kiwidrew

8 ms·

31.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Thanks for digging up those details! Looks perfect for implementing a small 16-bit CPU core with a handful of peripherals; wonder if it'll come in a hobbyist-friendly package?
32.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
I'm very happy with OsmAnd+ on Android. I'm not sure which server(s) are being used by the app when it downloads the map data, but the transfer rate from the server leaves much to be desired. It's probably a significant bur
33.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
You could also try to track down an old CRT serial terminal; they have very sharp monochrome displays and I find that the dark background with amber/green/white phosphor is very easy on the eyes. It's also more difficult to
34.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Not only that, but most of those microcontrollers are single-source, which amplifies any supply chain issues because you have to wait for your specific MCU to become available; there are no 'drop in' replacements any longer.
35.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
They do not have the same semantics. JSON has a data model based on the lowest-common-denominator data structures available in programming languages, i.e. lists and dictionaries. HTML/XML has a radically different data model that'
36.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Ah yes, the Clickspring videos are fantastic! I hope he manages to resume the work on his replica soon.
37.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Fun historical tidbit: Tim Paterson, the author of 86-DOS (which went on to become Microsoft's famous MS-DOS), did his early 8086 development on a CP/M machine. He wrote an 8086 cross-assembler and also an 8080-to-8086 translato
38.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
I think OS/2 and XENIX were the only two operating systems that ever used 80286 protected mode. I'm not surprised that OS/2 makes a good test case for emulators!
39.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
I have to wonder how many of those "privacy protections" are enforced by the software running on the tag itself, though. A malicious tag might be able to attack an iPhone -- it's not hard to imagine that the "communicate
40.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
Indeed. Running the DMA at 4.77Mhz made a lot of sense in the context of the original PC and XT, especially since the 8237 was only rated for 5Mhz anyways... [Not to mention that the 8088 took 4 cycles to read a byte from memory and 5 cycl
41.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
> The 8237 is an ISA device and operates at the bus speed (with some overhead, ymmv, yada yada). It's even worse than that -- the 8237 DMA controller is clocked at 4.77Mhz for backwards compatability. The normal ISA bus clock is
42.
by kiwidrew 5y ago
This outright hostility towards third-party clients was how I knew that Signal was just a wolf wearing open-source clothing. Glad I stayed far far away.
43.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
If you do this, it'd be great to have a way to select the 'mode' of search (exact query vs 'smart' terms). I'm not sure what the user interface ought to be, but "literally" "anything" &quot
44.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> Yes, an interpreter is exactly what microcoding is. In a sense, yes, it is indeed! But when I think "microcode" then I think something like the 8086's horizontal microcode [1], where each line of microcode is wired dir
45.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
I'm surprised that there aren't any specialised instructions or hardware resources to handle the RISC-V instruction decoding/dispatching. [1] Like, sure, it's not meant to be a fast implementation, but even just a "
46.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
It's a C99 variable-length array declaration, so the syntax is valid; but unfortunately it doesn't actually do anything useful. The 'const unsigned char data[len]' declaration just decays to 'const unsigned char *
47.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yep, CGA in monochrome is quite pleasant. Black, amber, and two intermediate shades of amber, what more could one need?! It's really much nicer than any of the garish CGA colour palettes. [With the possible exception of the black-re
48.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yep, my cringe is triggered by "retro" pixels that are perfectly square with impossibly sharp edges/borders between neighbours. The CRT shaders we have these days are pretty good at turning raw pixels into something that loo
49.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
sendmail.cf was a warning, not an example!
50.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Tcl is another contender for a configuration language that has been around for ages and ages. Although it's not as slick as Lua, which was of course originally designed as an extensible configuration language.
51.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
There are (still!) a lot of copies floating around -- both online and offline -- and it runs on the most pervasive commodity platform that ever existed: 16 bit real mode x86. Those binaries will boot on anything from an ancient IBM PC with
52.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Imagine that with emacs: it's easy! Simply double-clutch the "Ctrl" and "Super" pedals while pressing Alt+Shift+T on the keyboard to open a new block context and auto-indent to the correct tab stop. ;)
53.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Yeah, those languages were IIRC designed to be edited offline (as a deck of punch cards) and submitted to a mainframe via high-speed card reader as a batch job.
54.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Nice, I hadn't heard of this project before! In particular BOOTSTRA [1] looks really fun. I have also toyed with the idea of using MS-DOS 3.30 as a guaranteed-ubiquitous build environment. It comes with a filesystem, a text editor (ED
55.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
And he was almost certainly using ed(1) as his editor and a mechanical teletype at 7.5 or 10.0 characters per second as his terminal... The C language (and all of Unix) was designed to be very terse as a consequence.
56.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
This is in keeping with the style of the original Unix utilities. Having a handful of global variables reduces the amount of stuff being passed around from function to function; utilities don't need to worry too much about free()ing d
57.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
Precisely! In the olden days of real mode MS-DOS, if you want to gather keystrokes from the user securely (e.g. a password) the program could simply take over the IRQ1 (keyboard interrupt) vector and that was sufficient. The extra paranoid
58.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
While the BIOS and VBIOS of a typical 286/386 machine was indeed a closed-source binary blob, there were several factors that helped keep this in check: 1. The underlying hardware interfaces (I/O ports, memory addresses, etc.) wa
59.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
> Humans have to remember domains Humans don't have to remember domain names (and email addresses and URLs) because we have address books, contact lists, and bookmarks. We do have to recognize domains (and email addresses etc)
60.
by kiwidrew 6y ago
With the major cloud providers charging upwards of $0.10 per GB of outbound traffic, it's no wonder that few even attempt to compete with Youtube.

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