kabdib

55 ms·

601.
by kabdib 7y ago
About 60-70 seconds, IRRC. It's been a while since I measured it. We did some optimizations, other folks did a better job (e.g., optimally skewing physical sectors so that they'd be hit nearly immediately after a head seek).
602.
by kabdib 7y ago
Sorry, most of a box's boot time is the BIOS and other stuff. The servers I run at work take 3-4 minutes to boot, the last twenty seconds or so is the OS coming up. The consumer PCs I use have a similar ratio. POST time is crazy bad. I
603.
by kabdib 7y ago
Even when the OS was loaded off of a hard drive, the boot time was still about 2-3 seconds (I did measure this). Not really exceptional. It took maybe a minute to load off floppy disk. That is STILL shorter than the POST time for every mach
604.
by kabdib 7y ago
I had an Atari ST in a closet, and decided to get rid of it a while back. I pulled it out to test it. The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse that moves, takes less than one second. If you boot from a hard drive, maybe anot
605.
by kabdib 7y ago
It should definitely be the standard. I agree, it should not even be worthwhile mentioning. It was still refreshing to see. We talk about Dunbar's number quite a bit, actually. We're about 2X that, enough for several tribes.
606.
by kabdib 7y ago
My current employer has a standard "you own anything you do in your spare time, as long as it's not done on work equipment" clause in the contract. Quite a few people here have side projects, discussion about them is open, an
607.
by kabdib 7y ago
I've met a couple of really good FORTH programmers over the years. They were humble about it, were also happy to use other tools in their work, and they just happened to be working on projects that were really good fits for FORTH'
608.
by kabdib 7y ago
A few years ago I read a newspaper article about an insurer in Oregon who told a customer they weren't going to pay for some needed medical care, and pointed out that OR had (just adopted) a legal suicide option. I sometimes think abou
609.
by kabdib 7y ago
Good tools will see you through a job with ease; they pay for themselves. Bad tools will have you hating life and doing a poor job at things. I spend many, many hours at a keyboard, every day. Life is too short to put up with terrible tools
610.
by kabdib 7y ago
I liked John Shen's Modern Processor Design and Noam Nisan's The Elements of Computing Systems . The websites I mentioned have hobbyist-level details that are pretty interesting (but in general won't teach you much about t
611.
by kabdib 7y ago
There are some popular textbooks on computer architecture; Patterson's stuff is good, but there are better texts. Some techno-hobbyist sites (like Ars Technica) do CPU reviews that get into various microarchitectures. Datasheets from p
612.
by kabdib 7y ago
I forget the name of the book, but yes, they really did write that. It wasn't a mainstream author, if that matters. (It might have been a megabit, but it sure wasn't much compared to what you need in order to run a computerized
613.
by kabdib 7y ago
I was at Atari when, one fine day, some folks in the UK that we had never heard of did a product announcement about an Atari computer that definitely was not coming out of our engineering group. (We were down to one building at that point,
614.
by kabdib 7y ago
A recently penned introduction to Neuromancer (by Gibson, I think, though it might be by Neil Gaiman) points this out, as well as Gibson's failure to predict cell phones (which he is chagrined by). Just the other day I was reading some
615.
by kabdib 7y ago
Hmmm, at those prices I would worry about the quality of the SSD. (I've learned to trust a few brands, learned to avoid a few others, the hard way. The 512GB SSDs I'd consider purchasing go for 2X-4X your mentioned cost).
616.
by kabdib 7y ago
I worked as a dishwasher for a year. Every high-tech job I've had since then has been easy in comparison, even the crazy ones.
617.
by kabdib 7y ago
I kept having this sense of deja-vu as I read the article. This is essentially how the persistent store of the Apple Newton worked. Pretty neat. Our stuff supported vanilla battery-backed RAM, and we also supported memory-mapped flash (whic
618.
by kabdib 7y ago
I remember reading a guide from IBM about training the memory path of some Power architecture system. The tl;dr; was essentially "Follow <big set of rules for circuit board layout> exactly , as if your life depended on it, and s
619.
by kabdib 7y ago
The moment that lies are forbidden is the moment that someone needs to decide the difference between truth and falsehood. Is that a decree by the state? The result of an expensive and protracted legal process? Do we put it to a vote? Is the
620.
by kabdib 7y ago
I've been using Emacs for 40 years. My .emacs file is 59 lines long. Most of the customizations turn off features have been added (menu bars and so forth), or that disable "helpful brain damage" that simply got in the way. I&
621.
by kabdib 7y ago
Words cannot express my contempt for the stack-ranking system that Ballmer liked. I saw perfectly good engineers being forced out because managers had to find five or ten percent of their staff to let go. Some groups deliberately hired unde
622.
by kabdib 7y ago
If it's kept over three years, you have to believe that there are backups of the data made, and that the backups are retained forever. So ANY persistent mapping from the data to a specific computer is effectively permanent the moment i
623.
by kabdib 7y ago
The "default" install is headless, yup. Yet, if you want something usable in many environments, you'll need the GUI. We use third party (and Microsoft) tools that do pixels (and PowerShell still doesn't do everything). S
624.
by kabdib 7y ago
I don't recall seeing a way to remove Cortana, just disable it. (Yup, fills me with confidence).
625.
by kabdib 7y ago
The big howler for me was Cortana running as part of Windows Server 2016, by default. Look: I'm not really happy running Windows Server to begin with [HN crowd: a decision that was not mine, by the way], so why do you have to have this
626.
by kabdib 7y ago
All drives will fail. You're just buying time (or rather, the likelihood of getting more time out of the drive). I've had a couple of WD reds fail. You pop in another and rebuild the volume. It's normal as long as it's n
627.
by kabdib 7y ago
I once spent two weeks tracking down a scheduler bug (it would stop scheduling threads and stall forever) to two assembly-language instructions that were in the wrong order, and would cause a timer interrupt to never fire if there was an in
628.
by kabdib 7y ago
Honestly, byte order didn't matter much. There were so many more dimensions of incompatibility available that byte-order didn't enter the picture when you were choosing a processor for a product. Most data was exchanged via files
629.
by kabdib 7y ago
I did "all three". My road was basically: - tons of self study while I designed hardware and wrote code on my own - school, which started showing me more advanced things - an internship, which exposed me to the real world I was in
630.
by kabdib 7y ago
I wonder how far away you need to be from that thing to survive its last few seconds. Is a few million miles and maybe a good-sized moon to hide behind sufficient?

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