kabdib

20 ms·

211.
by kabdib 4y ago
It depends on the contract between the parties involved.
212.
by kabdib 4y ago
VisiCorp was developing their VisiOn platform in the 1984-ish timeframe. They were bending heaven and earth to fit into 640K. Telling their corporate customers, "Buy another 512K of RAM" would probably have saved their company and
213.
by kabdib 4y ago
Right, this is exactly what chips like the 68000 did.
214.
by kabdib 4y ago
Is there anything on the SanDisk site about this? I checked a few weeks ago and saw nothing.
215.
by kabdib 4y ago
It looks like a Televideo terminal, maybe a 925. The Consumer and Coin-op engineering folks used DEC VAXes for development. (The Home Computer Division used Data General MV/8000 machines, which were actually not that bad. The MV/8
216.
by kabdib 4y ago
It helps when the engineers are given proper resources. I'm guessing there wasn't anyone in Marketing trying to maximize profits at the cost of game quality. ET with double the ROM and six months of development time would probably
217.
by kabdib 4y ago
Another big mistake was to make the paragraph size 4 bits. Should have been at least 8 -- that would have given the 8086 a 24-bit address space, which would have made things verrry interesting in the MSDOS / early Windows world. (I kno
218.
by kabdib 4y ago
How to play guitar. I'm in my 60s, but it's never too late to learn how to shred or shoe-gaze. Similarly, 30+ years ago I learned how to ride a motorcycle, and rode for 30 years without crashing. It was great having a hobby that h
219.
by kabdib 4y ago
In our startup it seemed to be a case of the CEO wanting to be "in charge". He could have gone for showing competence, gaining the respect and trust of engineering, and being a source of understanding and compassion to a group tha
220.
by kabdib 4y ago
I did once work that magic week at Apple. You got triple time if you did, but it had to be okayed by nosebleed levels of management. I was tracking down one of the hardest bugs I've ever found, it took most of that week (the fix was
221.
by kabdib 4y ago
Apple used to give people the week between Christmas and New Years Day off (maybe they still do, I don't know). I was was part of a startup that a number of Apple engineers went to; over half of our engineering org was from Apple, and
222.
by kabdib 4y ago
Java was my first introduction to full bull-goose, consultant-class enterprise architecture , where I think that salaries and hourly rates are proportional to the number of cascaded factory classes your solution requires. At least four or
223.
by kabdib 4y ago
This particular internet rando predates the internet. I have a lot of stories, some from Arpanet days. I didn't talk with Gary directly about the incident, but my boss did. I have no reason to disbelieve either of them. But it's p
224.
by kabdib 4y ago
I did some work at DRI in 1984 (my group was housed in the old KMST television studio, on the outskirts of the DRI campus, for about four months while we ported GEM to the Atari ST). My manager talked with Gary about the CP/M incident
225.
by kabdib 4y ago
It is free when the vehicle is parked at my house and has access to our wireless guest network. It can download updates just fine. This is purely a money decision by Volvo. $300 a year is crazy. I never even turned that feature on.
226.
by kabdib 4y ago
Intel wanted to do this with floating point operations on the Pentium, in the 1990s. A set of e-fuses would give you access to (say) another hundred million floating point adds or something, then the CPU would burn a fuse and you'd hav
227.
by kabdib 4y ago
Let me narrow my guess: They hit 4 years, 206 days and 16 hours . . . or 40,000 hours. And that they were sold by HP or Dell, and manufactured by SanDisk. Do I win a prize? (None of us win prizes on this one).
228.
by kabdib 4y ago
I once had a small fleet of SSDs fail because they had some uptime counters that overflowed after 4.5 years, and that somehow persistently wrecked some internal data structures. It turned them into little, unrecoverable bricks. It was not a
229.
by kabdib 4y ago
I still use /bin/ed over vi. Seriously. (And then install Emacs and turn off the screen candy fluff they've added over the last 25-30 years).
230.
by kabdib 4y ago
I usually knew what I had done wrong. (Really). :-)
231.
by kabdib 4y ago
Don't know if it's true, but it makes a fun story: ST80 used reference counting with counts saturating at some low number (like 127), and of course there are problems collecting circular references. A comprehensive analysis of a m
232.
by kabdib 4y ago
Different group; I know him but did not work with him. Not really sure what, if any, easter eggs he stuck into his titles. Frankly I'm not sure he had space on the 2600 console, that thing was tiny .
233.
by kabdib 4y ago
Sure. I'll edit that down a bit. I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the type of customer who is not great, and who would be great to get rid of. A net positive for everyone, if it were possible. Most customers are great.
234.
by kabdib 4y ago
> I feel even in gaming, the customer is always right at the end of the day. There are customers who are most definitely not right. The kind that cheat in online games, lie about it, dox you when you catch them. The kind of customer that
235.
by kabdib 4y ago
I stuck an easter egg into one of my game cartridges. The egg was underwhelming (just my initials), but I wanted to prove that it was me who wrote the title. The hand on the cave wall, you know? "I was here" for future generations
236.
by kabdib 4y ago
I agree with most of that. Charles Stross has a great essay on why space travel is horrible , and that robots are far, far better choices for almost any kind of mission. Hauling people around the universe is expensive, they're so frag
237.
by kabdib 4y ago
People die all the time. It's a natural and (we are pretty sure) unavoidable side-effect of living. It might be awkward and untidy, but so is pooping. The universe makes no value judgements. It's not embarrassing, it's life.
238.
by kabdib 4y ago
I interviewed at a startup decades ago and talked with the CEO for about an hour. I asked questions about their customers, their competitors, their investors, and the technical challenges he thought his company had. I didn't ask for ha
239.
by kabdib 4y ago
I totally get that. But. He could have picked a different franchise (or created a new one) instead of hitching the movie's title to a book with a totally different message and atmosphere. I wanted to see something darker, something abo
240.
by kabdib 4y ago
Well, not with that supreme court. The current one, on the other hand, might work great for the FBI. In 1868, Vigenère was considered unbreakable. If it was good enough then...

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