helpfulContrib

I find the mis-installed panels of the Cosmonaut a little more appealing than they would have been, done properly. The vista of the original design is certainly appealing in its symmetry - but the misaligned panels provide a narrative, rather than a static scene. As the eyes travel the panels provide motion through space, bringing the viewer along for the ride with the cosmonaut. I therefore have to wonder if, having discovered the mistake, the constructors realized that they might have improved the intentions of the artist, or indeed if the artist themselves simply let it be, due to the improved narrative positioning.

What a delightful article!

The cost of a single F35 could fund so much peace in the world. The only reason this isn't happening is because the people making sure the American people keep endlessly funding these programs have no intention whatsoever to make peace. They just don't have the intention to do so.

They intend for there to be endless war, which is what these machines produce. It is the only thing they can be used for..

It was a beautiful, sunny day when my tiBook, the first generation arrived. It was exciting, Apple were building decent hardware again, MacOS X was on its way.

I unpacked it, plugged it in, and set up my Ricochet Modem.

A few hours later, the battery was charged and I left my office on Kingswell Avenue and walked down to the Ellis House, which was the closest bit of open, public lawn I could find.. I wanted to do 'that thing', surf the Internet in a random location outside in the realworld.

The Ellis House provided the perfect location. I sat there on the lawn, ssh'ed into my server back in the office, kind of astounded. "This is the future, and I'm experiencing it at the Bladerunner House, lol", I thought to myself.

I sent my girlfriend an ICQ message to join me, and bring a DVD for us to watch, maybe a small picnic too. She arrived a few minutes later and we watched the Final Fantasy movie on DVD, on my laptop, sitting on the Ellis House lawn, as the sun went down.

It was a classic moment I'll never forget.

Of course its true - we wouldn't have gotten to the moon, or been able to build world-encompassing highway and Internet systems, without the critical mass of people who built our academic and industrial institutions.

To see the nature of your fallacy, just look out at your universities and wonder how they will operate, as effectively as they have so far, with half the staff. And then, that staff halves again in 10 years.

Doing this, honestly, do you still have faith that the deleterious effect of humanity upon itself will be replenished with new perspectives, new generations, new ideas?

We humans are instinctively cannibals. We don't eat each other literally any more, but spiritually and culturally. The moment there is less of that human culture to consume, the closer we get to actually reverting to the physical manifestation of it ..

Here's a random dungeon generator GAME (get potion, avoid snake, explore dungeon) that fits in 10 lines of BASIC [1] and would probably easily fit on a business card, too:

https://bunsen.itch.io/the-snake-temple-by-rax

([1] - The 10-line BASIC competition is happening again this year, details here: https://gkanold.wixsite.com/homeputerium/copy-of-rules)

The Japanese electronics giants of that era had an alterntive to MIX, in the ITRON [1] initiative, which included plans for a system-wide virtual machine to be used for compatibility purposes .. Knuths' books, while popular among Japanese computer scientists of the era, had some stiff competition in the Japanese industrial sector .. a few of the major players produced ITRON kernels with this capability, it would be interesting to research which of the personal computing toys of the era were ITRON machines in disguise ..

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRON_project

We took away the compilers so there would be generations of consumers instead of coders.

>airbags

I really have to wonder if these are really gasbags, containing something like pure nitrogen or whatever .. but did we introduce Earth gas to Mars' atmosphere in this process?

I have multiple Macs in my house, a couple iPads and tons of iPhones .. what I really want more than anything is to be able to access any/all of them with virtual screens.

If Vision Pro provides this experience - seamless displays of all devices on a single headset - then that is the point where I immediately invest.

I'm too old for 3D games, they make me puke. But if I can sit comfortably in a lounge chair with this thing strapped to my noggin and access all the machines in my house, for work (code), then I'm sold.

Portability and effectiveness. Sure, for you a dongle is great. But not if you're in the trenches covered in mud and you have to dig it out of a pocket somewhere ..

Technically, this is not necessarily knitting, its crocheting ..

