archive.org/details/mad-magazine-198-1978
123.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Make sure to check out the dedication!
124.
by drfuchs 4y ago
In the charming 1988 Best Foreign Film "Cinema Paradiso," set in a small pre-war Italian town, the projectionist has to preview every imported American film for the local priest, who sits and rings a bell at each scene containing
125.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Easy: I have an array with 256 elements. And I want to store the indexes of various elements of the array off in another data structure. So many of them, in fact, that it’s important that the index values each fit into a byte. So, I want t
126.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Cf. Chuck Berry’s “Riding Along In My Automobile.”
127.
by drfuchs 4y ago
The convention of using "ABCDEF" didn't get established until well after the LGP-30 was designed in the 1950's. The Wikipedia entry on "Hexadecimal" says "The now-current notation using the letters A to F
128.
by drfuchs 4y ago
The reason for FGJKQW is simple: Look at the list of single-letter mnemonics for the 16 opcodes (called “orders” in the manual you cite). Sort them alphabetically, and look for the first six letters that are unused. Viola! (Of course, the p
129.
by drfuchs 4y ago
On my 2015 Mac, using just a single core, TeX composes the entire 495-page TeXbook in under 0.2 seconds, or about 0.4 milliseconds per page. That includes reading the 1.3Mb input file, evaluating all macros and such, doing all line-breaking
130.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Troy, watch out you don't open yourself up for an attack from the bad guys: They'll start sending you solicitations with ReplyTo addresses of industry honeypots, and before you know it, you'll become a known spammer and your
131.
by drfuchs 4y ago
While the main body of a Hollerith card was invariably a light tan, it was typical to have a quarter-inch strip of color across the top. The idea was that you could tell the payroll program (purple) from the inventory program (green). It
132.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Lamport says that either pronunciation is acceptable, and back when he gave talks about LaTeX, he would carefully switch back and forth between "ay" and "ah" each time he uttered "LaTeX". Or so he claims.
133.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Could be faster still if it didn't calloc/free a "Fingerprint" buffer each time you add or query an entry. Since its individual BloomFilters are not thread-safe anyway, it could allocate the buffer once at BloomFilter cr
134.
by drfuchs 4y ago
And how much software is used to generate what’s inside them; search for “Pentium FDIV bug”.
135.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Indeed. In 1986, Knuth was exclusively using the SAIL DEC10, running the WAITS OS. This environment limited him to approximately half a megabyte of data space (heap plus stack plus globals), and half a megabyte of code space. All statical
136.
by drfuchs 4y ago
All sorts of hash functions expect 64-bit intermediate values. Worse, these algorithms are liable to go haywire, and return very-not-randomized results if intermediate values are silently truncated to 56 bits (or magically become floating-
137.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Then again, I remember when your list of "great" features was exactly what was perceived as making "cars insanely expensive" and unreliable at the time. And a generation or two earlier, it was seatbelts, headrests, fuel
138.
by drfuchs 4y ago
The IBM 360 had BCT back in 1964. Rumor had it that it was created for Fortran DO statements (“for-loops”), but IBM’s compiler never emitted it. “The BCT instruction subtracts 1 from the value of the contents of the target register specifi
139.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Yikes; the author is simply wrong about TeX in the quote about squaring the width difference (there is some cubing going on, but of space stretch and shrink ratios of the natural space width specified per-font). He also seems to imply that
140.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Just wait til you see City Lights! Impossible not to cry at the end.
141.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Still a lot better than having you show up and then get laid off a week later. Typically happens in larger companies where your boss’s boss doesn’t know that his boss’s boss is about to lop off your department because her boss’s boss has
142.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Anybody care to speculate on the chance that Twitter forces their sale to him, and then TSLA goes down far enough that Musk gets a margin call on the loan he's using to finance the purchase, and he loses everything? Or at least half of
143.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Well, the Q*bert Instruction Manual, top of page numbered "17", shows Vbattery powering two "Scratch Pad Memory" RAM chips. This is typically where the "High Scores" are stored in anticipation of your local a
144.
by drfuchs 4y ago
http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_David%20Thiel.ht... has a better description of Q*Bert's cussing than minute 35 of the video: MT: You came up with the idea of using the random phonemes of a speech chip
145.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Yeah, but there’s 55 pounds of cocaine in the trunk.
146.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Soccer is obvious? Explain the details of the “offside” rule to us USAmericans again? Which is not to say that the concept of baseball’s “forced base” isn’t incomprehensible to Europeans, never mind “tagging up”. And don’t even bother w
147.
by drfuchs 4y ago
I’d argue that those lines were mysterious until the subsequent closing shot that functions as the visual punch line. At least ten-year-old me didn’t get the earlier hints.
148.
by drfuchs 4y ago
[Spoiler Alert:] Original 1968 “Planet of the Apes”? It's a great visual reveal in the last moments of the film; no dialog needed.
149.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Exactly. It has nothing to do with hardware. I am complaining about the inconsistency in the single hex digit, two ascii character, view. Why don't people who claim to prefer little-endianness actually follow through and display these
150.
by drfuchs 4y ago
Ok, sorry I said "0x89ABCDEF" rather than "0x89 0xAB 0xCD OxEF" to make it clear that it is not "already one quantity", but an ordered sequence of four bytes (though it is how p/x displays it). How about t

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