drallison

Amazing work. <sigh/> A whole block of cool research to track. <grin/>

The undocumented instructions in the 8085 were described in detail in Dr Dobb's Journal shortly after announcement of the 8085 (with no mention of the "new" instructions).

The 6600 was not a superscalar machine but simply a pipelined processor. Superscalar machines first appeared in the floating point processor of the IBM 360/91 and may well be due to John Cocke (IBM) who generalized the notion. Yale Patt (UC Berkeley, U Michigan, U Texas at Austin) refined the ideas. Most processors designed today have superscalar features.

The People's Computer Company published many BASIC games in its publications (PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, Dr. Dobbs Journal, Recreational Computing) and in the book, What to Do After You Hit Return: Or, P.C.C.'s First Book of Computer Games. Many of the games were reprinted elsewhere, often without attribution.

I worked on the MUMPS Standard when I taught in the Medical Informatics Committee at UC San Francisco. When I first encountered the language, I was appalled. For example, in pre-standard MUMPS, lines with no trailing blanks and lines with one trailing blank had a different interpretation. For those interested, https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/hb/nbshandbook118.p.... At one of the standardization meetings, I embarrassed myself by called MUMPS a "viral disease" because of the pathology of the programming language as defined to an audience of people who saw it as a practical tool they used every day. The standard helped stabilize the language. I acquired an appreciation for the incredible skill application programmers can adapt a general purpose extensible language to do their bidding.

Wait. We are exploring boundaries and understanding and not necessarily maintaining the present system. Money? Lend? Ownership? Business? Protecting money? Payments? Privilege? Banking? These are all up for rethinking.

Why do we even need banks? What does the financial industry provide? If we were to restructure everything, what would make sense? What are the invariant properties of a viable financial system?

Everyone should read this summary/review of the "debate".

More important, everyone should read the paper being debated: Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, Richard A. De Millo (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Richard J. Lipton and Alan J. Perlis (Yale University). This is one of my favorite CS papers because it exposes a lot of the mechanism behind making proofs that are convincing. What does it mean to say you have proven something.

Eric Mitchell will discuss the problem of detecting machine-generated text followed by an open forum Q&A. Part of EE380, Stanford EE Computer Systems Forum.

Don't believe this article. If adding automation and robots to the mix does not decrease cost, it is not going to happen. Labor is the only free variable.

It is a real loss, Gumby. Carl and I were friends and spent hours on the telephone solving the problems of the world and playing polymath math. Hardly a day would go by without an hour or so chat with Carl.

It is a real loss, Gumby. Carl and I were friends and spent hours on the telephone solving the problems of the world.

Amen. Fuel out of thin air: CO2 capture from air and converted to methanol takes way more energy than can be recovered from the created fuel.

Just a quick reminder: Fred Brooks did much more than write the Mythical Man Month.

Most of what passes for crypto isn't. The hard problem is not providing an encrypted channel, it's doing the rest, particularly key exchange. When you can construct an encrypted channel, then you need to look at maintaining the end points secure and ensuring the local data is appropriately secured and encrypted. Then, .... Crypto provides a few tools, but secure systems require careful design, analysis, and knowledge and a fascile command of some arcane mathematics.

It is unlikely that there is a way to avoid obsession and addiction Supply an ipad with a reliable high bandwidth "works anywhere" network connection, lots of memory, lots of processor performance, and Minecraft. Sign her/him up for home schooling. Stockpile food and drink that can be consumed while working on Minecraft. Setup sleeping bag and mattress near the Minecraft site. Cut a deal with the child that they will check-in once a week and set them free.

The 1979 HP APL\3000 compiler was pretty cool. As I remember, the project was led by John Walters who led the IBM 360 assembler development and was unique in how it managed data references.

An earlier compiler/interpreter in the same vein was written in 1971 for the Burroughs B6700 by Jim Ryan and described in the 3rd APL Conference.

No, I do not believe engineer founders have problems getting hired. They are "experienced" and "know the ropes". Startups rarely fail because of a boffo in engineering.

I second this choice. Be sure to get the second edition and to read the various fascicles for Knuth's Volume 4 of Art of Computer Programming. Volume 2 has some useful content as well.

