dwheeler

78 ms·

811.
by dwheeler 7y ago
Thanks! I think it's important to note that to my knowledge, no lies were told. Those in organizations who delved into the details found that yes, it's a supercomputer. It's a really obsolete one. But it is more capable tha
812.
by dwheeler 7y ago
I do have a story, I hope it's interesting. The CDC 6600 was used as the student mainframe for George Mason University (GMU) in Northern Virginia in the 1980s. For engineering classes (e.g., electronics engineering) the 6600 was sti
813.
by dwheeler 7y ago
> That's insane. What's even more insane is that a bit over 20 years later homecomputers reached that frequency. And in the next decade they reached over 100 MHz. The CDCs still had a good run. This line was originally released
814.
by dwheeler 7y ago
Very fun. It turns out that it is easy to implement a natural deduction system using a system based on Hilbert's approach. A discussion on this for metamath's set.mm is here: http://us.metamath.org/mpeuni/mmna
815.
by dwheeler 7y ago
I used and programmed the 6600, including in assembly language. They were incredibly fast for the time at numerical calculation. I used them for electronics simulations in SPICE, and they were great for that. However, they had 60 bit words
816.
by dwheeler 7y ago
A lot of that stuff is overtaken by events, but I clearly say that the essay was written in 2009. Nevertheless, if you wanted to see what I wrote in 2009, there it is. It hasn't disappeared from The Ether, there's a disturbingly l
817.
by dwheeler 7y ago
My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. ht
818.
by dwheeler 7y ago
Railroader and Brakeman compensate for this by not being generic analysis tools for Ruby, but instead focusing specifically only on Ruby on Rails. Because Ruby on Rails has a lot of additional conventions, it's much easier to build a s
819.
by dwheeler 7y ago
My understanding is that they've been viewed by many of their populace as competent in gaining substantial economic growth. Many other countries have had far less growth than China in the last few decades.
820.
by dwheeler 7y ago
If you're using Ruby on Rails, you should be using a static code analyzer to look for vulnerabilities. Please take a look at Railroader, an OSS tool I maintain that does this (and contributors are wanted!): https://railroade
821.
by dwheeler 7y ago
Different tools are better at different things. Shell is required to be basically everywhere. It's part of POSIX. It's also standardized. Shell scripts written 30 years ago still work, and will probably work 30 years from now to
822.
by dwheeler 7y ago
Um, no. Curl-to-shell is bad. Check this out: https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-b...
823.
by dwheeler 7y ago
It's not just bash, this is true for all POSIX shells (including dash, bash, ksh, and so on). If you're doing a lot of complex calculations, shells are the wrong tool for the job. But if it's a relatively small program whose
824.
by dwheeler 7y ago
I completely agree that you should run 1+ license checkers in your CI process, just like you should check anything else in your CI process that you care about. In the CII Best Practices badge project we use both the "license_finder&q
825.
by dwheeler 7y ago
> Dependencies are cattle, not pets. That doesn't make any sense. That analogy works for mostly-identical computers, where if your software won't run on one computer you can just use another mostly-identical computer. Almost by
826.
by dwheeler 7y ago
Exactly, I thought the same thing myself. See, that wasn't so hard!! I'll be here all week, try the lamb.
827.
by dwheeler 7y ago
> In years gone by, it was common practice to look inside archive files to inspect README files and suchlike. That's true, I did it many times. But those years are long ago. Good riddance. Most of the time today, for most people, a
828.
by dwheeler 7y ago
The first part is a standard BSD license, however it has a weird extra restriction. It cannot be sold or published in printed form. That is a restriction on use that almost certainly makes it not open source software. It certainly isn&#x
829.
by dwheeler 7y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't see why anyone should waste a moment with a proprietary operating system with such limited use. If you need a simple educational operating system with a book, Minux is available and open source software. If
830.
by dwheeler 7y ago
I read it, I don't buy it in general. In most use cases we need serious safety margins. Their "attacks always get better" section downplays serious issues. First, it seems extreme hubris to think that something can't eve
831.
by dwheeler 7y ago
In addition to Creative Computing, 1980: "How to Fit a Large Program Into a Small Machine" by Blank/Galley There were at least two other articles published at the time that provided a lot of details: * IEEE Computer, 1979: &q
832.
by dwheeler 7y ago
> So, even if highfalutin phrases like “virtual machine” weren’t yet tripping off the tongue of the average bedroom hacker, it wasn’t hard to divine what Infocom must be doing in the broad strokes. The specifics, however, were another ma
833.
by dwheeler 7y ago
When money is paid for something, then the service needs to be rendered or the money returned. Everything else is fraud. If Cerberus doesn't like lifetime licenses, they need to at least return the money paid for those licenses. I susp
834.
by dwheeler 7y ago
It is absolutely true. I don't know of any current computer that comes close to the low latency of the 8-bit Apple //e for example. Here's a survey: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-mod
835.
by dwheeler 7y ago
If you're interested, I suggest looking at "readable Lisp". Details here: https://readable.sourceforge.io/
836.
by dwheeler 7y ago
Forth-2012's local variable support includes support for {: ... :}. A "|" within this separates parameters (which are loaded from passed parameters) from local variables. If I understand the spec correctly, it looks like yo
837.
by dwheeler 7y ago
We can certainly quibble about the names given in a standard, but "local" is the term the Forth specification uses, so that's what I'm going with. > All variables in Forth are local variables. That's true in some
838.
by dwheeler 7y ago
> There are other ways to success. Absolutely. I've played with Forth many times, and enjoyed it. But when it comes to building systems that people pay to develop & maintain, I haven't found any use cases recently. No d
839.
by dwheeler 7y ago
I mentioned the book "Starting Forth". You can get a lightly-updated version of the book for free here: https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/ There are other books about Forth, but this one is really its own
840.
by dwheeler 7y ago
That's a plausible use case. Question is, if the engineer goes away, how long would it take to replace him? Languages do not take too long to learn, but Forth programs are often hard for others to read. I think most people prefer cross

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