drpixie

7 ms·

271.
by drpixie 3y ago
Yes. Works fine on all but one site, which only works on chrome. (Running on Linux and Android.) Also firefox seems slightly faster to start & to execute than chrome, though I'd be happy to drop lots of the JS garbage to make prope
272.
by drpixie 3y ago
I think you can still buy "Meccano" ... like Lego but potentially more capable. Eight might be a little young, but got to start sometime :)
273.
by drpixie 3y ago
> Except it doesn't scale that well to all of the different operations. How do you distinguish between a signed and an unsigned high multiply? What do you do for operations like count-trailing-zeros or popcount, which don't map
274.
by drpixie 3y ago
To be fair - the processor only has binary opcodes & operands :) My example wasn't clear enough - I wasn't proposing full expression compiling. If you think (simplistically) of assembler as a macro processor that maps text mne
275.
by drpixie 3y ago
Done that on several occasions. There are plenty of projects (and many languages) that compile to C and hand that on to the systems compiler. As an output format, C actually works very well. It hides the fiddly things like register allocati
276.
by drpixie 3y ago
Very true, though there are some instruction sets with literally thousands - like the Intel x86-64. Give me RISC any day.
277.
by drpixie 3y ago
It's all convention. Personally, I'd like more arithmetic convention. Instead of: MYARRAY: DEFW 100 ADD R1,R5,R7 MVI R2,R1,MYARRAY how about: MYARRAY: WORD[100] R1 = R5+R7 MYARRAY[R2] = R1 Not much harder top
278.
by drpixie 3y ago
42
279.
by drpixie 3y ago
Yup. I even find network (!!) settings disappearing or changing. (shakes head sadly)
280.
by drpixie 3y ago
In many ways it's still a problem. Sure you've now got xx-GB of RAM and zz-TB of storage, but you now live in a world where images and video are used for day-to-day comms, instead of text. Compared with (say) 20 years ago, you&#x2
281.
by drpixie 3y ago
> Some people recommended tools to me which can be used to switch most of those things off. But honestly: How do you trust a system (or its manufacturer) if you can't even know if those settings, which you deliberately chose, persis
282.
by drpixie 3y ago
Some things are worth protecting against, but most of the blocking I've seen has beeen sites that just don't conform with google's prefences. Given that there is a conflict between google's preferences and mine, there is
283.
by drpixie 3y ago
Yeah - I've still got my copy from way back when ... makes me one of the old guys:) It was inspiring - partly for what could be (which was the vibe of the times) and partly for what it was. I still miss the old, big, machines.
284.
by drpixie 3y ago
Not a traditional history narrative but: Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson - a fabulous exploration of the optimism of the early computing era. I imagine it's long out of print but apparently available from internet archiv
285.
by drpixie 3y ago
I normally prefer browser to app. Why would I want to install yet more junk software, which might be doing who-knows-what, if I can get the same result without adding extra weird, untrustworthy stuff to my systems? This applies to PCs and m
286.
by drpixie 3y ago
Microsoft seem to have dropped any pretense of being a software company, and Windows of being an "OS". Windows is pretty much the same old same old but with more and more and more ads. It gets a big "gee whiz" when they
287.
by drpixie 3y ago
How often do you hear "As a parent ...", especially used to justify a completely unremarkable statement. "As a mother, it's important that my child is healthy" - duh.
288.
by drpixie 3y ago
Imagine trying to get compensation for your broken windows from Elon Musk!
289.
by drpixie 3y ago
And we're not talking about one (rich) bastard disturbing one other person. A sonic boom will disturb almost everyone under/near the flightpath. How many people would be under a supersonic flight down the US east coast from (say)
290.
How to Be a Technology Charlatan(scottlocklin.wordpress.com)
2 points by drpixie 3y ago|1 comments
291.
by drpixie 4y ago
Obviously I didn't make my point clearly, because your examples confirm what I'm thinking. Electronic music has been around for ages - I was a great fan of Kraftwerk. Your kids have huge amounts of music, I had a bit - they are do
292.
by drpixie 4y ago
Yup - we have higher res graphics, and (maybe) quicker networking, but we're doing almost exactly the same things, in almost exactly the same manner. Progress?? I despair that we've all got astonishing computer power but it hasn&#
293.
by drpixie 4y ago
Check out some microkernel systems (eg. Hurd). They have their problems, but the core OS is very minimal. The microkernel idea is to move everything that can be moved, out to user-space. The minimal OS services is typically thread managemen
294.
by drpixie 4y ago
It's a nice word. I wonder where they borrowed it from :)
295.
by drpixie 4y ago
It's disturbingly reminiscent of the rule britannia crowd, proud boys, and (now) dilbert :(
296.
by drpixie 4y ago
Your right, but email is never fully reliable. How many times have you lost things into your gmail/outlook/etc's spam folder? And with the amount of genuine spam being sent FROM GMAIL to my backup gmail address, it's unt
297.
by drpixie 4y ago
> In some cases, websites weren't even allowing email registration with a self-hosted email. I've seen that once or twice, but it was because my self-hosted is on a .one domain. There are (not surprisingly) a few organisations
298.
by drpixie 4y ago
Optane had enormous potential, but being outside with our paradigm, couldn't plug into existing systems and apps :(
299.
by drpixie 4y ago
Or perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle - science (or computing) changes one funeral at a time. Things change when the people wedded to old ideas are off the scene.
300.
by drpixie 4y ago
Yay - I too want something better. It will be initially difficult, completely incompatible. But I hope that, someday, only computer historians will discusses "files" and "ports".

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