kabdib

74 ms·

751.
by kabdib 8y ago
They just get recycled. I've worked on projects with the same code name at different companies. By the way, if your company is in desperate financial difficulty, circling the drain with increasing speed, and the management cobbles up a
752.
by kabdib 8y ago
I grew up just a few miles from WWV. When I was a teenager I had an electronics lab, and the most reliable noise in the circuits I built was the WWV signal. I could take a diode, a length of wire and a speaker and know the exact time, no tu
753.
by kabdib 8y ago
The 68000 was pretty predictable and easy to write assembly for. Even up to the 68030 Motorola was still valiantly trying to document the cycle counts of instructions, but the tables were getting pretty big and complicated and the customers
754.
by kabdib 8y ago
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep has a "dataset", basically an educator PDA for a child (covered in fake fur, IIRC) that contains a nearly bottomless amount of information. It's captured and used by an alien race to
755.
by kabdib 8y ago
I think of the iAPX 432 as "over-designed and under-engineered". Intel was writing architectural checks (bit-aligned instructions, capability-based permissions, "everything is an object") they couldn't cash (very, v
756.
by kabdib 8y ago
So many red flags there. Run away.
757.
by kabdib 8y ago
I was paying over $700 a year for glasses. Funny how the cost always seemed to add up to the max annual amount that my Vision program covered. Since my prescription basically stopped changing five years ago, I determined my IPD (pretty easy
758.
by kabdib 8y ago
Niven and Pournelle predicted unrepairability in The Mote in God's Eye - Renner [said] "I remembered something. Have you got your pocket computer?" "Certainly." She took it out to show him. &quot
759.
by kabdib 8y ago
_Space Cadet_, 1948, references pocket phones as well, with this funny bit about avoiding them - Tex Jarman looked at him understandingly. "Your folks always worry, don't they? I fooled mine -- packed my phone in my bag.&quo
760.
by kabdib 8y ago
Awaits FBI rotundness?
761.
by kabdib 8y ago
Ballmer had some bad ideas, but he wanted Microsoft to succeed. He didn't see the attrition as a problem. The Sears folks are pirates, they don't give a shit about Sears and just want to extract as much money as they can. Big diff
762.
by kabdib 8y ago
Whatever bad things you can say about Ballmer, he wasn't out to gut Microsoft. He simply made decisions that were short-sighted and insular. Well, and the review system (which caused a bunch of good people to leave for Google in Kirkla
763.
by kabdib 8y ago
FWIW, here's one of my more popular posts: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987 There are a bunch more, but nothing that really covers my early experience with Unix. Something about "common tools of the late
764.
by kabdib 8y ago
You can comfortably read and comprehend the Unix v6 kernel source code in a day or two. The printed form of Lyons Notes is about half a centimeter thick, maybe 150 pages. Machines were smaller then, too. 64K of code on a PDP-11, small ROMs
765.
by kabdib 8y ago
Don't stop coding BUT don't take on engineering responsibilities that will diminish your value as a manager. All too often I see the developer to manager transition treated as if management were merely an additional responsibility
766.
by kabdib 8y ago
I've been using Emacs since 1979. I still don't know vi, and have no desire to learn (I can putter around in it, but it's . . . irritating). For short editing tasks on systems that don't have Emacs (or a sane clone of it
767.
by kabdib 8y ago
I had a chance to try out an early version of the game which was mounted on actuators; it would tilt and shake according to inputs and explosions and so forth. It was also a little buggy, and you could easily get into feedback loops where t
768.
by kabdib 8y ago
My home-brew Z-80 system, with dozens of unterminated copper traces wiggling rail-to-rail square waves at 5 volts in an unshielded cabinet, wiped out TV reception with herringbone patterns for a couple houses around. It was the 1970s, nobod
769.
by kabdib 8y ago
I once expressed the "I'm not in it for money, I just want to do a great product" thing to a CEO, and he immediately offered to cut my salary in half. I got the message. (I had a few more happy years at that place, but never
770.
by kabdib 8y ago
Interning "for a few weeks" means that you miss out on candidates who already have perfectly good jobs. These are often the folks that you are trying to hire. So imagine how a candidate reacts to, "Well, while we know you&#x2
771.
by kabdib 8y ago
It definitely crossed my mind. On the other hand, what I've read about the "security" of the infrastructure for controlling power, water, gas and so on doesn't fill me with confidence, and concern for these systems is no
772.
by kabdib 8y ago
More recent robocalls that I've been getting have had the same area code and a slightly different prefix. More difficult to ignore. I assume it's just as easy to fake these numbers as others.
773.
by kabdib 8y ago
That's how I learned C. I bought a copy of K&R, but didn't have access to a Unix system with a C compiler for about a month (when my new job started). I read the book and wrote out all the exercises in a notebook. When it came
774.
by kabdib 8y ago
The FCC must "consider" the comments. The comments can then be ignored. All tidy and legal. If the FCC was "considering" known forged comments then it is probably actionable, even if the result is the same. If the FCC ne
775.
by kabdib 8y ago
In Xbox, many of the firmware hires the hardware folks made seemed to be payed poorly. Also, there were tons of contractors, and not much institutional knowledge was retained. (At one point they had to pay a consulting firm to decompile the
776.
by kabdib 8y ago
There are services that incorporate P2P (e.g., Spotify, and you can find others if you do some research). If you're writing closed-source software that operates on content that belongs to you (or that you've legally licensed) ther
777.
by kabdib 8y ago
It's very unlikely for the consoles to be opened up in a technical sense. At least on the Xbox, the store is not very pluggable, and allowing third parties to sign code just ain't going to happen. I would expect relief here to be
778.
by kabdib 8y ago
The telescope application was not very demanding real-time. It basically did slewing control, and you have sufficient overhead to do that in BASIC; milliseconds don't matter very much. Telescopes are a classic example of FORTH's
779.
by kabdib 8y ago
Yeah, FORTH is really good at this. You can start exercising stuff at the hardware level in just a few hours. It's fantastic for system bring-up, and I've used it several times for this. FORTH is terrible at scaling to large s
780.
by kabdib 8y ago
A great many famines in the 1900s were caused by war, unrest and "political stuff" (including forced relocation and creation of work camps / collective farms / prison farms, whatever you want to call them). There were so

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