kabdib

8 ms·

31.
by kabdib 1y ago
the source code of quickdraw is art
32.
by kabdib 1y ago
we used FORTH extensively in the bring-up of the Atari ST. it was easy for the hardware engineers to come up with little fragments of FORTH so they could exercise their chips without needing much support from the software team FORTHs are fu
33.
by kabdib 1y ago
trivia: brain heatsinks also feature in Julian May's Pliocene Saga (in The Adversary IIRC) and A.A. Attanasio's Radix
34.
by kabdib 1y ago
one of the managers at Atari Coin-op disliked turtles there was a special ROM, a version of Asteroids just for him, where the rocks were changed to big, medium and small turtles
35.
by kabdib 1y ago
i'm dadhacker, yes i may bring the site back, but it's not a priority, and i'm not sure i can write much at the moment without getting into trouble :-)
36.
by kabdib 1y ago
i was at a startup where meetings were stifling. i had code to write, but i was stuck in HOURS long meetings half the week while marketing and sales types droned on and on about stuff that was meaningless unless we had a product to sell. uh
37.
by kabdib 1y ago
in 1977 or so my dad (a college professor) advised me not to go into computers a couple of decades later (i hadn't listened, and had been working for high-tech Silly Valley for quite a while) he apologized :-)
38.
by kabdib 1y ago
note that ICE often attempts to treat administrative warrants as judicial warrants, and it's unclear from this reporting what they actually had [edit: it was an administrative warrant, not an _actual_ judicial warrant]
39.
by kabdib 1y ago
henry s f cooper's book _the evening star_ is a great description of the Magellan probe (the venus orbiter), and how they were debugging what turned out to be OS race conditions on a spacecraft millions of miles away
40.
by kabdib 1y ago
atari marketing was pretty f---ing terrible. objectively so i had one of the home computer division marketing types come to my office one day, and was asked: "can you print out all possible 8x8 bitmaps? we'd like to submit them to
41.
by kabdib 2y ago
this happens in "real life" as well i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20 wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip entirely 1974 was a terrible year
42.
by kabdib 2y ago
this is at best a disingenuous argument (russia and china would love to have access to that data. so would a lot of other governments)
43.
by kabdib 2y ago
that's a lot of crayons
44.
by kabdib 2y ago
Minimal Brain Activity
45.
by kabdib 2y ago
Tracy Kidder, _Soul of a New Machine_ Henry SF Cooper, _The Evening Star_ (debugging OS race conditions on a Venus orbiter) Pascal Zachary, _Showstopper_ (about David Cutler and Windows NT) Richard Preston, _American Steel_ (building an ear
46.
by kabdib 2y ago
i work on embedded systems, and this stuff does matter. it costs real money when you are buying the chips and selling hardware
47.
by kabdib 2y ago
i keep a very simple "notes.txt" file and just append to it; i add a timestamp at the start of every day. literally no other formal structure i put nearly everything in it that is interesting. snippets of code, bits of debugging s
48.
by kabdib 2y ago
$1B is the amount it took to get him to stop. He could have stopped earlier, and had ample opportunity, but that was apparently his price.
49.
by kabdib 2y ago
reductio ad absurdum: we're back to Pony Express
50.
by kabdib 2y ago
near as i can tell, the "ai revolution" consists largely of nontechnical climbers trying to get a promotion package (or scamming VCs, just like the XML craze of 1999) it's very much along the lines of "i've got a gr
51.
by kabdib 2y ago
Entropy never sleeps
52.
by kabdib 2y ago
I wonder how much of a problem crosswinds are. Not a lot of mass, and that big can has a lot of sail area.
53.
by kabdib 2y ago
At Apple, back in the 80s anyway, you could put anything you wanted on your business card except President or CEO. One of my cow-orkers had "Dread Pirate Roberts (retired)"
54.
by kabdib 2y ago
Anyone reading Nintendo patents should get used to "but, there's prior art!"
55.
by kabdib 2y ago
Yup. Cash for silence
56.
by kabdib 2y ago
Our property values were great until they installed the seismographs.
57.
by kabdib 2y ago
Especially sketchy places like Hacker News. Just look at the name!
58.
by kabdib 2y ago
It looks fractally terrible, but: > "This is not about speech. It's not. It's about the actual action of > going on the keyboard, going into the dark web, gathering the information, > downloading it to your computer
59.
by kabdib 2y ago
"McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money" is how it was explained to me
60.
by kabdib 2y ago
I've had "quality-team-as-peer" situations only a few times in my career, and it's been great every time. Getting meaningful feedback on specs and early builds from people who knew what they were doing (and were happy d

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