kabdib

45 ms·

481.
by kabdib 6y ago
I frequent several datacenters in the Pacific Northwest; a couple of them are near the cheap power available in the central part of Washington State. We're on friendly terms with the staff and we talk about their other customers in gen
482.
by kabdib 6y ago
The disk controller chip let you seek track by track. No fine control at all. You could format extra tracks, if you felt lucky. Usually you could get away with couple extra. I never did this with any files I valued.
483.
by kabdib 6y ago
The other direction, too: "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run!"
484.
by kabdib 6y ago
ST was always "16/32" in conversation with Leonard Tramiel. I don't recall an instance where he admitted it might be anything else. I guess it's possible, but I think that Sam knew it would be unfair to the team. I
485.
by kabdib 6y ago
Four bits per cell, though. I worry about that.
486.
by kabdib 6y ago
In the 1980s I helped design a "one gate delay MMU" for the Atari ST. It gave you relocation and bounds checking in two directions ("text" going up from zero, stack going down from infinity) in power-of-two-size incremen
487.
by kabdib 6y ago
I've had good luck with a mix of recursive descent -- for high fidelity error messages -- and Pratt at the expression level. I suspect that if expressions got seriously complicated in my applications (e.g., lots of different types with
488.
by kabdib 6y ago
For a while I had a gig writing HR software, and I read a bunch of books on conducting technical interviews. One particular gem of a book -- the title escapes me -- had example interview questions for some popular programming languages. I d
489.
by kabdib 6y ago
I don't know vi/vim at all (okay, only enough to exit an accidental session), so I can't judge the quality of these emulator plugins. But I am curious: On the Emacs side of things, none of the dozens of editors I've used
490.
by kabdib 6y ago
Same here; the YKs on my keychain take an incredible amount of abuse, rubbing against keys and other objects all day long, for years, and I've never had any trouble. Contacts don't show appreciable wear (and they've had thous
491.
by kabdib 6y ago
I have a Selectric II, bought for $15 at a second-hand store. It's a glorious machine for writing, the keyboard is second to none and words just seem to flow out of my hands when I type on the thing. It's wonderful. The problem is
492.
by kabdib 6y ago
We first detected exoplanets in 1992 (that was for a planet orbitig a neutron star, for one orbiting a "vanilla" star it was 1995). So until 25-30 years ago, we had NO data on the frequency of exoplanets. Exoplanet hunting really
493.
by kabdib 6y ago
The solar system is actually not stable in the long term. Early planetary development was violent and chaotic, and the planets shifted around a lot more than you might think. We can't project orbits out indefinitely, either; multiple s
494.
by kabdib 6y ago
Thanks for the pointer to meson. Ten minutes into it and it's already far less broken than other build systems I've been test driving recently. I'm sure it will let me down soon, but so far ... :-) (My reaction to CMake'
495.
by kabdib 6y ago
> "Seriously? If you only even considered this is something reasonable to do > you should not be anywhere near Linux kernel development. Just go away!" A response like this would get you a serious talkin' to at just abo
496.
by kabdib 6y ago
> Shivji’s Atari 130ST display units were hollow cases, but people could see them. Those were live STs, running actual OS bits. There weren't many of them working (I think we had five machines, and limited supply of the custom chips
497.
by kabdib 6y ago
> It also invented PC. No. Personal computers were around for quite a while before IBM decided to enter the market (with a not very good and very expensive machine, I should add). The PC mantle probably goes to Processor Technology, or m
498.
by kabdib 6y ago
Same issue on the Atari ST; the custom chips just permanently mapped the first 8 bytes of RAM to the first 8 bytes of ROM. The remaining vectors stayed in RAM. Other systems I've seen just put a ROM at 0x00000000 and do an indirection
499.
by kabdib 6y ago
Or an Atari ST. Just sayin'. :-)
500.
by kabdib 6y ago
Let's just say that unless you're under a non-technical (e.g., political) mandate to use an embedded version of Windows, I cannot think of a good reason to seriously consider it.
501.
by kabdib 6y ago
This is very cool, thank you. Smalltalk is my favorite language that I will never ship a product in. :-/
502.
by kabdib 6y ago
One of my favorite bug fixes took me two weeks to find, and the fix was to swap two assembly language instructions (this was a bug in the Apple Newton context switch code, and swapping the instructions let timer interrupts happen reliably,
503.
by kabdib 6y ago
Or a safety system, like an airbag. Not something you want to be triggering as a matter of course or to be proud of having done so, ever.
504.
by kabdib 6y ago
I actually read it. It's actually really terrible.
505.
by kabdib 6y ago
> Is this a serious problem? You would be astonished, absolutely flabbergasted, at the number of "senior engineers" who interview well, talk great about projects, but cannot demonstrate basic programming skills (e.g., convert a
506.
by kabdib 6y ago
A common disease, I think. The builder we used in Xbox did this. It was a real pain in the fundament when things went sideways.
507.
by kabdib 6y ago
It's from _A Deepness in the Sky_. The actual epoch chosen was the time of the first moon landing, a little prior to 1-Jan-1970 (I like this touch, something with actual historical significance and likely documentable to a fraction of
508.
by kabdib 6y ago
'make' is the language that I hold up as an example when I say, "When you are developing a new programming language, do the debugger EARLY because you're going to need one anyway." Debugging multi-million-line makef
509.
by kabdib 6y ago
... and a peer here mentions that the term existed in GEM as well. I worked on that a bit, too. Guess I forgot :-)
510.
by kabdib 6y ago
We used the term in Newton, circa 1991.

More ›