kabdib

33 ms·

391.
by kabdib 5y ago
I've used a number of gadgets over the years (starting with an Apple Newton), and none of my notes on them have survived. On the other hand, I've got boxes and boxes of notebooks (Strathmore sketchpads and Moleskine-equivalents) t
392.
by kabdib 5y ago
Looks like a few were: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/155951-games-written-in-fo... These were written by third parties and published by Atari. Atari did not have any game programmers on the payroll at that poi
393.
by kabdib 5y ago
FORTH is a fun little class of languages. These are easy to implement; in a few KB you can have a working development environment, with a screen editor, debugger and whatnot. In my experience, FORTH doesn't really scale to big projects
394.
by kabdib 5y ago
Er, you bring the service down so you can do work on it. Somebody is doing that work. I guarantee that you'll have trouble hiring qualified people for a role that includes core hours of "2AM-5AM Sunday mornings" (or whateve
395.
by kabdib 5y ago
What part of the world? One service I worked on (with customers around the globe) had about 10 minutes of scheduled downtime a week. Peak user load was, interestingly enough, during our core hours, when there are a lot more hands on deck to
396.
by kabdib 5y ago
It didn't help that graphics on the PC were absolutely terrible. IBM's monochrome monitor was beautiful, but text only. Their color graphics card had one of the worst interfaces you could imagine short of setting pixels one-by-one
397.
by kabdib 5y ago
Is this affected by external magnetic fields, or other interference that a hard-wired connection is immune to? I'm not in the habit of waving magnets around near CPUs, but I worry about susceptibility to EMI and transients.
398.
by kabdib 5y ago
There's a big difference between hard-won technology (worthwhile protecting with patents, or trade secret law) and "this is how we designed this iteration of the project." Of course your implementation is secret (because it&#
399.
by kabdib 5y ago
We can probably all agree that about half of C++ needs to be eliminated or redesigned. We probably can't agree on which half. :-)
400.
by kabdib 5y ago
Hmmm. If I chose a chip with the resources to run this Toit thing, I can reduce costs by switching to a cheaper, less powerful chip and writing native code. If I'm shipping several million of these, it's a no-brainer; it saves rea
401.
by kabdib 5y ago
I was looking at health insurance in WA state, and the sites that imitate the official government site do a pretty good job at everything except having decent, non-scammy insurance offerings.
402.
by kabdib 5y ago
Comparing tulip bulbs and NFTs: With one of them you can grow a flower, while the other isn't even good fertilizer. In the past weeks I've seen a ton of ads (on Youtube, Twitter, etc.) that look an awful lot like elements of pump-
403.
by kabdib 6y ago
Had to look up MPW (Multi Project Wafer). The MPW I'm most familiar with is a development environment for the 68K-era Macintosh computers . . . :-)
404.
by kabdib 6y ago
Apple definitely has a say in how its software is run. IOS is licensed for use on Apple-branded devices, with further stipulations requiring, amongst other things, that it remain unmodified (it's right there in the EULA). I'll be
405.
by kabdib 6y ago
Not allowing arbitrary code on a platform is hardly an irrelevant point. It's a fundamental architectural decision that makes deep statements about what a platform can do, and who has permission to do it. These decisions define both bu
406.
by kabdib 6y ago
>>"The same reason you can’t put software you want on a Xbox/PlayStation/Switch." > Stop using this argument, its daft and convinces noone. Letting anyone put any software they wanted on an Xbox/Playstation
407.
by kabdib 6y ago
I don't remember for sure. I think that if the title exited (by returning, or hitting an unhandled exception), the console tore everything down and relaunched the title . . . but it also might have just let threads die until there we
408.
by kabdib 6y ago
I was surprised to see that (at least on the 360) there was no way for a title to terminate itself; the game process ran until it was killed by something else (e.g., the user launching another title, or shutting the console down). Another s
409.
by kabdib 6y ago
Gradle is one of those rare tools that makes me wish I was driving a tractor.
410.
by kabdib 6y ago
My first experience with the Waves NX stuff was on a Dell laptop; I started some music, and suddenly the "camera on" LED lit up. I spent the next few minutes searching the laptop for malware. I don't remember how I determined
411.
by kabdib 6y ago
Weelll, you also have to do the exercises . . .
412.
by kabdib 6y ago
So, what does TECO do when you type your name into it? :-) (I still use /bin/ed instead of . . . certain other editors I will not name here. Mercifully, all of my TECO "skills" have fled).
413.
by kabdib 6y ago
For me, the thing that will always define cryptocurrencies was what occurred a few years ago at a datacenter I frequent. Someone had built-out a cage with 50 to 60 really nice high-end racks of shiny, new bitcoin mining hardware. Snazzy l
414.
by kabdib 6y ago
You're not missing much.
415.
by kabdib 6y ago
The transition date for TCP was Jan 1, 1983 (see RFC 801 and various other documents by Crocker, et al). I don't recall any shutdowns, though my Arpanet access at the time was limited to a dial-up TIP and some PDP-10s at MIT, and I mig
416.
by kabdib 6y ago
You could download the TCP/IP standards for free. The OSI standards were thousands of dollars, I believe; a classic Big Standards move. I think the writing was on the wall, right there. You're in college, what do you think the com
417.
by kabdib 6y ago
My guess is that LISP programmers are largely a self-selected group of pretty decent hackers. I'm basing this on some exposure to Lisp Machines in the 1980s, and some Common LISP stuff in the 90s. Generally adults. LISP is my favorite
418.
by kabdib 6y ago
Years ago, I maintained (tongue in cheek) that OOP was a great paradigm not because it was inherently better, but because it was so bad that you had to rewrite your code several times to make it work. And once you've written something
419.
by kabdib 6y ago
I read an SF story a few years ago where the idea was to sequester the carbon of Venus into blocks of diamond. A minor bit of (ahem) atmosphere in a pretty good novel . . . just don't remember the title.
420.
by kabdib 6y ago
I dislike sandboxes that - have complicated permissions that users misunderstand or can be tricked into misconfiguring through inattention, misleading user interface or fatigue - aren't actually sandboxes because the isolation they cla

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