A sailboat typically flies about 5 - 8 square meters of material in the sails, pulling 3 - 4 tons of material around the world ..

I'm reminded of the folks working on getting the Motorola M56k DSP emulator working so well that it can boot the firmware for many popular digital-analog synthesizers directly, and pretty much produce word-compatible output from factory patches .. astonishing stuff.

PC-Write. Bought the sources, too. PKZIP. Was pretty much required. Quarterdesk Desqview. Used it for 6 months, then switched to Linux. And of course, DOOM .. Wolfenstein .. Spectre VR ..

> the medications are safe to fly on

Citation?

By exploiting existing long-established natural underground rivers and water basins ..

Right - is it not the case that this object is tracking Mode 1 CD-ROM physical (i.e. rotational) frames, not audio/video frames? That is .. a Mode 1× CD-ROM drive reads 150/2 = 75 consecutive sectors per second ... 150k/sec transfer rate ..

This has now become more confusing than Linux.

Get your finite non-linearity fix here:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080010/

Great movie, well recommended ..

In since it was Chips 'n Dips. Still got my 3-number slashdot ID. Were definitely some crazy great days, refreshing slashdot back in the day ..

I use my recently acquired uConsole (clockwork Pi) with the RISC-V module to teach myself RISC-V Assembly and so on. Once I'm done with it in that capacity, I'm going to use it for email.

All these mini-devices get evaluated on the basis of whether they can be, eventually used for basic e-mail.

>Visual Basic allowed people with minimal knowledge of computers to write useful applications

Over a weekend, I built a very useful application using only the `yad` [1] tool, sqlite3, and BASH scripts. Its a membership system with integrated Bluetooth, QR codes, Markdown for membership cards, and so on.

I was impressed with how quickly it all came together.

It was delightful to be programming forms, using BASH to validate the results, and then stuff things into a relational database - all with common tools available with ease on the newly installed Raspberry Pi.

I was struck with how pleasant it felt to be coding this way. Immediate forms, very rapid validation logic, and a great set of tools to do data mangling. I even managed to convince ChatGPT to give me a "randomized test data" script that populated my nascent database with acceptable data for the purposes of continued development. Suddenly, rendering Markdown from the .sqlite3 database was fun!

We've come a long way. I didn't have to fuss much to gain access to many of these tools. Of course it helps that I know a bit of `yad` to be dangerous, enough sqlite3 to be productive, and just enough BASH to tie it all together.

I couldn't help but feel, somehow, that there was a way to make a GUI for these three tools, though ..

[1] - https://github.com/v1cont/yad

The great thing about FM is that it is quite a digital technology ..

Dexed:

https://zynthian.org/engines/_engine-list/engine-dexed

.. can be run on Zynthian (http://zynthian.com/)

And, there is the Monome, which supports various amazing FM thingies too:

https://llllllll.co/t/triggers-sorens-standalone-fm-synth/50...

https://llllllll.co/t/xd1-is-an-fm-synth/59150

Seriously the TX81Z is at the root of a lot of inspiring synth engines that have appeared since... and in the case of the Monome/Zynthian examples, proves yet again that no matter how complicated the synth engine behind it, as long as you've got a semi-decent user interface, people will cope and make tunes.

Which is why the TX81Z is such an oddity! :)

(Disclaimer: FS1R owner)

>My point was that that does not scale.

Thanks for the clarification.

>Also, I didn't have a scheduler. The point of interrupts is that you don't need a scheduler.

I think where we digress in position is that I do not think you have a good justification for the statement "be scared of signals" because, after all, you are clearly not scared of them and have decided to bend them to your own thoughts on how best to optimize your application, so its sort of ingenuous to hold the position having completely wiped "the standard way to do high-performance signal-handling" from your slate, to put your own special case forward by example. You're clearly not scared of them.

I'm calling you out on it because signals are absolutely not scary, but maybe talking about them with other experts can be.

Your case is more an example of how unscary signals are - but you've opted for longjmp()'s (which are, imho as a systems programmer, a far more cromulant fear) in your code as a solution to a problem which I don't think is really typical.

