deater

6 ms·

1.
by deater 21d ago
even some of Banks' stuff starts to get a bit dated. I was re-reading Consider Phlebas the other day, and in one sequence he snuck into a high-security concert type event and he's making narrow escapes because concert security is
2.
by deater 2mo ago
back when the Apple II / Applesoft BASIC twitter bot was a thing similar techniques were the best way to inject assembly language into a BASIC program, though we quickly learned there were more compact ways than REM to get a line ignor
3.
by deater 5mo ago
There are probably so many stories out there of interesting things she did. A few are breifly referenced at her old website here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060116130917/http://www.csl.co...
4.
by deater 5mo ago
you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee" I notice these things a bit more as she was my PhD thesis advisor
5.
Sally McKee, who coined the term "the memory wall", has died(online-tribute.com)
124 points by deater 5mo ago|43 comments
6.
by deater 8mo ago
you should try running Linpack on them all (you can find the results here mixed in with other machines I own) https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/machines.html When I did that on Pi3 when it first came out y
7.
by deater 8mo ago
I don't know how many of you have seen a 1541 floppy drive in person either but it is massive, it's heavier and possibly bigger that an actual Commodore 64 and pretty expensive at the time too. it's fun seeing c64 people on t
8.
by deater 9mo ago
as the previous commenter hinted, it's because the founders were Vera and Augustin
9.
by deater 9mo ago
way back in the day our college LUG (linux user group) had a rep from VA Linux come to speak, but the person running things was unfamiliar with the company and kept calling them "Virginia Linux"
10.
Maximizing Compression of Apple II Hi-Res Images(deater.net)
27 points by deater 9mo ago|4 comments
11.
by deater 10mo ago
at the time, just out of undergrad, I ended up working for the remnants of the #9 Video Card company that had been bought by S3 and was masking a last effort at making a Linux-based Transmeta-powered "web-pad" (tablet): the "
12.
Monster Splash double-hires demo for Apple IIe(deater.net)
8 points by deater 11mo ago|0 comments
13.
by deater 11mo ago
saying "windows 98 was bad too" is just an example that Microsoft has always had poor code quality. Back in the day Linux, for all its flaws, was generaly a lot more stable on the same hardware. microsoft has a lot to answer for
14.
by deater 1y ago
as someone who has written my own OS from scratch (vmwOS) and teach a class on it, I have to agree with a lot of the other comments that x86-based OS projects do end up being exercises in 40-year old PC/x86 retrocomputing. A few years
15.
by deater 1y ago
quite possible because it's from Europe, but remember that Apple was sticking + on the end of their model names 6 years before the Amiga existed.
16.
by deater 1y ago
as someone who has built various raspberry pi clusters over the years (I even got an academic paper out of one) the big shame is that as far as I know it's still virtually impossible to use the fairly powerful GPUs they have for GPGPU
17.
by deater 1y ago
ironically, you should be thanking Apple that the IBM PC exists The Apple II was an open system and IBM clearly took a lot of inspiration from the Apple II line. Look at the 5150 motherboard in the picture in the article and compare it to
18.
by deater 1y ago
I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being. https://groups.google.com/g/r
19.
by deater 1y ago
dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time. I would have linked it here but none of th
20.
by deater 1y ago
it's already happened. So many of the main contributors work for IBM, Microsoft, and Intel. It's extremely difficult to have your voice heard / patches accepted if you're just a hobbyist developer I've gone to the
21.
by deater 1y ago
it's funny that a lot of us Linux nuts on comp.os.linux.advocacy back in the 90s predicted this was Microsoft's planned endgame. I personally thought it would take less than 30 years for them to get around to it though.
22.
by deater 1y ago
my plan to rick-roll every major coding competition continues apace. muahahaha I actually had another entry that I felt had much more clever coding that did some nice sixel animations but from what I understand there were many entries also
23.
by deater 1y ago
I think you'll find more systems used DRAM than SRAM. The Apple II was one of the first 6502 systems to use DRAM (in 1977) and Woz was incredibly clever in getting the refresh for free as a side effect of the video generation
24.
by deater 1y ago
I have to say as a 6502 assembly programmer I have wasted many hours of my life tracking down the same issue in my code (forgetting to put an # in front of an immediate value and thus accidentally doing a memory access instead). Often it&#
25.
by deater 1y ago
the problem is I have a whole box of composite capture cards and only one actually does a reasonably good job. I feel like it'd get expensive doing the same thing with HDMI capture boards. My other big problem with HDMI capture is try
26.
by deater 1y ago
I have to admit I'm being difficult here and want to capture the output of the composite port from the actual Apple II video circuitry. I feel like having a raspberry Pi replace the video circuitry is cheating somehow, and I know that
27.
by deater 1y ago
I still find it nearly impossible to get good video captures from my Apple II for demoscene purposes the best I can get is an old composite->USB capture device which mostly does a good job but struggles with lo-res graphics (grey ends up
28.
by deater 1y ago
you can also get a regular interrupt from a Mockingboard sound card, these days it's probably more likely people will have one of those (especially if they are running under emulation) than a mouse card. when writing demos and games th
29.
by deater 1y ago
haha as someone who has spent a lot of time recently doing Apple II graphics coding, both for games, sizecoding, and the demoscene, let me tell you that the weird layout in fact is not easier to deal with. You have to waste a lot of space o
30.
by deater 1y ago
if anyone is curious, the data structure used in the Apple II version had the idea of "locations" which just hold 4 of the nodes described here. Usually this would be for North/South/East/West, plus there would be

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