pdw

8 ms·

1.
by pdw 1mo ago
It's baffling but I'm starting to believe that some people genuinely cannot tell. It's like nails on chalkboard to me.
2.
by pdw 1mo ago
Because it imagines that no library other than libc has an ABI that depends on intmax_t. Suppose I have a libfoo that has a public function that takes an intmax_t parameter. Or that has a public struct with an intmax_t field. It will be com
3.
by pdw 2mo ago
Floppy reliability dropped of a cliff in the mid-90s. It came to a point where it wasn't unusual to see I/O errors even on completely new floppies. But with older drives and older media, produced to a higher standard, they were pr
4.
by pdw 4mo ago
I'm sad that the building instructions link doesn't work. I'd love to see them.
5.
by pdw 5mo ago
Nothing to do with the VM. The game was designed that way, navigation is part of the puzzle.
6.
by pdw 7mo ago
I think that's out of date. The banner at the top of the page says "you can request a free license for version 5.4 from us." According to archive.org that was added later than the text you quoted, somewhere between 2022 and 2
7.
by pdw 7mo ago
In the early 90s Microsoft distributed the full Win32 API documentation as a WinHelp file. It felt very much as hyperlinked man-pages. Super fast too, even on machines of the time. WIN32.HLP can still be easily found, but modern Windows ver
8.
by pdw 7mo ago
"Shipping" wouldn't be a problem, they could just run it from a network drive. Their PCs were networked, they needed to test deathmatches after all ;) And the compilation speed difference wouldn't be small. The HP workst
9.
by pdw 8mo ago
Even then it was not universal. For example, that Apple I ad that got posted a few days ago mentioned that "the system is expandable to 65K". https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/
10.
by pdw 8mo ago
Even in computing the binary definition is only used with memory sizes. E.g. storage, network speeds, clock rates use the standard definition.
11.
by pdw 9mo ago
All of Microsoft's applications used to do that! The 16-bit versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc all were implemented using bytecode. That technology was only integrated in Microsoft C and made public in 1992 [1], before that the M
12.
by pdw 10mo ago
Rosetta uses software emulation for x87 floating point. That's slow, but in practice that doesn't matter much. Mac software never had a reason to use x87 FP, every Intel Mac had at least SSE3 support.
13.
by pdw 10mo ago
The signedness of `char` is implementation-defined, it is signed on x86 but unsigned on ARM. So assigning a plain char to a wider integer type is suspicious, did the programmer expect sign-extension or zero-extension?
14.
by pdw 10mo ago
The Nintendo GameCube and Wii also had IBM CPUs.
15.
by pdw 11mo ago
I wouldn't assume ABCL runs on Android. It's not listed as a supported runtime on their website.
16.
by pdw 11mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)
17.
by pdw 11mo ago
A lot of game devs of that era sadly treated the Adlib/SoundBlaster OPL2 chip as nothing more than a very poor MIDI synth, but it was capable of much better. For example, listen to some of Stéphane Picq's music. https:/&#x2F
18.
by pdw 1y ago
In those days malloc would use sbrk to allocate memory. And yes, mmap was designed to memory map files. Using it to allocate anonymous pages came later.
19.
by pdw 1y ago
Are they in widespread use? They were deprecated in 1995.
20.
by pdw 1y ago
I always wondered how secure AS/400 actually is. The original implementation might have checked tag bits in hardware (I don't know), but the current (PowerPC) implementation relies on the compiler generating a "check tag bits
21.
by pdw 1y ago
Debian woody (2002) shipped gnustep. I tried it back then, but as far as I remember, it was weird enough that anybody who didn't have NEXTSTEP experience would bounce right off. The floating menus, the weird scrollbars, etc. There were
22.
by pdw 1y ago
Security researchers rarely fix bugs. They don't see it as their job, and it requires a very different skill set than finding or exploiting them anyway.
23.
by pdw 1y ago
From that article: > While similar, it is not the widely reported Asrock motherboard problem, as the motherboards we use are of a different make
24.
by pdw 1y ago
The Windows 2000 launch is closer to the release of Altair 8800 than it is to today :/
25.
by pdw 1y ago
Right, people forget that the xz-utils backdoor happened to a very traditional no-dependencies C project.
26.
by pdw 1y ago
zlib comes with a basic ZIP implementation (libminizip).
27.
by pdw 1y ago
As a user you can only use the polyfill to replace the XSLTProcessor() JavaScript API. You can't use the polyfill if you're using XSLT for XML Stylesheets (<?xml-stylesheet … ?> tags). (But of course, XML Stylesheets are mos
28.
by pdw 1y ago
It's disheartening that this Chrome dev in the comments shows himself to be completely unaware of the RSS ecosystem...
29.
Why Looking Isn't Always Seeing: Readership Skills and Graphical Programming(dl.acm.org)
1 points by pdw 1y ago|0 comments
30.
by pdw 1y ago
With an old and conservative project like Emacs, the reason could just as likely be that it was done that way for the NEXTSTEP port in the early 90s and that nobody revisited it since then. Oftentimes the reason is just legacy, limited manp

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