thought_alarm

12 ms·

31.
by thought_alarm 2y ago
Historical fun fact: In the original version of Objective-C and NextStep (1988-1994), the common base class (Object) provided an implementation of `copyFromZone:` that did an exact memcpy of the object, a la NSCopyObject. In other words, N
32.
by thought_alarm 2y ago
> Those files should only be created if the user actually makes adjustments to the view settings or set a manual location for icons in a folder. That’s unfortunately not what happens and visiting a folder pretty much guarantees that a .
33.
by thought_alarm 2y ago
> "Randomly reading from various memory addresses might give the modern programmer some concern about security holes, maybe somehow reading leftover data on the bus an application shouldn't be able to see. On the Apple II, the
34.
by thought_alarm 2y ago
Things from 30 years ago: mdfind 'kMDItemContentCreationDate < $time.iso(1994-06-23)' > out.txt Highlights include: * Castle Wolfenstien for MS-DOS (1983-6-29) * Lisa OS Source Code (1983-6-29) * Classic Mac Disks f
35.
by thought_alarm 2y ago
From the perspective of the security experts who designed the system, it's a feature and a requirement.
36.
by thought_alarm 2y ago
The inability to move them is a feature, not a bug. If you can't move them you can't accidentally give them to the wrong person. A passkey only authenticates a device (or group of devices). All passkey providers must provide sec
37.
by thought_alarm 2y ago
This news hits like a ton of bricks. I can't think of another single person more influential and important to my own musical journey than Steve Albini. Guys like him are supposed to live to a ripe old age telling stories. It's j
38.
by thought_alarm 3y ago
I'm comfortable in C, C++, ObjC, and Swift. I like Swift, but I'm not going to contort myself to use it exclusively. I have some stuff that has zero Swift and likely never will. Most other things are a mix. If I'm writing a
39.
by thought_alarm 3y ago
Microsoft gave discounts on Windows licenses to companies that agreed to stop purchasing Netscape client and server software, thereby choking off Netscape revenue streams. It forced Netscape to sell to AOL. Microsoft controlled 95% of the p
40.
by thought_alarm 3y ago
The problem with the original firmware was that its interrupt handler used a zero-page location to store the accumulator. AppleSoft BASIC uses the same zero-page location for its own use, which makes BASIC incompatible with interrupts. Ano
41.
by thought_alarm 3y ago
NT wasn't ready for general consumers until XP in 2001. It took Apple a similarly long time to whip NextStep OS into shape.
42.
by thought_alarm 3y ago
The switch symbol dates back to the very first international Lisa keyboards from 1983. They needed a language-independent symbol for the "Option" key in 1983, that's what someone chose, and it stuck. Some other keyboard triv
43.
by thought_alarm 3y ago
Everybody's dropping C++ and learning Ruby.
44.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
Yes, that's right. This page has more info: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... The PAL color circuit was initially an expansion card for the Apple II+ in 1979. The same circuit
45.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
> Might not actually be RGB, did not look at the schematic. But having RGB before modulating into NTSC's color difference signals is not uncommon The standard NTSC Apple II does not generate color this way, but the European PAL mode
46.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
64K of random access memory, plus 1K of linear access (shift register) memory. The 1K shift register was used as the 40x24 screen buffer. This is the biggest limitation of that machine; you can't modify the screen directly, you can on
47.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
I haven't read _Racing the Beam_, but the impression I get is that while the 2600 looks crazy, it actually wouldn't be that difficult or insane to write a graphics kernel to generate the screen layout you need. It's just a
48.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
The TI-PC was released around the same time that Compaq was ushering in the era of the 100%-compatible PC clone. Compaq, of course, created the first 100% compatible clean-room implementation of the BIOS, modified MS-DOS to work with it, ra
49.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
OS X 10.7 (Lion) was the first post-iPhone version of MacOS, released in late 2011. It was a bumpy release and it's not remembered fondly, but it introduced a number of fundamental features that modern iOS/Mac users depend on, lik
50.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
Seems to be a Swift problem; an oversight with the default Xcode settings, perhaps? I tried running `strip -rSTx` on an ad-hoc binary that contained only C/C++/ObjC code (no Swift) and it had no effect. It does have an effect on b
51.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
For those who aren't familiar with this particular chapter in Apple II history: - "Copy-2-Plus" was the ubiquitous disk copier/disk utility software for Apple II computers in the mid to late 80s. The makers of Copy-2-Pl
52.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
Building it on top of ProDOS might be fairly doable. ProDOS provides an API for block-based file I/O that's fairly simple and supports multiple different drive types. On a 128k system you'd get a 64k RAM disk for free. It m
53.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
The lesson of Xerox PARC is this: Even if you're 10 years ahead of everyone technologically, it's still impossible to predict how the market will unfold. The arrival of Visicalc transformed the toy personal computers into legitima
54.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
This is great advice for people who don't know how computers work.
55.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
A-list apps have always received special treatment. MacOS and Windows are both full of app-specific hacks to ensure that misbehaving but popular apps continue to work between system versions.
56.
by thought_alarm 4y ago
That's how digital audio was originally recorded to tape back in the 1970s and 80s: encode the data into a broadcast video signal and record it using a VCR. In the age of $5000 10 MB hard drives, this was the only sensible way to work
57.
by thought_alarm 5y ago
I always edit the genre so that the tracks work correctly with my various different smart playlists. In rare instances I'll also need to tweak the artist name to fit with the existing tracks in my library. Sometimes the album or track
58.
by thought_alarm 5y ago
Cars with key fobs are easily stolen and shipped overseas by programming a new key fob. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/marketplace-car-thefts-1.6396...
59.
by thought_alarm 5y ago
I was an MLB.TV subscriber for a number of years, back when there were no blackout restrictions (or ads) in Canada. It was a really great service. The thing I learned very quickly was that most local team broadcasts were orders of magnitud
60.
by thought_alarm 5y ago
Apple went all in on Java, but the developers didn't follow. The unusual syntax of Objective-C was always seen as a hinderance to OpenStep/Cocoa adoption, and Java was seen as the solution to that problem. But Java wasn't a p

More ›