weland

88 ms·

301.
by weland 12y ago
I'm an EE and can confirm this. An EE who does something other than microelectronics can generally understand how those circuits work, but is generally unable to design a non-trivial one.
302.
by weland 12y ago
This is precisely what sprang in my mind. It's stuff like the LISP Machines and Elite that have survived the 1980s long enough for us to consider them as part of a "golden era". Those were the exception, not the norm, of the
303.
by weland 12y ago
My life has gone along pretty similar lines. It's always good when you see there are others who made it! Congratulations!
304.
by weland 12y ago
Practical experience shows that once you run into even routine systems programming elements, like writing device drivers and whatnot, you eventually have to concede some safety, or end up with an unprogrammable behemoth of such baroque comp
305.
by weland 12y ago
How big a family and how big a farm? My grandparents used to have one, too. As they grew old and the family either shrank or less of it became available for regular fieldwork, it simply became unsustainable for them. They kept a small-ish g
306.
by weland 12y ago
> Right, it doesn't feed us entirely most days, but we don't have to buy many veggies. This is in the context where, as ZenPro stated above: > industrial countries spend between 9-11% of their annual income on foodstuffs and
307.
by weland 12y ago
> There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for
308.
by weland 12y ago
> PGP is fucking complicated, annoying, and non-user-friendly to use as a computer literate individual that codes for a living. I really don't think it is. Yes, it took me two days or so of reading stuff and chaining commands when I
309.
by weland 12y ago
My highly cynical take: education. It will fucking take education. All this "oh my god but PGP is so complicated , how can a regular user be expected to use all this?" thing is crap we use to delude ourselves into ignoring the fa
310.
by weland 12y ago
zOS and SystemZ are indeed backwards compatible, and not without reason, but stuff like MTS really is obsolete. Or at least I think it should be (I'm not involved in maintaining such systems, I just enjoy collecting old computers)
311.
by weland 12y ago
> Ford's time clock system is still ran on emulated System360's using MTS Fuck! MTS? The Michigan Terminal System? I haven't heard that being mentioned since I was, literally, a kid. Even IBM considers that obsolete, and I
312.
by weland 12y ago
Good point. I sort of lost contact with the Plan 9 world a while ago -- I kept following the news, but no longer ran a system. Last time I used it, the X11 port was somewhere between experimental and broken, and vim is, uhm, not the editor
313.
by weland 12y ago
> Some applications are too complex for math, so you just have to create really good simulations, like for example in wireless communications. Understanding the math behind those simulations is absolutely crucial to not getting bit by th
314.
by weland 12y ago
Converting many of the tools used by the Unix hackerdom is made rather difficult by two aspects: * Plan 9's approach on terminal is entirely decoupled from the TTY idea. The terminal is basically a program that takes commands, has a sh
315.
by weland 12y ago
I used Plan 9 continuously for one summer, a while ago, when I was in high school. It's a nice environment, but certainly not something that could be used for day-to-day computing. I still needed another computer for almost anything th
316.
by weland 12y ago
I had a similar frame of mind when I was a student. I didn't pay too much attention to the formal details; I didn't brush it off, to be fair, and I think I paid more attention to it than most of my colleagues, but I still massivel
317.
by weland 12y ago
Unlike most of the web 2.0 world, there is substantially more value in their content than in their design wizardry. It's a team with limited resources whose can barely keep up with the information they archive and is doing an impressiv
318.
by weland 12y ago
Fifty bucks they'll "only use it for counter-terrorist operations". Another fifty bucks says wearing dubious clothes is going to be a terrorist operation fifteen years from now.
319.
by weland 12y ago
Well fuck, why wasn't I invited to the revolution? Journalists should know better than throwing around weasel phrases like these. Consumer devices like the Pencil are outside the scope of interest , let alone work, of most hardware an
320.
by weland 12y ago
I have mixed feelings about a system like this one. On one hand, knowing more about the habits of a student (or of students in general!) is very helpful, but when it goes wrong, it can have very bad results, and I find it hard to weigh th
321.
by weland 12y ago
Hm, good point. My difficulty was this: if a company holds patents that it is not exploiting, all they're doing is adding unneeded pressure on competitors who have to think twice about implementing something similar because you never k
322.
by weland 12y ago
I'm not sure if that could be worked out in a fair manner. Holding patents as a nearly-bankrupt company that's essentially out of business is not necessarily to be forbidden -- it can still be used constructively, e.g. by licensin
323.
by weland 12y ago
IMHO, this should not be dealt with at a company level, since the shell company is arguably not engaged in any economic activity: their juridical entity is, essentially, worthless. Instead, given the toxic economic climate the people behi
324.
by weland 12y ago
Actually, the very basics of carpentry are the things you use to put together the IKEA desks! No, seriously. IKEA didn't have a store open around here when I was a kid; some of the less pretentious furniture in my parents' house w
325.
by weland 12y ago
> Software of this type is needed to do a chore, and honestly if the tools are in place, it could be re-created in an afternoon rather than extended when the time comes. I agree that it's supposed to do a chore, so it should be as e
326.
by weland 12y ago
I hope my comparison with Visual Basic didn't come out as derogatory. Because, at the risk of no sane programming talking to me ever again, I will admit that I really do admire it! It wasn't built in a period that would have allow
327.
by weland 12y ago
I also wish that programming were a lot different today than it was when I started learning it. That being said, a lot of this article's points are things I've heard before. They led to the development of Visual Basic & co., m
328.
by weland 12y ago
> Obviously Fortran is used a lot in HPC and numerical routines, but I always figured those were closed-source and rarely updated, with development focusing on their wrappers. There are quite a few that are open-source, and often under v
329.
by weland 12y ago
> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers? I'm one. I used BeOS 5 on my home computer for a while, a long time ago. Not for production work, mind you, but for everyday stuff and programming of my own, nonetheless.
330.
by weland 12y ago
It's fighting for users' privacy as in fighting for how much of that ton of information they're gathering can be withheld . Otherwise, yeah, I know a few really attractive ladies who are fucking for virginity.

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