kabdib

49 ms·

541.
by kabdib 7y ago
I was actually thinking about catastrophic failure, as in something on the chip burning out and making the clock stop. My guess is that they were probably cooling it with beer (or at least cold beer bottle bottoms) to get that last critical
542.
by kabdib 7y ago
I was told by Leonard Tramiel (who was my manager at Atari for a while) that the world record for a production 6502 was 25Mhz. This was demonstrated one Friday evening, some time after the beer fridge had been opened in one of the labs. I d
543.
by kabdib 7y ago
AraxisMerge (pretty -- ahem -- comparable to BeyondCompare). A good visual diff tool is a must-have; I can't imagine life without one.
544.
by kabdib 7y ago
> and that I needed to go back and study sql I once had an interviewer with two (TWO!) PhDs. He made sure that I knew he had two (TWO!) PhDs by handing me his business card as we sat down and casually remarking that he had two PhDs (see,
545.
by kabdib 7y ago
I didn't get very far with Myst. I really enjoyed Riven, however. Fantastic game. Right up until the penultimate puzzle, and it's a doozy that basically requires you to have paid careful attention to things along the way (my notes
546.
by kabdib 7y ago
Honestly, dealing with Atari wasn't that great even when you're talking about the "real" Ataris. (The Warner Atari might have been okay to work with, but with the Tramiel Atari you really had to watch your back in any ki
547.
by kabdib 7y ago
I joined the ACM in college. I found the library pretty useful as a "typical developer" and took good advantage of the free access that my employers provided. I paid for ACM library access out of my own pocket when I left for a sm
548.
by kabdib 7y ago
> put all your bits into a good sized buffer and use DMA to push them out Sure, time-honored technique for audio. Very on the mark. But it doesn't really fix the "latency is forever" problem. Buffer too much and your contr
549.
by kabdib 7y ago
I did a 2FA system a while back. The happy login path and crypto work took a couple of days, and the mobile app work was similarly easy. Probably 80% of the effort was working through account recovery and other support-related issues.
550.
by kabdib 7y ago
EIGHT electrons? Indistinguishable from magic, man. [Cue future archeologists: "Remember when our grandparents could only get a few gigabytes on a quark? How primitive, how sooo last-femtocentury."]
551.
by kabdib 7y ago
Yup, I had mis-remembered the SLC versus TLC numbers. I'm surprised QLC gets as high as 1000, frankly. It's like the cells are on a first-name basis with the electrons they hold.
552.
by kabdib 7y ago
In 1991 or so, Intel was speccing devices with 100K erase cycles. In private conversation we were told "Oh, they'll last millions, it's just that erases take longer and longer to the point where you run out of patience and ju
553.
by kabdib 7y ago
"Five nines of reliability? Pshaw! We have nine FIVES!"
554.
by kabdib 7y ago
I'm happy to pay a reasonable amount to replace a failing rechargeable battery. If it's 20 or 30 bucks to get another three years out of a pair of wireless headphones, okay. I suspect that with standardized cells (perhaps a few do
555.
by kabdib 7y ago
Yeah, I mis-spoke. Swappable is better.
556.
by kabdib 7y ago
I'd like to have standard rechargeable batteries in products. Not necessarily "hot" swappable (though that would be nice for devices like cellphones). But at least available in standard forms, and replaceable by someone with
557.
by kabdib 7y ago
There was a lot of frustration with the quality of games for the Kinect. Some nice, playable titles for adults, more for kids (who are more tolerant of "pointless fun" like balloon-popping and chasing things around). But there wer
558.
by kabdib 7y ago
I was in a used bookstore a few years ago, and ran across a book titled something like "User Interface Design with MOTIF". Well, it had been a power of years since I last touched X-Windows (with intent to draw pixels, anyway) and
559.
by kabdib 7y ago
This is why you need to be interviewing for things like "customer focus" as well as the technical side of things. I've rejected candidates who have been great on their technical skills . . . who I would never want to be makin
560.
by kabdib 7y ago
It's even more fun when you're mixing libraries, and some of them return 1 on success, some of them return zero, and some -1, and you can't tell by inspection which is which. Bonus points if the API you're using inconsis
561.
by kabdib 7y ago
Bellevue, WA here; I had a very bad case of the flu in early Feb (worst I can remember) and it took 3+ weeks to fully recover. Many cow-orkers were also affected (some meetings with 30+ people were down to a handful of people . . . not a ba
562.
by kabdib 7y ago
Wheee! Thanks for that.
563.
by kabdib 7y ago
(chuckles) Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-) We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to gener
564.
by kabdib 7y ago
Back in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a reputation as one of the more helpful geeks. One fine day a marketing guy knocked o
565.
by kabdib 7y ago
Many of the large C++ projects I've been on are exceptionless, but do throw an OOM exception which is caught at a very high level. That's usually the point where a crashdump is taken and some other forensics are gathered; a dece
566.
by kabdib 7y ago
Been there. That time at Apple when we were sitting in a meeting, fat and happy about the bug count in a new C compiler and how ready it looked to ship, when it was revealed that a Q/A person had turned the floating point tests off six
567.
by kabdib 7y ago
The Mac development environment (MPW) wasn't free, either. I was in the MPW group before joining Newton, and made an obnoxious ass of myself saying that MPW should be free. One of the common objections was "how do we support horde
568.
by kabdib 7y ago
Wasn't Apple using the same argument when they refused to make custom iOS firmware with backdoors for the FBI a few years ago? I could be wrong. I guess my point is, this is a double-edged sword, like most freedoms.
569.
by kabdib 7y ago
Late 1970s. Two interns are reading system call manuals; we're on a v6 Unix system, running on a PDP-11/45. Like many bad ideas, it starts with an innocent question: "What happens if we recursively fork?" Five minutes an
570.
by kabdib 7y ago
Man, the people who push certification systems on the software engineering community really burn my biscuits. I haven't seen a certification system that wasn't either a money-grab (product-specific certifications, like Windows or

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