mschaef

20 ms·

241.
by mschaef 6y ago
> Owing debt with property as collateral will be financially ruining for most of the middle class. What's the mechanism you're thinking will cause this? Based on what you've said, I can imagine you're thinking either
242.
by mschaef 6y ago
> Yes, this is why computer science students from schools like ... UT Austin (EWD's stomping grounds) are almost completely unemployable in the software-related industries. UTCS 1997 here. I've been employed in software-related
243.
by mschaef 6y ago
> I'd be curious to know if Dijkstra had access to a similar embarrassment of riches. Dijkstra spent a good chunk of the latter part of his career at the University of Texas in Austin. There was plenty of access to facilities there,
244.
by mschaef 6y ago
At least in my experience, macros are really an escape hatch of last resort, and for the reasons you mention. Semi-related: http://www.mschaef.com/defmacro-coupling
245.
by mschaef 6y ago
> That's the thing that Lisp/Smalltalk/Forth/Tcl proponents, who lament the unpopularity of their favorite language [1], frequently get wrong. ... but that those don't really matter that much in most practical
246.
by mschaef 6y ago
> Tcl has declined in use over the years, and while there's a vocal community of people who like it, To my way of thinking, Tcl is one of the languages that falls into the same category as Lisp, Smalltalk, and Forth. Like those thre
247.
by mschaef 6y ago
> it must have been easier, even at the time, to just use a PC (in the wider sense, not just IBM PC and clones). Agreed. It was probably a tradition dating back to the fact that HP did the original pocket calculator, but even through to
248.
by mschaef 6y ago
> I intrigued by the support for the 28S these days. I still have my 28S (with working battery door) from when I was at University. But, while I was impressed by it's potential, I never loved it as a device to use I came to the high
249.
by mschaef 6y ago
Interesting... did the ][+ support an add on 80 column card? My hunch is no, but not sure at all
250.
by mschaef 6y ago
Thanks... I can at least partially relate to that already. US toolkits (wrench/spanner, sockets, and the like) have conventionally included both metric and imperial tools for at least 30-40 years already. (I find myself about evenly us
251.
by mschaef 6y ago
> Metrication process in US is really way too slow. I've thought that too, but wonder about what metrification would mean for things like screw thread pitch (which is measured in TPI, and I assume would change if the units changed).
252.
by mschaef 6y ago
Seems like a natural fit, if maybe even a bit overpowered. That said, the embedded 68K project I was on was for an industrial process control device. (We were making hardware that would fit in a valve or sensor in the field and connect it t
253.
by mschaef 6y ago
> This may improve colour sensitivity, It looks like it also improves low-light sensitivity, which is arguably more useful than colour sensitivity. "Rod sensitivity (the ability to see in low light) also improved significantly in th
254.
by mschaef 6y ago
> wide use in the appliance market through the 90's as well. Things like firewalls. Thank you for clarifying with that bit... I was (very briefly) trying to imagine how a 90's era dishwasher or something might use a 68K CPU in
255.
by mschaef 6y ago
> wasn't the heyday of the Motorola 68k the 80s? It depends on the market. For PC/workstation class machines, the 80's into the early 90's were 68k's moment in the sun. But I distinctly remember doing new embedde
256.
by mschaef 6y ago
> There are new hardware accelerators being developed such as the Vampire which will provide a faster basis for running Linux on Amiga/m68k: That's very impressive... I'd known people had been doing Amiga accelerators for
257.
by mschaef 6y ago
You seem to think we disagree, and reading through your points, I'm honestly not sure why.
258.
by mschaef 6y ago
> I started developing for Windows 3.0 using Borland tools and never paid more than 100 euro (when converted for today's money) with their Turbo C++ and Pascal compilers, ... > I guess we have different points of view what being
259.
by mschaef 6y ago
> In fairness you didn't just get the development tools, you also got copies of just about every MS server and office product on what were fairly generous developer licenses. It didn't start out that way... they added a premium
260.
by mschaef 6y ago
> Also the Windows SDK was always available for free, just you needed to get a C compiler yourself. Not quite _always_... For the first few versions of Windows, the SDK was a fairly expensive separate product you had to buy in addition t
261.
by mschaef 6y ago
> .NET ideas got re-implemented as COM I know where you're coming from, given Longhorn's original history as an effort to implement part of Windows on .Net, but it's still interesting to see it cast this way. Without getti
262.
by mschaef 6y ago
Some of this is the experience to know what parts of a system are likely matter in the long run and some of it is the discipline to hold yourself and your team accountable. If I had to boil the first part down, I'd say you need to focu
263.
by mschaef 6y ago
Segment alignment. Not read alignment. Large model memory allocators would allocate memory on segment boundaries. This is more or less essential if you need to use more than 64K of memory in your program. An 8-bit paragraph size (rather tha
264.
by mschaef 6y ago
> I think that the face of computing would have changed quite dramatically if Intel had decided to make the x86 segment paragraph size 256 bytes (8 bits) instead of the useless 4 bits. I've made that argument in the past too, but I
265.
by mschaef 6y ago
Intel was trying to maintain backward compatibility, so the segments made sense. (They let you default to using the same 16-bit pointers as the earlier 8-bit CPU's, and only use the extended capability if you explicitly opted in by adj
266.
by mschaef 6y ago
Not at all.... The best way to think of Win32s was that it was analogous to a "DOS Extender", but for Windows. The main point of what it did was to allow the use of a different memory model under an existing operating system. In t
267.
by mschaef 6y ago
> Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best. Windows 2000 was very good, but I'm also fond of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It had a certain simplicity and directness that they lo
268.
by mschaef 6y ago
> I use core.async a lot too and really like it, however, I do feel that it suffers from being a macro instead of part of the language, Agreed. The core abstraction of a go block is essentially a user-space thread. Because macros are lim
269.
by mschaef 6y ago
It does me too... I was an early high school computer enthusiast/programmer around this time, and remember waiting for Windows 3 with bated breath. At the time, I didn't appreciate the engineering and politics behind what went int
270.
by mschaef 6y ago
"The ideal tech stack..." goes on to rattle off half a dozen or so components, ranging from languages to libraries. Ugh. It's a personal blog. A small amount of mostly static text and images served on demand in a couple diffe

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