tralarpa

You were in good company. The Xerox Alto CPU used four 74181 ALUs.

Somes lines in PDP-11 assembly from 2.11BSD:

  mov r1,-(sp)
  mov $1024.,-(sp)
  mov $outbuf,-(sp)
  mov fout,-(sp)
  jsr pc,_write
  add $6,sp
  mov (sp)+,r1
  tst r0
  bpl 2f
  jmp wrterr

I've looked at a few dozen of the designs featured on the front page, and most of them don't make sense. What is the purpose of this?

The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...

> This is true of any language

Is it? Java has changed a lot, but in such a way that it's still easy to mentally map new features to the old ones, provided you have understood the core language. IDEs can even convert your code from old to new and back.

They still do.

Spanish vale and English value have the same Latin origin. Persian bale is an Arabic loanword.

When reading an article written by Bjorn Lomborg, you should also do the effort to read the cited sources. This is not an ad hominem attack, just an observation. Do it and you will see.

The title says "dialects" but most comments here are only about accents.

Can people here give examples of non-standard grammar or vocabulary (that goes beyond some temporary slang or subculture words)?

Great article.

Wish list of topics to add:

- branch predictors that can detect patterns (edit: I guess it's already covered in the paragraph about raising prediction accuracy)

- LRU-approximations in L1 caches

- Data prefetching (sequential, stride)

- Return address stack

Concerning μops, I think the 68060 did that, too.

I highly recommend the NHK documentary "10 years with Hayao Miyazaki" that shows how he works (and also his sometimes difficult character).

Ah, that makes more sense than my theory. It's a weak copy protection method, though, as you can just try and see what happens, and I think they dropped it in M&M3.

A few years ago, I decompiled a good part of the PC version of Might & Magic 1 for fun. According to Wikipedia, it had been released in 1986, although I don't know whether that refers to the PC version or to the original Apple II version.

It is a quite big game: the main executable is 117KB, plus around 50 overlay files of 1.5 KB each for the different dungeons and cities, plus the graphics files. I guess it was even too big for the average PC hardware at that time, or it was a limitation inherited from the original Apple II version: When you want to cast a spell you have to enter the number of the spell from the manual, maybe because there was not enough memory to fit the names of the 94 spells into RAM. Apart from that and the limited graphics and the lack of sound, the internal ruleset is very complete. You have all kind of spells and objects, capabilities, an aging mechanism, shops, etc.. The usual stuff that you also see in today's RPGs.

The modern uninstall.exe that came with it (I bought the game on GOG) was 1.3MB big.

VisiCalc was published in 1979.

Wow. That's really impressive. Here is more background:

https://magazin.wienmuseum.at/die-387-haeuser-des-peter-frit...

And the virtual exhibition of the museum:

https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/alben/edb7nhc3tyww8dncp-sonde...

Some of the models contain a rail segment (Märklin etc.). Was he a model train enthousiast and the houses were part of a layout, or did he use the rails just as accessories? Strange that the articles don't say anything about the artist's motivation.

That's funny because I have two objects on my desk for which I know that they use 555s. One is a no-name joystick with "autofire" function from the late 1980's. The other is a mass produced motor controller from the 2000's where the 555 generates the PWM signal for a FET.

I don't know much about app development, but I was curious and downloaded the Albert Heijn apk for ARM64. Inside the apk, the three largest entities are:

- libflutter.so 140 MBytes (flutter, obviously)

- flutter_assets 29 MBytes (this is a directory. The name is a bit misleading because it mostly consists of AH-specific icons.)

- libapp.so 20 MBytes (also related to flutter, I think)

There is a 640 KByte json file in the assets that stores an animation in base64 format. Now you know what the CPU and storage resources of your devices are used for nowadays...

Similar results here.

I'm curious to know what the problem of Firefox is. For example, the 3d-raytrace-SP benchmark is nearly three times faster on Edge than on Firefox on my i7 laptop. The code of that benchmark is very simple and mostly consists of basic math operations and array accesses. Maybe the canvas operations are particularly slow on Firefox? This seems to be an example that developers should take a look at.

I know the answer to 1.5. And I know the story behind 1.6, but not the name of the town... That's it :)

I searched a little bit and found these numbers for t-shirts in a 20 foot container:

- Shipping container from China to the US: $3000-$9000 (tariffs?)

- Number of t-shirts per container: 35000

How much heavier are jeans than t-shirts? 10 times? That would mean an increase of $2.50 if container shipping costs double.

"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

There are two approaches (sometimes mixed):

(a) you reverse engineer the application writing or reading the file. Even without fully understanding the application it can give you valuable information about the format (e.g. "The application calls fwrite in a for loop ten times, maybe those are related to the ten elements that I see on the screen").

(b) you reverse engineer only the file. For example, you change one value in the application and compare the resulting output file. Or the opposite way: you change one value in the file and see what happens in the application when you load it.

> and what if you need 1TB of random data? With 48kHz audio you would be waiting 5000 years haha. 1MB is still more than a day

I think you dropped the "k" in "kHz" in your calculations.

Yes, but that's my point: the ARM2 cannot get faster than 1.25 MIPS in an Amiga because of the memory bandwidth (assuming that the CPU uses 5 MBytes/s of the available 7 MBytes/s that it has to share with the graphics chipset).

I wonder how much faster the ARM2 would have been compared to the 68k in a first-generation Amiga. The Amiga's chip memory only delivered 7 MBytes/s, shared between the CPU and the chipset! With its 32-bit instruction words, the ARM2 would have been very far from its theoretical performance.

I have never used it, but I think the GhidrAssist plugin does that (and more).

> I wish someone ran a proper study

There are several scientific publications on this. But I don't think the latest models are available as convenient plugins for IDA or Ghidra. Guessing variable and function names are considered as relatively easy nowadays. Types and structures are the challenges now.

> I surely don't remember such clone.

I think they mean MicroEmacs. Despite its name, it was not Emacs, but it had Emacs-like keyboard shortcuts, multiple buffers, and macros, which was quite neat for a free 1986 application on a home computer.

French orthography competitions are on a different level. Spelling of difficult words combined with grammar rule exceptions.

Sources generally seen as authoritative (Duden, Wahrig etc.) estimate that the German everyday language has between 250,000 and 500,000 words (depending how you count), without counting technical terms.