kabdib

38 ms·

421.
by kabdib 6y ago
Do not EVER believe that HR is there for you . Ever.
422.
by kabdib 6y ago
This came as a complete surprise to the folks at Atari HQ in Sunnyvale. Well, certainly the engineers who were working on the ST and the 8-bit line. It could be that upper management knew. But us worker-bee types, a truly WTF moment. "
423.
by kabdib 6y ago
Oh yeah, in 1986 Reagan administration introduced tariffs for 64K DRAMs from Japan. I remember having a bunch of trouble tracking the chips down so I could upgrade a 128K Macintosh to a 512K "Fat Mac" (which was easy to do, if you
424.
by kabdib 6y ago
"What you have to realize," said one Atari engineer (I think it was Shiraz Shivji), "Is that DRAMs are really analog components." IIRC the ST was running DRAMs a few tens of nanoseconds (ten to fifteen percent) faster th
425.
by kabdib 6y ago
SMS 2FA costs money per message. It's also subject to telecom rules -- you usually need to buy short codes by geography if you're sending at scale, and that involves dealing with bureaucracies at scale, too. Getting a short code c
426.
by kabdib 6y ago
I'll shake my cane here. It's a mistake to add unnecessary features to the C preprocessor when we should be putting that sucker to bed already. The CPP was a marginally bad idea 45+ years ago when it was invented, and it only hurt
427.
by kabdib 6y ago
Those were just cross-development for non-GUI stuff (BIOS, drivers and languages). Folks doing graphics bringup were mostly working on Apple LISA systems booted into CP/M-68K (ugh), since they were similar to the ST with a monochrome m
428.
by kabdib 6y ago
The Tramiels were notoriously tight with money, and would often just refuse to pay people when they thought they could get away with it. We had some Vax 11/780s (for engineering and finance), and DEC's service technicians were ins
429.
by kabdib 6y ago
... except for the 5200's non-centering joysticks. Those essentially broke the platform.
430.
by kabdib 6y ago
The usual joke: Respond by giving your mangler (and maybe his mangler) two copies of The Mythical Man-Month .
431.
by kabdib 6y ago
I'm curious about CPU usage for the two adapter types. My experience (quite a while back...) was that USB required a bunch more involvement from the CPU than the simpler block-oriented drivers. (Hubs don't affect things much; on t
432.
by kabdib 6y ago
You would be surprised how far "scp to a bunch of Linux boxes" plus some load balancers will get you.
433.
by kabdib 6y ago
"Confusion hath made his masterpiece" I was working at Apple in 1993. My parents called me one day and said that they wanted to buy another Mac, and were wondering which model was best for them. I'd been heads down on Newton
434.
by kabdib 6y ago
On really high volume consumer electronics, multiply any cost savings by tens of millions. Now you're talking real money. The HW engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors that cost less than a penny. I'm kidding a
435.
by kabdib 6y ago
I read Soul of a New Machine in college, and then wound up working for a company that actually used the machine that the book was about (the Eclipse MV/8000) for cross-development of video games. This was 1982. I was used to a Unix-a
436.
by kabdib 6y ago
It wasn't resetting, it was ditching lower priority tasks that it didn't have (real) time to accomplish. Notably, the computer was still doing important work (ahem, flying the LM :-) ), and the tasks it didn't have time to do
437.
by kabdib 6y ago
A science fiction story about synthetic milk, rather funny and one of my favorites: https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v62n06_1959-02_EXcite...
438.
by kabdib 6y ago
In the early 80s, Atari was desperate to portray video games as constructive social objects, rather than as the quarter-sucking homework-wreckers they actually were. In an effort to legitimize themselves and the market, Atari produced a &qu
439.
by kabdib 6y ago
This reminds me of a story. It's been quite a while, it's from a friend, and my memory is definitely not fresh, but it goes something like this: It's 1989 or so, and Apple has an internal project doing outline fonts (led by S
440.
by kabdib 6y ago
How many IBM 360s does it take to execute a job? Three: Two to hold it down, one to cut its head off.
441.
by kabdib 6y ago
Crypto wars II. Barr was making noises about banning strong domestic cryptography again, a few months ago. It's a Democratic party trigger, too, so don't expect this to change much. [Can you fine folks in California vote out Feins
442.
by kabdib 6y ago
Some of the participants were carrying things like nylon handcuffs, bombs (or bomb making materials?) and molotov cocktails. This preparation proves that peaceful protest was never the core intent.
443.
by kabdib 6y ago
One 3rd party seller on NewEgg has been ripping off customers for years. (You order something from them -- say, a mouse -- and they find some shitty used product on Ebay or someplace and ship that to you . Getting a refund can be a challe
444.
by kabdib 6y ago
It's definitely not flaky hardware.
445.
by kabdib 6y ago
Bought $10K of options before I quit. 20 years later the company has gone public and has a market cap of several billion. My options? "Extinguished" in some "event" 18 years ago. My guess is that's the event where t
446.
by kabdib 6y ago
I help run a service that uses hundreds of Windows boxes, and at any one time two or three of them always seem to have a borked windows update state. Recovery is utter fucking voodoo, and it's usually better to flatten a machine than a
447.
by kabdib 6y ago
I once overheard a phone interview for a position so interesting that I wanted to apply for it myself. The answer to "How did you hear about our company?" would not have gone well. :-)
448.
by kabdib 6y ago
That makes a lot more sense; written in relatively portable C instead of the sea of MACRO-10 assembly statements I had imagined. Thanks for the clarification!
449.
by kabdib 6y ago
Check out Valve's game network sockets layer, it addresses a lot of the things you're worried about https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
450.
by kabdib 6y ago
> Cisco Systems got its start by running bootleg versions of the TOPS-10 > operating system on its very first routers AFAIK, TOPS-10 only ran on 36-bit PDP-10 hardware. And the only PDP-10 clones I know of were made by Foonly and some

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