kabdib

39 ms·

451.
by kabdib 6y ago
It seems like we're seeing the outcome of an internal political battle for relevancy. My first question when I see a product like this is, "Do the people developing the service actually use it themselves?"
452.
by kabdib 6y ago
I would have believed the chip designer. He explained the problem (an issue involving synchronization between different clock domains in this case) and why the workaround (that WE had to figure out, without help from the vendor) was correct
453.
by kabdib 6y ago
I'm fine, thanks for asking :-) It was a specific example, one of many from a vendor that I will not name, and over a decade ago.
454.
by kabdib 6y ago
More eyes on a design would help. Proprietary SOCs suck when you run into a bug in system bring-up (and if you are going off the beaten track even a little, you will), and you have a vendor that: - Doesn't believe you. In fact, is quit
455.
by kabdib 6y ago
For Hayes modems, this wouldn't (well, shouldn't ) have worked, since it requires a one second pause between the last '+' and the command. It's part of Hayes' patent IIRC. I believe it was also only processed
456.
by kabdib 6y ago
I've wondered how long it will be before input events are traceable to specific devices (e.g., you type 'A' on your keyboard, registered to you, and get a scancode . . . plus a few hundred bits timestamped and signed by the d
457.
by kabdib 6y ago
You're correct, my mistake.
458.
by kabdib 6y ago
Ballmer created an indescribably toxic culture around reviews with his David Welch inspired "up or out" and "fire the bottom five percent" policies. Stack rankings were more like knife fights than honest appraisals of pe
459.
by kabdib 6y ago
It's still a pretty accurate description of how Valve works.
460.
by kabdib 6y ago
It's a good time to re-visit old friends on the shelf, or find new ones. I picked up a series that I'd stuck a bookmark in 30 years ago, and I wish I'd continued reading it back then. On the other hand, I have roughly 2,000 p
461.
by kabdib 6y ago
I put myself into a news bubble about six weeks ago. I still very occasionally read local news and a mainstream front page (say, every few days), which seems sufficient to let me know what's going on in broad terms. Stuff leaks into th
462.
by kabdib 6y ago
The bigger ones definitely required decent periodic maintenance. Typically you'd contract DEC or a third party to come out semi-annually to vacuum things out, apply field fixes (yes, run wires on boards and the backplane), and run hard
463.
by kabdib 6y ago
This is precisely what I do. Pretty much anything that sends my mind off into a cool direction works well. Some narrators are better than others (Stefan Rudnicki has a great voice, and William Dufris does a wonderful job of voicing characte
464.
by kabdib 6y ago
There are probably more moving parts in a C++ compiler than the whole lunar landing program. :-)
465.
by kabdib 6y ago
I've been sitting on a nice domain name (no specifics...) and it's been a "someday, I'm going to build this simple idea" application. A few days ago, someone offered to buy the domain. Not for much money, but still,
466.
by kabdib 6y ago
Not a problem if you're on a motorcycle. Me, from out of state: "I'd like to pump my own gas, please". In other words, I do not want some stranger accidentally dousing my bike with gas or scratching the tank. Attendant:
467.
by kabdib 6y ago
My 8-bit games just used rectangles; for circles I just overlapped two inside the geometry in a fat "+" shape. This was on a platform with pixel-accurate collision detection in hardware, and I always thought that the sloppy geomet
468.
by kabdib 6y ago
A friend of mine (now deceased) robbed a bank once. His side of the story was that he walked into the bank (unarmed, by the way) and simply demanded money; they gave it to him and he walked out. He said he was astonished at how smoothly the
469.
by kabdib 6y ago
A language translation target would be kind of fun. I wonder how much of modern idiomatic english could be successfully machine translated . . . or even translated using meatware?
470.
by kabdib 6y ago
Q: "Why is academia so cut-throat?" A: "Because the stakes are so low." My dad was a professor and researcher (in ecology) in the 60s and 70s. He had a cartoon on his office wall, later relocated to his office at home, w
471.
by kabdib 6y ago
Concurrency, as they say, is a bitch. I would hate to program against that model. The best model I've found so far is cooperative multithreading, that is, coroutines that explicitly yield control, combined with well-isolated worker thr
472.
by kabdib 6y ago
On iOS, it's "Color Blind Pal".
473.
by kabdib 6y ago
I usually ignore syntax highlighting. I can't see it well because it's tiny, and because the "designers" usually chose colors that are tough to distinguish, and sometimes very difficult to see at all. For instance, the d
474.
by kabdib 6y ago
I'm r/g colorblind, and suddenly the indistinguishability of small colored objects makes sense now. Wow. Okay then. I hate multicolor LEDs with a passion. Those little amber or green dots look identical to me, even when you put th
475.
by kabdib 6y ago
MPW was pretty neat, and I've not seen its equal since I left Apple. It's a simple concept, a shell-plus-screen-editor that lets you have both source code and commands in the same window, and the combination let you do things like
476.
by kabdib 6y ago
Using C++ exceptions is just not acceptable in large, production systems. I've worked on several C++ systems with tens of millions of lines of code. Different teams independently reached the conclusion that exceptions were destabilizin
477.
by kabdib 6y ago
Performing an operation that can fail in a constructor or destructor will you into trouble. It's a trap. You can check for initialization failure ("remember to call isObjectOkay()" or something like that) but you're basi
478.
by kabdib 6y ago
I believe that PCI compliance in the US requires that background checks be run on employees with access to the protected environment. I also believe that that is the only requirement: Run a background check. They don't say you have t
479.
by kabdib 6y ago
It looked to me like putting toolchain and bespoke tool dependencies into Bazel rules was about as manual as any other build system (e.g., next to impossible in a cross-platform manner, and error-prone at best). The correct response for a c
480.
by kabdib 6y ago
The Kinesis Gaming keyboard is my current go-to deck. The key layout is sane (nobody tried to nerf the "useless" ESC key), there are well-done macro and remapping features for light customization, and the LED lighting is actually

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