johnhattan

Coincidentally, I got a job at Tandy right out of college and I got to see the demise of the VIS firsthand.

There was a big warehouse in Fort Worth where un-sellable products ended up, so I definitely could've won that challenge. They had pallet-loads of brand-new VIS machines bundled with all 20-odd games for around $49.

Oooh I remember having one of these (with OS/2, no less) back when I had a side-job as the Microsoft support rep for Texas A&M. I was tasked with getting it up and working so I could demo it to the department heads who were looking to upgrade lots of old IBM XT's.

While DOS with Windows 286 worked okay, OS/2 for Mach20 never would get past installation.

I finally told my boss that I was getting nowhere with OS/2. She contacted her boss and later relayed to me that OS/2 for Mach20 had been marked as a "non functional product" and would be going away.

The happy ending was that I kept the Mach20 board in my ancient PC and used it for my remaining programming classes. It ran Turbo Pascal and QuickC for DOS quite well.

Ahh, thanks for the link. The webcam covers I'd seen in the past were just removable plastic stickers, and I was having a hard time visualizing what counts as "thin".

One of the photos shows them be about as thick as a credit card.

I remember a conversation I had with my daughter in the car when she was starting out with algebra...

Me: Is 9.999... the same as 10, or is it just really close to 10?

Kid: Really close. It never gets all the way there.

Me: Well then how close? What do you get when you subtract 9.999... from 10?

Kid: (pause) An infinite number of zeroes. . .and then a one. . .wait, you can't do that.

Me: Right. You just have an infinite number of zeroes. Which is zero.

Kid: (pause) Oh, that's mind-blowing.

According to the blog post, one of their tasks is to release a version of the build tool that will work locally.

If it's a "correct" maze with exactly one way to get from any one square to any other square (as Eller's mazes are), then it doesn't matter where your entry and exit points are -- there's always one solution for any entry/exit pair you choose.

It was published in 1922, and the author died in 1945. Seems like that book is PD by any measure.

According to the article, it looks like Gutenberg adds a layer of "let a lawyer sign off on it", presumably to keep them from getting sued out of existence. Is that the case for Worm Ouroboros?

Yes I did. I just wanted to relate my personal experience with it. Sometimes I'll see an article about something new just to discover that it's actually for an update that's a couple of weeks away. In this case, I just wanted to verify that it's working as advertised.

Just tried it. Looks like the latest Windows update installs a stub that sends the Windows app-store to the Python installer page if you type "Python" from the command line.

FWIW, the publisher for the MS app-store Python is "Python Software Foundation" and it, far as I can tell, is just ordinary Python and not some MS-only weirdness. It adds start menu links to the Python REPL and the IDLE tool.

There's a good free audiobook version on librivox.org

Also the Lazarus Pascal IDE is still around and is keeping the old-school VB flame alive. Just looking at the screenshots will make you nostalgic.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

I'd love to try out some old 16-bit and/or MS-DOS games on it. But I don't see a way to copy files into its sandbox. Anyone had any luck doing this?

That's always my problem when I look at lisp for game programming. If I say "I want to write a standalone 3D iPhone game using C#", there are plenty of sites that'll show me exactly what tools are out there, how they work together, and how to write/debug/package a complete game.

With Lisp, I often end up in the weeds looking at tools and tech that may or may not still be supported. I have a hard time figuring out a well-established set of tools that'll get me a first-class playable game in Lisp.

If anything I'm going to watch this game jam just to see what everyone's using and how good the results look.

Actually not having a fully rendered environment worked for Myst. If you were looking out a window or at a door, it was a good bet that there was something important to the plot there.

I think if I had a fully VR version, I would've ended up spending too much time on all the ancillary props that were scattered about everywhere.

And I'd end up about a hundred times saying "Oh, there's salt-shaker on the table. I'd better try to pick it up and examine it." rather than heading towards the stuff that actually advanced the story.

Rather odd that they're only showing the video as a downloadable MP4 file. I didn't see a copyright notice, so I put it up on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/R3Ax7U5dvbc

Note that the video is silent.

I just tried today's daily Windows x64 installer, and Windows Defender is blocking it, reporting that it's infected with "Trojan:Win32/Fuerboos.D!cl"

Might be a false positive, but I'm not moving forward until I know.

Yeah, I'd been using the Chromecast support in the earlier 3.0 betas. Seemed to be working just fine, although it wasn't getting the "friendly" name that I'd set for the device. So instead of "Living Room TV", I'd see a big hash-code.

It can also play audio over Google Home speakers.

HaxeDevelop is a rebranded version of FlashDevelop. While it's built in .NET, apparently enough of it was built with Windows-only code that porting wasn't in the cards.

HaxeDevelop's best (IMHO) feature was that it could switch targets easily and integrated seamlessly with the Flash runtime's debugger. So you could build and debug quickly using the Flash runtime and then compile your project to native code for production.

But yeah, in a perfect world VSCode integration would be the way to go forward.

My personal theory is that they're trying to improve the JS engine in Electron so they can improve VSCode. The VSCode people have posted some performance complaints in the past.

I would assume this would benefit desktop JS most, so it'd undoubtedly help Electron apps.

EDIT : There's a better explanation at https://github.com/Microsoft/napajs/wiki/Why-Napa.js

IIRC, you can use either. Whatever quote you used to start the string is the one that will end the string.

var foo:String = "foo"; // foo

var bar:String = 'bar'; // bar

var fooquotebar:String = "foo'bar"; // foo'bar

A bunch of years ago, there was a "Menuet" product that was a cross-platform C++ UI library for Mac/Windows/Whatever.

Did they expand the underpinnings into a complete OS, or is this an unrelated product?

Yeah, a WHOIS shows that it's owned by Andrew Anglin (the original owner) until 2020. I assume that the registrars (GoDaddy and Google) just aren't letting it point to anything.

If you want to bulk-download all of the issues, here's how to do it with wget.

https://blog.archive.org/2012/04/26/downloading-in-bulk-usin...

The Gnu Octave page looks pretty good. I was hoping they'd start copying that look everywhere.

I remember standing in line for Maker Faire in San Mateo several years ago. We arrived a half-hour early, so we had plenty of time to chat with the people around us. Turns out the guy in front of us was a Blue Man, and he was there because they were always on the lookout for interesting bits to add to the show.

Here's hoping. Although I'm not sure how well it'll be received, given that (IIRC) there's not a single explosion in the entire series.

It might be interesting if they went in more of a direction of "House Of Cards In Space" rather than "Game Of Thrones In Space".

Is Rust gaining any traction for system-level programming? When I heard that there was now a memory-safe thread-safe language without a GC, my immediate thought was "Every OS from now on should be written in this thing".

I just checked out Coedit. It looks quite nice, although I'm rather baffled that it's written in Pascal.

I assume it's forked from an existing open-source editor, but there's nothing in the source headers to say which one.

At this point, is GNU/Hurd just for people who like to hack around with OS kernels?

I mean, it's interesting to see the progress now and then, but I can't imagine seeing it on anyone's short-list for OS's that could be deployed in a production environment.

Seems like it'd be a good screen for a system that's intended for use outdoors. A lot of surveying hardware hooks up to a conventional laptop, but it's difficult to see laptop screens in full sunlight, and you either have to put a shade over the screen or leave the laptop in the cab of the truck.

How does E-Ink compare to LCD in temperature range?