leoc

64 ms·

841.
by leoc 6y ago
A lot of what Blow says is not entirely accurate. For example he presents a simple picture of declining software quality over time, but anyone who was around at the time knows that both desktop OSes and desktop applications (including web b
842.
by leoc 6y ago
Steven Levy's Hackers of course, but also his Crypto which is in some ways even better. Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning about the heyday of computing research at Xerox PARC isn't universally praised (IIRC it&#
843.
by leoc 6y ago
0:16:40 For those who haven't seen it before, there's a Computerphile video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVxeuwlvf8w (related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvwNKpDUkiE ) about the hacki
844.
Apple said to be among US companies lobbying against Uighur forced labor bill(appleinsider.com)
28 points by leoc 6y ago|1 comments
845.
by leoc 6y ago
NASA's first VR headset from 1985 https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/headset-virtua... used screens cannibalised from Citizen portable LCD TVs bought from Radio Shack: https://youtu.be/N
846.
by leoc 6y ago
On this website we can't fail to mention the connection to James Burke's Connections : Arecibo Observatory appears in Episode 3 from 43:50 https://youtu.be/eCp8h9RkaSw?list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV... (skip to
847.
by leoc 6y ago
What is the legal status of this?
848.
by leoc 6y ago
So ... use the tip of an Atomic-Force Microsocope to quite literally shave individual atoms off the surface, one after the other? An impressive feat, but "an efficient way to create nanographene for power and display devices"?
849.
by leoc 6y ago
> notably Apple avoided the trap of integrating hardware (the iPod) with hardware (the Mac), which would have handicapped the former to prop up the latter. Instead the company took advantage of the flexibility of software to port iTunes
850.
by leoc 6y ago
At the time of Doom's release many or most DOS/Windows PCs still didn't have hardware FPUs https://www.xtof.info/blog/?p=931 I think that using hardware floating-point would have prevented some of the ea
851.
by leoc 6y ago
I have to be honest, I don't know of anywhere in Britain or Ireland that has risen to the challenge of bake and shark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs_3wuEjXq0 (although, full disclosure, I haven't had the chan
852.
by leoc 6y ago
I am not. In the developed world there's comparatively little chance that a school district or national education system could afford about $100 per head for a rollout of RPi 400s but not the say $240 or so per head (being pretty conse
853.
by leoc 6y ago
I've done it, both relatively recently with a laptop connected to the TV and with a Spectrum +2A in the Good Old Days. It's pretty bad, and fortunately I am not and was not a child in a troubled household, or one of two children w
854.
by leoc 6y ago
Sharing a TV with everyone and everything else in the house is far from ideal. A good number of home-computer users did it in the '80s, but only out of necessity. You need multiple fully-working TVs knocking about the house before givi
855.
by leoc 6y ago
The reason that the old '80s microcomputers were often plugged into TVs was that monitors were too expensive. Sharing the TV with every other device and person in the house was a necessary evil. TV-hogging is probably about as problema
856.
by leoc 6y ago
Yes, but if hardware is the access problem then clamshell devices with a built-in screen are probably the better solution.
857.
by leoc 6y ago
The modern Apple "chiclets" seem to be really just low-travel scissor keys. "Real" chiclet keys as seen on the ZX Spectrum or the original PCjr keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5yIg5wmf6I were s
858.
by leoc 6y ago
Some of the '80s home micros like the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum and the Atari 400 had keyboards which were dire by modern standards, or in fact by contemporary standards. Even the "mechanical" keyboards with full travel t
859.
by leoc 6y ago
To be fair, it seems that was a large component of how everyone caught up with the UK. And of course Europe had a long history of trying to get technologies out of places like China.
860.
by leoc 6y ago
Who is the chairman of Rosneft? The chairman of the board of directors, not the chairman of the management board. https://www.rosneft.com/governance/board/ Then we can have a serious discussion about this subject.
861.
by leoc 6y ago
It's a fun fact not generally known that Ireland has its own Dalits: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/fire-destroys-... .
862.
by leoc 6y ago
He also recorded lovely narrations for Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG4wWO5HV3c&list=PLVJ2vTa3CV... and Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra https:/&
863.
by leoc 6y ago
Apparently the Venetian system looks rather good in retrospect, though it did include more rounds and ceremony than was mathematically necessary. https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf
864.
by leoc 6y ago
Gregory Benford's The Scarred Man supposedly has priority for a SF description of a computer virus (I haven't read it): http://www.gregorybenford.com/extra/the-scarred-man-returns/ . The original West
865.
by leoc 6y ago
I appreciate what people are getting at with “make invalid states unrepresentable”, but it can't be the best description of what the true objective is. After all, the first language to make invalid states unrepresentable was probably T
866.
by leoc 6y ago
Not an expert, but I'm not sure that's so. Europe had been trading bugs with Asia, the Middle East and north Africa continuously for thousands of years, while the Americas had been largely isolated.
867.
by leoc 6y ago
This is "the right mix".
868.
by leoc 6y ago
For those who haven't played it: Jagged Alliance 2 is the missing link between X-COM, Fallout and the most childish scriptwriting you've ever experienced.
869.
by leoc 6y ago
Britain has a whole clutch of universities which are global research powerhouses but are scorned as boring redbricks (or whatever) by most of the locals and unheard of to most people internationally.
870.
by leoc 6y ago
I think the author is referring specifically to the situation under Roman law here.

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