mschaef

86 ms·

781.
by mschaef 11y ago
> I think having kids, which I have not done, might slow time down a bit. Speaking from firsthand experience, it seems to do just the opposite.
782.
by mschaef 11y ago
In a manner of speaking, yes. It ran on PC hardware, but when it was first released the system requirements were at the high end of the spectrum. (Local bus, 32MB RAM, fast disk, specific graphics cards, etc.) In 1993-4, I lived in a dorm o
783.
by mschaef 11y ago
If you want to be amazed, check out Star Castle: http://starcastle2600.blogspot.com/p/star-castle-2600-story.... This is a recent (2011) Atari game that renders several concentric rotating circles, each with a gap. It&
784.
by mschaef 11y ago
> with instruction- and register-level hacks to save the 128 bytes of memory, with no source control aside from sneaker net, how many developers can reasonably work on it at the same time? 1? 2? I don't know from first-hand experien
785.
by mschaef 11y ago
Here's a great piece on how E.T. can be fixed with a few relatively minor changes: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ As much grief as Warshaw has gotten for E.T., it really is an amazing accomplishment
786.
by mschaef 11y ago
Yeah... IBM CGA text wasn't that good even in the best of circumstances. The 640x200 resolution and 8x8 character cells were really inadequate. Part of the reason for this is that IBM split the market into CGA for graphics and MDA for
787.
by mschaef 11y ago
Yeah... the original PC could be scaled way down in terms of hardware. It had a cassette interface and ROM BASIC, so it didn't need floppy disks, the CGA could connect to a TV via an RF modulator, and it was available with as little as
788.
by mschaef 11y ago
I think the thing I like the best about this article is that it forces you to take a C development environment and break it down into more pieces than is usual. One of my formative software development experiences was developing firmware fo
789.
by mschaef 11y ago
> This model is not unique to Windows, rather most non POSIX OSes. You could also point out that the hardlink/ref-count concept is not unique to POSIX and is present on Windows. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/
790.
by mschaef 11y ago
You'd be hard pressed to convince me that Windows model for locking files is superior to what Unix offers, at least as far as file deletion goes. Conceptually speaking, it's pretty simple: * Files are blobs of storage on disk refe
791.
by mschaef 11y ago
> Too bad e-ink isn't being developed anymore. Has development seriously stalled? I'd thought Amazon was developing it for the non-LCD Kindles. (At least I thought the Voyager represented a relatively recent step forward for eI
792.
by mschaef 11y ago
I'm sorry to hear of Mr. Hammond's early passing. My family had a couple computers before, but the first computer that was really mine was a Gateway 2000 486/33. I think I got it around 1991 or 1992. The first and only time I
793.
by mschaef 11y ago
It's more than a little ironic that you claim Emacs/vim users use their tool out of 'harcdore, programmer machismo', and you're doing basically the same thing in the opposite direction by accusing them of being unpr
794.
by mschaef 11y ago
> I was actually going to pay close to triple the sale price of the house if I waited the full 30 years. Did you adjust for inflation? Even at today's inflation rates, the dollars you pay in 30 years will be worth considerably less
795.
by mschaef 12y ago
Thanks.
796.
by mschaef 12y ago
Thanks. It's interesting that both you and the other respondent to my question are game developers. It makes sense that that line of work entails large data sets, etc.
797.
by mschaef 12y ago
Serious questions: what's the use case for 16GB RAM? I'm not doubting... just curious.
798.
by mschaef 12y ago
I've been programming since I was 8, and I'm now fast approaching 40. This makes it a bit hard for me to isolate the specific influence of programming on my life habits. That said, I do have a couple thoughts on how programming mi
799.
by mschaef 12y ago
Regarding point 1, java.jdbc can accept a variety of types of connection maps. The simplest scenario is you pass in a map that contains the connection information, and you get a new connection and transaction for each call. However, you can
800.
by mschaef 12y ago
If all you're doing is tweaking icon-style graphics for web pages then Gimp is still a good choice. Where Gimp really starts to fall short is when you need color management, alternative color spaces, and bit-depths beyond 8bpp. For me
801.
by mschaef 12y ago
I have a great deal of historical fondness for GIMP, dating back to the Spencer Kimball/Peter Mattis Gimp 0.5x. One of their last contributions to GIMP before moving on was to develop GTK as a part of the non-Motif GIMP 0.9x series. Gi
802.
by mschaef 12y ago
I'm glad to see that Factor is regaining some momentum. It made such good progress early on that it would be a shame if development didn't continue.
803.
by mschaef 12y ago
XAML by itself is actually fairly easy to work with because it doesn't actually do that much: At it's core, XAML boils down to an XML-based mechanism for constructing objects. Squint your eyes just right, and it starts to look lik
804.
by mschaef 12y ago
I have both a DX and a Paperwhite. The resolution on the DX isn't perfect, but I find that it works quite well for PDF's of academic papers. (Mostly formatted with LaTeX, with some occasional scans of older typewritten papers.) T
805.
by mschaef 12y ago
I've had a DX for around four years, and absolutely love it for reading PDF's (mostly of academic papers). It's light, the screen is clear, and it works well with all of the PDF's I've thrown at it. (This includes P
806.
by mschaef 12y ago
You need to have a clear understanding of the point of the analysis before you analyze anything. What, specifically, does your team have to produce? How much time and how many people do you have to complete the work? If you're the lead
807.
by mschaef 12y ago
There was a store in the basement of my college dorm that sold Intel-based NeXTStep machines. As befitting the OS and the time, they were all very high end machines: 486DX2/66, EISA/VLB, SCSI Disk, 32+MB, and all priced well over
808.
by mschaef 12y ago
The original author of the blog post _did_ write some interesting software in Lisp, used it to write a book, and then he wrote his blog post. To me this is a good example of something languages have to have to make progress: users and evang
809.
by mschaef 12y ago
A couple comments: > I dislike this notion that Lisp (or Haskell or OCaml or ...) owe it to everyone else to explain and enunciate why it can be more productive to use Lisp. There are a couple reasons why I think this happens. The first
810.
by mschaef 12y ago
> On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions. I think I'd characterize it a little differently: I remember games favoring 256-color

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