guidoism

17 ms·

1. 211.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   I discovered Kidder's book while I was digging into what microcode actually was. I had been thinking about what a huge impedance mismatch it was to write in C targeting an abstract machine that resembles of a PDP-11 and expecting the C
2. 212.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   I came across that book at a used book store while I was in college (back in the mid-90s). I thought it was hilarious. I couldn't put it down.
3. 213.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   It’s not that books are better than YouTube, in many cases (like visualizing math) books are much worse than video, but for a lot of topics books are the only source that goes in depth on a topic. It won’t necessarily be the case a hundred
4. 214.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   And Pascal was basically just an improved ALGOL which in part was designed to come up with a common notation to communicate algorithms in journal articles. The negative issues aren’t so bad in that light.
5. 215.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   This exactly. I read the essay and said to myself “meh”. Having a phone that I can’t mess up is actually pretty dang nice. High performance computing is definitely locked down. An M1 Mac is pretty dang nice. But for general purpose computin
6. 216.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   I mean, yeah, sure. But if solving a problem is your goal, not "being number 1" or whatever then who cares about your competition. You are (hopefully) in competition against problems and reality, not other companies.
7. 217.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   Somewhat related to the discussion: Why do start-up's need so much money? We live in a world where a software start-up needs basically $0 in cap ex. If the founders don't have existing financial obligations and can live in a place
8. 218.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   Not sure this is an indictment of git. It still works great without central servers (unlike svn) but GitHub just makes it nicer for most people. And with GitHub the wiki is just a git repo so I’m guessing it would be easy to take with you.
9. 219.▲
   by guidoism 6y ago

   > I know this is a trap, but I’m tired and don’t have the energy to be a server admin for something that’s held together with scotch tape and prayers when I’m really supposed to be writing OpenGL code. OMG I feel heard. I feel like this
10. 220.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    I see what you are saying but I think it misses the point. We need a filesystem right now because data disappears from RAM when electricity goes away. With persistent memory you don't need that extra serialization/deserializatio
11. 221.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Yeah I think the whole “need to reboot to get to a clean state” is maybe a bug not a feature. It is certainly possible to build systems that can run for years or decades. I’m guessing that persistent memory will require us to think about ch
12. 222.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    I'm disappointed. Google actually scanned a huge number of newspaper microfilm and microfiche back in 2010-11: https://news.google.com/newspapers It's an amazing resource, but it's hidden away and researchers
13. 223.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    The basic concept is that you create a wave that moves at the speed of sound and when it reaches the end you have a microphone which picks up the signal and retransmits it through the coil. Pretty ingenious way to store information!
14. 224.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    This is a really cool video. They are recreating the EDSAC and the memory it used is really weird. Originally they used mercury but because it's so expensive and difficult to work with they decided to go with nickel wires which is a si
15. 225.▲
    Recreation of EDSAC delay line storage (2020) [video](youtube.com)

    5 points by guidoism 6y ago|2 comments
16. 226.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    https://planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/warnock_camelot.pdf
17. 227.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    At the junior programmer levels yes that can be true. At the principal engineer levels it’s not true. At that level you have to invent new ways of doing things when existing ways don’t cut it. Looking into the past is super charging.
18. 228.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Fortunately people are putting up some of that early work: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects
19. 229.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    I’ve been saying the same thing so much that I should probably just get it tattooed on my forehead. It’s crazy to think about the carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere in order to do the same computations over and over again. Same goes
20. 230.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    This this this. We’ve sort of settled on the architecture of our “stack” mostly by historical accident. It has constantly been the local maxima for various variables throughout our short history. And because of the inertia of the mass of wh
21. 231.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    I was going to say the same thing but it’s probably a cardboard box filled with paper. Somebody who understands the stuff needs to spend the time to go through it and scan it and catalog it. And given the time crunch for the test of Vol 4,
22. 232.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Meh. Put in some good subwoofers and you’ll never know the difference. :) I have been (only half jokingly) planning a electrification of an old 2-stroke Vespa or Lambretta and decided that it wouldn’t feel right unless it shook like a two s
23. 233.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Thank you. I was thinking of the big and expensive computers that people used before mini computers and microcomputers. What was so special about their hardware and software? The reason it’s interesting to me is that we as a community have
24. 234.▲
    I've never used a mainframe, what makes them great, what can we learn from them?

    2 points by guidoism 6y ago|4 comments
25. 235.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Several of the boards from Friendly ELEC have dual ethernet: https://www.friendlyarm.com
26. 236.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Just curious, are companies that conspire to fraud allowed to continue working on projects that require clearance?
27. 237.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Something missing on the list that I found out a few years ago: Hire a personal stylist to help you find what kind of clothing works for you. This is especially helpful to the stereotypical geeky male nerd like me. It helped me a lot to go
28. 238.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    I reeeeally don't want to go down this rathole but a few days ago when my kids were having problems connecting to YouTube on both wifi and LTE I had begun to think that Trump pulled the 1. Stop Internet, 2. Attempt Coup thing.
29. 239.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    I've noticed references to my.name@google.com instead of my real address my.name@gmail.com — That doesn't seem good.
30. 240.▲
    by guidoism 6y ago

    Apple was not starting from scratch, they used NeXT for software and ARM for hardware. Those are both from the 1980s.