jhbadger

10 ms·

211.
by jhbadger 7mo ago
Maybe I am just old, but I have absolutely no idea what this passage is about -- why would people be fiddling with Bluetooth on a date and why would it cause them to forget their network? >"Bluetooth does not work," Kravitz sai
212.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
You might not like this type of interface, but it is hardly "nonsensical". In the 1990s this sort of text-based GUI was common in DOS programs, such as Borland's "Turbo" languages and the original pre-Windows FoxPro
213.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
Or the (mostly forgotten) scripting language Pike (derived from the internal language of a MUD) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language)
214.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
The TrueType fonts might not look like the screen fonts, but weirdly, I think it works for this use because it reminds me of "screenshots" in books and manuals from the era which weren't in general literal screenshots but wer
215.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
I agree that opening up opportunities for other futures is good, but I don't think Dune was a good example of that even if you like the story -- Dune simply avoided the issue by assuming the future would implausibly turn into the past
216.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
The "bad" is referring to the floppies, not the ad. The ad with the robots at dinner was about buying Maxwell floppies (which were considerably more expensive than no-name floppies) because otherwise the machines might "eat y
217.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
Just a reminder for those who may be interested. WigglyPaint is implemented in Decker, an homage to Hypercard that runs on modern operating systems (both by John Earnest).
218.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
To be fair, in the 1980s thanks to the Forth Interest Group (FIG), free implementations of Forth existed for most platforms at a time when most programming languages were commercial products selling for $100 or more (in 1980s dollars). It&#
219.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
There's a great 1986 book "Designing and Programming Personal Expert Systems" by Feucht and Townsend that implements expert systems in Forth (and in the process, much of the capability of Prolog and Lisp).
220.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
It all depends on whether the paper fits the journal. Minor journals serve a useful service as a repository for minor results. And minor results are still worth publishing because they might provide a detail or technique later needed for a
221.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
And "if a clod be washed away by the C" which is a reference to John Donne's poem that introduced the phrases "No man is an island" and "for whom the bell tolls".
222.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
Yes, it certainly sells more than tires. It is basically a WalMart style discount store. And yes, it owns several other chains as well. But still, he says he's never been to Canada, and Canadian Tire and the other chains aren't op
223.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
When you get stuck, try random directions. That's what my robot vacuum does.
224.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
But the fancy org-babel stuff is 90% of the reason I use org -- and that's only on Emacs as far as I know.
225.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
Depends on how you define "normies". Sure, students happily napstered away, but a lot of adults (even those with no financial stake in the music industry) seriously believed the claims of the music executives that this "pirac
226.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
There's people who live in Tijuana, Mexico and work in San Diego, California and that's way worse than Canada/USA in terms of time and hassle. Not something I'd want to do, but then I wouldn't want to live in Connec
227.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
I love Paged Out -- it's basically the only modern equivalent to 1980s BYTE or Dr. Dobbs Journal today.
228.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
I'm not sure I like merging translations together. They really make a difference, not like merging irrelevant things like paperback vs hardcover. A lot of classic literature from non-English originals (and I assume vice versa) suffers
229.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
It also annoyed me that the Commodore 64s used for their online service were shown with DOS prompts. I think the set designers thought "Commodore 64s are old; old computers ran DOS; therefore Commodore 64s ran DOS"
230.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
He's basically supposed to be a Steve Jobs character - manipulative, with weak technical knowledge, but with high charisma. The part where he takes credit for Gordon's work is very much a reference to the Jobs/Wozniak relatio
231.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
There is also Decker ( https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker ) that is open source and feels much more "Hypercardy", although the retro dithering asthetic may put some people off.
232.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
It's known over here (to the degree that it is at all) for being the source of the THX name that Lucas later used for his digital sound system. But the movie is interesting in itself as an early pre-fame Lucas movie.
233.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
In the 1990s, entire GUI applications would be written in Tcl/Tk -- not just the frontend -- the entire thing.
234.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
As someone has brought up, Transputers (an early parallel architecture) was a thing in the 1980s because people thought CPU speed was reaching a plateau. They were kind of right (which is why modern CPUs are multicore) but were a decade or
235.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
It was procedural at least in the sense that you couldn't store the data for all the planets in memory (or even store it on disk) on the 1980s systems it ran on. So you needed a way to generate the data on the fly.
236.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
It is really, really easy to write a Forth interpreter (You can write a simple one in an afternoon). It's often the first software written for an architecture. The structure of Forth means that the hardware-dependent parts are containe
237.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
I think it was lost on a lot of the audience at the time as well, who saw Beavis and Butthead as cool rather than a critique of anti-intellectualism. That's the problem with satire in general -- no position is so absurd that somebody w
238.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
I think it is pretty unreasonable to call CP/M "primitive beyond belief". It was basically equivalent to MS-DOS in capability -- after all, MS-DOS was basically an unlicensed clone of CP/M for the 8086.
239.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
That's not what a social contract is you are thinking of a legal contract, something very different. A social contract is by definition, implicit rather than explicit.
240.
by jhbadger 8mo ago
Well, a lot of Batman also expressly questions whether Batman is really good and emphasizes the point that he became Batman because of the trauma of seeing his parents murdered. Given that most of the villains he fights also have a tragic b

More ›