greenbit

5 ms·

31.
by greenbit 4mo ago
Maybe it's the very molecules that the live cells were using, just doing their thing without the cells. Cells concentrate things by confining them in a small volume, but otoh, if you have damp particles, the thin water layer on the par
32.
by greenbit 4mo ago
This is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.
33.
by greenbit 4mo ago
A G15 would probably have blown the doors off the Burroughs 205, but the 205 had way more blinkenlights.
34.
by greenbit 4mo ago
CDs turned out to be terrible for long term storage, because the actual bits are pits in the very thin aluminum layer that's bonded to one side of the transparent polycarbonate disk. The back side of that aluminum often had nothing but
35.
by greenbit 5mo ago
You know, that's possible, I wouldn't be surprised. This was 20 years ago. I only recall a sense that the w2k system seemed more complicated than XP in that area.
36.
by greenbit 5mo ago
I am continually amazed at the number of my nerdy colleagues who have never even heard of Pratchett, particularly when it's someone who's into D&D or otherwise enthusiastic about Tolken-esque works. Imagine the dry humor of Hi
37.
by greenbit 5mo ago
What's that phrase, "derivative work" or something?
38.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Look closely, you'll notice there's no network interface. The only vulnerability in a system like that is physical access by malicious individuals. About the worst mal-ware it can have is a boot sector that installs a "termin
39.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Except for "the hive". Remember the hive? Sort of an alternate registry, in addition to the actual registry. Granted, it was pretty invisible, until it got corrupted. I had a win2k machine that was my daily (at home) that was fine
40.
by greenbit 5mo ago
"[..] card readers for BASIC" Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, w
41.
by greenbit 5mo ago
I remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in
42.
by greenbit 5mo ago
And for such simple processors and systems no less! No descriptor tables to deal with, no memory management to configure. These days it takes a little processor inside the main processor, just to get things started. Those were golden times.
43.
by greenbit 5mo ago
And here I was thinking how it would be fun to make a decoder for those 9 warbleys in the middle.
44.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Indeed, even if I don't do anything else with my HF rig, usually I'll check good old CHU. Can't always make out the verbal parts, but those tones usually cut through. Been setting my clocks by CHU for literally decades. Going
45.
by greenbit 5mo ago
I recall seeing it just stop dead center, quite bright. Immediately just turned the machine off, but that did seem to account for why a couple of the other machines in the room had small round-ish phosphors burns right in that spot
46.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Found a schematic for the 4016/4032 at https://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/schematics/computers... The vertical deflection drive appears to have some feedback, so maybe that could constitute an
47.
by greenbit 5mo ago
The Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE
48.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Too many to mention, but this was unreasonably amusing command_not_found_handle() { echo ?SN ERROR }
49.
by greenbit 5mo ago
I'd click on that
50.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Oddball, oddball. They keep using that word. What constitutes an 'oddball tone'? OK, so I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Evidently they play a series of beeps all at the same pitch except for the occasional oddball at a
51.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Yes. That.
52.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Or maybe just before that, when they started wearing digital watches.
53.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Didn't see the Burroughs Datatron B205 in there. Not sure how many were built, so maybe it's not important enough, but it had a certain kind of fame, e.g. https://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=45
54.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Instead of 'some', how about 'any'? So if you went with 1940s/50s shouty-case, you'd have ALL, ANY, NALL, NANY, ODD, & EVEN.
55.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Who gets to do the customizing though? Suspecting that "auto hide the taskbar" will suddenly become more popular. Oh no! "Your taskbar buttons will be back after these important messages"
56.
by greenbit 5mo ago
Wonderful, can't wait to be ambushed by Son of Clippy. Should have anticipated these kinds of shenanigans.
57.
by greenbit 6mo ago
All those HR Giger artworks, yes, Omni had style
58.
by greenbit 6mo ago
Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it&#x27
59.
by greenbit 6mo ago
Watch out, every little map zoom or slide seems to put another url in your browser history. Not exaggerating here, must have found over 100 of them after just a minute or so of playing with the page
60.
by greenbit 6mo ago
".. meat doesn't scale" For better or worse, that pretty much captures everthing you need to know about the remainder of your s/w career these days, if you think about it

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