kabdib

78 ms·

841.
by kabdib 8y ago
"2+3=(massive system crash)" [Examines core dump] "Hmmm, might have been okay..." The cartoons are funny and have never gone out of style. I still refer cow-orkers to them and get laughs.
842.
by kabdib 8y ago
Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice is one of my favorite books on language implementation. It's dated (the machines targeted were things like 8Mhz 68000 boxes) but details and pragmatics of bootstrapping your way into a wor
843.
by kabdib 8y ago
I pay for Comcast business class, because (a) I do work from home, and am on call, (b) the SLA says they need to roll a truck within four hours (we've had trouble in our city with line cards going bad and them not being fixed for mont
844.
by kabdib 8y ago
You're never going to stamp out casual copying. We know that doesn't work. Even in a healthy market there will always be some. Rampant copyright infringement is a sign of an inefficient market; supply is limited (e.g., geo-locked)
845.
by kabdib 8y ago
You need to consider survivor bias. We don't have data for the number of "artists of the past" who were stopped because they couldn't find patrons. How many Da Vincis and Mozarts had to work in fields or row galleys rath
846.
by kabdib 8y ago
I've wondered if the 16 byte paragraph size came from prejudices of engineers who were involved with the iAPX 432, an "object oriented" processor that was canceled after Intel realized it had significant, architecture-level p
847.
by kabdib 8y ago
Intel made the paragraph size of the x86 16 bytes, or four bits of the physical address. The documentation I read at the time claimed that this was to make sharing pieces of segments easier (or perhaps they wanted to encourage people to mak
848.
by kabdib 8y ago
Actually it's a LOT more than that, since each of the 5 colors has 128 possible values. There's some duplication (same color slot, trivial rotations and reflections and such) but I think the order of magnitude is probably "cl
849.
by kabdib 8y ago
Okay, a true story, my second disappointing interaction with Atari marketing. One fine day my boss came to me and said that he had an ask from Atari Marketing (in the Home Computer arm of the company). The marketing drone came to my office
850.
by kabdib 8y ago
... and that's three more than the average Atari marketing exec had back then. No wonder they had trouble understanding the game industry :-)
851.
by kabdib 8y ago
To be clear, the Asteroids era arcade units had microprocessors (Atari coin-op engineers tended to use 6502s then), in addition to a boardful of glorious digital and analog stuff to drive the vector display.
852.
by kabdib 8y ago
At one point early in the Mac's history, Apple marketing tried to tell the world that SCSI was pronounced "Sexy", rather than "Scuzzy". I guess they'd finally been told the name of the machine's hard drive
853.
by kabdib 8y ago
Total guess, but they could have been including them in a hash function or struct equality check (equality with memcmp, hash by just grabbing bytes, etc.). That would not have gone well with uninitialized padding :-)
854.
by kabdib 8y ago
The ability to buy games was removed from the Steam Link app.
855.
by kabdib 8y ago
That's what everybody else uses. If you want to write edgy, hip and modern documentation you need to use words that other people don't. "Touch" implies a friendly, approachable and non-threatening user interface. It lets
856.
by kabdib 8y ago
Bleargh, you're right. </blush>
857.
by kabdib 8y ago
I had a 3B2 in the 1980s; it was an okay Unix machine that AT&T had no idea how to market. The development tools (C compiler, etc.) cost extra, and came on about 30 floppy disks that you had to load in a very fussy order. The machine&#x
858.
by kabdib 8y ago
Just re-hashing passwords, with a more secure algorithm implemented in an HSM.
859.
by kabdib 8y ago
My experience at the U of MD (probably dated, but man your summary sounds familiar...): http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=755
860.
by kabdib 8y ago
With a tower of MOVEM.L instructions and enough scratch registers you could get within a percent or two of theoretical bus speed for moving aligned data around. The ST used this in spots, and the memory manager and toolbox of the Macintosh
861.
by kabdib 8y ago
The last low-level device I shipped code on, we had 2K of program space and about 1K of RAM. Started writing in vanilla C, crunching pieces into hand-written assembly and rewriting fat code when space got tight. 6 bytes free in the final co
862.
by kabdib 8y ago
The fuses I have experience with are indeed "blown" -- actual metal traces are physically opened with a large current -- and can't be intentionally reset. Often you blow fuses in multiples and take a vote, because the fuses c
863.
by kabdib 9y ago
Hitting the ground was exactly what I was trying to get across. Otherwise, discounting pesky atmospheric drag, your vector doesn't matter.
864.
by kabdib 9y ago
On the other hand, regulation of alcohol has not gone well historically, with people arguably worse off with very stringent controls. Artificial scarcity has resulted in predictable increases in black markets and crime, reduction in safet
865.
by kabdib 9y ago
Sure, just reach escape velocity (well, in the right direction). It's higher than orbital velocity, obviously. To escape the solar system you'll need a bit more velocity on top of that. We do this all the time with probes to other
866.
by kabdib 9y ago
These fuses don't necessarily stay blown; it's possible for them to mechanically heal. Consoles I've worked with have often blown multiple fuses and taken a vote (for controlling important features and version minimums).
867.
by kabdib 9y ago
Also, the INMOS Transputer. It's a seriously odd but inspired architecture. Didn't scale in performance. Had some really interesting ideas in its ISA and interprocessor communication system.
868.
by kabdib 9y ago
Writing a 2600 game was a little like a contact sport, you got beaten up a lot by the hardware ("What's wrong with this stupid register?"), got beaten up by marketing ("Can't you cram that thing into 2K of ROM? What
869.
by kabdib 9y ago
You have more than 128 bytes of memory. MUCH more, considering what's available :-) - The I/O chip has a register or two used to store the direction of a bit in the port. If you don't care whether the port is reading or writi
870.
by kabdib 9y ago
I believe the gap at the bottom of the door was indeed wider at Microsoft . . .

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