ncmncm

28 ms·

271.
by ncmncm 4y ago
It did a very great deal with amazingly little physical hardware. As much as people complained about its performance, I would have been proud to have designed it.
272.
by ncmncm 4y ago
They use the term informally. You seem to be assuming much more than you or they can know: that the signals picked up are, in fact random. Not understanding their meaning, if any, is fundamentally different from knowing they are random.
273.
by ncmncm 4y ago
It is an art installation . Every last detail of every art installation is "for clicks" (where not just for kicks).
274.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Why do you assume it is noise? It might be noise, in which case the exhibit is "just" art. Or, it might indicate a more dynamic electrical activity than we are used to thinking is there.
275.
by ncmncm 4y ago
How is it nonsense? Either the machete is moving according to signals picked up from the plant, or it's not. Are you asserting that the voltages sensed are just random noise, and do not represent internal potentials? Or just that the p
276.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Make or be? Hard to tell lately.
277.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Correction is correct.
278.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Oh, really? "Laid claim" is is all it takes to own land people have held, lived on, and worked for at least ten millennia?
279.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Produced a zillion other tsunamis, first. The fossil record in what is now northern US shows two local tsunamis triggered when two kinds of seismic wave that travel at different speeds arrived sometime apart, affecting what we would conside
280.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Pity he isn't offering $54.40. Cf. "Fifty-four forty or fight!", a slogan demanding that England give up a bunch of Pacific Northwest territory to the US that it in any case had never owned, the land having been already occup
281.
by ncmncm 4y ago
The Alto was super-slow, even by standards of the time. It had a very, very limited CPU running an emulation of a more powerful ISA that app code was compiled to. Things we expect to have dedicated hardware for -- network interface, display
282.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Funny, you see him poke the mouse once, with one finger. They really went out of their way to make him useless and helpless. For reasons. At that time, being seen actually using anything technical -- most especially, typing -- would hav
283.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Xerox really hated selling equipment. They wanted to lease things for MRR.
284.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Xerox Star was $25,000, and came with all the software they had: WP, spreadsheet, file manager. Coded in Pascal. Apple Lisa was $10,000. Same, otherwise. ("Clascal", compiled to bytecodes interpreted by 5 MHz 68k.) Mac was less, b
285.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Arcnet was 3 Mbps, I think. Linux had drivers for it until after 2000, and pushed IP packets through it. People loved their Arcnet. Apple, meanwhile, had AppleTalk over RS-422. Was it 1/2 Mbps?
286.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Both had buttons and a monochrome screen, and ran programs. What got my attention was how slowly text was painted on the screen, in the ad. I wonder if that was artificial. People used to be weirded out by computers being "too fast&quo
287.
by ncmncm 4y ago
No, that was sh. Steve Bourne. I met him once. #define IF if( #define THEN ){ #define ELSE }else{ #define ELSEIF }else if( #define END } #define WHILE while( #define FOR for( These are described as "non-syntactic
288.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Yet, that is the wrong way. for I in {1..10}; do .... done
289.
by ncmncm 4y ago
If he couldn't do it in 300 lines of Python, C++, or bash, he was incompetent and should have been reassigned. At best. 7500 lines for that is not an asset, it is a liability, regardless of language. At least while he was writing his
290.
by ncmncm 4y ago
We have orbital predictions for all the asteroids above a certain size, but only a fraction of tens of thousands of smaller bodies entirely sufficient to end civilization and very possibly drive us to extinction. One struck the ice sheet in
291.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Must have been in the Engineering school.
292.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Another alternative is a laptop with a failed display, from ebay or your local thrift store. Plug in an old monitor from the same place when you need to, or ssh in.
293.
by ncmncm 4y ago
Caches. Branch predictors, prefetching, translation lookaside buffers and their shoot-downs. The Hot Path. Bitsets, popcount, FFS, a&~(a-1). Kernel bypass, ring buffers. Logging, write-ahead logs, undo/redo/autosave via loggin
294.
by ncmncm 4y ago
The number in the "permissive action links" was 00000000000000. Random numbers are very easy to come by.
295.
by ncmncm 4y ago
No. Like asking if all animals are about like a dog. All animals need calories and B-12. Other details vary. Many animals have arranged to grow internal bacterial colonies for B-12. A very few get calories from sunlight.
296.
by ncmncm 4y ago
A lot of smallish bolides could be much worse than one big one. Particularly if the big one would miss, but many of the saller ones don't.
297.
by ncmncm 4y ago
1. We have absolutely no certainty that no planet-killers are there. All we know is that none mapper are. 2. China has an Arecibo-class device. Actually bigger than Arecibo. Do we need two? Considering that the whole Free World could not sc
298.
by ncmncm 4y ago
The concrete is just to prevent internal punctures, and provide rigidity in case of punctures. Probably spray foam would serve as well.
299.
by ncmncm 4y ago
"Software archaeology"
300.
by ncmncm 4y ago
You can get an explosion without. (Cf. Chernobyl and Fukushima.) Just not the mushroom cloud.

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