kabdib

27 ms·

301.
by kabdib 5y ago
Well, they were clearly upset at losing the contract. But mostly they were trying to say, "Okay, you probably have a guy who can do that. But it will be a buggy mess and it will go better if you don't give that dev permission to b
302.
by kabdib 5y ago
The Mac you compiled that on likely had a 5Mhz (yes, FIVE MEGAHERTZ) SCSI bus for its disk I/O. And none of the headers had "#pragma once" . . . Was QuickDraw GX also known as Skia, perhaps earlier in its life?
303.
by kabdib 5y ago
I forget what happened to the Green Hills folks, but the official MPW C compiler was an offshoot of the MPW Pascal compiler, and was written by Roger Lawrence at Apple in about a year (around 1987-1988) largely as a reaction to what he thou
304.
by kabdib 5y ago
I use FB to keep track of a few old friends, a couple of online "clubs", and to just kind of monitor the goings-on and general sense-of-the-crazy from That Side of the Family (if you have one of those, you know what I mean). FB is
305.
by kabdib 5y ago
The vanilla 68000 can definitely use an MMU. I think you're conflating "can handle a general fault" and "does address translation". Some PDP-11s ran Unix just fine with MMUs that didn't generate page faults (th
306.
by kabdib 5y ago
I've helped put easter eggs into sooo many products. Exhortations from management ("... firing offense") simply made us hide them much, much better. One product I worked on (ahem, no names) we had written an easter egg and ho
307.
by kabdib 5y ago
Yup. Why use the operating system's async I/O system when you can simply burn a thread and do blocking I/O? </snark> Been down that primrose path, have the road rash to prove it. mmap() is great until you realize t
308.
by kabdib 5y ago
I had ten years prepaid premium on LastPass, being an early adopter (it was a good product and a good price at the time). After they were acquired, LogMeIn was quite happy to charge my credit card for the premium service, for several years
309.
by kabdib 5y ago
> vastly more capable than JWST ... not at the same wavelengths. The earth's atmosphere is largely opaque to IR, for instance.
310.
by kabdib 5y ago
A while ago I worked on the 2FA access feature of a large online service. The fun crypto-related and login-path stuff took maybe two weeks. The remaining months were all about account recovery. It's really hard to do well, and unless y
311.
by kabdib 5y ago
As an early LastPass adopter, I paid for about ten years of their Premium tier (it was pretty cheap early on). After they were sold the first time, it took them several years to stop billing me every year anyway, so I've still got abou
312.
by kabdib 5y ago
My dad was a scientist (an ecologist), and growing up I got second-hand exposure to the scientific community through his friends, cow-orkers and the stories he brought home. The weird, somehow collegial "you scratch my back and I'
313.
by kabdib 5y ago
Walter Isaacson's The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race . Reading about how the Crispr and mRNA vaccine development happened was gripping.
314.
by kabdib 5y ago
There are OS internals books that document this kind of thing (e.g., various books on FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS, etc.). You can also learn a lot just by reading the specifications for various object file formats, or the source code to tools l
315.
by kabdib 5y ago
Typo early in the format documentation, where the text has an example: (byte & 0x1F) >> 3 should probably be ((byte >> 3) & 0x1f) ... or something like that.
316.
by kabdib 5y ago
Because the only unsolved problem in logging libraries is: "When do I stop adding features?" Decent logging is surprisingly complicated, but it's not "We need an arrrchitecturreee! for infinitely configurable logging o
317.
by kabdib 5y ago
Local authorities can get a warrant. They can also open packages deemed suspicious, without a warrant. I'd expect packages from out-of-state pharmacies would be deemed "suspicious" and searched. And there's always the ha
318.
by kabdib 5y ago
Quick story. As I understand it, the UI folks at Nintendo who were working on the Wii controller did user testing, of course. In one test, they would hand a new user a controller wand with instructions to "Just draw stuff on the screen
319.
by kabdib 5y ago
A light, enjoyable read along these lines is Leo Frankowski's "high tech knight" series, starting with The Cross-time Engineer . The main character -- a real engineer -- gets transported back to medieval Poland, and he kno
320.
by kabdib 5y ago
Specialist knowledge. Hard problem. Company is located in Seattle. Someone capable of doing a good job on this can make FAR more doing something else. $20K is a joke.
321.
by kabdib 5y ago
You're better off with a plan along the lines of "launch a less-good-but-still-perfectly-fine new space telescope every couple of years" so that you eventually get good at it, and can afford to make mistakes. A few hundred mi
322.
by kabdib 5y ago
I stand corrected. Apologies.
323.
by kabdib 5y ago
$20K is at most 100 hours of consulting time in SV. Probably less [it's been quite a while since I was in that market]. Analogue was hoping for a screaming deal on this software. He was right to walk away.
324.
by kabdib 5y ago
There are public records on how phone companies are doing, complaint-wise. It's interesting (but infuriating) reading.
325.
by kabdib 5y ago
It took over a year for Ziply to repair the land line of my 90-year-old parents. 30+ hours on the phone with support, multiple visits by techs who were simply not interested in doing any work. I had a tech tell me, literally to my face, &qu
326.
by kabdib 5y ago
GeoWorks was one of the (very small) set of windowing systems we looked at for the Atari ST. This was only a month after Atari was bought, and the folks from Commodore were running things without consulting us "old Atari" types (e
327.
by kabdib 5y ago
Go read Bruce Sterling's 1993 article on something relatively straight forward, like glue: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/3zode9/bruce_sterling_... I've done a bit more reading about pai
328.
by kabdib 5y ago
"Look," I once said to a manager of mine, "I've been using this programming language longer than you've been alive ..." Card-carrying member here. :-)
329.
by kabdib 5y ago
I eagerly awaited every issue. It taught me a lot, in an era where finding information about computers was pretty difficult. I was in junior high school, and none of the books in the school or public libraries covered any of this fancy ne
330.
by kabdib 5y ago
The "air pressure" on the moon is in the sub-nano-Pascal range, significantly lower than an electronic vacuum tube (e.g., often on the order of 100 micro Pascals). There's not a bunch of air on the moon.

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