mschaef

75 ms·

571.
by mschaef 9y ago
Great article. The way I look at it is something like the swordsman scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The swordsman's doing fancy optimizations and C just blows away the need. If you can find a language that's x100 the performance
572.
by mschaef 9y ago
That's true, but there's also something unique about being able to take an existing idea and turn it into something relevant and marketable. Look at everything Xerox did to advance the state of the art, and compare that with their
573.
by mschaef 9y ago
A tub file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tub_file (Note that the overall search takes 10 seconds, not the one second of an individual seek... so the human had a bit more time to be competitive with the disk than a sin
574.
by mschaef 9y ago
> What Luhn invented was a checksum, Agreed there is a distinction, but he invented hashing too. Citations: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ibms-early-computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has
575.
by mschaef 9y ago
It's a real shame they don't talk more specifically about Luhn's role in the 'record addressing' problem. Back in 1953, IBM was investigating disk storage for record retrieval in large volumes of data. Seek/rea
576.
by mschaef 9y ago
What exactly does 'won' mean to you in this context? Other than the fact you're tying it to some vaguely positive notion around momentum, it's not at all obvious what claim you're making.
577.
by mschaef 9y ago
> What if programming is just hard? It's not. I remember learning to program in Logo on a Commodore 64 when I was in the third grade. Even back then, I was decomposing my code into functions, playing around with recursion, etc. 30
578.
by mschaef 9y ago
You say that like it's an easy thing to do. For a relatively novel data model with potentially unusual performance characteristics, the chance of finding a properly done, fair, and generally understandable benchmark is virtually imposs
579.
by mschaef 9y ago
I don't think my eyesight is quite that good, and I've never been impressed with the X11 fixed fonts (particularly at that size.) FWIW, I've used 8px as a benchmark for character cell width for years. The original PC's I
580.
by mschaef 9y ago
I use a 13" MBA as a development machine and find the screen good for the work I do. (Admittedly not anything too graphically intensive.) I do find the 1440x900 a useful improvement over 1280x800, in that the 1440px width allows for 2
581.
by mschaef 9y ago
> we might be well-served by accepting a paradigm for 10 minutes and building on it rather than always chasing after the next hot thing. Exactly this. > I'd argue Make is more like PHP than it is GIT. What would you want a make r
582.
by mschaef 9y ago
> As with many 'simplified' DSLs that are often unsuited to the task at hand (e.g. C++ templating) Isn't a C++ template the exact opposite of 'Domain Specific'?
583.
by mschaef 9y ago
> So it's extremely popular/widespread, therefore it must be good, and therefore you should use it (thereby making it even more popular/widespread)? My experience has been that that people that truly understand and appreci
584.
by mschaef 9y ago
> Both C and Make are decades-old technologies, but most people can read a C file without much experience and intuitively understand what is going on. While they might think they know what's going on, I'm not convinced they act
585.
by mschaef 9y ago
One of my first large purchases of computer hardware was a Sony GDM-17SE1 monitor. This was in 1994, when a 17" display was unusual, and the display went along with an 8MB 486DX/33 machine. The display was expensive at the time ($
586.
by mschaef 9y ago
> syscalls, which, since they aren't usually a huge percentage of processing in the first place... Let's stop the fear mongering Agreed! (We should probably also stop overgeneralizing about the nature of computational workload
587.
by mschaef 9y ago
Yeah... I just find the printed log output a bit easier to read (at least for the few times I need to do this sort of thing). '@' syntax falls into that same basic category - powerful, the better solution, but nothing I use enough
588.
by mschaef 9y ago
> I'm not shy about recursively copying the entire repository on disk Agreed. > Also, once you understand how to pull things out of the reflog, That, and I'll also dump a git log of the last couple dozen commits into an edit
589.
by mschaef 9y ago
> I don't think it's as appreciated that git's complexity generally discourages people from trying things out. For me, at least, the underlying model actually makes it easier to try things out. As long as my work is in co
590.
by mschaef 9y ago
> Those go for some pretty good money, don't they. Yes, both the 42S and 16C sell for more than the 48's do these days.
591.
by mschaef 9y ago
> I still think the HP-41CX was the pinnacle. You might also have liked the 42S... it was built to be as a more direct successor to the 41's. The UI is much more similar to the 41 than the 28/48/etc. > I did buy a 28(so
592.
by mschaef 9y ago
Very cool... the Museum of HP Calculators is also a good one: http://www.hpmuseum.org/ A more user-oriented HP site is here: https://www.hpcalc.org/ These were really amazing little machines, particularly
593.
by mschaef 9y ago
> these folks are living in dying bodies If you're not, please let us know your secret.
594.
by mschaef 9y ago
> You get 2 OS with Windows 9x? Really? Or is it that Windows 9x is just a GUI on top of DOS? At the very least its product tying. This is an interesting question... Windows started out (early-mid 1980's) as a graphical layer on top
595.
by mschaef 9y ago
mikestew has some good points, but flashing back a bit further to 87/88 is also illustrative. The original PC was released in 1981, followed in 1984 by the PC AT. One of the things the PC AT was supposed to do is bring multitasking an
596.
by mschaef 9y ago
Technical issues aside, Windows by itself made MS >$100B over the last 10 years. If that's 'one of the worst debacles'... (I did like MS OS/2 2.0 though...)
597.
by mschaef 9y ago
Thanks for sharing. Was there able to be any code sharing between the Motif/OpenLook versions and the DOS/OS/2 versions? (Or just concepts?) The other thing I should've mentioned is that at the time, OS/2 did look
598.
by mschaef 9y ago
Absolutely - Versions 1 and 2 were brilliant. I remember watching my dad use it with the keyboard shortcuts and wondering how he navigated the menus without the arrows. Those slash commands wound up at the core of a nice little macro langau
599.
by mschaef 9y ago
Lotus did a good job shooting itself in the foot. It's easy to second guess in hindsight, but it always amazed me that they didn't have any Windows story at all for their one major product, Lotus 1-2-3, until 1991 or 92. (And even
600.
by mschaef 9y ago
It's interesting to see this in the context of their later success, but one bit of trivia stood out: > Microsoft is now unleashing a barrage of programs, including ... Access, a communications package for the I.B.M. computer. This

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