kabdib

87 ms·

901.
by kabdib 9y ago
Agreed. I always figured this was a meme that made it easier for the police to track you down (just do some forensics on the magazine paper, fonts, etc., and locate someone with matching subscriptions). "Hey boss, we got a subscriber
902.
by kabdib 9y ago
Clip out letters from magazines and paste them onto craft paper. Plenty of precedence. "iF YOu wAnT tO SEe yOUR deMOCRacY aGAIn lEAvE 5 miLLioN dOLlArs uNDer THE bRidGe AT ..."
903.
by kabdib 9y ago
The best teams I've been on have done well without much management at all. Mostly the managers were there to shield the team, the rest of the time the managers just got out of the way. On the very best projects, individuals will step u
904.
by kabdib 9y ago
Philosophy is great stuff, I've read my share. I've also got a few linear foot of questionable material on my bookshelf. The Carlos Castenada stuff is clearly bullshit and mostly there just as a cautionary tale. I can't make
905.
by kabdib 9y ago
"We don't need people to engineer buildings any more, because we have architects and city planners." I wouldn't expect a philosophy major to leapfrog into a similar compensation package as a competent engineer. At best t
906.
by kabdib 9y ago
RROD cost Microsoft a billion dollars, maybe two billion. That doesn't scream "Please shave the cooling system down to the absolute minimum cost on the next console" to the hardware team. The XBone cooler is a pretty decent o
907.
by kabdib 9y ago
Consoles are pretty serious about effective cooling. There is definitely price pressure, but that's not a one-sided thing -- you need to make sure that the unit lasts long enough, and that its cooling system doesn't generate too m
908.
by kabdib 9y ago
This is a real thing. For game consoles, which run their chips pretty "hot" in order to meet the performance requirements for high-end gaming, the main SOCs have a design lifetime. There are deliberate trade-offs between performan
909.
by kabdib 9y ago
DPs were over-used by architecture astronauts. For a while I was encountering Factories nested several levels deep, and everybody was making Singleton objects for things that didn't need to be singletons. Ask ten people what a Visitor
910.
by kabdib 9y ago
"I gave my manager two copies of The Mythical Man-Month so he could read it twice as fast."
911.
by kabdib 9y ago
You can trust a person you choose, perhaps. What about that person's successors? Data is forever, people change, people are coerced or bribed, and stuff gets stolen or compromised (or subpeonaed). Over time, databases are leaky. Take t
912.
by kabdib 9y ago
In the Apple Newton source code, a cow-orker of mine wrote a comment about Sharp Electronics, our manufacturing partner. The comment was a snarky inclusion of their corporate motto, "From Sharp minds come sharp products" in a plac
913.
by kabdib 9y ago
The mere mention of her name was sufficient :-)
914.
by kabdib 9y ago
There was a simple scanning system called "Policheck" that was introduced in most source trees; it checked against a list of keywords. It didn't prevent checkins IIRC, but it flagged files for attention (it's been a whil
915.
by kabdib 9y ago
Definitely. I've listened to a bunch of traditional history books, as well as science and technology (e.g., _Soul of a New Machine_, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_).
916.
by kabdib 9y ago
Side projects are not a reliable metric. I have worked with fantastic developers -- ones who I'd love to work with again -- who did not do side projects. These were generally people who did really great work while using normal hours, b
917.
by kabdib 9y ago
I've worked with many programming environments, and PowerBuilder stands out as one of the worst. I remember exchanging emails and doing phone calls with the developers about some howling bad bugs in their COM support, bad enough that w
918.
by kabdib 9y ago
Prior version of the system used PowerBuilder. That figures. My fly-by of PowerBuilder 20 years ago made a deep impression. Like, I never wanted to even think about that hunk of garbage again. It's right up there with PeopleSoft. If
919.
by kabdib 9y ago
The T8?
920.
by kabdib 9y ago
Microsoft and Apple have put a lot of thought into the security architectures of their consumer hardware. I've made this exact argument before -- just put the ATM app into a console title. It's the most secure hunk of readily avai
921.
by kabdib 9y ago
"... prohibited from designing ..." isn't going to past 1st amendment muster. You can design and publish designs to your heart's content. Manufacturing is often performed outside of the state of WA. Bans on imports, not
922.
by kabdib 9y ago
Yeah, the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) did pretty much the same thing (back in 1987 or so). I forget the ordering guarantee, it might have been lexicographic by filename. Global initialization in C++ has been a horrible mess,
923.
by kabdib 9y ago
Yeah, as an "investor" and an employee of several startups, I generally wound up on the losing side of the equation, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Stuff that amounted to, "Oh, we extinguished those shares, sorr
924.
by kabdib 9y ago
Games were cross-assembled on a VAX (using a modified version of the DEC macro assembler). I never saw the "blue FORTH box" but it was probably a ROM emulator of some kind that you downloaded code to, with some FORTH words for doi
925.
by kabdib 9y ago
A short tale of three firmware updaters. Device #1: A "root boot" loader in flash, very simple, loaded by a boot ROM. Its only job is to find the first good "large" chunk of boot code, get it into RAM and run it. The &qu
926.
by kabdib 9y ago
IIRC it was some improperly guarded code that was intended to run only on the non-production development systems (some debugging support). The kernel would touch a non-existent h/w register and trap, which was fatal. Removing the code
927.
by kabdib 9y ago
I debugged a boot issue on the Apple Newton this way. The latest flash image was a brick on production hardware (no available LEDs, GPIOs, etc.) but not on development hardware. But I could flash a new OS image. So I wrote some small loop
928.
by kabdib 9y ago
Yeah, had me confused for a while. Easy to set with a group policy, though. Still, could have been better communicated.
929.
by kabdib 9y ago
The 360 didn't open up the ability for titles to generate their own code and run it. Some internal features of the 360 did (the back compat stuff, and some other projects I can't talk about), but in general you couldn't JIT w
930.
by kabdib 9y ago
> The responsibility to document the quirks and necessary workarounds lie with the manufacturer of the hardware. When you buy an SOC, the /contract/ you have with the chip company determines the extent and depth of their respon

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