kabdib

9 ms·

61.
by kabdib 2y ago
Write the debugger first. Or at least, very early. You're going to need one anyway . . .
62.
by kabdib 2y ago
The moment I tried typing on this keyboard in an Apple store, I knew it would cost Apple a ton of money.
63.
by kabdib 2y ago
Exactly. Google's behavior here is terrible.
64.
by kabdib 2y ago
Exactly.
65.
by kabdib 2y ago
I get occasional probes from Google services against my domain, clearly made by bad actors who are trying to break into it. It's not "lose your domain with a slip of the finger" territory, but it's still not great. There
66.
by kabdib 2y ago
"This avionics firmware is absolutely terrible." "Well, last week it was driving a bus."
67.
by kabdib 2y ago
Yet it was named ".sys", an extension normally reserved for driver executables AFAIK Brillant! [sic]
68.
by kabdib 2y ago
That's a pretty broad brush.
69.
by kabdib 2y ago
Yeah, that's super slimy.
70.
by kabdib 2y ago
That would be a STRONG magnetic field. Not a safe environment for people (think about living in the same room as an MRI magnet). Also, not all satellite debris is metallic. Any ceramic / glass / plastic would zip right through.
71.
by kabdib 2y ago
If the team writing the Cybertruck firmware was confused by - user has depressed brake - user has depressed accelerator ... and needs to pick a priority between these two inputs, I am available for consulting.
72.
by kabdib 2y ago
The Atari involvement wasn't until August 1984 or after. We never saw any Pascal source code for CP/M-68K (it had been ported to C by then, I suppose). CP/M-68K was awful, GemDos was a little better (written largely by Jason
73.
by kabdib 2y ago
I listened to an audiobook lecture about Ulysses, and that helped me understand the book better (at least through one professor's own opinions). It took me six attempts to get through Gravity's Rainbow (and it was worth it). My re
74.
by kabdib 3y ago
You can tell which team that lost the turf war and has to maintain the old code. Pity them.
75.
by kabdib 3y ago
Forth is a charming little language, and I highly recommend spending a few evenings implementing one on the processor of your choice. You'll be astonished at how much functionality will fit in just a few kilobytes. FORTH will teach you
76.
by kabdib 3y ago
When I was on ITS, I just implemented SUPDUP in my terminal. It made Emacs usable at 300 baud. That protocol is a nice piece of engineering. I got a big dose of Telecoms standards early in my career, including some X.25 and networking stuff
77.
by kabdib 3y ago
I enjoyed his writeups about the fuzzballs back in the day, I learned a lot and had fun doing it.
78.
by kabdib 3y ago
Danny Dunn was great. Also, The Magical Flight to the Mushroom Planet and its first sequel. Read those to tatters. And the "Alvin" books ( Alvin's Secret Code , The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald ). Then I discovere
79.
by kabdib 3y ago
Software guy with 40+ years in the biz here. Your job never has been safe. Well, not in "big tech firm" territory anyway. I've not gone more than 3 years without seeing some kind of downsizing or shift in strategy or whatever
80.
by kabdib 3y ago
Agreed. In fact, the better that engineers understand the customers and end-users the better-off the company probably is. That is a good, healthy practice. But having engineers actually trying to do sales to make up for revenue shortfall .
81.
by kabdib 3y ago
Signs that I've seen before leaving: * There are more VPs than there are restrooms. * The free coffee and soda is no more. * Engineers are co-opted as salespeople ("... and why is the project late?").
82.
by kabdib 3y ago
When I was at Apple (started in '87, about the time the Macintosh II shipped), many of the groups in the systems software and support orgs (development tools, networking, etc.) had a table where there were binders of ROM assembly listi
83.
by kabdib 3y ago
Modifying the game code is a red line, too. I don't think that VAC allows this at all, and for good reason.
84.
by kabdib 3y ago
We had 88K nuBus cards for our Macs. I was digging into 88K runtime architecture and toolchains to support it. Without warning, one fine day we were instructed to immediately remove the cards and return them to managers. No explanations.
85.
by kabdib 3y ago
Yeah, we went ElasticSearch and some bespoke code after Splunk decided to raise its prices. Wasn't even a difficult decision, don't regret it. If you can afford Splunk, just wait a couple of years until they figure that out.
86.
by kabdib 3y ago
Atari had an 8-byte string we were supposed to embed somewhere in all of our cartridges. It was just random bits to me, but I heard later it was a message in morse code, which would probably be fun to reveal in court. I think this practice
87.
by kabdib 3y ago
It was common practice in early Atari games to have custom, non-ASCII character sets. For Tempest, as an anti-tamper measure the team made the character assignments for the game's copyright message executable 6502 code. Periodically, i
88.
by kabdib 3y ago
I have some Radio Shack solder that I bought in the mid 1970s. It smells /wonderful/ and takes me back to building kits when I was a teen.
89.
by kabdib 3y ago
Ha, the version of ZIP that I use was built in 1996, and I was using a version of 'ls' that I wrote for NT 3.1 -- maybe 1993 or so -- until a couple of years ago. These programs don't use DLLs, and frankly there's little
90.
by kabdib 3y ago
An SF book published in the 1950s (I have forgotten title and author, sigh) featured a then-imagined supercomputer with - 1M bits of storage - A mile on a side - Located in Buffalo, NY, and cooled by Niagra Falls (vacuum tubes, natch) - A

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