nigel_bree

8 ms·

1.
by nigel_bree 1y ago
Interesting. Both timely, given the recent discovery of the massive failure to disclose the asset hiding in his family trust by Carl Bates, yet also rendered less pertinent because of it - in reality a wide swathe, and possibly a majority o
2.
by nigel_bree 1y ago
> Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them? No, because the decades have worn them down. It's been a long time since there have ever been jobs in NZ advertised requiring hard development skill
3.
by nigel_bree 1y ago
> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that the NZ market has almost no companies that need or
4.
by nigel_bree 1y ago
Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements. Almost the entirety of the growth in the size of the imaging
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by nigel_bree 3y ago
The big thing I think with any book is to aim to inspire people (especially younger ones) to create for themselves, and while there's probably a way to do that with an exegesis of the existing source I don't know what it would be.
6.
by nigel_bree 3y ago
Hey Nils, love your work - back around '90 when I joined Mark Williams I was a big Scheme fan, so your whole t3x.org site and "Scheme 9 from Empty Space" particularly puts a smile on my dial. I do think the fact that Coherent
7.
by nigel_bree 3y ago
Definitely true. And as well, the level of innovation that brought, particularly in places like Australia/NZ or the (then) East Germany/Ukraine, the outrageous cost of components made for a whole generation of quite exceptional &q
8.
by nigel_bree 3y ago
The classic "Nautilus" manual was really interesting on two sides; one was the quality of the writing, which was all down to Fred Butzen - he just had a real knack for clarity and working with him on documenting the work I did dur
9.
by nigel_bree 3y ago
Yes, and also notably Dave Conroy of MicroEMACS fame. I do believe that as with QNX and MKS Systems and Watcom, Coherent was mostly built by former graduates of Waterloo university - their computing department is responsible for a great man
10.
by nigel_bree 3y ago
Yes, prior to 4.x processes were strictly limited to 64kb code and 64kb data - essentially the equivalent to what MS-DOS programmers would call the small memory model only. There are a bunch of reasons for this, all of which stem from the f
11.
by nigel_bree 3y ago
It's not based on V6, although it was basically created as a clone of it (and on the PDP-11, no less - the x86 versions of Coherent until 4.x were basically just minimal ports that kept the PDP-11's classic 16-bit flavour). It was
12.
by nigel_bree 3y ago
You'd likely find the experience pretty miserable, not so much because of the C compiler - Steve did a great job with that - but actually because of the filesystem. Coherent was around for a long time, remember; it used a very classic
13.
by nigel_bree 5y ago
Yeah, just to confirm that for v7.1, we got a full source license of it for Symantec Ghost because Microsoft had withdrawn permission for us to distribute anything at all to do with MS-DOS, and we had a lot of customers still using DOS boot
14.
by nigel_bree 5y ago
Not sure about the specific text the parent had in mind but "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics" by Newman and Sproull (1979, but I bought it in '81 in the student edition and it influenced me a lot in my youth) made
15.
by nigel_bree 6y ago
I love this article, and have recommended it many times in discussion with young people learning programming in other forums (although it's rare for them to come back to me to say they'd read it, so...). There are some small diffe
16.
by nigel_bree 6y ago
Anyone from HN who wants to can drop by on the way to a more traditional tourist spot like Mangawhai or further north (although over summer I'm often away at the weekends racing stockcars). The phone number for the library redirects to
17.
by nigel_bree 6y ago
I currently live in Kaiwaka not far from Mangawhai and have since Symantec bought out Ghost in '98, as that helped me afford a first house. It's a wonderful place to live. I did a lot remotely back then and once Symantec closed in
18.
by nigel_bree 7y ago
> I think I later upgraded to a 100MB IDE disk, but was still lucky. Well, it really wasn't luck as much as keeping with the electrical specs. Do that, you'd never see a problem, and the later IDE "cable select" schem
19.
by nigel_bree 7y ago
Yeah, cross-subsidised products like that were an issue. But it's worth noting that part of the fine line we had to walk was that lots of the people who bought Coherent had hardware on which something like Solaris would have been total
20.
by nigel_bree 7y ago
> What killed it is they, for some reason, spent time and treasure port XWindows to it instead of working on a TCP/IP stack Just to be clear, there's a whole heaping helping of really big work required to get there either way,
21.
by nigel_bree 7y ago
> The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode As the person responsible (alas), my specific recollection of this particular bug was that the root cause wasn't thermal recalibration, but r
22.
by nigel_bree 13y ago
Genuine Ghost - aka "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite" was indeed file-level, built on its own filesystem code, although the NTFS support was initially fairly rough and the image file format use for NTFS in .GHO containers wasn't a pure file a