w0mbat

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331.
by w0mbat 6y ago
An example of the XCMD-heavy HyperCard stuff I worked on was the "Last Chance to See" Mac CD-ROM with Douglas Adams. A small team worked on it but the whole UI is done with XCMDs I wrote as is the audio streaming. I don't se
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by w0mbat 6y ago
Part of the genius of HyperCard was that it didn’t take long for someone to learn the whole language and all the things you could do. Once I hit the edges there were a few things I wanted to do that HyperCard didn’t support but I found I co
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by w0mbat 6y ago
This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more. He was getting a massive salarY, bonuses in the millions, and he had persuaded Google to pay him even more money thro
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by w0mbat 6y ago
It's shown up in Vista and some other Windows versions since that. I though they used it fairly tastefully, but I'm not a Windows user so haven't spent much time looking at it. Apple currently has the blur radius so high they
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by w0mbat 6y ago
I invented the translucent blurred window effect. It first shipped in Mac IE 5.0 in April 2000 (the non-Carbon version only), for the autocomplete window, and later that year for the web page context menu (first in the special MacHack versi
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by w0mbat 6y ago
I've used wheel mice on the Mac from the time the Microsoft USB wheel mouse came out, back when there was a Mac driver that controlled classic Mac apps by looking for scroll bars and sending events, licensed from an Italian developer.
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by w0mbat 6y ago
The scene of the battle of Midway would also hold a hoard of nice steel (the Japanese lost a lot of ships including aircraft carriers). I understand that Scapa Flow has been heavily salvaged with only 7 out of 52 ships still down there.
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by w0mbat 6y ago
David Spade's personal assistant famously attacked him with a stun gun, so be careful! Normally, though, the story is the reverse: a celeb mis-treated their personal assistant and is now being sued.
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by w0mbat 6y ago
No it’s named after the “Shoes” meme video from 2006.
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by w0mbat 6y ago
In the late 80s I worked at a little BBC department writing multimedia Mac & Windows software (it had moved on from the BBC Micro software it used to write). This was a team descended from the team that did the Domesday Project years be
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by w0mbat 6y ago
The original ARM team was given a power budget of 1 watt, but when the first silicon was made they found they had accidentally made it so efficient that it ran on a tenth of a watt. There is a nice little first-hand history of the early d
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by w0mbat 6y ago
Insurance is exactly the same thing as gambling. For example, when someone buys an extended warranty on a new TV they are betting that it will break before a certain date (and after the factory warranty has expired). Most customers lose tha
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by w0mbat 6y ago
The author seems not to know what a codpiece is, as if he thinks it's an unneeded extra garment men wore on top to draw attention to their genitals. Mens' trousers in those days were two separate garments: a left leg and a right l
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by w0mbat 6y ago
Amazon's 401k plan is terrible when compared to competing companies. I cancelled my Amazon interview the second I saw the terms of it. I had to find the details for myself because the info packet the recruiter sent me, conveniently lef
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by w0mbat 6y ago
Ex-browser dev here. Please don't ship invalid HTML like this. Web standards specify how to render valid HTML in a standard way, and browsers have become better and better at that over the years. Invalid HTML destroys all that. Each br
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by w0mbat 7y ago
The headline switches from singular to plural halfway through. I love this idea though. The manufacturers should get onboard with “emergency BiPAP” mode to make this happen without users having to do an elaborate hack.
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by w0mbat 7y ago
TLDR; They treated patients who presented with low blood oxygen by lying them on their belly or side and giving them oxygen through a nasal tube. No machine required. In many cases it worked perfectly.
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by w0mbat 7y ago
Nice article. Logical next step is to drive all 3 screens from a single power supply (as these use LED backlighting, they do not require much power each). I would build the AC transformer into the middle screen and have it output DC to the
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by w0mbat 7y ago
I would like to disagree with the author's post, but I couldn't understand a word of it.
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by w0mbat 7y ago
In the 90s, a startup called WebTV managed to negotiate and buy a perpetual SOURCE CODE license for Perforce (P4). WebTV built their own good version control system called "SourceDepot" on top of P4. When Microsoft bought WebTV th
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by w0mbat 7y ago
Various mass-market desktop apps that I've worked on have had a test system like this, where tests will screenshot the new build in various states and the pictures are compared with known good reference screenshots from a previous buil
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by w0mbat 7y ago
That's what I was going to say! It's very like when Steve Jobs started NeXt in the 80s, and Apple sued claiming theft of intellectual property and poaching of key staff. In my opinion the Apple claims had no merit, particularly in
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by w0mbat 7y ago
Back in the 90s when I was at a small BBC spin-off writing 3D Atlas (published by EA) we'd periodically get orders from EA to mark Tibet or Taiwan as part of China, or attribute Kashmir to India or Pakistan or something, apparently req
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by w0mbat 7y ago
That would explain a lot. Our 80’s high school physics teacher taught us that acceleration equals velocity squared, but he was prone to using vast over simplifications to get through the material quickly.
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by w0mbat 7y ago
What confuses many people in high school is that F = ma but KE = 1/2 mv^2 (or 1/2 ma).
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by w0mbat 7y ago
Yes, I see this as healthy turnover, the circle of life. I can testify that every main project I worked on when at Google is gone now except Chrome, the last thing I coded for. However, I don't think my time on other stuff was wasted.
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by w0mbat 7y ago
Coal is an environmental disaster. Burning it releases CO2, sulphur that causes acid rain, and surprising amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium. In fact, coal power plants cause more radioactive contamination than nuclear power plants,
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by w0mbat 7y ago
I think this is a cheap optimization the brain uses. Every time our location changes, it clears short term memory to have a fresh slate and be aware in the new situation. Think of it as setting up a new stack frame. I think it evolved so th
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4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers' Productivity by 40%, Microsoft Japan Says(npr.org)
3 points by w0mbat 7y ago|0 comments
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by w0mbat 7y ago
In Oakland, where I live, thieves have been targeting old generation 2 Priuses most often. I finally got my 2005 updated for the modern world with a CarPlay stereo and backup camera, and now I have to worry about it getting hacked apart by

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