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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

That’s why they called it the Pentium and not the 586: on the bench it kept coming out at 585.9999999. I’m sorry.

To pay my way for the silliness: I will highly recommend “The Pentium Chronicles” for a view into that time and place.

It covers the development of the P6 arch, but there is some inside baseball about the P5. And it’s just one of the best books I’ve ever read about really amazingly well-run engineering efforts.

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I will always appreciate the old jokes like this. Never apologies for them no matter how cheesy!

My favorite from the 90's was, what does a computer and an air conditioner have in common? Both stop working when you open windows.

Why is Linux like a Wigwam?

No Windows, no Gates and Apache inside.

TIL that wigwam and wickiup are two names for similar enough dwellings that we may consider them the same thing. I always thought that wigwams were bigger. They're usually called wigwams in the northeast among the Iroquois confederacy and wickiups in the southwest among the Apache.

I think the Iroquois were mostly associated with longhouses, not huts.

yeah I think my issue stems from getting taught that wigwam was a synonym for longhouse when we learned the terms in school in the Northeast (like dead in the middle of an Iroquois nation). Haudenosaunee (endonym for Iroquois) literally references the longhouse. Wigwam has nothing to do with longhouse! It's an Algonquian word (further East from the Iroquois). Will keep this in mind.

This reminds me of another old line:

"In a world without walls or fences, who needs Windows or Gates?"

Your comment reminded me that Cyrix had a "586" chip (technically was called the 5x86) and 12 year old me definitely thought it was an Intel when I bought it at a local computer show. Turned out to be a great little processor for the price.

Cyrix was a really fascinating company. Extremely short lived but had a huge impact on Intel's grip over the processor space (Intel lost all their lawsuits against them and nearly faced antitrust proceedings because of it).

Q: What do you get when you cross a mathematician with an Intel Pentium Chip? A: A mad scientist!

This bug is a great counterexample to the adage that 'computers don't make mistakes - they do exactly as they're told'.

I believe there is a lot of overlap between the transcript of an interview Robert Colwell did [1] with his book The Pentium Chronicles. I've read and liked both. I'm linking to archive.org's copy as the original site appears to be defunct.

[1] Oral history of Robert P. Colwell (1954- ) Interviewed by Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Prof., University of Michigan School of Information, at Colwell’s home near Portland, Oregon, on August 24-25, 2009

https://web.archive.org/web/20210726205114/https://www.sigmi...

I just checked and this book is 100$ AU. Why so expensive?

Wild guess - out of print, highly sought after, collector's item?

It's still in print - it's listed on Amazon UK for £37.95 (~$74 AUD).

If you're lucky enough to know someone with the right IEEE Xplore subscription: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/book/5989703

Appears to be available for lending at archive.org

When I was running a team that included other managers I bought copies for everyone, and I believe at least one is in a box somewhere. I’ve read it dozens of times so I’m happy to pass it along if I can find it.

No promises (I’ve moved a lot) but if you email me I’ll try to find it and if I do it’s yours.

0.999 repeating is an infinite summation that converges to 1.

There are multiple proofs for this, but my favorite simple, yet informal proof, is that there is no real number you can add to 0.999 infinitely repeating to make it 1. So mathematically, they are equal.

1.0-0.99999>0

If spheres have theoretically zero contact area, and they stack in a tube, is there zero contact area between the spheres?

We say that the limits of 1/x and 2/x are equal, but they have different slopes approaching said asymptotic limit

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