Thus, not really scary at all.

Well, it was a fun read of some code, and thanks for bc anyway.

>I've done real-time too.

There is a case for signals in strictly real-time, strictly high-performance, and also strictly realtime+high-performance code.

You have decided to go strictly for high-performance, for your well-argued reasons, and you've abandoned a standard practice for your stated claims, but this isn't just about your code - its about how people can mis-use signals, and in your case you're mis-using signals by not using them.

It is the advice:

>"Yes be very afraid of signals."

.. which feels not entirely appropriate.

So I took a look at the bc code, and I too am terrified of your use of longjmp.

It appears to me you've gotten somewhat smelly code because you didn't find the appropriate datatype for your case, and decided to roll your own scheduling instead. Ouch.

>As of 2.7.0, my bc had 77 places where signals were checked, and I was probably missing a few.

To refactor this to a simple CAS operation to see if the thread should terminate, doesn't seem too unrealistic to me. Only 77 places to drop a macro that does the op - checking only if the signal handler has told your high-performance thread us to stop, hup, die, etc.

Signals are awesome, and work great - obviously - for many, many high-performance applications, and your high-performance, CPU-bound application might feel like the only way you could do it - but you certainly can attain the same performance and still handle signals like a well-behaved application that doesn't have to take big leaps just to stay ahead of the scheduler ..

Oh, there are many exploits in this example code which could be demonstrated.

But this is not production code, and shouldn't be read this way.

In my opinion the writer quite clearly establishes that this code and methodology is only intended to be illustrative of the broader subject, which is: how Wayland works.

And inasmuch as it is illustrative, the very many exploits it shows are explicitly available, is a root note of its value. This author knows whats up.

Stupid question: Is the math of the design of cup based on the math of the water? In other words, are the actual curves and angles of things derived from the surface tension properties of water in space?

So, if one wanted to make a capillary cup for custard, it'd be different dimensions? Would love to see a parametric version of this (OpenSCAD?) somehow that can be generated for different liquids ...

In my very early days with Linux, my side-distraction 386 had been running a hand-cobbled kernel, cross-compiled, no network access, and then with some rootfs and bin tools built by following some obscure thing I read on minix-list.

And it was fine for me to log in and poke at it, for a while - after all, I only used it as a side hack thing while I waited for my work-related MIPS pizzabox and other things to do their other thing, for which I was paid, at the time.

But then came Yggdrasil.

I 'temporarily' yanked the CD drive out of my bosses 486 editing/gaming machine, popped the floppy into da' box, flipped the switch, and up she booted in glorious VGA 640x400.

A kind-of working X workstation, which .. everyone in the dev team .. found it kind of an astonishing feat for this much belittled 386 toy. "Okay then, we've got an extra term .. do the network drivers work?", as we chortled at the frequency flop.

And so it began. Oh, what a world that little kernel has wrought, and I am eternally grateful for the fact of its existence, my ability to use it and push it out into the wide, wide world personally, and so on.

The USB boots are great. Totally down for Terabyte+FAST USB sticks, though, sooner or later .. I mean, "my bootable USB stick is a compute stick, kthx.."

What a ride.

The recent Oric Atmos fan make is pretty nice, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC1cJGLGlxo

I admit that I watched the video, and have followed octopus discoveries for decades now - having had my own youthful enlightenment on the subject in regions bearing blue rings - and found myself internally compelled to find some way that we can develop our communication abilities with octopus in similar ways to the sapien research that has happened in our zeitgeist.

I truly believe we can "sign-language" with cuttlefish, if we try. We can more than likely attempt to involve ourselves with the Octopus villages/covens we keep finding all over the place - they are social creatures, just perhaps not in the littoral species .. - and we should _really_ stop eating them. In the same way we don't eat monkeys.

Anyway, these compulsions in my case are internal, and I dare not express just how much I love these creatures and want them to be a part of the human experiences because every time I have encountered them in their world, it has made my world even more amazing, too.

The question of whether we should cross the human/octupus non-communication gap is a deep and serious one. Think about it next time you find one on the reef.