If you become one of the best programmers in the world, what will you have achieved? What is there about programming that captures your passion? Will that be sustainable for the brief moment you are alive. What do you want as a legacy after 80 years of work?

One example: The Hacker's Conference ["Hackers"]. It is populated by a diverse group of people, . Attendees program, but I doubt that anyone of the attendees would call themselves a programmer except in jest.

Hackers do what they do. Some are mathematicians, some are musicians. At least one plays the organ. Others are into sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Some are spiritual, some agnostic. Some climb mountains. Others worry about how to planet-form the earth to recover from an over-abundance of CO2. Some have families and kids, some do not. Everyone is interested in everything. Hackers know things, observe, and learn things. They delight in sharing knowledge, particularly arcane knowledge. They are compassionate, ethical, and loving (although there are occasional exceptions).

If you are good at programming you are likely to be good at living an exploratory life. Be fearless and brash. Always wonder why and learn how.

Archive.org (the Internet Archive) is doing important, critical work to build and maintain an archival copy of everything.

If you have not used the system, spend some time and discover the gems that are included in its collection. https://archive.org Offer suggestions and get involved.

On July 15th I attended the Archive Open House and spoke with Brewster about the ambitious plans through the coming year and the next few decades. There is a lot that needs to be done.

The Archive needs your moral, political, and monetary support. To donate: https://archive.org/donate .

Archive.org (the Internet Archive) is doing important, critical work to build and maintain an archival copy of everything.

If you have not used the system, spend some time and discover the gems that are included in its collection. https://archive.org Offer suggestions and get involved.

On July 15th I attended the Archive Open House and spoke with Brewster about the ambitious plans through the coming year and the next few decades. There is a lot that needs to be done.

The Archive needs your moral, political, and monetary support. To donate: https://archive.org/donate .

Worth listening particularly if you think you'd like to buy a sailboat and gadabout the world. Engaging, geeky, and informative.

Well,"space bubbles" do not provide a mechanism to reverse global warming. Space bubbles (and other shading systems) divert some of the incoming heat from the sun and would allow cooling by re-radiation. But the space bubbles do not do anything about the CO2 in the atmosphere, the root cause of global warming, and so the greenhouse effects persist. This approach is a "Hail Mary" panic response, useful when the global warming disaster is upon us, nothing has been done, and people are dying.

Others have proposed similar projects and are actively developing sunshade technology.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Patents are constitutionally mandated.

Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

The Register in this article gets it wrong.

Under the Department of Commerce, the USPTO's core mission is to protect intellectual property, or IP. Creators file patent applications in hope of keeping competitors from copying their inventions without permission, and patents are supposed to allow businesses to thrive with their own novel designs while not stifling wider innovation.

The Register's focus is on the protection of intellectual property for businesses. The Constitution however mandates patents and copyright to promote the progress of science and useful arts [for the people] and offers a time-limited limited monopoly to inventors and authors as the means progress is promoted. The concepts are quite separate and distinct.

This interpreter for a BASIC subset very much like Tiny BASIC, which was done for the Altair as a project at PCC (The People's Computer Company) in the mid-1970's. I am looking forward to reading the code.

There are several typos and factual errors in this article. A careful proofread with fact checking and corrections republished if it is to be used as a primary reference.

Wonderful. A380 transatlantic flights were the most comfortable way to get from California to Europe (London or Paris).

The Russian aggression into Ukraine is an anathema; if sanctions are the solution, everyone supporting the Ukraine needs to take a strong position despite the human cost inflicted upon civilians.

Every country needs to not buy Russian goods or goods produced by another sanctioned country.

Every country needs not to sell goods to Russia or another sanctioned country.

All financial and commercial interactions between the Russia and its sanctioned supporters needs to cease.

For example, that means China and India should not be buying Russian oil and other goods. If they do, then they too will be sanctioned.

Likewise, countries that sell goods to Russia or other sanctioned countries, for example, aircraft parts, should themselves be sanctioned.

Aggressive sanctions can cause significant damage, disruption, even casualties.

Are there realistic models of the various economies that can be used to forecast the impacts of various sanction strategies? Where is there data on the economies of Russia, the Ukraine, and their global trading partners adequate to estimate impacts of different strategies.

Silicon Catalyst is a global venture incubator with many hardware projects in progress.